“We want money, anyway,” Avery frankly admitted. “Oh, and by the way, Michael, I’ve asked Goldney, the Treasurer of the O.U.D.S. to put you up.”
“What on earth for?” gasped Michael.
“Oh, they’ll want supers. They’re doing The Merchant of Venice. Great sport. Wedders is going to join. I want him to play the Prince of Morocco.”
“But are you running the Ouds as well as The Oxford Looking-Glass?” Michael inquired gently.
In the end, however, he was persuaded by Avery to become a member, and not only to join himself but to persuade other St. Mary’s freshmen, including Lonsdale, to join. The preliminary readings and the rehearsals certainly passed away the Lent term very well, for though Michael was not cast for a speaking part, he had the satisfaction of seeing Wedderburn and Avery play respectively the Princes of Morocco and Arragon, and of helping Lonsdale to entertain the professional actresses who came up from London to take part in the production.
“I think I ought to have played Lorenzo,” said Lonsdale seriously to Michael, just before the first night. “I think Miss Delacourt would have preferred to play Jessica to my Lorenzo. As it is I’m only a gondolier, an attendant, and a soldier.”
Michael was quite relieved when this final lament burst forth. It seemed to set Lonsdale once more securely in the ranks of the amateurs. There had been a dangerous fluency of professional terminology in “my Lorenzo.”
“I’m only a gondolier, an attendant, and a mute judge,” Michael observed.
“And I don’t think that ass from Oriel knows how to play Lorenzo,” Lonsdale went on. “He doesn’t appreciate acting with Miss Delacourt. I wonder if my governor would be very sick if I chucked the Foreign Office and went on the stage. Do you think I could act, if I had a chance? I’m perfectly sure I could act with Miss Delacourt. Don’t forget you’re lunching with me to-morrow. I don’t mind telling you she threw over a lunch with that ass from Oriel who’s playing Lorenzo. I never heard such an idiotic voice in my life.”
Such conversations coupled with requests from Wedderburn and Maurice Avery to hear them their two long speeches seemed to Michael to occupy all his leisure that term. At the same time he enjoyed the rehearsals in the lecture rooms at Christ Church, and he enjoyed escaping sometimes to Alan’s rooms and ultimately persuading Alan to become a gondolier, an attendant and a soldier. Moreover, he met various men from other colleges, and he began to realize faintly thereby the individuality of each college, but most of all perhaps the individuality of his own college, as when Lonsdale came up to him one day with an expression of alarm to say that he had been invited to lunch by the man who played Launcelot Gobbo.