'Shakespeare! It's Shakespeare! Everybody knows their Shakespeare.'
Clara took the precaution of learning his part in his scenes with her and was able to prompt him when he started fumbling or improvising. He was taut with anxiety, and completely ignored everything not immediately bearing on the production, as to which he was obviously not easy in his mind. He talked to himself a good deal, and Clara heard him more than once damning Charles under his breath. In spite of herself she was a little hurt that he took no notice of her outside her part in the play. His only concern with the world off the stage was through Lady Bracebridge and Lady Butcher, who were vastly busy with the dressing of the front of the house and began introducing their distinguished aristocratic and political friends at rehearsals, where they used to sit in the darkness of the auditorium and say,—
'Too sweet! Divine, divine!'
It was difficult to see what they could possibly make of the chaos on the stage, with actors strolling to and fro mumbling their parts, others going through their scenes, carpenters running hither and thither, the lights going up and down and changing from blue to amber, amber to blue, white, red.... Up to the very last Sir Henry made changes, and the more excited he got the further he drifted away from the play's dramatic context, and strove to break up the aesthetic impression of the whole with innumerable tricks, silences, gestures, exaggerated movements of the actors, touches of grotesque and irrelevant humour, devices by which Prospero could be in the centre of the stage, anything and everything to impose his own tradition and personality on both Shakespeare and Charles.
Clara was thankful that Charles had quarrelled with him and was not there to see. Sir Henry was like a man possessed. He worked in a frenzy to retrieve the situation, and to recover the ground he had lost; and he only seemed sure of himself in his scenes with Ariel, and over them he went again and again, not for a moment sparing Clara or thinking of the physical effort so much repetition entailed for her.
She did not object. It was a great relief to go to her rooms, worn out, and to lie, unable to think, incapable of calculation, lost to everything except her will to play Ariel with all the magic and youthful vitality she possessed. Everything outside the play had disappeared for her, too. That so much of Charles's work should be submerged hurt her terribly and she blamed herself, but for that was only the more determined to retrieve the situation with her own art, to which, as Sir Henry revered it, he clung. She knew that and was determined not to fail. However much Charles's work was mutilated, her success—if she won it—would redeem his plight.
Therefore she surrendered herself absolutely to the whirling chaos of the rehearsals, from which it seemed impossible that order could ever come. She ordered her own thoughts by doing the obvious thing, reading the play until she was soaked with it. No one else apparently had done that and, as she grew more familiar with it and more intimate with its spirit, she began to doubt horribly whether Charles had done so either. His scenery seemed as remote from that spirit as Sir Henry's theatrical devices, and almost equally an imposition. As she realised this she was forced to see how completely she was now detached from Charles, and also, to her suffering, how she had laid herself open to the charge of having used him, though he, in his generous simplicity, would never see it in that light or bring any accusation against her.... She blamed herself far more for what she had done to Rodd. That, she knew, was serious, and the more intimate she became with Shakespeare's genius the more she understood the havoc she must have wrought in Rodd's life.
How strange was this world of Prime Ministers and actor-managers which dominated London and in which London acquiesced; very charming, very delightful, if only one could believe in it, or could accept that it was the best possible that London could throw up. But if it was so, what need was there of so much advertising, paragraphing, interviewing? Which was the pretence, the theatre or the world outside it? Which were the actresses, she and Julia Wainwright and the rest, or Lady Butcher and Lady Bracebridge? And in fine, was it all, like everything else, only a question of money? Verschoyle's money? And if Verschoyle paid, why was he shoved aside so ignominiously?
Clara shivered as she thought of the immense complication of what should be so simple and true and beautiful.... But what alternative was there? This elaboration and corruption of the theatre or the imagination working freely in an empty room.
She could see no other. Rodd's terrible concentration ending in impotence or the dissipation of real powers, as in Butcher and Mann, in fantasy.