Mr. Leahurst made that ugly sound and lit another cigarette.
“You’d better come down to the theater to-morrer mornin’.”
“Which theatre, Mr. Leahurst?”
“Duke o’ Kent’s. I’ve got it on my hands till Feb. eight”; and going, he turned. “If your thing should catch on, I’d have to shift yer.”
The venture was fairly started now, and the excitement grew more febrile. There was difficulty in finding a good title for the play. The author’s title had at once been condemned as “tripe.” He had called his work The Secret Disaster of Mr. Eadenwell; meaning to convey thereby the main point of the fable—the disaster being that the imagined Eadenwell’s private code of ethics would not work and was abandoned by him without anyone else knowing what had happened. Alwyn was in favour of calling it The Danger Signal; but somebody reported that Mr. Leahurst said the sort of titles he preferred were Love Wins, For Two Bright Eyes, and The Tempting Sex. Of course they might not use these, since they were titles of existing plays.
Miss Verinder and Mildred were present at the rehearsals. They could not keep away. This new strange aspect of a playhouse fascinated them—the darkness of the house itself, the seats all shrouded in white wrappers, with somewhere high up near the invisible roof a slanting beam of real daylight; and the stage brilliantly lit yet not like the stage, with odd bits of scenery, and the players unpainted, in commonplace every-day costume.
Miss Verinder sat in a stall next the central gangway, well back from the empty orchestra, and Mildred sat with her, except when for a few minutes Alwyn was unoccupied and could come down through the pass-door from the stage.
Mildred said, “We mustn’t expect it to shape all at once.”
That of course was what they were doing with the play, shaping it. Everyone was busy—the producer, Alwyn himself, Mr. Russell the stage-manager, a Mr. Holmdale with vaguely defined interests in Leahurst productions, and some one else who appeared spasmodically; so many that it seemed as if anybody who came in from the street took a hand at it. They chopped and changed little bits of dialogue, they transposed scenes, they worked hard.
People playing minor characters came down and clustered watching, and there were a few hangers-on in stalls at ends of rows; amongst them a rather miserable-looking man, very nervous and shy, who bowed and smiled at everybody. No one took any notice of him. A silly affected young woman playing the lady’s-maid did not know her words, and with a shrill giggle said they were not worth learning. Miss Millbank, who played the principal female part, complained bitterly of the things she was made to say—“things that I simply don’t feel.”