In the New Year he shut himself up with the first draft of a play and for three months only left his flat for an hour’s walk each day in the Green Park. Sometimes, as he sat bent before his miniature theatre, marshalling, drilling and dismissing his little card-board figures, he could fancy Barbara’s eager, low voice at his side, her breath warm on his cheek, and the keen, sweet scent of carnations once more, at each lithe movement of her body, filling the room where in other years she had argued out his plays line by line; sometimes, as he read his speeches aloud, he caught himself pausing for her judgement of their rhythm; and, when the first rehearsal was called, he knew that he would find her ghost sitting with clasped hands on a stool by his feet; on the first night it would await him in his box, defying him to bring any one else to a seat already taken.
“But this is Life,” he whispered to himself. “I... I told Gaisford I was going to forget about all this.”
As soon as the new play was mentioned in the theatrical gossip of the press, he received the usual appeals from unknown men and women to be given a trial. As usual he sent them bodily to Manders and, as usual, instructed his secretary and servants to admit no one who called without a satisfactory explanation. Manders hoped to begin rehearsing in the late summer and to produce the play in the autumn; Eric had too much other work on hand to waste his scanty leisure on stage-struck amateurs; he had not seen a play since his return to England and was beginning to forget the highly-charged, conventionally unreal atmosphere of the theatre.
A week’s conscientious study of contemporary drama satisfied him that, whatever else the critics might say of “The Gate of Horn”, they would not degrade it by comparison with any of the plays that he had felt constrained to see. On the last night of his penance he was escaping into the Strand from the unknown people who persisted in bowing to him, when a girl, standing by herself a few paces ahead, turned carelessly and bade him good-evening in a diffident and rather surprised voice.
“I’m afraid I can’t see who it is,” Eric had to confess. “I’m as blind as a bat, when I come out of a theatre.”
“It’s Ivy Maitland. You wouldn’t remember me.”
“Indeed I do. Are you all by yourself?”
“Yes. I came with a man, but he—he had to go before the end.”
“Then you must let me see you home,” said Eric after a moment’s hesitation which he hoped she would not notice. “It’s the Cromwell Road, didn’t you tell me?”
“Not now. I—in spite of your advice... I really couldn’t stand it any longer at home. But you mustn’t come out of your way; I’m only a step from here—at the back of the Adelphi.”