The mess to which he referred was The Golden Asse, which had been undergoing revision ever since its appearance in London in May. The work had revealed weaknesses in performance, and when Revelstoke had been convinced that the weaknesses were real, and had tried to correct them, the opera had seemed to collapse; its individual parts were still good, but they could not be made to stick together satisfactorily. Domdaniel had been reassuring; the commonest thing in the world, said he; always happened when a big work wanted revision; all that was needed was patience. But patience had worn thin, for The Golden Asse was to appear as part of the current Music Festival in Venice, and revisions had gone on, minutely but tiresomely, until yesterday. Most of the tinkering had been done on the orchestral interludes which linked the many scenes of the opera; Monica had copied, and re-copied, and copied again, principally because it was convenient for her to do so, being so close at hand, but also to save the money of the Association for English Opera—money which she had herself provided in substantial but insufficient amount. There is no such thing as enough money for opera, she had discovered.

The pattern of work was surprisingly regular. Domdaniel would find fault with a passage, and suggest how it might be re-cast: Revelstoke, after argument, would re-write the passage in his own way: Domdaniel, having first said that the new version would do splendidly, was likely to find in a few hours that it was—well, not quite right, and suggest further revision, usually along the lines he had originally proposed. Revelstoke would again re-write, producing something manifestly inferior to what he had done before. Domdaniel would then suggest that the earlier revision be used—with a few changes which he could easily make himself, to spare Giles trouble. But Giles did not want to be spared trouble; he wanted the music as he had written it in the beginning. There were shocking rows.

The parts which would shortly be distributed to the music desks in the orchestra were a muddle even for musicians, who are used to muddled parts. Over the neat script of the professional copyist were gummed countless bits of paper upon which were corrections in Monica’s script, almost as neat. But over these might be further corrections, in Giles’ beautiful but minute script, or in the bold hand of Domdaniel. Further revision appeared, in Domdaniel’s hand, in red pencil. Yet, somehow, at orchestra rehearsals the players made sense of it all. Philosophical and usually patient men, they interpreted the muddle under their eyes, and brought forth beauty.

That was what made it all worth while. The Golden Asse was a thing of beauty. Giles’ libretto followed faithfully the second-century story of the unfortunate Lucius, whose meddling in magic caused him to be transformed into an ass, from which unhappy metamorphosis he was delivered only after he had achieved new wisdom. But the character of the music emphasized the tale as allegory—humorous, poignant, humane allegory—disclosing the metamorphosis of life itself, in which man moves from confident inexperience through the bitterness of experience, toward the rueful wisdom of self-knowledge. Where the music came from, not even Giles’ most intimate associates—and this now meant Monica and Domdaniel—could guess, for as the work had progressed he had grown increasingly freakish, his moods alternating between one of morose incivility and another of noisy hilarity. There was nothing of the serene wisdom of his music to be discerned in himself.

The journey to Venice had been, for Monica, a misery. She had travelled with Giles and the stage director, Richard Jago. Giles had insisted that wagon-lits were an extravagance, so they had slept in their seats; nor would he hear of meals in the restaurant-car—they must picnic, it would be so much cheaper and jollier. So they had eaten innumerable hard rolls into which lumps of bitter chocolate were stuffed, fruit-cake, and cheese, with occasional swigs at a flask of brandy. Monica had not liked this stodgy diet, and had bought a few pears for herself; they had made her ill, as Giles, who had an English mistrust of fruit, had predicted, and after their arrival in Venice Domdaniel had had to dose her for a couple of days with Fernet Branca.

But it was not the physical discomforts of the journey which had made it so exhausting. Giles was in one of his hilarious moods, and insisted that she and Jago sing lewd rounds with him, for hours at a time. Giles was entranced by rounds and catches, especially those of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in which, as they were sung, simple-minded obscenities were revealed. And so, to the astonishment of their fellow-travellers (when they had any) they sped across Europe to the strains of—

Jago, who was a mild and withdrawn young man, could never quite master the time of that one, and Giles abused him whenever they sang it. They had better luck with—

But Giles’ favourite was the most musically intricate and poetically inane of his large repertoire. It was a true “catch”, and the words ran—

But when the “catch” made itself heard, he would enjoy it as heartily as any port-soaked member of an eighteenth-century catch-club, and smack Monica resoundingly on her bottom as he sang “And let your bum be seen?”—as though there were some possibility that the point might be missed.

“For God’s sake, Giles, will you stop acting the Beloved Vagabond for just half an hour? My head aches,” Jago would protest.

“You have no zest for life,” Revelstoke would reply. Or he might sulk for a time, or doze. But soon he would be at it again, insisting that they try once more to master Purcell’s—

which they never succeeded in doing, for Jago was not up to it. Monica was heartily glad, dulled though her senses were by the nausea which the bad pears had caused her, when the train crept through some dirty suburbs and Giles announced that they were at last sniffing the undeniable stench of the Queen of the Adriatic.

Still, that was all past now. The first Venetian performance of The Golden Asse in its revised version was to take place tonight, and Monica, at half-past four, was already in her dressing-room, arranging and re-arranging her make-up materials, or lying on a sofa looking out at Venetian rooftops, so quiet under the September sunshine.

To be here, in a dressing-room all her own, in the celebrated Teatro della Fenice—was that not romance enough, without common, touristy sight-seeing? Yes, certainly it was. One must grow up some time, and would she not herself be, in a few hours, one of the sights of Venice? Yes, of course, that was the idea. And anyhow, after the first night was out of the way, Sir Benedict would take her sightseeing.

At twenty-three, resting can be hard work. Monica was thoroughly tired of it. She ran down the broad, empty passages until she came to the large, gold-framed mirror which was fastened to the wall in the long gallery which gave the artists access to the stage and passed through the door from daylight into the darkness of the huge stage itself. Above her was the soaring, dusty mystery of the flies, hung thickly with drop-scenes; somewhere, high in the lantern above the stage, a sunbeam penetrated the murk, touching the cobweb of fly-lines in a dozen places before it came to rest at last on one of the huge canvases. Once again Monica experienced the unfamiliar feel of a raked stage, so subtle in its enticement toward the footlights, so unexpectedly resistant in its retreat toward the back-cloth—for the single basic setting which served for The Golden Asse was already in place. One setting for an opera with eighteen scenes—it still seemed strange to her, nurtured on the elaborate naturalism in The Victor Book of the Opera; yet it was wonderful how well this unit-setting worked. She yielded to the slope, and stood directly in front of the prompter’s box, looking across the orchestra pit toward the ornate music desk from which, in a few hours, she must follow Domdaniel’s nuances of direction.