Night at the Vulcan

Chapter II IN A GLASS DARKLY

Martyn slept for ten hours. A wind got up in the night and found its way into the top of the stagehouse at the Vulcan. Up in the grid old back-cloths moved a little and, since the Vulcan was a hemp-house, there was a soughing among the forest of ropes. Flakes of paper, relics of some Victorian snowstorm, were dislodged from the top of a batten and fluttered down to the stage. Rain, driven fitfully against the theatre, ran in cascades down pipes and dripped noisily from ledges into the stage-door entry. The theatre mice came out, explored the contents of paste-pots in the sink-room and scuttled unsuccessfully about a covered plate of tongue and veal. Out in the auditorium there arose at intervals a vague whisper, and in his cubby-hole off the dock Fred Badger dozed and woke uneasily. At one o’clock he went on his rounds. He padded down corridors, flicking his torchlight on framed sketches for décor and costumes, explored the foyer and examined the locked doors of the offices. He climbed the heavily carpeted stairs and, lost in meditation, stood for a long time in the dress circle among shrouded rows of seats and curtained doorways. Sighing dolorously he returned backstage and made a stealthy entrance onto the set. Finally he creaked to the Greenroom door and, impelled by who knows what impulse, furtively opened it.

Martyn lay across the chair, her knees supported by one of its arms and her head by the other. The glow from the gas fire was reflected in her face. Fred Badger stood for quite a long time eyeing her and scraping his chin with calloused fingers. At last he backed out, softly closed the door and tiptoed to his cubby-hole, where he telephoned the fire-station to make his routine report.

At dawn the rain stopped and cleaning-vans swept the water down Carpet Street with their great brushes. Milk-carts clinked past the Vulcan and the first bus roared by. Martyn heard none of them. She woke to the murmur of the gas fire, and the confused memory of a dream in which someone tapped gently at a door. The windowless room was still dark but she looked at her watch in the fire-glow and found it was eight o’clock. She got up stiffly, crossed the room and opened the door on grey diffused daylight A cup of tea with a large sandwich balanced on it had been left on the floor of the passage. Underneath it was a torn scrap of paper on which was scrawled: Keep your pecker up matey see you some more.

With a feeling of gratitude and timid security she breakfasted in the Greenroom, and afterwards explored the empty passage, finding at the far end an unlocked and unused dressing-room. To this room she brought her own suitcase and here, with a chair propped under the door-handle, she stripped and washed in icy water. In clean clothes, with her toilet complete, and with a feeling of detachment, as if she herself looked on from a distance at these proceedings, she crossed the stage and went out through the side door and up the alleyway into Carpet Street.

It was a clean sunny morning. The air struck sharply at her lips and nostrils and the light dazzled her. A van had drawn up outside the Vulcan and men were lifting furniture from it. There were cleaners at work in the foyer and a telegraph boy came out whistling. Carpet Street was noisy with traffic. Martyn turned left and walked quickly downhill until she came to a corner shop called Florian. In the window a girl in a blue coverall was setting out a large gilt basket of roses. The door was still locked but Martyn, emboldened by fresh air and a sense of freedom and adventure, tapped on the window and when the girl looked up pointed to the roses and held up Mr. Grantley’s card. The girl smiled and, leaving the window, came to let her in.

Martyn said: “I’m sorry to bother you, but Mr. Grantley at the Vulcan told me to get some roses for Miss Helena Hamilton. He didn’t give me any money and I’m afraid I haven’t got any. Is all this very irregular and tiresome?”

“That will be quayte O.K.” the girl said in a friendly manner. “Mr. Grantley has an account.”

“Perhaps you know what sort of roses I should get,” Martyn suggested. She felt extraordinarily light and rather loquacious. “You see, I’m Miss Hamilton’s dresser but I’m new and I don’t know what she likes.”

“Red would be quayte in order, I think. There are some lovely Bloody Warriors just in.” She caught Martyn’s eye and giggled. “Well, they do think of the weirdest names, don’t they? Look: aren’t they lovelies?” She held up a group of roses with drops of water clinging to their half-opened petals. “Gorgeous,” she said, “aren’t they? Such a colour.”

Martyn, appalled at the price, took a dozen. The girl looked curiously at her and said: “Miss Hamilton’s dresser. Fancy! Aren’t you lucky?” and she was vividly reminded of Fred Badger.

“I feel terribly lucky this morning,” she said and was going away when the girl, turning pink under her makeup, said: “Pardon me asking, but I don’t suppose you could get me Miss Hamilton’s autograph. I’d be ever so thrilled.”

“I haven’t even seen her yet but I’ll do my best.”

“You are a duck. Thanks a million. Of course,” the girl added, “I’m a real fan. I never miss any of her pictures and I do think Adam Poole — pardon me, Mr. Poole — is simply mawvellous. I mean to say I think he’s just mawvellous. They’re so mawvellous together. I suppose he’s crazy about her in real life, isn’t he? I always say they couldn’t act together like that — you know, so gorgeously — unless they had a pretty hot clue on the sayde. Don’t you agree?”

Martyn said she hadn’t had a chance of forming an opinion as yet and left the florist in pensive contemplation of the remaining Bloody Warriors.

When she got back to the theatre its character had completely changed: it was alive and noisy. The dock-doors were open and sunlight lay in incongruous patches on painted canvas and stacked furniture. Up in the grid there was a sound of hammering. A back cloth hung diagonally in mid-air and descended in jerks, while a man in shirtsleeves shouted: “Down on yer long. Now yer short. Now bodily. Right-oh! Dead it. Now find yer Number Two.”

A chandelier lay in a heap in the middle of the stage, and above it was suspended a batten of spotlights within reach of an elderly mechanist who fitted pink and straw-coloured mediums into their frames. Near the stage-door a group of men stared at a small Empire desk from which a stage-hand had removed a cloth wrapping. A tall young man in spectacles, wearing a red pullover and corduroy trousers, said irritably: “It’s too bloody chi-chi. Without a shadow of doubt, he’ll hate its guts.”

He glanced at Martyn and added: “Put them in her room, dear, will you?”

She hurried to the dressing-room passage and found that here too there was life and movement. A vacuum-cleaner hummed in the Greenroom, a bald man in overalls was tacking cards on the doors, somewhere down the passage an unseen person sang cheerfully and the door next to Miss Hamilton’s was open. These signs of preparation awakened in Martyn a sense of urgency. In a sudden fluster she unwrapped her roses and thrust them into the vase. The stalks were too long and she had nothing to cut them with. She ran down the passage to the empty room, and reflected as she rootled in her suitcase that she would be expected to have sewing materials at hand. Here was the housewife an aunt had given her when she left New Zealand but it was depleted and in a muddle. She ran back with it, sawed at the rose stems with her nail-scissors and, when someone in the next room tapped on the wall, inadvertently jammed the points into her hand.

“And how,” a disembodied voice inquired, “is La Belle Tansley this morning?”

Sucking her left hand and arranging roses with her right, Martyn wondered how she should respond to this advance. She called out tentatively: “I’m afraid it’s not Miss Tansley.”

“What’s that?” the voice said vaguely, and a moment later she heard the brisk sound of a clothes-brush at work.

The roses were done at last. She stood with the ends of the stalks in her hand and wondered why she had become so nervous.

“Here we go again,” a voice said in the doorway. She spun round to face a small man in an alpaca coat with a dinner-jacket in his hands. He stared at her with his jaw dropped. “Pardon me,” he said. “I thought you was Miss Tansley.”

Martyn explained. “Well!” he said. “That’ll be her heart, that will. She ought to have given up before this. I warned her. In hospital, too? T’ch, t’ch, t’ch.” He wagged his head and looked, apparently in astonishment, at Martyn. “So that’s the story,” he continued, “and you’ve stepped into the breach. Fancy that! Better introduce ourselves, hadn’t we? The name’s Cringle but Bob’ll do as well as anything else. I’m ’is lordship’s dresser. How are you?”

Martyn gave him her name and they shook hands. He had a pleasant face covered with a cobweb of fine wrinkles. “Been long at this game?” he asked, and added: “Well, that’s a foolish question, isn’t it? I should have said: Will this be your first place, or Are you doing it in your school holidays, or something of that sort.”

“Do you suppose,” Martyn said anxiously, “Miss Hamilton will think I’m too young?”

“Not if you give satisfaction, she won’t. She’s all right if you give satisfaction. Different from my case. Slave meself dizzy, I can, and if ’is lordship’s in one of ’is moods, what do I get for it? Spare me days, I don’t know why I put up with it and that’s a fact. But she’s all right if she likes you.” He paused and added tentatively: “But you know all about that, I dare say.” Martyn was silent and felt his curiosity reach out as if it were something tangible. At last she said desperately: “I’ll try. I want to give satisfaction.”

He glanced round the room. “Looks nice,” he said. “Are you pressed and shook out? Yes, I can see you are. Flowers too. Very nice. Would you be a friend of hers? Doing it to oblige, like?”

“No, no. I’ve never seen her. Except in the pictures, of course.”

“Is that a fact?” His rather bird-like eyes were bright with speculation. “Young ladies,” he said, “have to turn their hands to all sorts of work these days, don’t they?”

“I suppose so. Yes.”

“No offence, I hope, but I was wondering if you come from one of those drama-schools. Hoping to learn a bit, watching from the side, like.”

A kind of sheepishness that had hardened into obstinacy prevented her from telling him in a few words why she was there. The impulse of a fortnight ago to rush to somebody — the ship’s captain, the High Commissioner for her own country, anyone — and unload her burden of disaster had given place almost at once to a determined silence. This mess was of her own making, she had decided, and she herself would see it out. And throughout the loneliness and panic of her ordeal, to this resolution she had stuck. It had ceased to be a reasoned affair with Martyn: the less she said, the less she wanted to say. She had become crystallized in reticence.

So she met the curiosity of the little dresser with an evasion. “It’d be wonderful,” she said, “if I did get the chance.”

A deep voice with an unusually vibrant quality called out on the stage. “Bob! Where the devil have you got to? Bob!”

“Cripes!” the little dresser ejaculated. “Here we are and in one of our tantrums. In here, sir! Coming, sir!”

He darted towards the doorway but before he reached it a man appeared there, a man so tall that for a fraction of a second he looked down over the dresser’s head directly into Martyn’s eyes.

“This young lady,” Bob Cringle explained with an air of discovery, “is the new dresser for Miss Hamilton. I just been showing her the ropes, Mr. Poole, sir.”

“You’d much better attend to your work. I want you.” He glanced again at Martyn. “Good morning,” he said and was gone. “Look at this!” she heard him say angrily in the next room. “Where are you!”

Cringle paused in the doorway to turn his thumbs down and his eyes up. “Here we are, sir. What’s the little trouble?” he was saying pacifically as he disappeared.

Martyn thought: “The picture in the Greenroom is more like him than the photographs.” Preoccupied with this discovery she was only vaguely aware of a fragrance in the air and a new voice in the passage. The next moment her employer came into the dressing-room.

An encounter with a person hitherto only seen and heard on the cinema screen is often disconcerting. It is as if the two-dimensional and enormous image had contracted about a living skeleton and in taking on substance had acquired an embarrassing normality. One is not always glad to change the familiar shadow for the strange reality.

Helena Hamilton was a blonde woman. She had every grace. To set down in detail the perfections of her hair, eyes, mouth and complexion, her shape and the gallantry of her carriage would be to reiterate merely that which everyone had seen in her innumerable pictures. She was, in fact, quite astonishingly beautiful. Even the circumstance of her looking somewhat older than her moving shadow could not modify the shock of finding her its equal in everything but this.

Coupled with her beauty was her charm. This was famous. She could reduce press conferences to a conglomerate of eager, even naïve, males. She could make a curtain-speech that every leading woman in every theatre in the English-speaking world had made before her and persuade the last man in the audience that it was original. She could convince bit-part actresses playing maids in first acts that there, but for the grace of God, went she.

On Martyn, however, taken off her balance and entirely by surprise, it was Miss Hamilton’s smell that made the first impression. At ten guineas a moderately sized bottle, she smelt like Master Fenton, all April and May. Martyn was very much shorter than Miss Hamilton but this did not prevent her from feeling cumbersome and out-of-place, as if she had been caught red-handed with her own work in the dressing-room. This awkwardness was in part dispelled by the friendliness of Miss Hamilton’s smile and the warmth of her enchanting voice.

“You’ve come to help me, haven’t you?” she said. “Now, that is kind. I know all about you from Mr. Grantley and I fully expect we’ll get along famously together. The only thing I don’t know, in fact; is your name.”

Martyn wondered if she ought to give only her Christian name or only her surname. She said: “Tarne. Martyn Tarne.”

“But what a charming name!” The brilliant eyes looked into Martyn’s face and their gaze sharpened. After a fractional pause she repeated: “Really charming,” and turned her back.

It took Martyn a moment or two to realize that this was her cue to remove Miss Hamilton’s coat. She lifted it from her shoulders — it was made of Persian lamb and smelt delicious — and hung it up. When she turned round she found that her employer was looking at her. She smiled reassuringly at Martyn and said: “You’ve got everything arranged very nicely. Roses, too. Lovely.”

“They’re from Mr. Grantley.”

“Sweet of him but I bet he sent you to buy them.”

“Well—” Martyn began and was saved by the entry of the young man in the red sweater with a dressing-case for which she was given the keys. While she was unpacking it the door opened and a middle-aged, handsome man with a raffish face and an air of boldness came in. She remembered the photographs in the foyer. This was Clark Bennington. He addressed himself to Miss Hamilton.

“Hullo,” he said, ‘I’ve been talking to John Rutherford.”

“What about?” she asked and sounded nervous.

“About that kid. Young Gay. He’s been at her again. So’s Adam.”

He glanced at Martyn. “I wanted to talk to you,” he added discontentedly.

“Well, so you shall. But I’ve got to change now, Ben. And look, this is my new dresser, Martyn Tarne.”

He eyed Martyn with more attention. “Quite a change from old Tansley,” he said. “And a very nice change, too.” He turned away. “Is Adam down?” He jerked his head at the wall.

“Yes.”

“I’ll see you later, then.”

“All right, but — yes, all right.”

He went out, leaving a faint rumour of alcohol behind him.

She was quite still for a moment after he had gone. Martyn heard her fetch a sigh, a sound half-impatient, half-anxious. “Oh, well,” she said, “let’s get going, shall we?”

Martyn had been much exercised about the extent of her duties. Did, for instance, a dresser undress her employer? Did she kneel at her feet and roll down her stockings? Did she unhook and unbutton? Or did she stand capably aside while these rites were performed by the principal herself? Miss Hamilton solved the problem by removing her dress, throwing it to Martyn and waiting to be inserted into her dressing-gown. During these operations a rumble of male voices sounded at intervals in the adjoining room. Presently there was a tap at the door. Martyn answered it and found the little dresser with a florist’s box in his hands. “Mr. Poole’s compliments,” he said and winked broadly before retiring.

Miss Hamilton by this time was spreading a yellow film over her face. She asked Martyn to open the box and, on seeing three orchids that lay crisp and fabulous on their mossy bed, sang “Darling!” on two clear notes. The voice beyond the wall responded. “Hullo?”

“They’re quite perfect. Thank you, my sweet.”

“Good,” the voice said. Martyn laid the box on the dressing-table and saw the card: Until to-morrow. Adam.

She got through the next half hour pretty successfully, she hoped. There seemed to be no blunders and Miss Hamilton continued charming and apparently delighted. There were constant visitors. A tap on the door would be followed by a head looking round and always by the invitation to come in. First there was Miss Gay Gainsford, a young and rather intense person with a pretty air of deference, who seemed to be in a state of extreme anxiety.

“Well, darling,” Miss Hamilton said, glancing at her in the glass. “Everything under strict control?”

Miss Gainsford said unevenly: “I suppose so. I’m trying to be good and sort of biddable, do you know, but underneath I realize that I’m seething like a cauldron. Butterflies the size of bats in the stomach.”

“Well, of course. But you mustn’t be terrified, really, because whatever happens we all know John’s written a good play, don’t we?”

“I suppose we do.”

“We do indeed. And Gay — you’re going to make a great personal success in this part. I want you to tell yourself you are. Do you know? Tell yourself.”

“I wish I could believe it.” Miss Gainsford clasped her hands and raised them to her lips. “It’s not very easy,” she said, “when he — John — Dr. Rutherford — so obviously thinks I’m a misfit. Everybody keeps telling me it’s a marvellous part, but for me it’s thirteen sides of hopeless hell. Honestly, it is.”

“Gay, what nonsense! John may seem hard—”

“Seem!”

“Well, he may be hard, then. He’s famous for it, after all. But you’ll get your reward, my dear, when the time comes. Remember,” said Miss Hamilton with immense gravity, “we all have faith in you.”

“Of course,” said Miss Gainsford with an increased quaver in her voice, “it’s too marvellous your feeling like that about it. You’ve been so miraculously kind. And Uncle Ben, of course. Both of you. I can’t get over it.”

“But, my dear, that’s utter nonsense. You’re going to be one of our rising young actresses.”

“You do really think so!”

“But yes. We all do.” Her voice lost a little colour and then freshened. “We all do,” she repeated firmly and turned back to her glass.

Miss Gainsford went to the door and hesitated there. “Adam doesn’t,” she said loudly.

Miss Hamilton made a quick expressive gesture toward the next dressing-room and put her finger to her lips. “He’ll be really angry if he hears you say that,” she whispered, and added aloud with somewhat forced casualness: “Is John down this morning?”

“He’s on-stage. I think he said he’d like to speak to you.”

“I want to see him particularly. Will you tell him, darling?”

“Of course, Aunty Helena,” Miss Gainsford said rather miserably, and added: “I’m sorry, I forgot. Of course, Helena, darling.” With a wan smile she was gone.

“Oh, dear!” Miss Hamilton sighed and catching Martyn’s eye in the looking-glass made a rueful face. “If only—” she began and stopped unaccountably, her gaze still fixed on Martyn’s image. “Never mind,” she said.

There was a noisy footfall in the passage followed by a bang on the door, and, with scarcely a pause for permission, by the entry of a large, florid and angry-looking man wearing a sweater, a leather waistcoat, a muffler and a very old duffel coat.

“Good morning, John darling,” said Miss Hamilton gaily and extended her hand. The new-comer planted a smacking kiss on it and fixed Martyn with a china-blue and bulging pair of eyes. Martyn turned away from this embarrassing regard.

“What have we here?” he demanded. His voice was loud and rumbling.

“My new dresser. Dr. Rutherford, Martyn.”

“Stay me with flagons!” said Rutherford. He turned on Miss Hamilton. “That fool of a wench Gainsford said you wanted me,” he said. “What’s up?”

“John, what have you been saying to that child?”

“I? Nothing. Nothing to what I could, and, mark you, what I ought to say to her. I merely asked her if, for the sake of my sanity, she’d be good enough to play the central scene without a goddam simper on her fat and wholly unsuitable dial.”

“You’re frightening her.”

“She’s terrifying me. She may be your niece, Helena—”

“She’s not my niece. She’s Ben’s niece.”

“If she was the Pope’s niece she’d still be a goddam pain in the neck. I wrote this part for an intelligent actress who could be made to look reasonably like Adam. What do you give me? A moronic amateur who looks like nothing on God’s earth.”

“She’s extremely pretty.”

“Lollypops! Adam’s too damn easy on her. The only hope lies in shaking her up. Or kicking her out and I’d do that myself if I had my way. It ought to have been done a month back. Even now—”

“Oh, my dear John! We open in two days, you might remember.”

“An actress worth her salt’d memorize it in an hour. I told her—”

“I do beg you,” she said, “to leave her to Adam. After all he is the producer, John, and he’s very wise.”

Dr. Rutherford pulled out of some submerged pocket a metal box. From this he extracted a pinch of snuff, which he took with loud and uncouth noises.

“In a moment,” he said, “you’ll be telling me the author ought to keep out of the theatre.”

“That’s utter nonsense.”

“Let them try to keep me out,” he said and burst into a neighing laugh.

Miss Hamilton slightly opened her mouth, hardened her upper lip, and with the closest attention painted it a purplish red. “Really,” she said briskly, “you’d much better behave prettily, you know. You’ll end by having her on your hands with a nervous breakdown.”

“The sooner the better if it’s a good one.”

“Honestly, John, you are the rock bottom when you get like this. If you didn’t write the plays you do write — if you weren’t the greatest dramatist since—”

“Spare me the raptures,” he said, “and give me some actors. And while we’re on the subject, I may as well tell you that I don’t like the way Ben is shaping in the big scene. If Adam doesn’t watch him he’ll be up to some bloody leading-man hocus-pocus, and by God if he tries that on I’ll wring his neck for him.”

She turned and faced him. “John, he won’t. I’m sure he won’t.”

“No, you’re not. You can’t be sure. Nor can I. But if there’s any sign of it to-night, and Adam doesn’t tackle him, I will. I’ll tickle his catastrophe, by God I will. As for that Mongolian monstrosity, that discard from the waxworks, Mr. Parry Percival, what devil — will you answer me — what inverted sadist foisted it on my play?”

“Now, look here, John—” Miss Hamilton began with some warmth, and was shouted down.

“Have I not stipulated from the beginning of my disastrous association with this ill-fated playhouse that I would have none of these abortions in my works? These Things. These foetid Growths. These Queers.”

“Parry isn’t one.”

“Yah! He shrieks it. I have an instinct, my girl. I nose them as I go into the lobby.”

She made a gesture of despair. “I give up,” she said.

He helped himself to another pinch of snuff. “Hooey!” he snorted. “You don’t do anything of the sort, my sweetie-pie. You’re going to rock ’em, you and Adam. Think of that and preen yourself. And leave all the rest — to me.”

“Don’t quote from Macbeth. If Gay Gainsford heard you doing that she really would go off at the deep end.”

“Which is precisely where I’d like to push her.”

“Oh, go away,” she cried out impatiently but with an air of good nature. “I’ve had enough of you. You’re wonderful and you’re hopeless. Go away.”

“The audience is concluded?” He scraped the parody of a Regency bow.

“The audience is concluded. The door, Martyn.”

Martyn opened the door. Until then, feeling wretchedly in the way, she had busied herself with the stack of suitcases in the corner of the room and now, for the first time, came absolutely face to face with the visitor. He eyed her with an extraordinary air of astonishment.

“Here!” he said. “Hi!”

“No, John,” Miss Hamilton said with great determination. “No!”

“Eureka!”

“Nothing of the sort. Good morning.”

He gave a shrill whistle and swaggered out. Martyn turned back to find her employer staring into the glass. Her hands trembled and she clasped them together. “Martyn,” she said, “I’m going to call you Martyn because it’s such a nice name. You know, a dresser is rather a particular sort of person. She has to be as deaf as a post and as blind as a bat to almost everything that goes on under her very nose. Dr. Rutherford is, as I expect you know, a most distinguished and brilliant person. Our Greatest English Playwright. But like many brilliant people,” Miss Hamilton continued, in what Martyn couldnt help thinking a rather too special voice, “he is eccentric. We all understand and we expect you to do so too. Do you know?”

Martyn said she did.

“Good. Now, put me into that pink thing and let us know the worst about it, shall we?”

When she was dressed she stood before the cheval-glass and looked with cold intensity at her image. “My God,” she said, “the lighting had better be good.”

Martyn said: “Isn’t it right? It looks lovely to me.”

“My poor girl!” she muttered. “You run to my husband and ask him for cigarettes. He’s got my case. I need a stimulant.”

Martyn hurried into the passage and tapped at the next door. “So they are married,” she thought. “He must be ten years younger than she is but they’re married and he still sends her orchids in the morning.”

The deep voice shouted impatiently: “Come!” and she opened the door and went in.

The little dresser was putting Poole into a dinner jacket. Their backs were turned to Martyn. “Yes?” Poole said,

“Miss Hamilton would like her cigarette case, if you please.”

“I haven’t got it,” he said and shouted: “Helena!”

“Hullo, darling?”

“I haven’t got your case.”

There was a considerable pause. The voice beyond the wall called: “No, no. Ben’s got it. Mr. Bennington, Martyn.”

“I’m so sorry,” Martyn said, and made for the door, conscious of the little dresser’s embarrassment and of Poole’s annoyance.

Mr. Clark Bennington’s room was on the opposite side of the passage and next the Greenroom. On her entrance Martyn was abruptly and most unpleasantly transported into the immediate past — into yesterday with its exhaustion, muddle and panic, to the moment of extreme humiliation when Fred Badger had smelt brandy on her breath. Mr. Bennington’s flask was open on his dressing-shelf and he was in the act of entertaining a thick-set gentleman with beautifully groomed white hair, wearing a monocle in a strikingly handsome face. This person set down his tumbler and gazed in a startled fashion at Martyn.

“It’s not,” he said, evidently picking up with some difficulty the conversation she had interrupted, “it’s not that I would for the world interfere, Ben, dear boy. Nor do I enjoy raising what is no doubt a delicate subject in these particular circumstances. But I feel for the child damnably, you know. Damnably. Moreover, it does rather appear that the Doctor never loses an opportunity to upset her.”

“I couldn’t agree more, old boy, and I’m bloody angry about it. Yes, dear, wait a moment, will you?” Mr. Bennington rejoined, running his speeches together and addressing them to no one in particular. This is my wife’s new dresser, J.G.”

“Really?” Mr. J. G. Darcey responded and bowed politely to Martyn. “Good morning, child. See you later, Ben, my boy. Thousand thanks.”

He rose, looked kindly at Martyn, dropped his monocle, passed his hand over his hair and went out, breaking into operatic song in the passage.

Mr. Bennington made a half-hearted attempt to put his flask out of sight and addressed himself to Martyn.

“And what,” he asked, “can I do for the new dresser?”

Martyn delivered her message. “Cigarette case? Have I got my wife’s cigarette case? God, I don’t know. Try my overcoat, dear, will you? Behind the door. Inside pocket. No secrets,” he added obscurely. “Forgive my asking you. I’m busy.”

But he didn’t seem particularly busy. He twisted round in his chair and watched Martyn as she made a fruitless search of his overcoat pockets. “This your first job?” he asked. She said it was not and he added: “As a dresser, I mean.”

“I’ve worked in the theatre before.”

“And where was that?”

“In New Zealand.”

“Really?” he said, as if she had answered some vitally important question.

“I’m afraid,” Martyn went on quickly, “it’s not in the overcoat.”

“God, what a bore! Give me my jacket then, would you? The grey flannel.”

She handed it to him and he fumbled through the pockets. A pocket-book dropped on the floor, spilling its contents. Martyn gathered them together and he made such a clumsy business of taking them from her that she was obliged to put them on the shelf. Among them was an envelope bearing a foreign stamp and postmark. He snatched it up and it fluttered in his fingers. “Mustn’t lose track of that one, must we?” he said and laughed. “All the way from Uncle Tito.” He thrust it at Martyn. “Look,” he said and steadied his hand against the edge of the shelf. “What d’you think of that? Take it.”

Troubled at once by the delay and by the oddness of his manner Martyn took the envelope and saw that it was addressed to Bennington.

“Do you collect autographs,” Bennington asked with ridiculous intensity—“or signed letters?”

“No, I’m afraid I don’t,” she said and put the letter face-down on the shelf.

“There’s someone,” he said with a jab of his finger at the envelope, “who’d give a hell of a lot for that one in there. A hell of a lot.”

He burst out laughing, pulled a cigarette case out of the jacket and handed it to her with a flourish. “Purest gold,” he said. “Birthday present but not from me. I’m her husband, you know. What the hell! Are you leaving me? Don’t go.”

Martyn made her escape and ran back to Miss Hamilton’s room, where she found her in conference with Adam Poole and a young man of romantic appearance whom she recognized as the original of the last of the photographs in the foyer — Mr. Parry Percival. The instinct that makes us aware of a conversation in which we ourselves have in our absence been involved warned Martyn that they had been talking about her and had broken off on her entrance. After a moment’s silence, Mr. Percival, with far too elaborate a nonchalance, said: “Yes. Well, there you have it,” and it was obvious that there was a kind of double significance in his remark. Miss Hamilton said: “My poor Martyn, where have you been?” with a lightness that was not quite cordial.

“I’m sorry,” Martyn said. “Mr. Bennington had trouble in finding the case.” She hesitated for a moment and added, “Madam.”

“That,” Miss Hamilton rejoined, looking at Adam Poole, “rings dismally true. Would you believe it, darling, I became so furious with him for taking it that, most reluctantly, I gave him one for himself. He lost it instantly, of course, and now swears he didn’t and mine is his. If you follow me.”

“With considerable difficulty,” Poole said, “I do.”

Parry Percival laughed gracefully. He had a winning, if not altogether authentic, air of ingenuousness, and at the moment seemed to be hovering on the edge of some indiscretion. “I am afraid,” he said ruefully to Miss Hamilton, “I’m rather in disgrace myself.”

“With me, or with Adam?”

“I hope not with either of you. With Ben.” He glanced apologetically at Poole, who did not look at him. “Because of the part, I mean. I suppose I spoke out of turn, but I really did think I could play it — still do for a matter of that, but there it is.”

It was obvious that he was speaking at Poole. Martyn saw Miss Hamilton look from one man to the other before she said lightly, “I think you could too, Parry, but as you say, there it is. Ben has got a flair, you know.”

Percival laughed. “He has indeed,” he said. “He has had it for twenty years. Sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. Honestly, I am sorry.”

Poole said: “I dislike post mortems on casting, Parry.”

“I know, I do apologize.” Percival turned ingratiatingly, and the strong light caught his face sideways. Martyn saw with astonishment that under the thin film of greasepaint there was a system of incipient lines, and she realized that he was not, after all, a young man. “I know,” he repeated, “I’m being naughty.”

Poole said: “We open on Thursday. The whole thing was thrashed out weeks ago. Any discussion now is completely fruitless.”

“That,” said Miss Hamilton, “is what I have been trying to tell the Doctor.”

“John? I heard him bellowing in here,” Poole said. “Where’s he gone? I want a word with him. And with you, Parry, by the way. It’s about that scene at the window in the second act. You’re not making your exit line. You must top Ben there. It’s most important”

“Look, old boy,” Mr. Percival said with agonized intensity, “I know. It’s just another of those things. Have you seen what Ben does? Have you seen that business with my handkerchief? He won’t take his hands off me. The whole exit gets messed up.”

“I’ll see what can be done.”

“John,” said Miss Hamilton, “is worried about it too, Adam.”

Poole said: “Then he should talk to me.”

“You know what the Doctor is.”

“We all do,” said Parry Percival, “and the public, I fear, is beginning to find out. God, there I go again.”

Poole looked at him. “You’ll get along better, I think, Parry, if you deny yourself these cracks against the rest of the company. Rutherford has written a serious play. It’d be a pity if any of us should lose faith in it.”

Percival reddened and made towards the door. “I’m just being a nuisance,” he said. “I’ll take myself off and be photographed like a good boy.” He made an insinuating movement of his shoulders towards Miss Hamilton, and fluttered his hand at her dress. “Marvellous,” he said—“a triumph, if the bit-part actor may be allowed to say so.”

The door shut crisply behind him, and Miss Hamilton said: “Darling, aren’t you rather high and grand with poor Parry?”

“I don’t think so. He’s behaving like an ass. He couldn’t play the part. He was born to be a feed.”

“He’d look it.”

“If all goes well Ben will be it.”

“If all goes well! Adam, I’m terrified. He’s—”

“Are you dressed, Helena? The cameras are ready.”

“Shoes, please, Martyn,” said Miss Hamilton. “Yes, darling. I’m right.”

Martyn fastened her shoes and then opened the door. Miss Hamilton swept out, lifting her skirts with great elegance. Martyn waited for Poole to follow, but he said: “You’re meant to be on-stage. Take make-up and a glass and whatever Miss Hamilton may need for her hair.”

She thanked him and in a flurry gathered the things together. Poole took the Persian lamb coat and stood by the door. She hesitated, expecting him to precede her, but found that he was looking at the cheval-glass. When she followed his gaze it was to be confronted by their images, side by side in the mirror.

“Extraordinary,” he said abruptly, “isn’t it?” and motioned her to go out.

When Martyn went out on the stage, she was able for the first time to see the company assembled together, and found it consisted, as far as the players were concerned, of no more than the six persons she had already encountered: first in their fixed professional poses in the show-frame at the front of the house, and later in their dressing-rooms. She had attached mental tags to them and found herself thinking of Helena Hamilton as the Leading Lady, of Gay Gainsford as the Ingenue, of J. G. Darcey as the Character Actor, of Parry Percival as the Juvenile, of Clark Bennington regrettably, perhaps unjustly, as the Drunken Actor, and of Adam Poole — but as yet she had found no label for Poole, unless it was the old-fashioned one of “Governor,” which pleased her by its vicarious association with the days of the Victorian actor-managers.

To this actual cast of six she must add a number of satellite figures — the author, Dr. John Rutherford, whose eccentricities seemed to surpass those of his legend, with which she was already acquainted; the man in the red sweater, who was the stage-manager, and was called Clem Smith; his assistant, a morose lurking figure; and the crew of stage-hands, who went about their business or contemplated the actors with equal detachment.

The actors were forming themselves now into a stage “picture” moving in a workman-like manner under the direction of Adam Poole, and watched with restless attentiveness by an elderly, slack-jointed man, carrying a paint pot and brushes. This man, the last of all the figures to appear upon the stage that morning, seemed to have no recognizable jobs but to be concerned in all of them. He was dressed in overalls and a tartan shirt, from which his long neck emerged, bird-like and crepe-y to terminate in a head that wobbled slightly as if its articulation with the top of the spine had loosened with age. He was constantly addressed with exasperated affection as Jacko. Under his direction, bunches of lights were wheeled into position, camera men peered and muttered, and at his given signal the players, by an easy transition in behaviour and appearance, became larger than life. A gap was left in the middle of the group, and into this when all was ready floated Helena Hamilton, ruffling her plumage, and becoming at once the focal point of the picture.

“Darling,” she said, “it’s not going to be a flash, is it, with all of you looking like village idiots, and me like the Third Witch on the morning after the cauldron scene?”

“If you can hold it for three seconds,” Adam Poole said, “it needn’t be a flash.”

“I can hold anything, if you come in and help me.”

He moved in beside her. “All right,” he said, “let’s try it. The end of the first act”; and at once she turned upon him a look of tragic and burning intensity. The elderly man wandered across and tweaked at her skirts. Without changing pose or expression, she said: “Isn’t it shameful the way Jacko can’t keep his hands off me.” He grinned and ambled away. Adam Poole said “Right”; the group froze in postures of urgency that led the eye towards the two central figures and the cameras clicked.

Martyn tried, as the morning wore on, to get some idea of the content of the play, but was unable to do so. Occasionally the players would speak snatches of dialogue leading up to the moment when a photograph was to be taken, and from these she gathered that the major conflict of the theme was between the characters played by Adam Poole and Clark Bennington and that this conflict was one of ideas. About a particular shot there was a great deal of difficulty. In this Poole and Gay Gainsford confronted each other, and it was necessary that her posture, the arrested gesture of her hand, and even her expression should be an exact reflection of his.

To Martyn, Poole had seemed to be a short-tempered man, but with Gay Gainsford he showed exemplary patience. “It’s the old story, Gay,” he said. “You’re over-anxious. It’s not enough for you to look like me. Let’s face it—” he hesitated for a moment and said quickly: “We’ve had all this, haven’t we — but it’s worth repeating — you can’t look strikingly like me, although Jacko’s done wonders. What you’ve got to do is to be me. At this moment, don’t you see, you’re my heredity, confronting me like a threat. As far as the photograph is concerned, we can cheat — the shot can be taken over your shoulder, but in the performance there can be no cheating, and that is why I’m making such a thing of it. Now let’s take it with the line. Your head’s on your arms, you raise it slowly to face me. Ready now. Right, up you come.”

Miss Gainsford raised her face to his as he leaned across the writing desk and whispered: “Don’t you like what you see?” At the same moment there was a cascade of laughter from Miss Hamilton. Poole’s voice cracked like a whip-lash: “Helena, please,” and she turned from Parry Percival to say: “Darling, I’m so sorry,” and in the same breath spoke her line of dialogue: “But it’s you, don’t you see? You can’t escape from it. It’s you.” Gay Gainsford made a hopeless little gesture and Poole said: “Too late, of course. Try again.”

They tried several times, in an atmosphere of increasing tension. The amiable Jacko was called in to make an infinitesimal change in Gay’s make-up, and Martyn saw him blot away a tear. At this juncture a disembodied voice roared from the back of the circle:

Poole glanced into the auditorium. “Do shut up like a good chap, John,” he said.

The man called Jacko burst out laughing and was instantly dismissed to the dressing-rooms by Poole.

There followed a quarter of an hour of mounting hysteria on the part of Gay Gainsford and of implacable persistence from Adam Poole. He said suddenly: “All right, we’ll cheat. Shift the camera.”

The remaining photographs were taken without a great deal of trouble. Miss Gainsford, looking utterly miserable, went off to her dressing-room. The man called Jacko reappeared and ambled across to Miss Hamilton. There was an adjustment in make-up while Martyn held up the mirror.

“Maybe it’s lucky,” he said, “you don’t have to look like somebody else.”

“Are you being nice or beastly, Jacko?”

He put a cigarette between her lips and lit it “The dresses are good,” he said. He had a very slight foreign accent.

“You think so, do you?”

“Naturally. I design them for you.”

“Next time,” she said grimly, “you’d better write the play as well.”

He was a phenomenally ugly man, but a smile of extraordinary sweetness broke across his face.

“All these agonies!” he murmured. “And on Thursday night everyone will be kissing everyone else and at the Combined Arts Ball we are in triumph and on Friday morning you will be purring over your notices. And you must not be unkind about the play. It is a good play.” He grinned again, more broadly. His teeth were enormous and uneven. “Even the little niece of the great husband cannot entirely destroy it.”

“Jacko!”

“You may say what you like, it is not intelligent casting.”

“Please, Jacko.”

“All right, all right. I remind you instead of the Combined Arts Ball, and that no one has decided in what costume we go.”

“Nobody has any ideas. Jacko, you must invent something marvellous.”

“And in two days I must also create out of air eight marvellous costumes.”

“Darling Jacko, how beastly we are to you. But you know you love performing your little wonders.”

“I suggest then, that we are characters from Tchekhov as they would be in Hollywood. You absurdly gorgeous, and the little niece still grimly ingenue. Adam perhaps as Vanya if he were played by Boris Karloff. And so on.”

“Where shall I get my absurdly gorgeous dress?”

“I paint the design on canvas and cut it out and if I were introduced to your dresser I would persuade her to sew it up.” He took the glass from Martyn and said: “No one makes any introductions in this theatre, so we introduce ourselves to each other. I am Jacques Doré, and you are the little chick whom the stork has brought too late, or dropped into the wrong nest. Really,” he said, rolling his eyes at Miss Hamilton, “it is the most remarkable coincidence, if it is a coincidence. I am dropping bricks,” he added. “I am a very privileged person but one day I drop an outsize brick, and away I go.” He made a circle of his thumb and forefinger and looked through it, as though it were a quizzing-glass, at Martyn. “All the same,” he said, “it is a pity you are a little dresser and not a little actress.”

Between the photograph call and the dress rehearsal, which was timed for seven o’clock, a state of uneven ferment prevailed at the Vulcan. During the rare occasions on which she had time to reflect, Martyn anticipated a sort of personal zero hour, a moment when she would have to take stock, to come to a decision. She had two and fourpence and no place of abode, and she had no idea when she would be paid, or how much she would get. This moment of reckoning, however, she continually postponed. The problem of food was answered for the moment by the announcement that it would be provided for everyone whose work kept them in the theatre throughout the day. As Miss Hamilton had discovered a number of minor alterations to be made in her dresses, Martyn was of this company. Having by this time realized the position of extraordinary ubiquity held by Jacko, she was not surprised to find him cooking a mysterious but savoury mess over the gas ring in Fred Badger’s sink-room.

This concoction was served in enamel mugs, at odd intervals, to anyone who asked for it, and Martyn found herself eating her share in company with Bob Cringle, Mr. Poole’s dresser. From him she learnt more about Mr. Jacques Doré. He was responsible for the décor and dressing of all Poole’s productions. His official status was that of assistant to Mr. Poole, but in actual fact he seemed to be a kind of superior odd-job man.

“General dogsbody,” Cringle gossiped, “that’s what Mr. Jacko is. ‘Poole’s Luck,’ people call him, and if the Guv’nor was superstitious about anything, which ’e is not, it would be about Mr. Jacko. The lady’s the same. Can’t do without ’im. As a matter of fact it’s on ’er account ’e sticks it out. You might say ’e’s ’er property, a kind of pet, if you like to put it that way. Joined up with ’er and ’is nibs when they was in Canada and the Guv’nor still doing the child-wonder at ’is posh college. ’E’s a Canadian-Frenchy, Mr. Jacko is. Twenty years ago that must ’ave been, only don’t say I said so. It’s what they call dog-like devotion, and that’s no error. To ’er, not to ’is nibs.”

“Do you mean Mr. Bennington?” Martyn ventured.

“Clark Bennington, the distinguished character actor, that’s right,” said Cringle dryly. Evidently he was not inclined to elaborate this theme. He entertained Martyn, instead, with a lively account of the eccentricities of Dr. John Rutherford. “My oaff,” he said, “what a daisy! Did you ’ear ’im chi-iking from the front this morning? Typical! We done three of ’is pieces up to date and never a dull moment. Rows and ructions, ructions and rows from the word go. The Guv’nor puts up with it on account he likes the pieces and what a time ’e ’as with ’im, oh dear! It’s something shocking the way Doctor cuts up. Dynamite! This time it’s the little lady and ’is nibs and Mr. Parry Profile Percival ’e’s got it in for. Can’t do nothing to please ’im. You should ’ear ’im at rehearsals. ‘You’re bastardizing my play,’ ’e ’owls. ‘Get the ’ell aht of it,’ ’e shrieks. You never see such an exhibition. Shocking! Then the Guv’nor shuts ’im up and ’e ’as an attack of the willies or what-have-you and keeps aht of the theaytre for a couple of days. Never longer, though, which is very unfortunate for all concerned.”

Martyn tried to find out from Cringle what the play was about. He was not very illuminating. “It’s ’igh-brow,” he said. “Intellectually, it’s clarse. ‘A Modern Morality’ he calls it, the Doctor does. It’s all about whether you’re brought up right makes any difference to what your old pot ’ands on to you. ‘ ’Eredity versus enviroment’ they call it. The Guv’nor’s enviroment, and all the rest of ’em’s ’eredity. And like it always is in clarse plays, the answer’s a lemon. Well, I must go on me way rejoicing.”

To Martyn, held as she was in a sort of emotional suspension, the lives and events enclosed within the stage walls and curtain of the Vulcan Theatre assumed a greater reality than her own immediate problem. Her existence since five o’clock the previous afternoon, when she had walked into the theatre, had much of the character and substance of a dream with all the shifting values, the passages of confusion and extreme clarity, which make up the texture of a dream. She was in a state of semi-trauma and found it vaguely agreeable. Her jobs would keep her busy all the afternoon and tonight there was the first dress rehearsal.

She could, she thought, tread water indefinitely, half in and half out of her dream, as long as she didn’t come face to face with Mr. Adam Poole in any more looking-glasses.