Clare was blessed—cursed—with that sixth sense, the sens du théâtre. Her own nature was, in essence, theatrical; her frigid and fastidious reserve warring incessantly with her irrepressible love of the scene for its own sake. She was aware of the trait and humiliated by its presence in her character. Usually she would curb her inclination with a severity that was in itself histrionic: at times she indulged it with voluptuous recklessness.
As a girl, the stage had appealed to her strongly; but her excessive squeamishness, with her acute sense of personal, bodily dignity, closed it to her as a career. Also her love of power. Though she knew little of stage life she had sufficient intuition to gauge correctly what she might become. Successful necessarily—dominant never. And she required a dais. But the compelling woman, she knew, is successful through her combination of intellectual strength with sexual charm. She must not scruple to use all the weapons at her service. Clare had told herself that there were some weapons to which she would never condescend. If sting had lain in the fact that, though she would, they were not hers to use, she did not acknowledge it, even to herself. Resolutely she put from her the idea of fostering a useless talent; and the desire to exploit it, save surreptitiously in social intercourse, dulled as she grew older.
Nevertheless, the yearly plays were to Clare a source of excitement and gratification. She alone was responsible for the production. In five successful years they had become an event, a festival—not only to the school, but to the entire neighbourhood. Two, and then three public performances were given each summer, and the proceeds benefited the school charities. As You Like It, Twelfth Night, Verona, and The Merchant of Venice, followed upon the Midsummer Night's Dream, and exhausted the list of entirely suitable plays; but after some hesitation, Clare had devised for her next venture scenes from King John. Several forms were studying the period, the Sixths and Fifths were reading the play, politically also it was apropos. (Clare had ever sound reasons to gild her decisions.) Privately she had been slightly embarrassed by the fact that the classes she supervised had that year proved themselves unusually poor in dramatic ability. She could depend, indeed, on a score of keen and capable children, but in Louise Denny alone had she glimpsed an actress who could do her credit. The child's physique precluded her from rôles that, otherwise, she could easily have filled, but as Prince Arthur, she could be made the central, unforgettable figure of an otherwise trite performance. "King John," quoth Clare; "decidedly, the very play." And King John was chosen.
Since the beginning of the term, with Clare as generalissimo and Alwynne most ingenious of adjutants, staff and school had worked enthusiastically. Costumes were finished, staging painted and planned, and the various scenes were, at length, receiving their final polish. Alwynne was responsible for the interpretation of the minor parts, while Clare, in her spare time, devoted herself to the principals, attacking alternately the exaggerations of Agatha's "Constance," Marion's stolid "Hubert," a certain near-sighted amiability in the spectacled "King John."
Clare was a born stage-manager, patient, resourceful, compelling. The children trusted her; she had the habit of success. Her air of authority cushioned them, denied the possibility of failure. Clare, wholly in earnest, Clare at usual hours, intimate and relaxed, Clare appealing, exhorting, inspiring, was irresistible. She got what she wanted from them and was not ill content. She knew to the last ounce their capabilities.
With Louise alone she had difficulties. The child was almost too easily trained. Responsive, quickly fired or chilled, she was, in fact, too delicately and completely attuned to Clare herself. Clare could be crude: she had her gusty moods: the little æolian harp quivered to snapping point before them. Originally this extreme sensitiveness had fascinated Clare; she felt like a musician exploring the possibilities of an unknown instrument; but she tired of it in time. As Louise became saturated with the stronger personality, she had, in her passionate desire to satisfy Clare, grown into her mere replica; reproducing her phraseology, voicing her opinions, reflecting her moods, stifling, in the exquisite delight of abnegation, all in her that had originally attracted the older woman. That the effect had been, first to amuse, then to irritate, finally to bore Clare's fickle humour, was natural enough. Clare, had she cared, could have guided the child, despite the great disparity of age, into a pleasant path of affection and friendship, but that she did not choose. She was disappointed, and showed it: and there, for her, the matter ended. That she was in any way responsible, she would not admit.
She did not, indeed, fully realise the extent of the change in Louise until the rehearsals began. For all her growing indifference, in spite of the marked deterioration that automatically it had caused in the girl's work, she had still a high and just opinion of her capabilities. She was positive that as Prince Arthur, Louise would give a fine and original performance, and anticipated with amused interest her initial rendering of the character.
At the first rehearsal Louise did not disappoint her. She was neither stiff nor self-conscious, and her acting, which proved to be entirely instinctive, carried conviction. Though Clare worked from the head, she could appreciate the more primitive method, but even then, the character as portrayed by Louise amazed her. The deliberate pathos, the cloying charm, did not seem to exist for Louise. She played as in an ecstasy of terror. The text, Clare knew, could permit the reading, and the conception interested her; but the temptation to criticise, alter and improve, was natural. Here and there, as rehearsals progressed, she pulled and patched and patted—quite genuinely in the interest of the play as a whole. But the result was discouraging. The Louise of former days would have defended her own version, delighting Clare with shy impudences and flashes of insight, naïve parries and counter-attacks, till between them they had attained notable results. But the sparkle had been drilled out of Louise. She was humble, anxiously acquiescent, agreeing with every alteration, accepting every suggestion, however foreign to her own instinctive convictions, while the vividness faded slowly from her reading, leaving it lifeless and forced.
"It's patchwork," said Clare disgustedly to Alwynne, at the end of the third week, "pure patchwork. She does everything I tell her—and the result is dire. What it will be like on the night, heaven knows! And there's nobody else. Yet she can act. That first performance was quite excellent."
"And she tries."