The song was very short and simple, a minor thread of melody that wavered about through a few plain phrases, but the hymn-like over-sweetness of some of the other songs was absent in this one. Dikon wondered how much its icy undercurrent of horror depended upon a knowledge of its theme. In the penultimate line a single girl’s voice rang out in a piercing scream, the cry of the maiden as she went to her death in the seething mud cauldron. It left an uncomfortable and abiding impression, which was not dispelled by the subsequent activities of the Savage Club quartette, the ventriloquist, the infant prodigy, or the determined soprano.

Gaunt had said that he would appear last on the programme. With what Dikon considered ridiculous solicitude, he had told Barbara to choose for him and she had at once asked for the Crispian Day speech: ‘The one we had this morning.’ ‘Then he was spouting the Bard by the sad sea waves,’ thought Dikon vindictively. ‘Good God, it’s nauseating.’

Gaunt said afterwards that he changed his mind about the opening speech because he realized that his audience would demand an encore, and he thought it better to finish up with the Henry V. But Dikon always believed that he had been influenced in his choice by the echo of the little song about death. For after opening rather obviously with the Bastard’s speech on England, he turned sombrely to Macbeth.

‘I have almost forgot the taste of fears…’

and continued to the end

‘…it is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.’

It is a terrible speech and Gaunt’s treatment of it, a deadly calm monotone, struck very cold indeed. When he had ended there was a second’s silence, ‘and then,’ Dikon said afterwards to Barbara, ‘they clapped because they wanted to get some warmth back into their hands.’ Gaunt watched them with a faint smile, collected himself, and then gave them Henry V with everything he’d got, bringing the Maori members of his audience to their feet, cheering. In the end he had to do the speech before Agincourt as well.

He came down glowing. He was, to use a phrase that has been done to death by actors, a great artist, but an audience meant only one thing to him: it was a single entity that must fall in love with him, and, as a corollary, with Shakespeare. Nobody knew better than Gaunt that to rouse an audience whose acquaintance with the plays was probably confined to the first line of Anthony’s oration was very nice work indeed. Rua, pacing to and fro in the traditional manner, thanked him first in Maori and then in English. The concert drew to an uproarious conclusion. ‘And now,’ said Rua, ‘The King.’

But before the audience could get to its feet Mr Questing was on his and had walked up on the platform.