"I'm no Othello, darling."
"Yet I am
Your Desdemona. Tell me of your travels."
"Of Anthropophagi?"
"'And men whose heads do grow beneath'"
"I saw no such,
Not in all wildest Greece and Macedon."
"Saw you no spirits?"
"None, Malvina—none."
"Not even the vampire, he who quaffs the blood
Of life, that he may live in death?"
"Not I.
How do you know that tale?"
"I've read
In old romances"
"Capital, capital," interrupted Varduk pleasantly. "I know that the play is written in a specific meter, yet you need not speak as though it were. If anything, make the lines less rhythmic and more matter-of-fact. Remember, you are young lovers, half bantering as you woo. Let your audience relax with you. Let it feel the verse form without actually hearing."
We continued, to the line where Aubrey tells of his travel-acquaintance Ruthven. Here the speech became definite verse:
"He is a friend who charms, but does not cheer,
One who commands, but comforts not, the world.
I do not doubt but women find him handsome,
Yet hearts must be uneasy at his glance."
Malvina asks:
"His glance? Is it so piercing when it strikes?"
And Aubrey:
"It does not pierce—indeed, it rather weighs,
Like lead, upon the face where it is fixed."
Followed the story, which I have outlined elsewhere, of the encounter with bandits and Ruthven's apparent sacrifice of himself to cover Aubrey's retreat. Then Martha Vining, as the maid Bridget, spoke to announce Ruthven's coming, and upon the heels of her speech Varduk moved stiffly toward us.
"Aubrey!" he cried, in a rich, ringing tone such as fills theaters, and not at all like his ordinary gentle voice. I made my due response:
"Have you lived, Ruthven? But the horde
Of outlaw warriors compassed you and struck"
In the rôle of Ruthven, Varduk's interruption was as natural and decisive as when, in ordinary conversation, he neatly cut another's speech in two with a remark of his own. I have already quoted this reply of Ruthven's:
"I faced them, and who seeks my face seeks death."
He was speaking the line, of course, without script, and his eyes held mine. Despite myself, I almost staggered under the weight of his glance. It was like that which Aubrey actually credits to Ruthven—lead-heavy instead of piercing, difficult to support.
The rehearsal went on, with Ruthven's seduction of Bridget and his court to the nervous but fascinated Malvina. In the end, as I have synopsized earlier, came his secret and miraculous revival from seeming death. Varduk delivered the final rather terrifying speech magnificently, and then abruptly doffed his Ruthven manner to smile congratulations all around.
"It's more than a month to our opening date in July," he said, "and yet I would be willing to present this play as a
