“But the first act takes place in the early morning.”
“I've thought of that. We must alter it to the evening.”
“But the opera opens with a hunting scene. People don't go hunting by moonlight.”
“It will be a novelty. That's what's wanted for comic opera. The ordinary hunting scene! My dear boy, it has been done to death.”
I stood this sort of thing for a week. “They are people of experience,” I argued to myself; “they must know more about it than I do.” By the end of the week I had arrived at the conclusion that anyhow they didn't. Added to which I lost my temper. It is a thing I should advise any lady or gentleman thinking of entering the ranks or dramatic authorship to lose as soon as possible. I took both manuscripts with me, and, entering Mr. Hodgson's private room, closed the door behind me. One parcel was the opera as I had originally written it, a neat, intelligible manuscript, whatever its other merits. The second, scored, interlined, altered, cut, interleaved, rewritten, reversed, turned inside out and topsy-turvy—one long, hopeless confusion from beginning to end—was the opera, as, everybody helping, we had “knocked it into shape.”
“That's your opera,” I said, pushing across to him the bulkier bundle. “If you can understand it, if you can make head or tail of it, if you care to produce it, it is yours, and you are welcome to it. This is mine!” I laid it on the table beside the other. “It may be good, it may be bad. If it is played at all it is played as it is written. Regard the contract as cancelled, and make up your mind.”
He argued with force, and he argued with eloquence. He appealed to my self-interest, he appealed to my better nature. It occupied him forty minutes by the clock. Then he called me an obstinate young fool, flung the opera as “knocked into shape” into the waste-paper basket—which was the only proper place for it, and, striding into the middle of the company, gave curt directions that the damned opera was to be played as it was written, and be damned to it!
The company shrugged its shoulders, and for the next month kept them shrugged. For awhile Hodgson remained away from the rehearsals, then returning, developed by degrees a melancholy interest in the somewhat gloomy proceedings.
So far I had won, but my difficulty was to maintain the position. The low comedian, reciting his lines with meaningless monotony, would pause occasionally to ask of me politely, whether this or that passage was intended to be serious or funny.
“You think,” the leading lady would enquire, more in sorrow than in anger, “that any girl would behave in this way—any real girl, I mean?”