Having decided that Wally had swelled head and not feeling much better, Mr Goble concentrated his attention on the stage. A good deal of action had taken place there during recently concluded business talk, and the unfortunate Finchley was back again, playing another of his scenes. Mr Goble glared at Lord Finchley. He did not like him, and he did not like the way he was speaking his lines.
The part of Lord Finchley was a non-singing role. It was a type part. Otis Pilkington had gone to the straight stage to find an artist, and had secured the not uncelebrated Wentworth Hill, who had come over from London to play in an English comedy which had just closed. The newspapers had called the play thin, but had thought that Wentworth Hill was an excellent comedian. Mr Hill thought so too, and it was consequently a shock to his already disordered nerves when a bellow from the auditorium stopped him in the middle of one of his speeches and a rasping voice informed him that he was doing it all wrong.
“I beg your pardon?” said Mr. Hill, quietly but dangerously, stepping to the footlights.
“Really?” Wentworth Hill, who a few years earlier had spent several terms at Oxford University before being sent down for aggravated disorderliness, had brought little away with him from that seat of learning except the Oxford manner. This he now employed upon Mr Goble with an icy severity which put the last touch to the manager’s fermenting state of mind. “Perhaps you would be kind enough to tell me just how you think that part should be played?”
“Speak out to the audience,” he said, stationing himself by the orchestra pit. “You’re turning your head away all the darned time.”
“I may be wrong,” said Mr Hill, “but I have played a certain amount, don’t you know, in pretty good companies, and I was always under the impression that one should address one’s remarks to the person one was speaking to, not deliver a recitation to the gallery. I was taught that that was the legitimate method.”
The word touched off all the dynamite in Mr Goble. Of all things in the theatre he detested most the “legitimate method.” His idea of producing was to instruct the cast to come down to the footlights and hand it to ’em. These people who looked up stage and talked to the audience through the backs of their necks revolted him.