Night at the Vulcan (12 page)

“What is this foolishness?”

“You know. Five years ago. The stage-hands were talking about it. I heard them. The gas fire case. The night that man was murdered. Everyone knows.”

“Be silent!” Jacko said loudly. “This is idiocy. I forbid you to speak of it. The chatter of morons. The Combined Arts Ball has no fixed date and, if it had, shall an assembly of British bourgeoisie in bad fancy dress control our destiny? I am ashamed of you. You are altogether too stupid. Master yourself.”

“It’s not only that. It’s everything. I can’t face it.”

His fingers closed down on her shoulders. “Master yourself,” he said. “You must. If you cry I shall beat you and wipe your make-up across your face. I defy you to cry.”

He cleaned his hands, tipped her head forward and began to massage the nape of her neck. “There are all sorts of things,” he said, “that you must remember and as many more to forget. Forget the little freak and the troubles of to-day. Remember to relax all your muscles and also your nerves and your thoughts. Remember the girl in the play and the faith I have in you, and Adam and also your Uncle Bennington.”

“Spare me my Uncle Bennington, Jacko. If my Uncle Bennington had left me where I belong, in fortnightly rep, I wouldn’t be facing this hell. I know what everyone thinks of Uncle Ben and I agree with them. I never want to see him again. I hate him. He’s made me go on with this. I wanted to throw the part in. It’s not my part. I loathe it. No, I don’t loathe it, that’s not true. I loathe myself for letting everybody down. Oh, God, Jacko, what am I going to do?”

Across the bowed head Jacko looked at his own reflection and poked a face at it. “You shall play this part,” he said through his teeth. “Mouse-heart, skunk-girl. You shall play. Think of nothing. Unbridle your infinite capacity for inertia and be dumb.”

Watching himself, he arranged his face in an unconvincing glower and fetched up a Shakesperian belly-voice.

He caught his breath. Beneath his fingers, Gay’s neck stiffened. He began to swear elaborately, in French and in a whisper.

“Jacko.
Jacko
. Where does that line come from?”

“I invented it.”

“You didn’t. You
didn’t
. It’s
Macbeth
,” she wailed. “
You’ve quoted from
Macbeth!” and burst into a flurry of terrified weeping.

“Great suffering and all-enduring Saints of God,” apostrophized Jacko, “give me some patience with this Quaking Thing.”

But Gay’s cries mounted in a sharp crescendo. She flung out her arms and beat with her fists on the dressing-table. A bottle of wet-white rocked to and fro, overbalanced, rapped smartly against the looking-glass and fell over. A neatly splintered star frosted the surface of the glass.

Gay pointed to it with an air of crazy triumph, snatched up her towel and scrubbed it across her makeup. She thrust her face, blotched and streaked with black cosmetic, at Jacko.

“
Don’t you like what you see
?” she quoted, and rocketed into genuine hysteria.

Five minutes later Jacko walked down the passage towards Adam Poole’s room, leaving J.G., who had rushed to the rescue in his shirt-sleeves, in helpless contemplation of the screaming Gay. Jacko disregarded the open doors and the anxious painted faces that looked out at him.

Bennington shouted from his room: “What the hell goes on? Who
is
that?”

“Listen,” Jacko began, thrusting his head in at the door. He looked at Bennington and stopped short. “Stay where you are,” he said and crossed the passage to Poole’s room.

Poole had swung round in his chair to face the door. Bob Cringle stood beside him, twisting a towel in his hands.

“Well?” Poole said. “What is it? Is it Gay?”

“She’s gone up. Sky-high. I can’t do anything nor can J.G., and I don’t believe anyone can. She refuses to go on.”

“Where’s John? Is this his doing?”

“God knows. I don’t think so. He came in an hour ago and said he’d be back at five to seven.”

“Has Ben tried?”

“She does nothing but scream that she never wants to see him again. In my opinion, Ben would be fatal.”

“He must be able to hear all this.”

“I told him to stay where he is.”

Poole looked sharply at Jacko and went out. Gay’s laughter had broken down in a storm of irregular sobbing that could be heard quite clearly. Helena Hamilton called out, “Adam, shall I go to her?” and he answered from the passage: “Better not, I think.”

He was some time with Gay. They heard her shouting: “No! No! I won’t go on! No!” over and over again like an automaton.

When he came out he went to Helena Hamilton’s room. She was dressed and made up. Martyn, with an ashen face, stood inside the doorway.

“I’m sorry, darling,” Poole said, “but you’ll have to do without a dresser.”

The call-boy came down the passage chanting: “Half-hour. Half-hour, please.”

Poole and Martyn looked at each other.

“You’ll be all right,” he said.

At ten to eight Martyn stood by the entrance.

She was dressed in Gay’s clothes and Jacko had made her up very lightly. They had all wished her luck: J.G., Parry Percival, Helena Hamilton, Adam Poole, Clem Smith and even the dressers and stage-hands.

There had been something real and touching in their way of doing this, so that even in her terror she had felt they were good and very kind. Bennington alone had not wished her well but he had kept right away, and this abstention, she thought, showed a certain generosity.

She no longer felt sick but the lining of her mouth and throat was harsh as if, in fact, she had actually vomited. She thought her sense of hearing must have become distorted. The actors’ voices on the other side of the canvas wall had the remote quality of voices in a nightmare, whereas the hammer-blows of her heart and the rustle of her dress that accompanied them sounded exceeding loud.

She saw the frames of the set, their lashings and painted legends — ACT I, P.2—and the door which she was to open. She could look into the Prompt corner where the A.S.M. followed the lighted script with his finger, and where, high above him, the electrician leaned over his perch, watching the play. The stage lights were reflected in his face. Everything was monstrous in its preoccupation. Martyn was alone.

She tried to command the upsurge of panic in her heart, to practise an approach to her ordeal, to create, in place of these implacable realities, the reality of the house in the play and that part of it in which now, out of sight of the audience, she must already have her being. This attempt went down before the clamour of her nerves. “I’m going to fail,” she thought.

Jacko came round the set. She hoped he wouldn’t speak to her and, as if he sensed this wish, he stopped at a distance and waited.

“I must listen,” she thought “I’m not listening. I don’t know where they’ve got to. I’ve forgotten which way the door opens. I’ve missed my cue.” Her inside deflated and despair griped it like a colic.

She turned and found Poole beside her.

“You’re all right,” he said. “The door opens on. You can do it. Now, my girl. On you go.”

Martyn didn’t hear the round of applause with which a London audience greets a player who appears at short notice.

She was on. She had made her entry and was engulfed in the play.

Dr. Rutherford sat in the O.P. box with his massive shoulder turned to the house and his gloved hands folded together on the balustrade. His face was in shadow but the stage lights just touched the bulging curve of his old-fashioned shirt-front. He was monumentally still. One of the critics, an elderly man, said in an aside to a colleague that Rutherford reminded him of Watts’s picture of the Minotaur.

For the greater part of the first act he was alone, having, as he had explained in the office, no masochistic itch to invite a guest to a Roman holiday where he himself was the major sacrifice. Towards the end of the act, however, Bob Grantley came into the box and stood behind him. Grantley’s attention was divided. Sometimes he looked down through beams of spotlights at the stalls, cobbled with heads, sometimes at the stage and sometimes, sideways and with caution, at the Doctor himself. Really, Grantley thought, he was quite uncomfortably motionless. One couldn’t tell what he was thinking and one hesitated, the Lord knew, to ask him.

Down on the stage Clark Bennington, Parry Percival and J.G. Darcey had opened the long crescendo leading to Helena’s entrance. Grantley thought suddenly how vividly an actor’s nature could be exposed on the stage: there was, for instance, a kind of bed-rock niceness about old J.G., a youthfulness of spirit that declaimed itself through the superimposed make-up, the characterization and J.G.’s indisputable middle age. And Bennington? And Percival? Grantley had begun to consider them in these terms when Percival, speaking one of his colourless lines, turned down-stage. Bennington moved centre, looked at Darcey and neatly sketched a parody of Percival’s somewhat finicking movement. The theatre was filled with laughter. Percival turned quickly; Bennington smiled innocently at him, prolpnging the laugh.

Grantley looked apprehensively at the Doctor.

“Is that new?” he ventured in a whisper. “That business?”

The Doctor didn’t answer, and Grantly wondered if he only imagined that the great hands on the balustrade had closed more tightly over each other.

Helena Hamilton came on to a storm of applause, and with her entrance the action was roused to a new excitement and was intensified with every word she uttered. The theatre grew warm with her presence and with a sense of heightened suspense,

“Now they’re all on,” Grantley thought, “except Adam and the girl.”

He drew a chair forward stealthily and sat behind Rutherford.

“It’s going enormously,” he murmured to the massive shoulder. “Terrific, old boy.” And because he was nervous he added: “This brings the girl on, doesn’t it?”

For the first time the Doctor spoke. His lips scarcely moved. A submerged voice uttered within him. “Hence,” it said, “heap of wrath, foul indigested lump.”

“Sorry, old boy,” whispered Grantley, and began to wonder what hope in hell there was of persuading the distinguished author to have a drink in the office during the interval with a hand-picked number of important persons.

He was still preoccupied with this problem when a side door in the set opened and a dark girl with short hair walked out on the stage.

Grantley joined in the kindly applause. The Doctor remained immovable.

The players swept up to their major climax, Adam came on, and five minutes later the curtain fell on the first act. The hands of the audience filled the house with a storm of rain. The storm swelled prodigiously and persisted even after the lights had come up.

“Ah, good girl,” Bob Grantley stammered, filled with the sudden and excessive emotion of the theatre. “Good old Adam. Jolly good show!”

Greatly daring, he clapped the Doctor on the shoulder.

The Doctor remained immovable.

Grantley edged away to the back of the box. “I must get back,” he said. “Look, John, there are one or two people coming to the office for a drink who would be—”

The Doctor turned massively in his seat and faced him.

“No,” he said, “thank you.”

“Well, but look, dear boy, it’s just one of those things. You know how it is, John, you know how—”

“Shut up,” said the Doctor without any particular malice. “I’m going back-stage,” he added. He rose and turned away from the audience. “I have no desire to swill tepid spirits with minor celebrities among the backsides of sand-blasted gods. Thank you, however. See you later.”

He opened the pass-door at the back of the box.

“You’re pleased, aren’t you?” Grantley said. “You
must
be pleased.”

“Must I? Must I indeed?”

“With the girl, at least? So far?”

“The wench is a good wench. So far. I go to tell her so. By your leave, Robert.”

He lumbered through the pass-door and Grantley heard him plunge dangerously down the narrow stairway to the stage.

Dr. Rutherford emerged in a kaleidoscopic world: a world where walls fell softly apart, landscapes ascended into darkness and stairways turned and moved aside. A blue haze rose from the stage, which was itself in motion. Jacko’s first set revolved bodily, giving way to a new and more distorted version of itself, which came to rest facing the curtain. Masking pieces were run forward to frame it in. The Doctor started off for the dressing-room passage and was at once involved with moving flats. “If you please, sir.”

“Stand aside there, please.”

“Gear stage,
by
your leave.” His bulky shape was screened and exposed again and again as he plunged forward confusedly. Warning bells rang, the call-boy began to chant: “Second act beginners, please. Second act.”

“Lights,” Clem Smith said.

The shifting world stood still. Circuit by circuit, the lights came on and bore down on the acting area. The last toggle-line slapped home and was made fast and the sweating stage-hands walked disinterestedly off the set.

Clem Smith, with his back to the curtain, made a final check, “Clear stage,” he said and looked at his watch. The curtain-hand climbed an iron ladder.

“Six minutes,” said the A.S.M. He wrote it on his chart. Clem moved into the Prompt corner. “Right,” he said. “Actors, please.”

J. G. Darcey and Parry Percival walked onto the set and took up their positions. Helena Hamilton came out of her dressing-room. She stood with her hands clasped lightly at her waist at a little distance from the door by which she must enter. A figure emerged from the shadows near the passage and went up to her.

“Miss Hamilton,” Martyn said nervously, “I’m not on for your quick change. I can do it.”

Helena turned. She looked at Martyn for a moment with an odd fixedness. Then a smile of extraordinary charm broke across her face and she took Martyn’s head lightly between her hands.

“My dear child,” she murmured, “my ridiculous child.” She hesitated for a moment and then said briskly: “I’ve got a new dresser.”

“A new dresser?”

“Jacko. He’s most efficient.”

Poole came down the passage. She turned to him and linked her arm through his. “She’s going to be splendid in her scene,” she said. “Isn’t she?”

Poole said: “Keep it up, Kate. All’s well.” And in the look he gave Helena Hamilton there was something of comradeship, something of compassion and something, perhaps, of gratitude.

Dr. Rutherford emerged from the passage and addressed himself to Martyn. “Here!” he said. “I’ve been looking for you, my pretty. You might be a lot worse, considering, but you haven’t done anything yet. When you play this next scene, my poppet, these few precepts in thy—”

“No, John,” Poole and Helena Hamilton said together. “Not now.”

He glowered at them. Poole nodded to Martyn, who began to move away but had not got far before she heard Rutherford say: “Have you tackled that fellow? Did you see it? Where is he? By God, when I get at him—”

“Stand by,” said Clem Smith.

“Quiet, John,” said Poole imperatively. “Back to your box, sir.”

The curtain rose on the second act.

For the rest of her life the physical events that were encompassed by the actual performance of the play were to be almost lost for Martyn. That is to say, she was to forget all but a few desultory and quite insignificant details, such as the fact of Jacko kissing her after she came off in the second act (he smelt of toothpaste and nicotine), and of Poole, when the curtain came down, giving her his handkerchief, which surprised her until she found her face was wet with her own tears. He had said something to her, then, with a manner so unlike anything she had found in him before that it had filled her with immense surprise, but she couldn’t remember his words and thought: “I shall never know what he said.” She knew that when she was not playing and during the intervals, she had stood near the entry to the passage and that people had spoken to her while she was there. But these recollections had no more substance than a dream. Still more unreal was her actual performance: she thought she remembered a sense of security and command that had astonishingly blessed her, but it was as if these things had happened to someone else. Indeed, she could not be perfectly certain that they had happened at all. She might have been under hypnosis or some partial anaesthesia for all the reality they afterwards retained.

This odd condition, which was perhaps the result of some kind of physical compensation for the extreme assault on her nerves and emotions, persisted until she made her final exit in the last act. It happened some time before the curtain. The character she played was the first to relinquish its hold and to fade out of the picture.

She came off and returned to her corner near the entry into the passage. The others were all on; the dressers and stage-staff, drawn by the hazards of a first night, watched from the side and Jacko was near the Prompt corner. The passage and dressing-rooms seemed deserted and Martyn was quite alone. She began to emerge from her trance-like suspension. Parry Percival came off and spoke to her.

“Darling,” he said incoherently, “you were perfectly splendid. I’m just so angry at the moment I can’t speak, but I do congratulate you!”

Martyn saw that he actually trembled with an emotion that was, she must suppose, fury. Out of the dream from which she was not yet fully awakened there came a memory of Gargantuan laughter and she thought she associated it with Bennington and with Percival. He said: “This settles it. I’m taking action. God, this settles it!” and darted down the passage.

Martyn thought, still confusedly, that she should go to the dressing-room and tidy her make-up for the curtain-call. But it was not her dressing-room, it was Gay’s and she felt uneasy about it. While she hesitated J.G. Darcey, who had come off, put his hand on her shoulder. “Well done, child,” he said. “A very creditable performance.”

Martyn thanked him and, on an impulse, added: “Mr. Darcey, is Gay still here? Should I say something to her? I’d like to, but I know how she must feel and I don’t want to be clumsy.”

He waited for a moment, looking at her. “She’s in the Greenroom,” he said. “Perhaps later. Not now, I think. Nice of you.”

“I won’t unless you say so, then.”

He made her a little bow. “I am at your service,” he said and followed Percival down the passage.

Jacko came round the set with the stage-hand who was to fire the effects-gun. When he saw Martyn his whole face split in a grin. He took her hands in his and kissed them and she was overwhelmed with shyness.

“But your face,” he said, wrinkling his own into a monkey’s grimace. “It shines like a good deed in a naughty world. Do not touch it yourself. To your dressing-room. I come in two minutes. Away, before your ears are blasted.”

He moved down-stage, applied his eye to a secret hole in the set through which he could watch the action, and held out his arm in warning to the stage-hand, who then lifted the effects-gun. Martyn went down the passage as Bennington came off. He caught her up: “Miss Tarne. Wait a moment, will you?”