“I don’t follow,” said Watty.

“Haven’t you seen me? They’re my two best laugh-getters. When Arthur’s going on about Knighthood, couldn’t I have a cup of wine? Then, just at the right moment, I give ‘em my Blurt. I choke on the wine and spew a lot of it over the people near by. Never fails. Or, if that’s a bit too strong, there’s my Sneeze—just a simple, loud sneeze, you see—to relieve the atmosphere. My Blurt is really a comic extension of my Sneeze, and of course I don’t want to obtrude, so the Sneeze might be best. But you ought to hear my Blurt before you make a decision. I’d like to know now, you see, before we go into rehearsal on the floor, so I can be thinking about it and tailor my Blurt—or my Sneeze—to come in just at the right moment. Because timing is everything in comedy, as I’m sure you know.”

“You must talk to Mr. Powell,” said Watty. “I have nothing to do with the staging.”

“But you see my point?”

“Yes, indeed.”

“I don’t want to be obtrusive, you understand; I just want to bring what I can to the ensemble.”

“It’s Mr. Powells department.”

“But may I say which you think best? The Blurt or the Sneeze?”

“I have no opinion. It’s not my department.”

It was an astonishment to Arthur and Maria, and to Darcourt as well, that Watty played from a full orchestral score, instructing the singers what they might expect to hear as they sang, and when they were momentarily silent; the singers worked from sketchy music, giving their vocal line and a hint or two of orchestration; the preparation of all this music, which was in Schnak’s wondrous hand, had cost a small fortune.

At the musical rehearsals Dr. Dahl-Soot was present, but not a voice. She spoke to no one but Watty, and very quietly. She whispered now and then to Schnak, who was her shadow, learning her craft—learning eagerly and rapidly.

The first general rehearsal took place in a dirty, ill-lit basement room in the Conservatory. It smelled of the economical lunches that had been consumed there for years by students; there was a pervasive atmosphere of bananas in their last stages of edibility, mingled with peanut butter. There was not much space, for there were three sets of timpani stored there, and in a corner an assembly of double-bass cases with nothing in them, like a conference of senators.

“How are we going to work here?” said Nutcombe Puckler. “There isn’t room to swing a cat.”

“Will you all please sit down,” said Gwen Larking. “There are chairs for everybody.”

“As this is a new work,” said Powell to the group, “and because the libretto offers some complexities, I want to begin today by reading through all three acts.”

“No piano,” said Nutcombe Puckler, who had a fine grasp of the obvious, as became an opera comic.

“Not a musical reading,” said Powell. “You all know your music—or you should—and we won’t sing for a day or two. No; I want you simply to read the words, as if this were a play. The librettist is with us, and he will be glad to clear up any difficulties about meanings.”

The company was in the main an intelligent one, perhaps because it was not what conventional critics would call a company of the first order. The singers were, upon the whole, young and North American; though they had all had plenty of opera experience they were not accustomed to the usages of the greatest opera theatres of the world. Reading held no terrors for them. There were one or two, of whom Nutcombe Puckler was the leader, who could not see any reason to speak anything that could possibly be sung, but they were willing to give it a try, to humor Powell, in whom they sensed a man of ideas who knew what he was doing. Some, like Hans Holzknecht, who was to sing the role of Arthur, did not read English with ease, and Miss Clara Intrepidi, who was to be Morgan Le Fay, stumbled over words that she had sung with no difficulty in her rehearsals with Watty. The one who read like an actor—an intelligent actor—was Oliver Twentyman, and the best of the group found that by Act Two they were trying, with varying success, to read like Oliver Twentyman.

If the company was youthful in the main, Oliver Twentyman balanced matters by being old. Not astronomically old, as some people insisted; not in his nineties. But he was said to be over eighty, and he was one of the wonders of the operatic world. His exquisitely produced, silvery tenor was always described by critics as small, but it had been heard with perfect clarity in all the great opera theatres of the world, and he was a favourite at Glyndebourne and several of the more distinguished, smaller American festivals. His particular line of work was characters of fantasy—Sellem in The Rake’s Progress, the Astrologer in Le Coq d’Or, and Oberon in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It had been a great coup to get him for Merlin. His reading of his part in the libretto was a delight.

“Marvellous!” said Powell. “Ladies and gentlemen, I beg you to take heed of Mr. Twentyman’s pronunciation of English; it is in the highest tradition.”

“Yes, but are not the vowels very distorted?” said Clara Intrepidi. “I mean, impure for singing. We have our vowels, right? The five? Ah, Ay, Ee, Oh, Oo. Those we can sing. You would not ask us to sing these impure sounds?”

“There are twelve vowel sounds in English,” said Powell; “and as it is a language which I myself had to acquire, not being born to it, you must not think me prejudiced. What are those vowels? They are all in this advice:

Who knows ought of art must learn

And then take his ease.

Every one of the twelve sings beautifully, and none gives such delicacy as the Indeterminate Vowel which is often a ‘y’ at the end of a word. ‘Very’ must be pronounced as a long and a short syllable, and not as two longs. I am going to nag you about pronunciation, I promise you.”

Miss Intrepidi pouted slightly, as though to suggest that the barbarities of English speech would have no effect on her singing. But Miss Donalda Roche, an American who was to sing Guenevere, was making careful notes.

“What was that about knowing art, Mr. Powell?” she said, and Geraint sang the vowel sequence for her, joined by Oliver Twentyman, who seemed, with the greatest politeness, to wish to show Miss Intrepidi that there were really twelve differentiated sounds, and that none of them were describable as impure.

On the whole, the singers enjoyed reading the libretto, and the day’s work showed clearly which were actors who could sing, and which singers who had learned to act. Marta Ullmann, the tiny creature who was to sing the small but impressive role of Elaine, came out very well with

But it was not quite such a good moment when Donalda Roche and Giles Shippen tried to read, in unison,

Nor was Miss Intrepidi the celebrated audience-tamer she was reputed to be when faced with her words to the villain Modred: