“Why chant that passage as though it were a hymn, when the whole intention of the line is—Ouch! You speak the stuff like the ancients spoke blank verse. There! When you are telling Pietro to bring you ‘raw gold’—you say ‘raw gold’ as though it were something sacred and divine. My dear fellow, it’s the stuff you’re working in every day of the week. Try and imagine yourself a plumber saying to his mate, ‘Get us a lump of putty, Jack.’ ”
At first Eliphalet resented this treatment hotly, but he was no match for this electric young man. On the third day of rehearsals he had been so ill-advised as to retort.
“You forget that I was acting many years before you were thought of.” He regretted the words almost before he had spoken them.
That night he sat down on his bed and reviewed the whole affair. His belief in himself was shattered. He realised that all the painful years of acquired technique were valueless. His entire stock-in-trade had been exploded and held up to ridicule by a young man who could scarcely need to shave more than twice a week. And the worst of it was that his resentment for that young man had died, and in his heart he confessed that all and everything he had been told was good and true and right, and that his own methods were bad and false and wrong.
Next morning he did a very gracious act. He apologised to Raymond Wakefield and promised to do his best in the future. Unhappily, the apology came at an inopportune moment. Both authors had been reviling Wakefield for letting them down, and had declared that the play would be ruined as a result of his casting. They insisted that Cardomay must be got rid of and the production postponed. Wakefield never admitted himself at fault, and a stormy scene resulted. Eventually Sir Owen Frazer was appealed to, and, to the general astonishment, he wrote on a sheet of paper, his voice being inoperative, that if either or both of the suggestions were carried out he would institute proceedings against everyone concerned. Being lessee of the theatre, nothing more could be said at the time, but subsequently Messrs. Raven and Franks foregathered and spoke hard words anent Sir Owen—who, they declared, being unable to play the part himself, desired nothing better than to see it mutilated.
One can understand, therefore, why Eliphalet’s apology was not so well received as it deserved. In fact, all that Raymond Wakefield said was:
“Glad to hear it, for we’ve any amount of lost ground to make up.”
The hours and days that followed were pitiful to the point of tragedy. The Old Card worked like a dray horse at the new art of being natural, which, despite his utmost effort, further and further eluded him. At the last dress-rehearsal there was not a line nor a movement, from start to finish, which fitted him anywhere.
Both authors left the theatre in a state of speechless fury at the end of the second act, and when the curtain fell on the final scene of the play, Raymond Wakefield just looked at him, shook his head, and followed their example.
Eliphalet Cardomay, a perfect picture in his Florentine robes, stood like a statue in the middle of the deserted stage. An overmastering desire possessed him to hide his head and cry like a child in some dark recess. He moved unsteadily toward the prompt corner. The iron door beside it was open, and there, in the brightly-lit corridor leading to the Royal Box, stood Sir Owen Frazer, and he was laughing—laughing, it seemed, as a man had never laughed before.