“But I can’t help thinking,” the librarian was continuing, in his low meditative voice, “that it might give rather an interesting scope for a romantic actor to act exactly that sort of high and yet hollow romance. There is a kind of dance that expresses contempt for the body. You can see it running like a pattern through any number of Asiatic traceries and arabesques. That dance was the dance of the Albigensian troubadours; and it was a dance of death. For that spirit can scorn the body in either of two ways; mutilating it like a fakir or pampering it like a sultan; but never doing it honour. Surely it will be rather interesting for you to interpret bitter hedonism, the high and wild cries, the horns and hootings of the old heathen revel, along with the underlying pessimism.”
“I feel the underlying pessimism all right,” answered Archer, “when Trelawney won’t come to rehearsals and Olive Ashley will only fidget about with her potty little paints.”
He lowered his voice a little hastily with the last words, for he realised for the first time that the lady in question was sitting at the other end of the library, with her back to him, bent over books and fidgeting away as described. She had not apparently heard him; in any case she did not turn round, and Julian Archer continued in the same tone of cheerful grumbling.
“I don’t suppose you have much experience of what really grips an audience,” he said. “Of course, nobody supposes it won’t go off all right in one sense. Nobody’s likely to give us the bird–”
“Give us what bird?” asked Mr. Herne, with mild interest.
“Nobody’s likely to howl at us and hiss us, or throw rotten eggs at us in Lord Seawood’s drawing-room, of course,” continued Archer, “but you can always tell whether an audience is gripped or not. At least, you can always tell when you’ve had as much experience as I have. Now unless she can put a little more pep into the dialogue, I’m not sure I can grip my audience.”
Herne was trying to listen politely with one half of his mind, but for the other half the garden beyond was taking on, as it so often did, the vague quality of a pageant in a vision. Far away at the end of an avenue of shining grass, among delicate trees, twinkling in the sunlight, he saw the figure of the Princess of the play. Rosamund was clad in her magnificent blue robes with her almost fantastic blue head-dress, and as she came round the curve of the path she made an outward gesture at once of freedom and fatigue, thrusting out her arms or throwing out her hands as if stretching herself. The long pointed sleeves she wore gave it somewhat the appearance of a bird flapping its wings; a bird of paradise, as the actor had said.
A half-thought formed itself in the librarian’s mind as to whether it was that sort of bird that nobody would ever give him in Lord Seawood’s drawing-room.
As the figure in blue drew nearer down the green avenues, however, even the dreamy librarian began to think that there might be another reason for that outward gesture. Something in her face suggested that the movement had been one of impatience or even of dismay since it cannot help looking like a mask of tragedy over quite trivial irritations. It might be questioned whether she regarded her present irritation as trivial. But she unconsciously carried about with her such a glow of good health and such a confidence of manner, that there was a second incongruity even in the fullness and firmness of her voice. There was something boisterous about it, that made even bad news sound as if it were good.
“And here’s a nice state of things,” she said indignantly, flapping open a telegram and staring round her in impersonal anger. “Hugh Trelawney says he can’t act the King after all.”