Mrs. Parry, rising that morning to control the grand occasion, and excluding from her mind as often as possible the image of a photograph in the papers of herself and Peter Stanhope side by side, “author and producer”, found a note from Lawrence Wentworth waiting on her breakfast table. It was short and frigid. It said only that he had caught a feverish chill and would not be at the performance. Even so, it had given him some trouble to write, for it had demanded contact, and only a desire that he should not be, by some maddening necessary inquiry, disturbed in his solitude, had compelled him to write it. He had sent it round very early, and then had returned to sit in his study, with curtains drawn, to help him in his sickness.
“Very odd weather to catch a feverish chill,” Mrs. Parry thought, looking through her window at the dancing sunlight. “And he might have returned his ticket, and he might have sent good wishes.” Good wishes were precisely what Wentworth was incapable of sending anywhere, but Mrs. Parry could not know that. It was difficult to imagine what either Zion or Gomorrah would make of Mrs. Parry, but of the two it was certainly Zion which would have to deal with her, since mere efficiency, like mere being, is in itself admirable, and must be coloured with definite evil before it can be lost. She made a note to tell the Seating Committee there was a seat to spare. If there were no other absentee, if none of the cast were knocked down by a car, blown up by a geyser, or otherwise incapacitated, she would think herself fortunate. She had had a private word with Pauline the day before, after the rehearsal. Rumours of Mrs. Anstruther’s condition had reached her, and she wanted, in effect, to know what Periel was going to do about it. She had always been a little worried about it, but one couldn’t refuse parts to suitable people because of elderly grandmothers. Periel, however, had been entirely sensible; with the full consent, almost (Mrs. Parry understood) under the direction of the grandmother. She would, under God, be there. Mrs. Parry had not too much belief in God’s punctuality, but she was more or less satisfied, and left it at that. If misadventure must come, the person best spared to it would be Peter Stanhope himself. Mrs. Parry would willingly have immolated him on any altar, had she had one, to ensure the presence of the rest, and the success of the afternoon; it was why he admired her. She desired a public success, but more ardently she desired success — the achievement. She would have preferred to give a perfect performance to empty seats rather than, to full, it should fall from perfection.
She was given her desire. Even the picture was supplied. Stanhope, approached by photographers, saw to that. He caused her to be collected from her affairs at a distance; he posed by her side; he directed a light conversation at her; and there they both were: “Mr. Stanhope chatting with the producer (Mrs. Catherine Parry).” She took advantage of the moment to remind him that he had promised to say something at the end of the play, “an informal epilogue”. He assured her that he was ready-“quite informal. The formal, perhaps, would need another speaker. An archangel, or something.”
“It’s angelic of you, Mr. Stanhope,” she said, touched to a new courtesy by his, but he only smiled and shook his head.
The photographs — of them, of the chief personages, of the Chorus — had been taken in a secluded part of the grounds before the performance. Stanhope lingered, watching, until they were done; then he joined Pauline.
“How good Mrs. Parry is!” he said sincerely. “Look how quiet and well-arranged we all are! a first performance is apt to be much more distracted, but it’s as much as our lives are worth to be upset now.”
She said thoughtfully, “She is good, but I don’t think it’s altogether her: it’s the stillness. Don’t you feel it, Peter?”
“It doesn’t weigh on us,” he answered, smiling, “but-yes.”
She said: “I wondered. My grandmother died this morning — five minutes after I got back. I wondered if I was imagining the stillness from that.”
“No,” he said thoughtfully, “but that may be in it. It’s as if there were silence in heaven — a fortunate silence. I almost wish it were the Tempest and not me. What a hope!
I’ll deliver all;
And promise you calm seas, auspicious gales,
And sail so expeditious, that shall catch
Your royal fleet far off.”
His voice became incantation; his hand stretched upward in the air, as if he invoked the motion of the influences, and the hand was magical to her sight. The words sprang over her; auspicious gales, sail so expeditious, and she away to the royal fleet far off, delivered, all delivered, all on its way. She answered: “No; I’m glad it’s you. You can have your Tempest, but I’d rather this.”
He said, with a mild protest: “Yet he wrote your part for you too; can you guess where?”
“I’ve been educated,” she answered, brilliant in her pause before they parted. “Twice educated, Peter. Shall I try?
Merrily, merrily, shall I live now Under the blossom that hangs on the bough.
Bless me to it.”
“Under the Mercy,” he said, and watched her out of sight before he went to find a way to his own seat.
The theatre was almost full; late-comers were hurrying in. The gate was on the point of being closed — two minutes, as the notices had stated, before the beginning of the play when the last came. It was Mrs. Sammile. She hurried through, and as she came she saw Stanhope. As he bowed, she said breathlessly: “So nice,@ isn’t it? Have you got everything you want?”
“Or that we don’t-” Stanhope began, but she chattered on: “But it’s a good thing not to have, isn’t it? Perfection would be so dull, wouldn’t it? It’s better to think of it than to have it isn’t it? I mean, who was it said it’s better to be always walking than to get there?”
“No, thank you very much,” he said, laughing outright. “I’d rather have perfection than think of it, though I don’t see why we shouldn’t do both. But we mustn’t stop; you’ve only a minute and a half. Where’s your ticket? This way.” He took her round to her seat — at the end of a row, towards the front — and as he showed it to her he said, gravely: “You won’t mind getting there for once, will you? Rather than travelling hopefully about this place the whole afternoon.”
She threw a look at him, as he ran from her to his own seat, which perplexed him, it seemed so full of bitterness and despair. It was almost as if she actually didn’t want to sit down. He thought, as he sank into his chair, “But if one hated to arrive? If one only lived by not arriving? if one preferred avoiding to knowing? if unheard melodies were only sweet because they weren’t there at all? false, false. . . . and dismissed his thought, for the Prologue stood out before the trees, and the moment of silence before the trumpet sounded was already upon them.
It sounded annunciatory of a new thing. It called its world together, and prepared union. It directed all attention forward, as, his blasts done, the Prologue, actors ready behind and audience expectant before, advanced slowly across the grass. But to one mind at least it did even more. At the dress rehearsal it had announced speech to Pauline, as to the rest; now it proclaimed the stillness. It sprang up out of the stillness. She also was aware of a new thing-of speech in relation to the silence in which it lived.
The pause in which the Prologue silently advanced exhibited itself to her as the fundamental thing. The words she had so long admired did not lose their force or beauty, but they were the mere feel of the texture. The harmony of motion and speech, now about to begin, held and was composed by the pauses: foot to foot, line to line, here a little and there a little. She knew she had always spoken poetry against the silence of this world; now she knew it had to be spoken against — that perhaps, but also something greater, some silence of its own. She recognized the awful space of separating stillness which all mighty art creates about itself, or, uncreating, makes clear to mortal apprehension. Such art, out of “the mind’s abyss”, makes tolerable, at the first word or note or instructed glance, the preluding presence of the abyss. It creates in an instant its own past. Then its significance mingles with other significances; the stillness gives up kindred meanings, each in its own orb, till by the subtlest graduations they press into altogether other significances, and these again into others, and so into one contemporaneous nature, as in that gathering unity of time from which Lilith feverishly fled. But that nature is to us a darkness, a stillness, only felt by the reverberations of the single speech. About the song of the Woodcutter’s Son was the stillness of the forest. That living stillness had gathered the girl into her communion with the dead; it had passed into her own spirit when the vision of herself had closed with herself; it had surrounded her when she looked on the dead face of Margaret; and now again it rose at the sound of the trumpet — that which is before the trumpet and shall be after, which is between all sentences and all words, which is between and in all speech and all breath, which is itself the essential nature of all, for all come from it and return to it.
She moved; she issued into the measured time of the play; she came out of heaven and returned to heaven, speaking the nature of heaven. In her very duty the doctrine of exchange held true, hierarchical and republican. She owed the words to Stanhope; he owed the utterance to her and the rest. He was over her in the sacred order, and yet in the sacred equality they ran level. So salvation lay everywhere in interchange: since, by an act only possible in the whole, Stanhope had substituted himself for her, and the moan of a God had carried the moan of the dead. She acted, and her acting was reality, for the stillness had taken it over. The sun was blazing, as if it would pierce all bodies there, as if another sun radiated from another sky exploring energies of brilliance. But the air was fresh.
She was astonished in the interval to hear Myrtle Fox complaining of the heat. “It’s quite intolerable,” Miss Fox said, “and these filthy trees. Why doesn’t Mr. Stanhope have them cut down? I do think one’s spirit needs air, don’t you? I should die in a jungle, and this feels like a jungle.”
“I should have thought,” Pauline said, but not with malice, “that you’d have found jungles cosy.”
“There’s such a thing as being too cosy,” Adela put in. “Pauline, I want to speak to you a minute.”
Pauline allowed herself to be withdrawn. Adela went on: “You’re very friendly with Mr. Stanhope, aren’t you?”
“Yes,” Pauline said, a little to her own surprise. She had rather meant to say: “O not very” or “Aren’t you?”, or the longer and more idiotic “Well I don’t know that you’d call it friendly”. But it struck her that both they and every other living creature, from the Four-by-the-Throne to ............