Swan Song

The rehearsal went as well as such rehearsals do go, and it was pleasing to find that Peacock knew his business. Edwin Shorthouse took direction with such unaccustomed meekness that Adam became suspicious. He remained uneasy, indeed, as long as the piano rehearsals lasted. Such saintly forbearance as Shorthouse was displaying is rare in any singer, and in Shorthouse, Adam reflected, was positively unnatural. He was not altogether surprised, therefore, at the campaign of obstruction which coincided with the beginning of the orchestral rehearsals.

None the less, things went quite smoothly in the early stages, and up to the day of the murder only one incident occurred which it is necessary to relate. The protagonists were Shorthouse, Joan Davis, and a young girl named Judith Haynes.

It was a Monday evening. During the afternoon they had run straight through the last scene of act three, finishing at about six o’clock; and subsequently, Joan Davis remained in the rehearsal-room with Peacock to deal with various loose ends in her own part. Unknown to them, two other people were still in the theatre: Shorthouse, who was drinking heavily in his dressing-room (he had been by no means sober during the afternoon, though, as always, he sang magnificently), and Judith Haynes, a member of the chorus, who had stayed on with a view to altering her costume which fitted badly.

At seven Peacock left, and Joan went up to her dressing-room to fetch a coat and scarf. In the chorus dressing-room she found Shorthouse, exceedingly drunk, doing his best to remove the clothes from Judith Haynes, who was struggling inexpertly with him. Joan – by no means a puny or a nervous woman – acted with vigour and promptness. In falling, Shorthouse caught his head on the angle of the door, and this contributed a good deal to quietening him. In fact, he lay without moving.

‘And that is that,’ said Joan, gazing at his supine form with workmanlike pride. She turned to the girl, who was dealing, scarlet-faced, with buttons and shoulder-straps, Joan saw that she was slender, fair, and young. ‘Are you all right, my dear?’

‘Y-yes, thank-you,’ Judith stammered. ‘I – I don’t know what I should have done if you hadn’t come along. I – He’s not –?’

‘No, no,’ Joan reassured her. ‘Breathing stertorously and very much alive. You’d better go home, hadn’t you?’

‘Yes. I – I don’t know how to thank you.’ Judith hesitated, and then added with a rush: ‘Please – please don’t tell anyone about this, will you? I should hate anyone to know …’

Joan frowned slightly. ‘If it weren’t a bit too late to get a substitute, I should see to it that Edwin was kicked out of this production.’

‘No, you mustn’t.’ Judith spoke with surprising vehemence. ‘I should be so ashamed if people knew …’

Being above all a practical woman, Joan was momentarily puzzled. ‘Ashamed? But you’re not to blame, child. Why on earth –?’

‘It’s just – oh, I don’t know. But please – please promise.’ Joan shrugged her shoulders and smiled. ‘Of course, if you want it that way. Where do you live? If it isn’t too far, I’ll walk home with you.’

‘It’s awfully kind, but you really needn’t bother …’

‘Nonsense,’ said Joan. ‘I should like to. It’s half an hour yet before my dinner-time.’

Judith was recovering her self-possession slowly. ‘What about’ – she nodded towards Shorthouse – ‘him?’

‘We’ll leave him,’ said Joan cheerfully. ‘Edwin is unfortunately one of those people who always recover from things … Have you got a coat? Then let’s make a move.’

On the way to Judith’s lodgings in Clarendon Street, Joan learned a little more about it. It appeared that Shorthouse had been making some kind of advances ever since rehearsals began, and that Judith, though repulsing these, had been too shy of his professional eminence to be actively rude to him. Moreover, there was a young man – also in the chorus – who had aspirations as a composer of opera, and Judith had thought that Shorthouse might be able to help or advise him.

‘I’ll advise him, my dear.’ said Joan. ‘And so will Adam, on pain of instant excommunication. But as to helping – well, virtually the only way to get a new opera put on is to be a multi-millionaire.’

She was very thoughtful as she walked back to the ‘Mace and Sceptre’. Edwin Shorthouse plainly was heading for a shipwreck from which not even his voice and his artistry would save him. It was a pity, Joan thought, that she could not assist in propelling him on to the rocks by publicizing this evening’s occurrence, but a promise was a promise. That she was obliged at least to break it was due to circumstances which few people could have foreseen.

Chapter Four (#u14a58352-2f2d-5454-9030-6e1750ae22f6)

Presently the orchestral rehearsals began, and with them, trouble.

Adam sighed windily, took out a packet of Spearmint chewing-gum, and placed part of its contents slowly in his mouth. His gaze, roving over the auditorium, came to rest on John Barfield, who was slumped in one of the front stalls, gobbling a ham sandwich and dropping the crumbs down the front of his waistcoat. The rapid and rhythmical movement of his jaws was obscurely fascinating. Adam stared until Barfield looked up sharply and caught his eye; then turned, with some dignity, to reconsider what was going on on the stage.

Or rather, what was not going on. ‘It is extraordinary,’ thought Adam, ‘that Edwin is able to find something wrong even when he’s only sitting still, singing a monologue.’ The cause of the present stoppage had eluded Adam in the first instance, but it appeared from the logomachy that was now in progress that it had something to do with tempo. ‘Naturally I defer to you absolutely, Mr Peacock,’ Shorthouse was saying without a hint of deference across the footlights. ‘It’s simply that I’ve not been used to such a marked accelerando at that point, and I felt that Sachs’ dignity was rather lessened by it.’

George Peacock fidgeted with his baton and looked harassed. And well he might, Adam reflected: rehearsing Die Meistersinger with Edwin Shorthouse in the cast had unnerved many an older and more experienced conductor. It was really all a great pity; Peacock was an able young man; this production would certainly be important to his career; and after four weeks’ nagging by Edwin Shorthouse he might easily make a mess of the actual show. Moreover – Adam glanced at his watch – time was getting on; they still had the third act to get through that afternoon.

‘Why, in the name of God,’ he whispered to Joan Davis, ‘can’t Edwin shut his trap for ten minutes at a time?’

Joan nodded briskly. ‘Inelegantly put,’ she returned, ‘but I could scarcely agree with you more. I’m very sorry for that young man. It’s just the greatest pity in the world that Edwin happens to be so good.’

‘He wouldn’t have lasted five minutes if he hadn’t been,’ said Adam. ‘And I’m inclined to think that someone may stick a knife in him yet.’

‘… So if you’ve got no objection,’ Peacock was saying from the rostrum, ‘we’ll keep it as it was. I think the extra impetus is wanted at that point.’

‘Of course,’ said Shorthouse. ‘Of course. I must try to follow your beat more closely. If I might have a more definite down-stroke at “springtime’s behest”—’

‘Ass,’ Joan commented in a vehement whisper from the wings. ‘Contemptible ass. The wretched man’s beat is perfectly clear.’

‘If we have many more hold-ups,’ Adam replied gloomily, ‘we shall never get on to the third act at all. Not that I should be altogether sorry,’ he added as an afterthought. ‘I tried to sing a top A in my bath this morning, and nothing but a sort of whistling sound came out.’

The music began again. Adam had heard it hundreds of times, but still it cast its warm enchantment over him. They reached the disputed passage. Shorthouse was dragging.

‘Now we shall see,’ said Joan.

Peacock tapped with his baton and the orchestra faded into silence. ‘I’m afraid we were a little ahead of you. Mr Shorthouse,’ he said pointedly.

‘Oh, Lord,’ groaned Adam. ‘Not sarcasm. Not sarcasm, you fool.’

The result was as he expected. There was a moment’s dead silence, and then: ‘If my efforts displease you, Mr Peacock,’ said Shorthouse, ‘I would be obliged if you would tell me so in a straightforward way, and not by means of cheap witticisms.’

There was another silence. Peacock flushed scarlet. Then: ‘I think we’ll leave that passage for the moment,’ he said quietly, ‘and go on. We’ll take it from scene four – Eva’s entry. Are you ready, Miss Davis?’ he called.

‘Perfectly,’ Joan called back. ‘Even the pretence of flirting with Edwin,’ she said to Adam, ‘makes me shudder.’

‘Never mind. Perhaps he’ll object to something you do. Then you can give him hell.’

‘How nice that would be,’ said Joan dreamily. ‘But there’s not much hope of it. He only picks on the young and inexperienced, who can’t answer back … Here we go.’

‘Ta-ta,’ said Adam. ‘Meet you under the lime-tree, and don’t bring a friend.’ He returned to his reflexions.

The situation was, in fact, worrying. There could be no doubt that Peacock was breaking up under the strain of incessant objections, interruptions, and superfluous requests for information about tempo, dynamics, and all the paraphernalia which should have been, and in fact had been, settled at the piano rehearsals; doing a complex, five-hour opera is labour enough without any member of the cast’s making a wilful nuisance of himself. What made it more objectionable was that where the opera management was concerned, Shorthouse could twist Peacock round his little finger, for Shorthouse was the box-office attraction, and Peacock virtually a nonentity; so that although nominally Peacock’s word was law …

Adam sighed, took another piece of chewing-gum, and again caught the eye of Barfield, who was beginning to eat a tomato. Barfield grimaced and nodded meaningly at the stage. Adam grimaced back. It was a futile interchange. At the other side of the stage, Shorthouse and Joan chanted mellifluously at one another, while the orchestra tranquillized, with an occasional tender dissonance, in A flat. Adam noticed suddenly how exceptionally well they were playing, and his anger with Shorthouse rose afresh. To calm himself, he took a third piece of chewing-gum. It was a pity the stuff lost its taste so quickly, and became merely rubbery.

A few moments later he was joined by Dennis Rutherston, the producer, and a dark, rather ill-looking young man whom he vaguely remembered as being the apprentice whose sole duty it is, in the first act, to explain (in two words) the absence of Niklaus Vogel from the Masters’ gathering.

‘It’s a trial,’ said Rutherston, ‘not being able to move people when they’re singing. A convention, if you ask me.’ He was a melancholy, youngish man who was never to be seen without a battered trilby hat on his head.

‘It sends one out of tune,’ Adam told him kindly.

‘And what a nuisance Shorthouse is being … The meadow scene’s going to be an unholy muddle,’ Rutherston prognosticated gloomily. ‘These damned apprentices will not stand still when they get to their places. They seem to imagine that if they shift about from foot to foot it produces an appearance of animation. Actually, it looks like a mass attack of incipient D.T.s.’

Beyond them, the music ceased abruptly. ‘Hullo,’ muttered Rutherston. ‘What now?’

‘It seems impossible to rehearse this work for five minutes’ – Peacock’s voice was shaking – ‘without an obbligato of muffled altercation from the wings. Will you please be quiet!’

‘That’s us,’ said Rutherston, faintly surprised. ‘Well, anyway, I must be off.’ As the music started again, he drifted away, followed by the dark young man.