"I wish they had been!" said Mr. Alloyd. "I'd just like to design a theatre! But of course I shall never get the chance."
"Why not?"
"I know I shan't," Mr. Alloyd insisted with gloomy disgust. "Only obtained this job by sheer accident! ... You got any ideas about theatres?"
"Well, I have," said Edward Henry.
Mr. Alloyd turned on him with a sardonic and half-benevolent gleam.
"And what are your ideas about theatres?"
"Well," said Edward Henry, "I should like to meet an architect who had thoroughly got it into his head that when people pay for seats to see a play they want to be able to see it, and not just get a look [152] at it now and then over other people's heads and round corners of boxes and things. In most theatres that I've been in the architects seemed to think that iron pillars and wooden heads are transparent. Either that, or the architects were rascals! Same with hearing! The pit costs half-a-crown, and you don't pay half-a-crown to hear glasses rattled in a bar or motor-omnibuses rushing down the street. I was never yet in a London theatre where the architect had really understood that what the people in the pit wanted to hear was the play and nothing but the play."
"You're rather hard on us," said Mr. Alloyd.
"Not so hard as you are on us!" said Edward Henry. "And then draughts! I suppose you think a draught on the back of the neck is good for us!... But of course you'll say all this has nothing to do with architecture!"
"Oh, no, I shan't! Oh, no, I shan't!" exclaimed Mr. Alloyd. "I quite agree with you!"