And then he failed to hear several words spoken by Rose Euclid. And then a few more. As the emotion of the scene grew, the proportion of her words audible in the gallery diminished. Until she became, for him, totally inarticulate, raving away there and struggling in a cocoon of hexameters.
Despair seized him. His nervous system—every separate nerve of it—was on the rack once more.
He stood up in a sort of paroxysm, and called loudly across the vast intervening space:
"Speak more distinctly, please."
A fearful silence fell upon the whole theatre. The rehearsal stopped. The building itself seemed to be staggered. Somebody had actually demanded that words should be uttered articulately!
Mr. Marrier turned towards the intruder, as one determined to put an end to such singularities.
"Who's up theyah?"
"I am," said Edward Henry. "And I want it to be clearly understood in my theatre that the first thing an actor has to do is to make himself heard. I daresay I'm devilish odd, but that's how I look at it."
"Whom do you mean, Mr. Machin?" asked Marrier in a different tone.
"I mean Miss Euclid of course. Here I've spent heaven knows how much on the acoustics of this theatre, and I can't make out a word she says. I can hear all the others. And this is the dress-rehearsal!"