"Yes, I think I understand you," said Harry, laughing. "I'll wait. And I'll come to the rehearsals, too!"
In October the rehearsals actually started, and Harry began to see what he told Mr. Bachmann he thought he understood. Day after day he sat in the dark draughty theater and watched the people on the stage slash and cut and change his carefully constructed dialogue without offering a word of remonstrance. At first the pleasure of seeing his own work take tangible form, on a real professional stage and by the agency of real professional actors more than made up for the loss. Then as the rehearsals went on, he perceived that there was a very real reason for every cut and change, and that the play benefited tremendously thereby. He began to see how acting accomplishes a great deal of what he had always considered the office of dialogue. A dialogue of five speeches, to take a concrete example, on the probable reasons why a certain person did not arrive when he was expected was made unnecessary by one of the characters crossing the stage and looking out of a window at just the right moment and with just the right facial expression.
Harry made no secret of his conviction that his play improved immensely under the care of Bachmann and his people. His attitude was that they knew everything about play-producing and he knew nothing, and that the extraordinary thing was that he had been able to provide them with any dramatic material whatever. He joked about it with the actors and managers, when occasion offered, as callously as if he had been a third person, and rather surprised himself by the light-heartedness he displayed. Whether this was entirely genuine, whether it did not contain elements of a pose, a desire to appear as a man of the theatrical world, a fear of falling into all the usual errors of youthful playwrights, he did not at first ask himself.
One day, about a week before the opening night, he received a jolt that made him look upon himself and his calling in rather a new light. This came through an unexpected agent—none other, indeed, than a woman of the cast, and not the player of the principal female part at that, but a lesser light, Bertha Bensel by name, a plain but pleasant little person of uncertain age. Harry was lunching alone with her and carrying on in what had become his customary style when talking of his play.
"You know," he was saying, "I thought at one time I had written a play, but I haven't, I've written a moving picture show. Everybody is writing movies these days, even those that try to write anything else, which just shows. I'm going regularly into the movie business, after this. Seriously. And I intend to write the real kind of movies, the kind that don't bother about the characters at all, but just dramatize scenery. I shall call things by their proper names, too. Let's see—a Devonshire parsonage is beloved and wooed by a Scotch moor, but turns him down for a Louis Onze château with a Le Nôtre garden. She discovers, just in time, that his intentions are not honorable, and is rescued by a Montana prairie, who happens along just at the right moment. The situation is still awkward, however, because the parsonage finds that her prairie has a wife living, a New York gambling hell, whom he hates but who won't release him. So the parsonage refuses his disinterested offers and starts life for herself. After various adventures with a South Carolina plantation, an Indian Ocean trawler, an Argentine pampas and the Scala theater at Milan, the poor parsonage ends up in a London sweat shop, to which she is at last discovered by the Scotch moor, who had been looking for her all these years. Embrace. Passed by the national board of censors."
Miss Bensel smiled, but did not seem to see much humor in this foolery. That was due, thought Harry, to the fatigue of her long morning's work, and he determined not to bother her with any more nonsense. The silence which he allowed to ensue, however, was broken by an unexpected remark from his vis-à-vis, who said with a dispassionate air:
"I think, Mr. Wimbourne, you stand in a great danger."
"Danger?"
"Yes, that is, I hope you do. If not, I'm very much disappointed in you."
"Thank you so much, but just how?"