Night at the Vulcan

Chapter IV SECOND DRESS REHEARSAL

When Martyn opened her eyes on the second morning of her adventure it was with the sensation of having come to rest after a painful journey. At first the events of the previous night seemed to be incorporated in the sleep that had followed them, and her happiness had something of the precarious and transitory quality of a remembered dream. It was difficult to believe that nine hours ago she had faced Adam Poole across a table on the stage of the Vulcan Theatre and had done so, for the moment at least, as an actress. The subsequent drive in a taxi with the unusually silent Jacko, their entrance into a sleeping house, creaking tiptoe up the stairs, the rapture of a hot bath and her subsequent oblivion — all these events flowed together in her memory and she felt she was as yet neither asleep nor fully wakened.

She lay quiet and looked about her. It was a bright morning and the sun came in at the attic window above her bed. The room had an air of great cleanliness and freshness. She remembered now that Jacko had told her he occasionally made use of it and indeed, tiny as it was, it bore his eccentric imprint. A set of designs for Twelfth Night was pinned to a wall-board. Ranged along the shelf were a number of figures dressed in paper as the persons in the play and on the wall facing her bed hung a mask of the fool, Feste, looking very like Jacko himself.

“There never was such a little room,” Martyn sighed, and began to plan how she would collect and stow away her modest belongings. She was filled with gratitude and with astonished humility.

The bathroom was on the next floor and as she went downstairs she smelt coffee and fresh bread. A door on the landing opened and Jacko’s clownish head looked out.

“Breakfast in ten minutes,” he said. “Speed is essential.”

Of all the amenities, it seemed to Martyn, a hot bath was the most beneficent, and after that a shower under which one could wash one’s hair quickly. “Lucky it’s short,” she thought, and rubbed it dry with her towel.

She was out again in eight minutes to find Jacko on the landing.

“Good,” he said. “In your woollen gown you are entirely respectable. A clean school-child. In.”

He marshalled her into a largish room set out in an orderly manner as a workshop. Martyn wondered why Jacko, who showed such exquisite neatness in his work, should in his person present such a wild front to the world. He was dressed now in faded cotton trousers, a paint-stained undervest and a tattered dressing-gown. He was unshaven and uncombed and his prominent eyes were slightly bloodshot. His manner, however, was as usual amiable and disarming.

“I propose,” he said, “that we breakfast together as a general rule. A light breakfast and supper are included in the arrangement. You will hand me your ration book and I shall shop with discretion. Undoubtedly I am a better cook than you and will therefore make myself responsible for supper. For luncheon you may return if you wish and forage ineffectually for yourself or make what other arrangement seems good to you. Approved?”

Martyn said carefully: “If you please, Jacko, I’m so grateful and so muddled I can’t think at all sensibly. You see, I don’t know what I shall be earning.”

“For your dual and unusual role of understudy and dresser, I imagine about eight pounds a week. Your rental, demi-pension, here is two.”

“It seems so little,” Martyn said timidly. “The rent, I mean.”

Jacko tapped the side of the coffee-pot with a spoon.

“Attention,” he said. “How often must I repeat. You will have the goodness to understand I am not a dirty old man. It is true that I am virile,” he continued with some complacency, “but you are not my type. I prefer the more mature, the more mondaine, the—” He stopped short, the spoon with which he had been gesticulating still held aloft. His eyes were fixed on the wall behind Martyn. She turned her head to see a sketch in water-colour of Helena Hamilton. When she faced Jacko again, he was grinning desperately.

“Believe me,” he said, “you are in no danger of discomfort from the smallest whisper of scandal. I am notoriously pure. This morning there are eggs and therefore an omelette. Let us observe silence while I make it”

He was gay, in his outlandish fashion, from then onwards. When they had finished their admirable breakfast she helped him wash up and he gave her what he called her orders for the day. She was to go down to the theatre with him, set about her work as a dresser, and at three o’clock she would be given a formal rehearsal as understudy. At night, for the second dress rehearsal, she would again take up her duties as Miss Hamilton’s dresser.

“An eccentric arrangement,” Jacko said. He groped in the bosom of his undervest and produced a somewhat tattered actor’s “part,” typewritten and bound in paper. “Only thirteen sides,” he said. “A bit-part. You will study the lines while you press and stitch and by this afternoon you are word-perfect, isn’t it? You are, of course, delighted?”

“Delighted,” Martyn said, “is not exactly the word. I’m flabbergasted and excited and grateful for everything and I just can’t believe it’s true. But it is a bit worrying to feel I’ve sort of got in on a fluke and that everybody’s wondering what it’s all about They are, you know.”

“All that,” Jacko said, with an ungainly sweep of his arm, “is of no importance. Gay Gainsford is still to play the part. She will not play it well but she is the niece of the leading lady’s husband and she is therefore in a favourable position.”

“Yes, but her uncle—”

He said quickly: “Clark Bennington was once a good actor. He is now a stencil. He drinks too much and when he is drunk he is offensive. Forget him.” He turned away and with less than his usual deftness began to set out his work-table. Finally, from an adjoining room he said indistinctly: “I advise that which I find difficult to perform. Do not allow yourself to become hag-ridden by this man. It is a great mistake. I myself—” His voice was lost in the spurt of running water. Martyn heard him shout: “Run off and learn your lines. I have a job in hand.”

With a feeling of unease she returned to her room. But when she opened her part and began to read the lines, this feeling retreated until it hung like a very small cloud over the hinterland of her mind. The foreground was occupied entirely by the exercise of memorizing and in a few minutes she had almost, but not quite, forgotten her anxiety.

She was given her moves that afternoon by the stage-manager, and at three o’clock rehearsed her scenes with the other two understudies. The remaining parts were read from the script. Jacko pottered about back-stage intent on one of his odd jobs: otherwise the theatre seemed to be deserted. Martyn had memorized her lines but inevitably lost them from time to time in her effort to associate them with physical movement. The uncompromising half-light of a working-stage, the mechanical pacing to-and-fro of understudies, the half-muted lines raised to concert-pitch only for cues, and the dead sound of voices in an empty house — all these workaday circumstances, though she was familiar enough with them, after all, laid a weight upon her: she lost her belief in the magic of the previous night. She was oppressed by this anti-climax, and could scarcely summon up the resources of her young experience to meet it.

The positions and moves had been planned with a vivid understanding of the text and seemed to spring out of it. She learnt them readily enough. Rather to her surprise, and, she thought, that of the other understudies, they were finally taken through her scenes at concert-pitch, so that by the end of the rehearsal the visual and aural aspects of her part had fused into a whole. She had got her routine. But it was no more than a routine: she spoke and paused and moved and spoke and there was no reality at all, she felt, in anything she did. Clem Smith, the stage-manager, said nothing about interpretation but, huddled in his overcoat, merely set the moves and then crouched over the script. She was not even a failure, she was just another colourless understudy and nothing had happened.

When it was over, Clem Smith shut the book and said: “Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. Eleven in the morning, if you please.” He lit a cigarette and went down into the auditorium and out through the front of the house.

Left alone on the stage, Martyn struggled with an acute attack of deflation. She tried to call herself to order. This in itself was a humiliating, if salutary, exercise. If, she thought savagely, she had been a Victorian young lady, she would at this juncture have locked herself away with a plush-bound journal and, after shedding some mortified tears, forced a confession out of herself. As it was, she set her jaw and worked it out there and then. The truth was, she told herself, she’d been at her old tricks again: she’d indulged in the most blatant kind of day-dream. She’d thought up a success-story and dumped herself down in the middle of it with half a dozen pageant-lamps bathing her girlish form. Because she looked like Poole and because last night she’d had a mild success with one line by playing it off her nerves she’d actually had the gall to imagine— Here Martyn felt her scalp creep and her face burn. “Come on,” she thought, “out with it.”

Very well, then. She’d dreamt up a further rehearsal with Poole. She’d seen herself responding eagerly to his production, she’d heard him say regretfully that if things had been different— She had even— At this point, overtaken with self-loathing, Martyn performed the childish exercise of throwing her part across the stage, stamping violently and thrusting her fingers through her hair.

“Damn and blast and hell,” said Martyn, pitching her voice to the back row of the gallery.

“Not quite as bad as all that.”

Adam Poole came out of the shadowed pit and down the centre-aisle of the stalls. He rested his hands on the rail of the orchestral well. Martyn gaped at him.

“You’ve got the mechanics,” he said. “Walk through it again by yourself before to-morrow. Then you can begin to think about the girl. Get the lay-out of the house into your head. Know your environment. What has she been doing all day before the play opens? What has she been thinking about? Why does she say the things she says and do the things she does? Listen to the other chaps’ lines. Come down here for five minutes and we’ll see what you think about acting.”

Martyn went down into the house. Of all her experiences during these three days at the Vulcan Theatre, she was to remember this most vividly. It was a curious interview. They sat side by side as if waiting for the rise-of-curtain. Their voices were deadened by the plush stalls. Jacko could be heard moving about behind the set and in some distant room back-stage, somebody in desultory fashion hammered and sawed. At first Martyn was ill at ease, unable to dismiss or to reconcile the jumble of distracted notions that beset her. But Poole was talking about theatre and about problems of the actor. He talked well, without particular emphasis but with penetration and authority. Soon she listened with single hearing and with all her attention to what he had to say. Her nervousness and uncertainty were gone, and presently she was able to speak of matters that had exercised her in her own brief experience of the stage. Their conversation was adult and fruitful. It didn’t even occur to her that they were getting on rather well together.

Jacko came out on the stage. He shielded his eyes with his hand and peered into the auditorium.

“Adam?” he said.

“Hullo? What is it?”

“It is Helena on the telephone to inquire why have you not rung her at four, the time being now five-thirty. Will you take it in the office?”

“Good Lord!” he ejaculated and got up. Martyn moved into the aisle to let him out.

He said: “All right, Miss Tarne. Work along the lines we’ve been talking about and you should be able to cope with the job. We take our understudies seriously at the Vulcan and like to feel they’re an integral part of the company. You’ll rehearse again tomorrow morning and—” He stopped unaccountably, and after a moment said hurriedly: “You’re all right, aren’t you? I mean you feel quite happy about this arrangement?”

“Yes,” she said. “Very happy.”

“Good.” He hesitated again for a second and then said: “I must go,” and was off down the aisle to the front of the house. He called out: “I’ll be in the office for some time, Jacko, if anyone wants me.”

A door banged. There was a long silence.

Jacko advanced to the footlights. “Where are you?” he asked.

“Here,” said Martyn.

“I see you. Or a piece of you. Where is the rest? Reassemble yourself. There is work to be done.”

The work turned out to be the sewing together of a fantastic garment created and tacked up by Jacko himself. It had a flamboyant design, stencilled in black and yellow, of double-headed eagles, and was made in part of scenic canvas. There was an electric sewing machine in the wardrobe-room, which was next to Mr. J. G. Darcey’s at the end of the passage. Here Jacko sat Martyn down, and here for the next hour she laboured under his exacting direction while he himself crawled about the floor cutting out further garments for the Combined Arts Ball. At half past six he went out, saying he would return with food.

Martyn laboured on. Sometimes she repeated the lines of the part, her voice drowned by the clatter of the machine. Sometimes, when engaged in hand-work, it would seem in the silent room that she had entered into a new existence, as if she had at that moment been born and was a stranger to her former self. And since this was rather a frightening sensation, though not new to Martyn, she must rouse herself and make a conscious effort to dispel it. On one of these occasions, when she had just switched off the machine, she felt something of the impulse that had guided her first attempt at the scene with Poole. Wishing to retain and strengthen this experience, she set aside her work and rested her head on her arms as the scene required. She waited in this posture, summoning her resources, and when she was ready raised her head to confront her opposite.

Gay Gainsford stood on the other side of the table, watching her.

Martyn’s flesh leapt on her bones. She cried out and made a sweeping gesture with her arms. A pair of scissors clattered to the floor.

“I’m sorry I startled you,” said Miss Gainsford. “I came in quietly. I thought you were asleep but I realize now — you were doing that scene. Weren’t you?”

“I’ve been given the understudy,” Martyn said.

“You’ve had an audition and a rehearsal, haven’t you?”

“Yes. I was so frightful at rehearsal, I thought I’d have another shot by myself.”

“You needn’t,” Miss Gainsford said, “try to make it easy for me.”

Martyn, still shaken and bewildered, looked at her visitor. She saw a pretty face that under its make-up was sodden with tears. Even as she looked, the large photogenic eyes flooded and the small mouth quivered.

“I suppose,” Miss Gainsford said, “you know what you’re doing to me.”

“Good Lord!” Martyn ejaculated. “What is all this? What have I done? I’ve got your understudy. I’m damn thankful to have it and so far I’ve made a pretty poor showing.”

“It’s no good taking that line with me. I know what’s happening.”

“Nothing’s happening. Oh, please,” Martyn implored, torn between pity and a rising fear, “please don’t cry. I’m nothing. I’m just an old understudy.”

“That’s pretty hot, I must say,” Miss Gainsford said. Her voice wavered grotesquely between two registers like an adolescent boy’s. “To talk about ‘any old understudy’ when you’ve got that appearance. What’s everyone saying about you when they think I’m not about? ‘She’s got the appearance!’ It doesn’t matter to them that I’ve had to dye my hair because they don’t like wigs. I still haven’t got the appearance. I’m a shoulder-length natural ash-blonde, and I’ve had to have an urchin cut and go black and all I get is insults. In any other management,” she continued wildly, “the author wouldn’t be allowed to speak to the artists as that man speaks to me. In any other management an artist would be protected against that kind of treatment. Adam’s worse, if anything. He’s so bloody patient and persistent and half the time you don’t know what he’s talking about.”

She drew breath, sobbed and hunted in her bag for her handkerchief.

Martyn said: “I’m so terribly sorry. It’s awful when things go badly at rehearsals. But the worst kind of rehearsals do have a way of turning into the best kind of performances. And it’s a grand play, isn’t it?”

“I loathe the play. To me it’s a lot of high-brow hokum and I don’t care who knows it. Why the hell couldn’t Uncle Ben leave me where I was, playing leads and second leads in fortnightly rep? We were a happy family in fortnightly rep; everyone had fun and games and there wasn’t this ghastly graveyard atmosphere. I was miserable enough, God knows, before you came but now it’s just more than I can stand.”

“But I’m not going to play the part,” Martyn said desperately. “You’ll be all right. It’s just got you down for the moment. I’d be no good, I expect, anyway.”

“It’s what they’re all saying and thinking. It’s a pity, they’re saying, that you came too late.”

“Nonsense. You only imagine that because of the likeness.”

“Do I? Let me tell you I’m not imagining all the things they’re saying about you. And about Adam. How you can stay here and take it! Unless it’s true. Is it true?”

Martyn closed her hands on the material she had been sewing. “I don’t want to know what they’re saying. There’s nothing unkind that’s true for them to say.”

“So the likeness is purely an accident? There’s no relationship?”

Martyn said: “It seems that we are very distantly related, so distantly that the likeness is a freak. I didn’t want to tell anyone about it. It’s of no significance at all. I haven’t used it to get into the theatre.”

“I don’t know how and why you got in but I wish to God you’d get out. How you can hang on, knowing what they think, if it isn’t true! You can’t have any pride or decency. It’s so cruel. It’s so damnably cruel.”

Martyn looked at the pretty tear-blubbered face and thought in terror that if it had been that of Atropos it could scarcely have offered a more dangerous threat. “Don’t!” she cried out. “Please don’t say that; I need this job so desperately. Honestly, honestly you’re making a thing of all this. I’m not hurting you.”

“Yes, you are. You’re driving me completely frantic. I’m nervously and emotionally exhausted,” Miss Gainsford sobbed, with an air of quoting somebody else. “It just needed you to send me over the borderr line. Uncle Ben keeps on and on and on about it until I think I’ll go mad. This is a beastly unlucky theatre anyway. Everyone knows there’s something wrong about it and then you come in like a Jonah and it’s the rock bottom. If,” Miss Gainsford went on, developing a command of histrionic climax of which Martyn would scarcely have suspected her capable, “if you have any pity at all, any humanity, you’ll spare me this awful ordeal.”

“But this is all nonsense. You’re making a song about nothing. I won’t be taken in by it,” Martyn said and recognized defeat in her own voice.

Miss Gainsford stared at her with watery indignation and through trembling lips uttered her final cliché. “You can’t,” she said, “do this thing to me,” and broke down completely.

It seemed to Martyn that beyond a facade of stock emotionalism she recognized a real and a profound distress. She thought confusedly that if they had met on some common and reasonable ground she would have been able to put up a better defence. As it was they merely floundered in a welter of unreason. It was intolerably distressing to her. Her precarious happiness died, she wanted to escape, she was lost. With a feeling of nightmarish detachment she heard herself say: “All right. I’ll speak to Mr. Poole. I’ll say I can’t do the understudy.”

Miss Gainsford had turned away. She held her handkerchief to her face. Her shoulders and head had been quivering but now they were still. There was a considerable pause. She blew her nose fussily, cleared her throat, and looked up at Martyn.

“But if you’re Helena’s dresser,” she said, “you’ll still be about.”

“You can’t mean you want to turn me out of the theatre altogether.”

“There’s no need,” Miss Gainsford mumbled, “to put it like that.”

Martyn heard a voice and footsteps in the passage. She didn’t want to be confronted with Jacko. She said: “I’ll see if Mr. Poole’s still in the theatre. I’ll speak to him now if he is.”

As she made for the door Miss Gainsford snatched at her arm. “Please!” she said. “I am grateful. But you will be really generous won’t you? Really big? You won’t bring me into it, will you? With Adam I mean. Adam wouldn’t underst—”

Her face set as if she had been held in suspension, like a motion picture freezing into a still. She didn’t even release her hold on Martyn’s arm.

Martyn spun round and saw Poole, with Jacko behind him, in the passage. To her own astonishment she burst out laughing.

“No, really!” she stammered. “It’s too much! This is the third time. Like the demon-king in pantomime.”

“What the devil do you mean?”

“I’m sorry. It’s just your flair for popping, up in crises. Other people’s crises. Mine, in fact.”

He grimaced as if he gave her up as a bad job. “What’s the present crisis?” he said and looked at Miss Gainsford, who had turned aside and was uneasily painting her mouth. “What is it, Gay?”

“Please!” she choked. “Please let me go. I’m all right, really. Quite all right. I just rather want to be alone.”

She achieved a tearful smile at Poole and an imploring glance at Martyn. Poole stood away from the door and watched her go out with her chin up and with courageous suffering neatly portrayed in every inch of her body.

She disappeared into the passage and a moment later the door of the Greenroom was heard to shut.

“It is a case of mis-casting,” said Jacko, coming into the room. “She should be in Hollywood. She has what it takes in Hollywood. What an exit! We have misjudged her.”

“Go and see what’s the matter.”

“She wants,” said Jacko, making a dolorous face, “to be alone.”

“No, she doesn’t. She wants an audience. You’re it. Get along and do your stuff.”

Jacko put several parcels on the table. “I am the dogsbody,” he said, “to end all dogsbodies,” and went out.

“Now, then,” Poole said.

Martyn gathered up her work and was silent.

“What’s the matter? You’re as white as a sheet. Sit down. What is all this?”

She sat behind the machine.

“Come on,” he said.

“I’m sorry if it’s inconvenient for you but I’m afraid I’ve got to give notice.”

“Indeed? As a dresser or as understudy?”

“As both.”

“It’s extremely inconvenient and I don’t accept it.”

“But you must. Honestly, you must. I can’t go on like this: it isn’t fair.”

“Do you mean because of that girl?”

“Because of her and because of everything. She’ll have a breakdown. There’ll be some disaster.”

“She doesn’t imagine you’re going to be given the part over her head, does she?”

“No, no, of course not. It’s just that she’s finding it hard anyway and the — the sight of me sort of panics her.”

“The likeness?”

“Yes.”

“She needn’t look, at you. I’m afraid she’s the most complete ass, that girl,” he muttered. He picked up a fold of the material Martyn had been sewing, looked absently at it and pushed the whole thing across the table. “Understand,” he said, “I won’t for a second entertain the idea of your going. For one thing Helena can’t do without you, and for another I will not be dictated to by a minor actress in my own company. Nor,” he added with a change of tone, “by anyone else.”

“I’m so terribly sorry for her,” Martyn said. “She feels there’s some sort of underground movement against her. She really feels it.”

“And you?”

“I must admit I don’t much enjoy the sensation of being in the theatre on sufferance. But I was so thankful—” She caught her breath and stopped.

“Who makes you feel you’re on sufferance? Gay? Bennington? Percival?”

“I used a silly phrase. Naturally, they all must think it a bit queer, my turning up. It looks queer.”

“It’d look a damn sight queerer if you faded out again. I can’t think,” he said impatiently, “how you could let yourself be bamboozled by that girl.”

“But it’s not all bamboozle. She really is at the end of her tether.”

Martyn waited for a moment. She thought inconsequently how strange it was that she should talk like this to Adam Poole, who two days ago had been a celebrated name, a remote legend, seen and heard and felt through a veil of characterization in his films.

“Oh, well,” she thought and said aloud: “I’m thinking of the show. It’s such a good play. She mustn’t be allowed to fail. I’m thinking about that.”

He came nearer and looked at her with a sort of incredulity. “Good Lord,” he said, “I believe you are! Do you mean to say you haven’t considered your own chance if she did crack up? Where’s your wishful thinking?”

Martyn slapped her palm down on the table. “But of course I have. Of course I’ve done my bit of wishful thinking. But don’t you see—”

He reached across the table and for a brief moment his hand closed over hers. “I think I do,” he said. “I’m beginning, it seems, to get a taste of your quality. How do you suppose the show would get on if you had to play?”

“That’s unfair,” Martyn cried.

“Well,” he said, “don’t run out on me. That’d be unfair, if you like. No dresser. No understudy. A damn shabby trick. As for this background music, I know where it arises. It’s a more complex business than you may suppose. I shall attend to it.” He moved behind her chair, and rested his hands on its back. “Well,” he said, “shall we clap hands and a bargain? How say you?”

Martyn said slowly: “I don’t see how I can do anything but say yes.”

“There’s my girl!” His hand brushed across her head and he moved away.

“Though I must say,” Martyn added, “you do well to quote Petruchio. And Henry the Fifth, if it comes to that.”

“A brace of autocratic male animals? Therefore it must follow you are ‘Kate’ in two places. And — shrewd Kate, French Kate, kind Kate, but never curst Kate — you will rehearse at eleven to-morrow, hold or cut bow-strings. Agreed?”

“I am content.”

“Damned if you look it, however. All right. I’ll have a word with that girl. Good day to you, Kate.”

“Good day, sir,” said Martyn.

That night the second dress rehearsal went through as for performance, without, as far as Martyn knew, any interruption during the action.

She stayed throughout in one or the other of Miss Hamilton’s dressing-rooms and, on the occasions when she was in transit, contrived to be out of the way of any of the players. In the second act, her duties kept her in the improvised dressing-room on the stage and she heard a good deal of the dialogue.

There is perhaps nothing that gives one so strong a sense of theatre from the inside as the sound of invisible players in action. The disembodied and remote voices, projected at an unseen mark, the uncanny quiet offstage, the smells and the feeling that the walls and the dust listen, the sense of a simmering expectancy; all these together make a corporate life so that the theatre itself seems to breathe and pulse and give out a warmth. This warmth communicated itself to Martyn and, in spite of all her misgivings, she glowed and thought to herself, “This is my place. This is where I belong.”

Much of the effect of the girl’s part in this act depended not so much on what she said, which was little, but on mime and on that integrity of approach which is made manifest in the smallest gesture, the least movement. Listening to Miss Gainsford’s slight uncoloured voice, Martyn thought: “But perhaps if one watched her it would be better. Perhaps something is happening that cannot be heard, only seen.”

Miss Hamilton, when she came off for her changes, spoke of nothing but the business in hand and said little enough about that. She was indrawn and formal in her dealings with her dresser. Martyn wondered uneasily how much Poole had told her of their interviews, whether she had any strong views or prejudices about her husband’s niece, or shared his resentment that Martyn herself had been cast as an understudy.

The heat radiated by the strong lights of the dressing-rooms intensified their characteristic smells. With business-like precision Miss Hamilton would aim an atomizer at her person and spray herself rhythmically with scent while Martyn, standing on a chair, waited to slip a dress over her head. After the end of the second act, when she was about this business in the star-room, Poole came in. “That went very nicely, Helena,” he said.

Martyn paused with the dress in her hands. Miss Hamilton extended her whitened arms, and with a very beautiful movement turned to him.

“Oh, darling,” she said. “Did it? Did it really?”

Martyn thought she had never seen anyone more lovely than her employer was then. Hers was the kind of beauty that declared itself when most simply arrayed. The white cloth that protected her hair added a Holbein-like emphasis to the bones and subtly turning planes of her face. There was a sort of naïveté and warmth in her posture: a touching intimacy. Martyn saw Poole take the hands that were extended to him and she turned her head away, not liking, with the voluminous dress in her arms, to climb down from her station on the chair. She felt suddenly desolate and shrunken within herself.

“Was it really right?” Miss Hamilton said.

“You were, at least.”

“But — otherwise?”

“Much as one would expect.”

“Where’s John?”

“In the circle, under oath not to come down until I say so.”

“Pray God, he keep his oath!” she quoted sombrely.

“Hullo, Kate,” Poole said.

“Kate?” Miss Hamilton asked. “Why Kate?”

“I suspect her,” said Poole, “of being a shrew. Get on with your job, Kate. What are you doing up there?”

Miss Hamilton said: “Really, darling!” and moved away to the chair. Martyn slipped the dress over her head, jumped down and began to fasten it. She did this to a running accompaniment from Poole. He whispered to himself anxiously as if he were Martyn, muttered and grunted as if Miss Hamilton complained that the dress was tight, and thus kept up a preposterous duologue, matching his words to their actions. This was done so quaintly and with so little effort that Martyn had much ado to keep a straight face and Miss Hamilton was moved to exasperated laughter. When she was dressed she took him by the arm. “Since when, my sweet, have you become a dressing-room comedian?”

“Oh God, your only jig-maker.”

“Last act, please, last act,” said the call-boy in the passage.

“Come on,” she said, and they went out together.

When the curtain was up, Martyn returned to the improvised dressing-room on the stage and there, having for the moment no duties, she listened to the invisible play and tried to discipline her most unruly heart.

Bennington’s last exit was followed in the play by his suicide, off-stage. Jacko, who had, it seemed, a passion for even the simplest of off-stage stunts, had come round from the front of the house to supervise the gunshot. He stood near the entry into the dressing-room passage with a stage-hand who carried an effects-gun. This was fired at the appropriate moment and, as they were stationed not far from Martyn in her canvas room, she leapt at the report, which was nerve-shatteringly successful. The acrid smell of the discharge drifted into her roofless shelter.

Evidently Bennington was standing near by. His voice, carefully lowered to a murmur, sounded just beyond the canvas wall. “And that,” he said, “takes me right off, thank God. Give me a cigarette, Jacko, will you?” There was a pause. The stage-hand moved away. A match scraped and Bennington said: “Come to my room and have a drink.”

“Thank you, Ben, not now,” Jacko whispered. “The curtain comes down in five minutes.”

“Followed by a delicious post mortem conducted by the Great Producer and the Talented Author. Entrancing prospect! How did I go, Jacko?”

“No actor,” Jacko returned, “cares to be told how he goes in anything but terms of extravagant praise. You know how clever you always are. You are quite as clever to-night as you have always been. Moreover, you showed some discretion.”

Martyn heard Bennington chuckle. “There’s still tomorrow,” he said. “I reserve my fire, old boy. I bide my time.”

There was a pause. Martyn heard one of them fetch a long sigh — Jacko, evidently, because Bennington, as if in answer to it, said: “Oh, nonsense.” After a moment he added: “The kid’s all right,” and when Jacko didn’t answer: “Don’t you think so?”

“Why, yes,” said Jacko.

On the stage the voices of Helena Hamilton and Adam Poole built towards a climax. The call-boy came round behind the set and went down the passage chanting: “All on for the curtain, please. All on.”

Martyn shifted the chair in the dressing-room and moved noisily. There was a brief silence.

“I don’t give a damn if she can hear,” Bennington said more loudly. “Wait a moment. Stay where you are. I was asking you what you thought of Gay’s performance. She’s all right. Isn’t she?”

“Yes, yes. I must go.”

“Wait a bit. If the fools left her alone she’d go tremendously. I tell you what, old boy. If our Eccentric Author exercises his talent for wisecracking on that kid to-night I’ll damn well take a hand.”

“You will precipitate a further scene, and that is to be avoided.”

“I’m not going to stand by and hear her bullied. By God, I’m not. I understand you’ve given harbourage, by the way, to the Mystery Maiden.”

“I must get round to the side. By your leave, Ben.”

“Plenty of time.”

And Martyn knew that Bennington stood in the entry to the passage, barring the way.

“I’m talking,” he said, “about this understudy-cum-dresser. Miss X.”

“You are prolific in cryptic titles.”

“Call her what you like, it’s a peculiar business. What is she? You may as well tell me, you know. Some ancient indiscretion of Adam’s adolescence come home to roost?”

“Be quiet, Ben.”

“For tuppence I’d ask Adam himself. And that’s not the only question I’d like to ask him. Do you think I relish my position?”

“They are getting near the tag. It is almost over.”

“Why do you suppose I drink a bit? What would you do in my place?”

“Think before I speak,” said Jacko, “for one thing.”

A buzzer sounded. “There’s the curtain,” said Jacko. “Look out.”

Martyn heard a kind of scuffle followed by an oath from Bennington. There were steps in the passage. The curtain fell with a giant whisper. A gust of air swept through the region back-stage.

“All on,” said the stage-manager distantly. Martyn heard the players go on and the curtain rise and fall again.

Poole, on the stage, said: “And that’s all of that. All right, everyone. Settle down and I’ll take the notes. John will be round in a moment. I’ll wait for you, Helena.”

Miss Hamilton came into the improvised room. Martyn removed her dress and put her into her gown.

“I’ll take my make-up off out there,” she said. “Bring the things, Martyn, will you? Grease, towels and my cigarettes?”

Martyn had them ready. She followed Miss Hamilton out and for the first time that night went onto the set.

Poole, wearing a dark dressing-gown, stood with his back to the curtain. The other five members of the cast sat, relaxed but attentive, about the stage. Jacko and Clem Smith waited by the Prompt corner with papers and pencils. Martyn held a looking-glass before Miss Hamilton, who said: “Adam, darling, you don’t mind, do you? I mustn’t miss a word but I do rather want to get on,” and began to remove her make-up.

Upon this scene Dr. John James Rutherford erupted. His arrival was prefaced in his usual manner by slammed doors, blundering footsteps and loud ejaculations. He then appeared in the central entrance, flame-headed, unshaven, overcoated, and grasping a sheaf of papers.

“Roast me,” he said, “in sulphur! Wash me in steep-down gulfs of liquid fire! ’Ere I again endure the loathy torment of a dress rehearsal! What have I done, ye gods, that I should—”

“All right, John,” Poole said. “Not yet. Sit down. On some heavy piece of furniture and carefully.”

Clem Smith shouted: “Alf! The Doctor’s chair.”

A large chair with broken springs was brought on and placed with its back to the curtain. Dr. Rutherford hurled himself into it and produced his snuff-box. “I am a child to chiding,” he said. “What goes on, chums?”

Poole said: “I’m going to take my stuff. If anything I have to say repeats exactly any of your own notes you might leave it out for the sake of saving time. If you’ve any objections, be a good chap and save them till I’ve finished. Agreed?”

“Can’t we cut the flummery and get down to business?”

“That’s just what I’m suggesting.”

“Is it? I wasn’t listening. Press on, then, my dear fellow. Press on.”

They settled down. Jacko gave Poole a block of notes and he began to work through them. “Nothing much in Act I,” he said, “until we get to—” His voice went on evenly. He spoke of details in timing, of orchestration and occasionally of stage-management. Sometimes a player would ask a question and there would be a brief discussion. Sometimes Clem Smith would make a note. For the scenes where Poole had been on, Jacko, it appeared, had taken separate notes. Martyn suddenly remembered that Jacko’s official status was that of assistant to Poole, and thought it characteristic of him that he made so little of his authority.

From where she stood, holding the glass for Helena Hamilton, she could see all the players. In the foreground was the alert and beautiful face of her employer, a little older now with its make-up gone, turning at times to the looking-glass and at times, when something in his notes concerned her, towards Poole. Beyond Miss Hamilton sat J. G. Darcey, alone and thoughtfully filling his pipe. He glanced occasionally, with an air of anxious solicitude, at Miss Gainsford. At the far side Parry Percival lay in an armchair looking fretful. Bennington stood near the centre with a towel in his hands. At one moment he came behind his wife. Putting a hand on her shoulder, he reached over it, helped himself to a dollop of grease from a jar in her case and slapped it on his face. She made a slight movement of distaste and immediately afterwards a little secret grimace, as if she had caught herself out in a blunder. For a moment he retained his hold of her shoulder. Then he looked down at her, dragged his clean fingers across her neck and, smearing.the grease over his face, returned to his former position and began to clean away his make-up.

Martyn didn’t want to look at Gay Gainsford but was unable altogether to avoid doing so. Miss Gainsford sat, at first alone, on a smallish sofa. She seemed to have herself tolerably well in hand, but her eyes were restless and her fingers plaited and replaited the folds of her dress. Bennington watched her from a distance until he had done with his towel. Then he crossed the stage and sat beside her, taking one of the restless hands in his.

He looked hard at Martyn, who was visited painfully by a feeling of great compassion for both of them and by a sensation of remorse. She had a notion, which she tried to dismiss as fantastic, that Poole sensed this reaction. His glance rested for a moment on her and she thought: “This is getting too complicated. It’s going to be too much for me.” She made an involuntary movement and at once Miss Hamilton put out a hand to the glass.

When Poole had dealt with the first act he turned to Dr. Rutherford, who had sat throughout with his legs extended and his chin on his chest, directing from under his brows a glare of extreme malevolence at the entire cast.

“Anything to add to that, John?” Poole asked.

“Apart from a passing observation that I regard the whole thing as a tour de force of understatement and with reservations that I keep to myself”—here Dr. Rutherford looked fixedly at Parry Percival—“I am mum. I reserve my fire.”

“Act II, then,” said Poole, and began again.

Martyn became aware after a few minutes that Dr. Rutherford, like Bennington, was staring at her. She was as horridly fascinated as a bird is said to be by the unwinking gaze of a snake. Do what she could to look elsewhere about the stage, she must after a time steal a glance at him, only to meet again his speculative and blood-shot regard. This alarmed her profoundly. She was persuaded that a feeling of tension had been communicated to the others, and that they too were aware of some kind of impending crisis. This feeling grew in intensity as Poole’s voice went steadily on with his notes. He had got about half-way through the second act when Dr. Rutherford ejaculated: “Hi! Wait a bit!” and began a frenzied search through his own notes, which seemed to be in complete disorder. Finally he pounced on a sheet of paper, dragged out a pair of spectacles and, with a hand raised to enjoin silence, read it to himself with strange noises in his breathing.

Having scattered the rest of his notes over his person and the floor, he now folded this particular sheet and sat on it

“Proceed,” he said. The cast stirred uneasily. Poole continued. He had come to the scene between himself and Miss Gainsford, and beyond a minor adjustment of position said nothing about it. Miss Hamilton, who had arrived at the final stage of her street make-up, dusted her face with powder, nodded good-humouredly at Martyn and turned to face Poole. Martyn thankfully shut the dressing-case and made for the nearest exit.

At the same moment Poole reached the end of his notes for the second act and Dr. Rutherford shouted: “Hold on! Stop that wench!”

Martyn, with a sensation of falling into chaos, turned in the doorway.

She saw nine faces lifted towards her own. They made a pattern against the smoke-thickened air. Her eyes travelled from one to the other and rested finally on Poole’s.

“It’s all right,” he said. “Go home.”

“No, you don’t,” Dr. Rutherford shouted excitedly.

“Indeed she does,” said Poole. “Run away home, Kate. Good night to you.”

Martyn heard the storm break as she fled down the passage.