Nancy’s small strong hands crashed out a couple of chords with astonishing sureness and emphasis.
It was a dress rehearsal, and Bill Patch and I were the only people in the room who were entitled to speak, just then. I waited for him, but he only gave me a quick glance and a nod. So I said: “That’s splendid, Mrs. Harter, thank you very much. Will you go off left, please? Now then, for the first scene.”
She left the stage and came round to the front. Then Captain Patch left the wall and walked across the room and went and sat down beside her.
Chapter Eleven
When the day preceding that of the show arrived, we had all reached the stage of believing, with entire conviction, that nothing else in the world mattered but a successful performance. It is this temporary but complete absence of sense of proportion that puts life into almost any undertaking, but more especially into one about which a number of people are engaged.
On the morning of that day Bill tried to hold a final rehearsal, at which half of the performers failed to appear, because they were frantically and irrationally mislaying vital pieces of property in different parts of the house or dashing off in search of substitutes for other equally vital pieces of property, alleged by them to have been mislaid by other members of the cast.
“If Alfred Kendal isn’t taken through his bit of dialogue at least half a dozen times more, he’ll ruin the whole thing,” said Patch, looking perfectly distraught. “In fact, he’ll probably do that anyhow. For Heaven’s sake, someone hear him his words.”
“I will,” said Nancy. “Where is Alfred?”
She snatched up a housemaid’s tray that had been loaded with empty vases for which Claire, her hands full of flowers, had been vainly inquiring a few moments earlier. “I’ll take this. Where is Alfred?”
“Always remember, when you’re carrying a loaded tray,” said General Kendal, “to put the heavy articles in the middle of the tray and not at the sides.”