The rehearsals were not going too well. For all Dinah’s efforts, she hadn’t been able to get very much concerted work out of her company. For one thing, with the exception of Selia Ross and Henry, they would not learn their lines. Dr Templett even took a sort of pride in it. He was forever talking about his experiences in amateur productions when he was a medical student.
‘I never knew what I was going to say,’ he said cheerfully. ‘I’m capable of saying almost anything. It was always all right on the night. A bit of cheek goes a long way. One can bluff it out with a gag or two. The great thing is not to be nervous.’
He himself was not at all nervous. He uttered such lines of the French Ambassador’s as he remembered, in a high-pitched voice, made a great many grimaces, waved his hands in a foreign manner, and was never still for an instant.
‘I leave it to the spur of the moment,’ he told them. ‘It’s wonderful what a difference it makes when you’re all made-up, with funny clothes on. I never know where I ought to be. You can’t do it in cold blood.’
‘But, Dr Templett, you’ve got to,’ Dinah lamented. ‘How can we get the timing right or the positions, if at one rehearsal you’re on the prompt and at the next on the o.p.?’
‘Don’t you worry,’ said Dr Templett. ‘We’ll be all right. Eet vill be – ’ow you say? – so, so charmante.’
Off-stage he continually spoke his lamentable broken English, and when he dried up, as he did incessantly, he interpolated his: ‘’ow you say?’
‘If I forget,’ he said to the rector, who was prompting, ‘I’ll just walk over to your side and say, “’ow you say?” like that, and then you’ll know.’
Selia Ross and he had an irritating trick of turning up late for rehearsals. Apparently the youngest Cain’s big toe still needed Dr Templett’s attention, and he explained that he picked up Mrs Ross and brought her to rehearsal on his way back from Cloudyfold. They would walk in with singularly complacent smiles, half an hour late, while Dinah was reading both their parts and trying to play her own. Sometimes she got her father to read their bits, but the rector intoned them so carefully and slowly that everybody else was thrown into a state of deadly confusion.
Miss Campanula, in a different way, was equally troublesome. She refused to give up her typewritten part. She carried it about with her and read each of her speeches in an undertone during the preceding dialogue, so that whenever she was on the stage the others spoke through a distressing mutter. When her cue came she seldom failed to say, ‘Oh. Now it’s me,’ before she began. She would often rattle off her lines without any inflexion, and apparently without the slightest regard for their meaning. She was forever telling Dinah that she was open to correction, but she received all suggestions in huffy grandeur, and they made not the smallest difference to her performance. Worse than all these peculiarities were Miss Campanula’s attempts at characterization. She made all sorts of clumsy and ineffective movements over which she herself seemed to have little control. She continually shifted her weight from one large foot to the other, rather in the manner of a penguin. She wandered about the stage and she made embarrassing grimaces. In addition to all this she had developed a frightful cold in her nose, and rehearsals were made hideous by her catarrhal difficulties.
Jocelyn was the type of amateur performer who learns his lines from the prompter. Unlike Miss Campanula, he did not hold his part in his hand. Indeed, he had lost it irrevocably immediately after the first rehearsal. He said that it did not matter, as he had already memorized his lines. This was a lie. He merely had the vague idea of their sense. His performance reminded Dinah of divine service, as he was obliged to repeat all his lines, like responses, after the rector. However, in spite of this defect, the squire had an instinctive sense of theatre. He did not fidget or gesticulate. With Dr Templett tearing about the stage like a wasp, this was particularly refreshing.
Miss Prentice did not know her part either, but she was a cunning bluffer. She had a long scene in which she held a newspaper open in her hands. Dinah discovered that Miss Prentice had pinned several of her sides to The Times. Others were left in handy places about the stage. When, in spite of these manoeuvres, she dried up, Miss Prentice stared in a gently reproachful manner at the person who spoke after her, so that everybody thought it was her vis-à-vis who was at fault.
Mrs Ross had learnt her part. Her clear, hard voice had plenty of edge. Once there, she worked, tried to follow Dinah’s suggestions, and was very good-humoured and obliging. If ever anything was wanted, Mrs Ross would get it. She brought down to the Parish Hall her cushions, her cocktail glasses and her bridge table. Dinah found herself depending more and more on Mrs Ross for ‘hand props’ and odds and ends of furniture. But, for all that, she did not like Mrs Ross, whose peals of laughter at all Dr Templett’s regrettable antics were extremely irritating. The determined rudeness with which Miss Prentice and Miss Campanula met all Mrs Ross’s advances forced Dinah into making friendly gestures which she continually regretted. She saw, with something like horror, that her father had innocently succumbed to Mrs Ross’s charm, and to her sudden interest in his church. This, more than anything else she did, inflamed Miss Campanula and Eleanor Prentice against Selia Ross. Dinah felt that her rehearsals were shot through and through with a mass of ugly suppressions. To complete her discomfort, the squire’s attitude towards Mrs Ross, being ripe with Edwardian naughtiness, obviously irritated Henry and the two ladies almost to breaking point.
Henry had learnt his part and shaped well. He and Dinah were the only members of the cast who gave any evidence of team work. The others scarcely even so much as looked at each other, and treated their speeches as if they were a string of interrupted recitations.
II
The battle of the music had raged for three weeks. Miss Prentice and Miss Campanula, together and alternately, had pretended to altruistic motives, and accused each other of selfishness, sulked, denied all desire to perform on the piano, given up their parts, relented, and offered their services anew. In the end Dinah, with her father’s moral support behind her, seized upon a moment when Miss Campanula had said she’d no wish to play on an instrument with five dumb notes in the treble and six in the bass.
‘All right, Miss Campanula,’ said Dinah, ‘we’ll have it like that. Miss Prentice has kindly volunteered, and I shall appoint her as pianist. As you’ve got the additional responsibility of the YPFC girls in the front of the house, it really does seem the best idea.’
After that Miss Campanula was barely civil to anybody but the rector and the squire.
Five days before the performance, Eleanor Prentice developed a condition which Miss Campanula called ‘a Place’ on the index finger of the left hand. Everybody noticed it. Miss Campanula did not fail to point out that it would probably be much worse on the night of the performance.
‘You’d better take care of that Place on your finger Eleanor,’ she said. ‘It’s gathering, and to me it looks very nasty. Your blood must be out of order.’
Miss Prentice denied this with an air of martyrdom, but there was no doubt that the Place grew increasingly ugly. Three days before the performance it was hidden by an obviously professional bandage, and everybody knew that she had consulted Dr Templett. A rumour sprang up that Miss Campanula had begun to practise her Prelude every morning after breakfast.
Dinah had a private conversation with Dr Templett.
‘What about Miss Prentice’s finger? Will she be able to play the piano?’
‘I’ve told her she’d better give up all idea of it,’ he said. ‘There’s a good deal of inflammation, and it’s very painful. It’ll hurt like the devil if she attempts to use it, and it’s not at all advisable that she should.’
‘What did she say?’
Dr Templett grinned.
‘She said she wouldn’t disappoint her audience, and that she could rearrange the fingering of her piece. It’s the “Venetian Suite”,