The week before the opening night he suggested that I should go along and see the first technical run-through of The White Devil. As the alternative was Sunday Night at the London Palladium with Pascal, I said that I would go, and I made my way to the theatre through the pouring rain at about eight in the evening. David said that he had asked permission from Wyndham for me to watch. It was an added interest to know that I was in some measure expected, and I was therefore in some measure expectant. I sat at the back of the auditorium to watch: it was dark there, and I could only just make out the forms of the other actors, technicians and hangers-on who were dotted sparsely around the stalls. I located Sophy quickly, from her continuous giggle. Wyndham Farrar was walking up and down one of the aisles, and David was on stage. I like watching rehearsals: they are far more interesting than performances. One can see in a rehearsal every detail of what has preceded: who loves whom, who is nervous, who is confident, who is vain, who has been bullied by the director, who is admired by the rest of the cast, who is on the verge of tearful disaster. A performance does not wholly conceal such things, but it conceals some of them; whereas here before me lay the whole pattern, or what I liked to think was the whole pattern. There was, too, a wonderful counterpoise between the life of the play itself and the life and dialogue that the actors would assume in the incessant breaks for lighting cues, music cues, furniture rearrangements and so forth, which were, rather than any more artistic concern, the purpose of the occasion. Peter Yates would break off at a line like Thou hast led me like a heathen sacrifice, With garlands and with fatal yokes of flowers, To mine eternal ruin in order to move a cushion on the bed, to complain about his boots or to put his arm round Viola, the waiting woman, and whisper in her ear, so that the notions of overpolished boots and eternal ruins mingled strangely.