The curtain rose on the last scene of Shakespeare’s
Othello
, the dreadful scene in which Desdemona is smothered, the scene which Dr Johnson declared is not to be endured. But by this audience, it seemed to Appleby, it was going to be endured tolerably well. For one thing, the smothering was apparently to be staged in the reticent way favoured by touring companies that depend on the support of organised parties of schoolchildren. Not that the schoolchildren, probably, would take a thoroughly Elizabethan robustness at all amiss. But headmistresses are different. If their charges must, in the sovereign name of Shakespeare, be taken to see a horrid murder, let it at least be committed in hugger-mugger in a darkened corner of the stage.
But if the audience was not going to be horrified, neither, so far, had it been gripped. Whatever currents of emotion had been liberated behind this proscenium arch – and currents of emotion there certainly were – they were not precisely those intended by the dramatist. Or rather, Appleby thought, it was as if across the main torrent of feeling as Shakespeare had designed it there were drifting eddies of private passion muddying and confusing the whole. Something of the sort one was familiar with in amateur theatricals, in which the jealousies and spites of rival performers excited by an unusual limelight occasionally reveal themselves as absurdly incongruous with the relationships designed by the story. But it is a thing less common on the professional stage, and during the preceding act the audience had been growing increasingly restless and unconvinced. Perhaps only Appleby himself, who had dropped into this dilapidated provincial theatre merely to fill an empty evening in a strange town, was giving a steadily more concentrated attention to the matters transacting themselves on the stage. Around him were the gigglings of bored children and the rustling of stealthily opened paper bags. Appleby, however, studied Desdemona’s bedchamber with a contracted brow.
Othello was about to enter with a taper and announce that,
It is the cause, it is the cause, my soul…
But there was a hitch. For one of those half-minute intervals which can seem an eternity in terms of theatrical time Othello failed to appear. The stage stood empty, with the sleeping Desdemona scarcely visible in her curtained and shadowy bed at the back. And this delay was only one of several signs that all was not well behind the scenes.
Most striking had been the blow – that public indignity to which Othello subjects his wife in the fourth act. The crack of an open palm across a face is a thing easily simulated on the stage; the assailant makes his gesture, his victim staggers back, and at the same time someone watching from the wings smartly claps his hands together. But on this occasion there had been the sound of
two
blows: one indeed from the wings and one from the stage itself. And as Desdemona fell back it had been just possible to discern first a cheek unnaturally flushed and then a trickle of blood from a nostril. Almost as if
Othello
were the brutal pothouse tragedy which some unfriendly critics have accused it of being, the hero had given his wife a bloodied nose… And the ensuing twenty lines had been uncommonly ticklish, with Desdemona playing out her shock and horror while covertly dabbing at her face with a handkerchief. No doubt an actor may be carried away. But an Othello who allowed himself this artistic excess would be decidedly dangerous. What if he permitted himself a similar whole-heartedness when the moment for smothering Desdemona came?
Still staring at the empty stage, Appleby shook his head. There had been other hints that private passions were percolating through the familiar dramatic story.
Othello
is a tragedy of suspicion, of suspicion concentrated in Othello himself – the hero who, not easily jealous, is yet brought by the triumphant cunning of the villain Iago to kill his wife because of a baseless belief in her adultery. But among the people on this stage suspicion was not concentrated but diffused. Behind the high dramatic poetry, behind the traditional business of the piece, an obscure and pervasive wariness lurked, as if in every mind were a doubtful speculation as to what other minds knew. Desdemona – Appleby could have sworn – was more frightened than Shakespeare’s heroine need be; Iago was indefinably on the defensive, whereas his nature should know nothing but ruthless if oblique attack; Iago’s wife Emilia, although she played out the honest impercipient waiting-woman efficiently scene by scene, was perceptibly wishing more than one of her fellow-players to the devil. As for Michael Cassio, he was harassed – which is no doubt what Cassio should chiefly be. But this Cassio was harassed behind the mask as well as across it. Appleby, knowing nothing of these strolling players without name or fame, yet suspected that Cassio was the company’s manager, and one despairingly aware that the play was badly misfiring…
On one side of Appleby a small girl massively exhaled an odour of peppermint drops. On the other side an even smaller boy entertained himself by transforming his programme into paper pellets and flicking them at the audience in the stalls below.
And now here was Othello at last – a really black Othello of the kind fashionable since Paul Robeson triumphed in the part. Only about this fellow there had been a faint flavour of nigger minstrel from the start, and it had long been plain that there was nothing approaching great acting in him. Yet the theatre fell suddenly silent. The man stood there framed in a canvas doorway, the customary lighted taper in his hand. His eyes rolled, fixed themselves, rolled again. His free hand made exaggerated clawing gestures before him. As far as any elevated conception of his role went he was violating almost every possible canon of the actor’s art. And yet the effect was queerly impressive – startling, indeed. The child on Appleby’s left gulped and regurgitated, as if all but choked by peppermint going down the wrong way. The boy on the right let his ammunition lie idle before him. From somewhere up in the gods another child cried out in fright. Othello stepped forward into a greenish limelight which gave him the appearance of a rather badly decomposed corpse.
Some forty-five seconds behind schedule, the unbearable scene had begun.
It is the cause, it is the cause, my soul;
Let me not name it to you, you chaste stars!
It is the cause…
The mysterious words rolled out into the darkness of the auditorium. And – of course – they were indestructible. Not even green limelight, not even an Othello who made damnable faces as he talked, could touch them.
Yet I’ll not shed her blood,
Nor scar that whiter skin of hers than snow…
To the dreadful threat Desdemona awoke. Propped up on the great bed, she edged herself into another limelight which again offended all artistic decorum.
Will you come to bed, my lord?
With mounting tension the scene moved inexorably forward. Othello – who at least had inches – was towering over the woman on the bed.
That handkerchief which I so loved and gave thee
Thou gavest to Cassio…
The Tragedy of the Handkerchief, this play had been contemptuously called. And the French translator, Appleby remembered, had preferred the more elevated word
bandeau
…
By heaven, I saw my handkerchief in’s hand.
O perjured woman! thou dost stone my heart,
And makest me call what I intend to do
A murder, which I thought a sacrifice;
I saw the handkerchief…
The limelights faded, sparing the susceptibilities of the schoolmistresses. It was just possible to discern Othello as taking up a great pillow in his hands. His last words to Desdemona rang out. There followed only horrible and inarticulate sounds. For, as if to give the now-appalled children their money’s worth after all, the players in their almost invisible alcove were rendering these final agonal moments with ghastly verisimilitude: the panting respirations of the man pressing the pillow home; the muffled groans and supplications of the dying woman. And then from a door hard by the bed-head came the cries of Emilia demanding admission. Othello drew the bed hangings to, reeled backwards like a drunken man, plunged into rambling speech as Emilia’s clamour grew:
My wife! my wife! what wife? I have no wife.
From despairing realisation his voice swelled in volume, swelled into its vast theatrical rhetoric, and from behind the hangings the dying Desdemona could be heard to moan anew.
O insupportable! O heavy hour!
Methinks it should be now a huge eclipse
Of sun and moon, and that the affrighted globe
Should yawn at alteration…
Emilia was calling again. Othello drew the hangings closer to, staggered to the door and unlocked it. The woman burst in with her news of disaster, and in rapid colloquy Othello learnt that his plot for the death of Cassio had failed. Again his voice rang out in despair:
Not Cassio kill’d! then murder’s out of tune,
And sweet revenge grows harsh…
And suddenly there was absolute silence on the stage. Othello and Emilia were standing still – and waiting. Again, and with a different note of anxiety, Othello cried out:
And sweet revenge grows harsh…
Appleby shivered. For again there was silence, the reiterated cue producing nothing. It was now that Desdemona should call out, that Emilia should wrench back the hangings upon the heroine’s death-agony and her last sublime attempt to free her lord from blame. But only silence held the boards.
With a swift panicky bump the curtain fell, blotting out the stage. On each side of Appleby were frightened children, soundlessly weeping.
“Their names?” said Appleby. “We’ll stick to Shakespeare for the moment and avoid confusion. And I think Cassio is the man who runs the show?”
The sergeant of police nodded. He was uncertain whether to be relieved or annoyed that a Detective Inspector from Scotland Yard had emerged helpfully but authoritatively from the audience. “That’s so, sir. And here he is.”
Chill draughts blew across the stage. The great curtain stirred uneasily, and from behind it there could still be heard the tramp and gabble of bewildered children being shepherded out. Here amid the flats and tawdry properties everything showed shadowy and insubstantial. The dead woman lay on what had seemed a bed, and beneath its greasepaint her face showed as black as Othello’s. The players, still in costumes, wigs, and beards to which theatrical illusion no longer attached, hovered in a half-world between fantasy and fact. And Cassio stood in the midst of them, his hand nervously toying with the hilt of a rapier, his weak and handsome face a study in despair. Appleby nodded to him. “This is your company?” he asked. “And Desdemona’s death means pretty well the end of it?”
Cassio groaned. “That is so. And it is an unimaginable disaster, as well as being” – he glanced fearfully towards the bed – “unspeakably horrible and painful.”
“In fact, if somebody wanted to smash you, here would have been a thoroughly effective way of going about it?”
The actor-manager looked startled. “It certainly would. The sort of audience we get will never book a seat with my company again. But I don’t think–”
“Quite so. It is a possible motive but not a likely one. Now, please tell me of the relationships existing between your different numbers.”
The man hesitated. “I am myself married to Bianca.”
A
fellow
, thought Appleby,
almost damned in a fair wife
. Aloud he said: “And the dead woman was actually married to Othello?”
“Yes. And so too with Iago and Emilia.”
“I see. In fact, your private relations are quite oddly akin to those in the play? And you may be said to be an isolated community, moving from town to town, with the rest of your company not much more than supers?”
Cassio licked his lips. “That is more or less true. We can’t afford much.”
“You certainly can’t afford murder.” Appleby’s glance swept the players who were now ranged in a semicircle round him. “I suppose you know that your performance this evening was all at sixes and sevens? Even the children were at a loss.” His finger shot out at Othello. “Why did you strike your wife?”
“Yes, why did you strike her?” Emilia had stepped forward. Her eyes, though red with weeping, snapped fire. “And why did you murder her, too?”
“Strike her?” Othello, his face a blotched pallor beneath its paint, had been glaring at Iago; now he swung round upon Iago’s wife. “You foul-mouthed–”
“That will do.” Appleby’s voice, although quiet, echoed in this resonant space. “There were six of you: Othello and Desdemona, Iago and Emilia, Cassio and Bianca. Your emotional relationships were a sordid muddle, and tonight they got out of hand. Well, I’m afraid we must have them into the limelight. And if you won’t confess to what was troubling you I expect there are minor members of your company who can be informative enough.”
“But this is outrageous.” It was Bianca who spoke – a beautiful girl with every appearance of self-control. “You can’t bully us like that, no matter what has happened.” She looked defiantly at the still figure on the bed and then turned to her husband. “Isn’t that so?”
But it was Iago and not Cassio who answered. He was a dark man with a constantly shifting eye and a lip which twitched nervously as he spoke. “Certainly it is so. In interrogating possible witnesses in such an affair the police are bound by the strictest rules. And until a solicitor–”
“Rubbish!” Unexpectedly and with venom Emilia had turned upon her husband. “Let the man go his own way, and it will be the sooner over.”
“But at least there are the mere physical possibilities to consider first.” Cassio was at once agitated and reasonable. “Just when did the thing happen? And is it possible therefore to rule anyone out straight away?”
Appleby nodded. “Very well. Opportunity first and motive second.”