Jeremy was waiting for him but Emily Dunne had gone. Almost everybody had gone. His spirits plummeted abysmally. Unpredictably, his heart was in his boots.

He went up to Mrs. Greenslade with extended hand.

“Wonderful,” he said. “How can we thank you.”

“Who is this comes hopping up the lane?”

“Hopping? Where? Oh, I see. A lady dressed for riding. She’s lame, Master Will. She’s hurt. She can’t put her foot to the ground.”

“She makes a grace of her ungainliness. There’s a stain across her face. And in her bosom. A raven’s feather in a valley of snow.”

“Earth. Mire. On her habit, too. She must have fallen.”

“Often enough, I dare swear.”

“She’s coming in at the gate.”

“Will! Where ARE you. WILL!”

“We’ll have to stop again. I’m afraid,” Peregrine said. “Gertie! Ask her to come on, will you, Charles?”

Charles Random opened the door on the Prompt side. “Gertie! Oh, dear.”

Gertrude Bracey entered with her jaw set and the light of battle in her eyes. Peregrine walked down the centre aisle and put his hands on the rail of the orchestral well.

“Gertie, love,” he said, “it went back again, didn’t it? It was all honey and sweet reasonableness and it wouldn’t have risen one solitary hackle. She must grate. She must be bossy. He’s looking down the lane at that dark, pale creature who comes hopping into his life with such deadly seduction. And while he’s quivering, slap bang into this disturbance of—of his whole personality—comes your voice: scolding, demanding, possessive, always too loud. It must be like that, Gertie. Don’t you see? You must hurt. You must jangle.”

He waited. She said nothing.

“I can’t have it any other way,” Peregrine said.

Nothing.

“Well, let’s build it again, shall we? Back to ‘Who is this,’ please, Marco. You’re off, please, Gertie.”

She walked off.

Marcus Knight cast up his eyes in elaborate resignation, raised his arms and let them flop.

“Very well, dear boy,” he said, “as often as you like, of course. One grows a little jaded but never mind.”

Marco was not the only one, Peregrine thought, to feel jaded: Gertie was enough to reduce an author-director to despair. She had after a short tour of the States become wedded to Method acting. This involved endless huddles with whoever would listen to her and a remorseless scavenging through her emotional past for fragments that could start her off on some astonishing association with her performance.

“It’s like a bargain basement,” Harry Grove said to Peregrine. The things Gertie digs up and tries on are really too rococo. We get a new look every day.”

It was a slow process and the unplotted pauses she took in which to bring the truth to light were utterly destructive to concerted playing. “If she goes on like this,” Peregrine thought, “she’ll tear herself to tatters and leave the audience merely wishing she wouldn’t.”

As for Marcus Knight, the danger signals for a major temperament had already been flown. There was a certain thunderous quietude which Peregrine thought it best to disregard.

Really, for him, Peregrine thought, Marco was behaving rather well, and he tried to ignore the little hammer that pounded away under Marco’s oval cheek.

“Who is this—”

Again they built up to her line. When it came it was merely shouted offstage without meaning and apparently without intention.

“Great Christ in Heaven!” Marcus Knight suddenly bellowed. “How long must this endure! What, in the name of all the suffering clans of martyrdom, am I expected to do? Am I coupled with a harridan or a bloody dove? My author, my producer, my art tell me that here is a great moment. I should be fed, by Heaven, fed: I should be led up to. I have my line to make. I must show what I am. My whole being should be lacerated. And so, God knows it is, but by what!” He strode to the door and flung it wide. Gertrude Bracey was exposed looking both terrified and determined. “By a drivelling, piping pea-hen!” he roared, straight into her face. “What sort of an actress are you, dear? Are you a woman, dear? Has anybody ever slighted you, trifled with you, deserted you? Have you no conception of the gnawing serpent that ravages a woman scorned?”

Somewhere in the front of the house Harry Grove laughed. Unmistakably, it was he. He had a light, mocking, derisive laugh, highly infectious to anybody who had not inspired it. Unhappily both Knight and Gertrude Bracey, for utterly opposed reasons, took it as a direct personal affront. Knight spun round on his heel, advanced to the edge of the stage and roared into the darkness of the auditorium. “Who is that! Who is it! I demand an answer.”

The laughter ran up to a falsetto climax and somewhere in the shadows Harry Grove said delightedly: “Oh dear me, dear me, how very entertaining. The King Dolphin in a rage.”

“Harry,” Peregrine said, turning his back on the stage and vainly trying to discern the offender. “You are a professional actor. You know perfectly well that you are behaving inexcusably. I must ask you to apologize to the company.”

“To the whole company, Perry dear? Or just to Gertie for laughing about her not being a woman scorned?”

Before Peregrine could reply Gertrude re-entered, looking wildly about the house. Having at last distinguished Grove in the back stalls, she pointed to him and screamed out with a virtuosity that she had hitherto denied herself: “This is a deliberate insult.” She then burst into tears.

There followed a phenomenon that would have been incomprehensible to anybody who was not intimately concerned with the professional theatre. Knight and Miss Bracey were suddenly allied. Insults of the immediate past were as if they had never been. They both began acting beautifully for each other: Gertrude making big eloquent piteous gestures and Marcus responding with massive understanding. She wept. He kissed her hand. They turned with the precision of variety artists to the auditorium and simultaneously shaded their eyes like comic sailors. Grove came gaily down the aisle saying: “I apologize. Marcus and Gerts. Everybody. I really do apologize. In seventeen plastic and entirely different positions. I shall go and be devoured backstage by the worm of contrition. What more can I do? I cannot say with even marginal accuracy that it’s all a mistake and that you’re not at all funny. But anything else. Anything else.”

“Be quiet,” Peregrine said, forcing a note of domineering authority which was entirely foreign to him. “You will certainly go backstage, since you are needed. I will see you after we break. In the meantime I wish neither to see nor hear from you until you make your entrance. Is that understood?”

“I’m sorry,” Grove said quietly. “I really am.” And he went backstage by the pass-door that Mr. Conducis had used when he pulled Peregrine out of the well.

“Marco and Gertie,” Peregrine said, and they turned blackly upon him. “I hope you’ll be very generous and do something nobody has a right to ask of you. I hope you’ll dismiss this lamentable incident as if it had never happened.”

“It is either that person or me. Never in the entire course of my professional experience—”

The Knight temperament raged on. Gertrude listened with gloomy approval and repaired her face. The rest of the company were still as mice. At last Peregrine managed to bring about a truce and eventually they began again at: “Who is this comes hopping up the lane?”

The row had had one startling and most desirable effect. Gertrude, perhaps by some process of emotive transference, now gave out her offstage line with all the venom of a fishwife.