“Frightful places,” said Ingestree, doing a dramatic shudder.

“I’ve seen worse since,” said Magnus. “You should try a tour in Central America, to balance your viewpoint. What was interesting about so many of the Canadian theatres, outside the big cities, was that they seemed to have been built with big ideas, and then abandoned before they were equipped. They had pretty good foyers and auditoriums with plush seats, and invariably eight boxes, four on each side of the stage, from which nobody could see very well. All of them had drop curtains with views of Venice or Rome on them, and a spy-hole through which so many actors had peeped that it was ringed with a black stain from their greasepaint. Quite a few had special curtains on which advertisements were printed for local merchants; Sir John didn’t like those, and Holroyd had to do what he could to suppress them.

“Every one had a sunken pen for an orchestra, with a fancy balustrade to cut it off from the stalls, and nobody ever seemed to sweep in there. At performance time a handful of assassins would creep into the pen from a low door beneath the stage, and fiddle and thump and toot the music to which they were accustomed. C. Pengelly Spickernell used to say bitterly that these musicians were all recruited from the local manager’s poor relations; it was his job to assemble as many of them as could get away from their regular work on a Monday morning and take them through the music that was to accompany our plays. Sir John was fussy about music, and always had a special overture for each of his productions, and usually an entr’acte as well.

“God knows it was not very distinguished music. When we heard it, it was a puzzle to know why ‘Overture to Scaramouche’ by Hugh Dunning did any more for the play that followed than if the orchestra had played ‘Overture to The Master of Ballantrae’ by Festyn Hughes. But there it was, and to Sir John and Milady these two lengths of mediocre music were as different as daylight and dark, and they used to sigh and raise their eyebrows at one another when they heard the miserable racket coming from the other side of the curtain, as if it were the ravishing of a masterpiece. In addition to this specially written music we carried a substantial body of stuff with such titles as ‘Minuet d’Amour’, ‘Peasant Dance’, and ‘Gaelic Memories’, which did for Rosemary; and for The Corsican Brothers Sir John insisted on an overture that had been written for Irving’s production of Robespierre by somebody called Litolff. Another great standby was ‘Suite: At the Play’, by York Bowen. But except in the big towns the orchestra couldn’t manage anything unfamiliar, so we generally ended up with ‘Three Dances from Henry VIII’, by Edward German, which I suppose is known to every bad orchestra in the world. C. Pengelly Spickernell used to grieve about it whenever anybody would listen, but I honestly think the audiences liked that bad playing, which was familiar and had associations with a good time.