Night at the Vulcan (7 page)

At this juncture the voice in the circle ejaculated: “Boo!”

“Quiet!” said Poole.

Miss Gainsford hesitated, looked wretchedly into the auditorium, and lost her words. She was twice prompted before she went on again. Bennington crossed the stage, put his arm about her shoulders and glared into the circle. The prompter once more threw out a line, Miss Gainsford repeated it and they were off again. Poole got up and went back-stage through the pass-door. The secretary leant forward and shakily lit one cigarette from the butt of another. For the life of her, Martyn couldn’t resist glancing at Jacko. He was slumped back in his stall with his arms folded — deliberately imperturbable, she felt — putting on an act. The light from the stage caught his emu-like head and, as if conscious of her attention, he rolled his eyes round at her. She hastily looked back at the stage.

With Gay Gainsford’s exit, Martyn could have sworn a wave of relaxation blessed the actors. The dialogue began to move forward compactly with a firm upward curve towards some well-designed climax. There was an increase in tempo corresponding with the rising suspense. Martyn’s blood tingled and her heart thumped. Through which door would the entrance be made? The players began a complex circling movement accompanied by a sharp crescendo in the dialogue. Up and up it soared. “Now,” she thought, “now!” The action of the play was held in suspense, poised and adjusted, and into the prepared silence, with judgement and precision, at the head of Jacko’s twisted flight of steps, came Adam Poole.

“Is that an entrance,” thought Martyn, pressing her hands together, “or is it an entrance?”

The curtain came down almost immediately. The secretary gathered his notes together and went backstage. Dr. Rutherford shouted: “Hold your horses,” thundered out of the circle, reappeared in the stalls, and plunged through the pass-door to back-stage where he could be heard cruelly apostrophizing the Almighty and the actors. Jacko stretched elaborately and slouched down the centre-aisle, saying into the air as he passed Martyn: “You had better get round for the change.”

Horrified, Martyn bolted like a rabbit. When she arrived in the dressing-room she found her employer, with a set face, attempting to unhook an elaborate back fastening. Martyn bleated an apology which was cut short.

“I hope,” said Miss Hamilton, “you haven’t mistaken the nature of your job, Martyn. You are my dresser and as such are expected to be here, in this dressing-room, whenever I return to it. Do you understand?”

Martyn, feeling very sick, said that she did, and with trembling fingers effected the complicated change. Miss Hamilton was completely silent, and to Martyn, humiliated and miserable, the necessary intimacies of her work were particularly mortifying.

A boy’s voice in the passage chanted: “Second act, please. Second act,” and Miss Hamilton said: “Have you got everything on-stage for the quick change?”

“I think so, madam.”

“Very well.” She looked at herself coldly and searchingly in the long glass and added: “I will go out.”

Martyn opened the door. Her employer glanced critically at her. “You’re as white as a sheet,” she said. “What’s the matter?”

Martyn stammered: “Am I? I’m sorry, madam. It must have been the first act.”

“Did you like it?”

“
Like
it?” Martyn repeated. “Oh yes, I liked it.”

“As much as that?” As easily as if she had passed from one room into another, Miss Hamilton re-entered her mood of enchantment. “What a ridiculous child you are,” she said. “It’s only actresses who are allowed to have temperaments.”

She went out to the stage, and as Martyn followed her she was surprised to feel in herself a kind of resistance to this woman who could so easily command her own happiness or misery.

An improvised dressing-room had been built on the stage for the quick change, and in or near it Martyn spent the whole of the second act. She was not sure when the quick change came, and didn’t like to ask anybody. She therefore spent the first quarter of an hour on tenterhooks, hearing the dialogue, but not seeing anything of the play.

After a short introductory passage the act opened with a long scene between Helena Hamilton and Adam Poole in which their attraction to each other was introduced and established, and her instinctive struggle against her environment made clear and developed. The scene was admirably played by both of them, and carried the play strongly forward. When Miss Hamilton came off she found her dresser bright-eyed and excited. Martyn managed the change without any blunders and in good time. Miss Hamilton’s attention seemed to be divided between her clothes and the scene which was now being played between J. G. Darcey, Poole and her husband. This scene built up into a quarrel between Poole and Bennington which at its climax was broken by Poole saying in his normal voice, “I dislike interrupting dress rehearsals, Ben, but we’ve had this point over and over again. Please take the line as we rehearsed it.”

There was complete silence, perhaps for five seconds, and then, unseen, so that Martyn formed no picture of what he was doing or how he looked, Bennington began to giggle. The sound wavered and bubbled into a laugh. Helena Hamilton whispered: “Oh, my
God
!” and went out toward the stage. Martyn heard the stage-hands who had been moving round the set stop dead as if in suspended animation. She saw Parry Percival, waiting off-stage, turn with a look of elaborate concern toward Miss Hamilton and mime bewilderment

Bennington’s laughter broke down into ungainly speech. “I always say,” he said, “there is no future in being an actor-manager unless you arrange things your own way. I want to make this chap a human being. You and John say he’s to be a monster. All right, all right, dear boy, I won’t offend again. He shall be less human than Caliban, and far less sympathetic.”

Evidently Poole was standing inside the entrance nearest to the dressing-room, because Martyn heard Bennington cross the stage and when he spoke again he was quite close to her, and had lowered his voice. “You’re grabbing everything, aren’t you?” the voice wavered. “On and off stage, as you might say — domestically and professionally. The piratical Mr. Poole.”

Poole muttered: “If you are not too drunk to think, we’ll go on,” and pitching his voice threw out a line of dialogue: “If you knew what you wanted, if there was any object, however silly, behind anything you say or do, I could find some excuse for you—”

Martyn heard Helena Hamilton catch her breath in a sob. The next moment she had flung open the door and had made her entrance.

Through the good offices of Jacko, Martyn was able to watch the rest of the act from the side. Evidently he was determined she should see as much as possible of the play. He sent her round a list, scribbled in an elaborate hand, of the warnings and cues for Miss Hamilton’s entrances and exits and times when she changed her dress.
Stand in the O.P. corner
, he had written across the paper,
and think of your sins
. She wouldn’t have dared to follow his advice if Miss Hamilton, on her first exit, had not said with a sort of irritated good nature: “You needn’t wait in the dressing-room perpetually. Just be ready for me, that’s all.”

So she stood in the shadows of the O.P. corner and saw the one big scene between Adam Poole and Gay Gainsford. The author’s intention was clear enough. In this girl, the impure flower of her heredity, the most hopelessly lost of all the group, he sought to show the obverse side of the character Poole presented. She was his twisted shadow, a spiritual incubus. In everything she said and did the audience must see a distortion of Poole himself, until at the end they faced each other across the desk, as in the scene that had been photographed, and Helena Hamilton re-entered to speak the line of climax: “
But it’s you, don’t you see? You can’t escape from it. It’s you
,” and the curtain came down.

Gay Gainsford was not good enough. It was not only that she didn’t resemble Poole closely: her performance was too anxious, too careful a reproduction of mannerisms without a flame to light them. Martyn burnt in her shadowy corner. The transparent covering in which, like a sea-creature, she had spent her twenty-four hours respite now shrivelled away and she was exposed to the inexorable hunger of an unsatisfied player.

She didn’t see Bennington until he put his hand on her arm as the curtain came down, and he startled her so much that she cried out and backed away from him.

“So you think you could do it, dear, do you?” he said.

Martyn stammered: “I’m sorry. Miss Hamilton will want me,” and dodged past him towards the improvised dressing-room. He followed, and with a conventionally showy movement barred her entrance.

“Wait a minute,
wait
a minute,” he said. “I want to talk to you.”

She stood there, afraid of him, conscious of his smell of grease-paint and alcohol, and thinking him a ridiculous as well as an alarming person.

“I’m
so
angry,” he said conversationally, “just literally so angry that I’m afraid you’re going to find me quite a difficult man. And now we’ve got that ironed out perhaps you’ll tell me who the bloody hell you are.”

“You know who I am,” Martyn said desperately. “Please let me go in.”

“M’wife’s dresser?”

He took her chin in his hand and twisted her face to the light. Poole came round the back of the set. Martyn thought: “He’ll be sick of the sight of me. Always getting myself into stupid little scenes.” Bennington’s hand felt wet and hot round her chin.

“M’wife’s dresser,” he repeated. “And m’wife’s lover’s little by-blow. That the story?”

Poole’s hand dropped on his arm. “In you go,” he said to Martyn, and twisted Bennington away front the door. Martyn slipped through and he shut it behind her. She heard him say: “You’re an offensive fellow in your cups, Ben. We’ll have this out after rehearsal. Get along and change for the third act.”

There was a moment’s pause. The door opened and he looked in.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

“Perfectly, thank you,” Martyn said, and in an agony of embarrassment added: “I’m sorry to be a nuisance, sir.”

“Oh, don’t be an ass,” he said with great ill humour. The next moment he had gone.

Miss Hamilton, looking desperately worried, came in to change for the third act.

The dress rehearsal ended at midnight in an atmosphere of acute tension. Because she had not yet been paid, Martyn proposed to sleep again in the Greenroom. So easily do our standards adjust themselves to our circumstances that whereas on her first night at the Vulcan the Greenroom had seemed a blessed haven, her hours of precarious security had bred a longing for a bed and ordered cleanliness, and she began to dread the night.

In groups and singly, the actors and stage-staff drifted away. Their voices died out in the alley and passages, and she saw, with dismay, that Fred Badger had emerged from the door of his cobby-hole and now eyed her speculatively. Desolation and fear possessed Martyn. With a show of preoccupation, she hurried away to Miss Hamilton’s dressing-room, which she had already set in order. Here she would find a moment’s respite. Perhaps in a few minutes she would creep down the passage and lock herself in the empty room and wait there until Fred Badger had gone his rounds. He would think she had found a lodging somewhere and left the theatre. She opened the door of Miss Hamilton’s room and went in.

Adam Poole was sitting in front of the gas fire.

Martyn stammered: “I’m sorry,” and made for the door.

“Come in,” he said and stood up. “I want to see you for a moment.”

“Well,” Martyn thought sickly, “this is it. I’m to go.”

He twisted the chair round and ordered rather than invited her to sit in it. As she did so she thought: “I won’t be able to sleep here to-night. When he’s sacked me I’ll get my suitcase and ask my way to the nearest women’s hostel. I’ll walk alone through the streets and when I get there the hostel will be shut.”

He had turned his back to her and seemed to be examining something on the dressing-shelf.

“I would very much rather have disregarded this business,” he said irritably, “but I suppose I can’t. For one thing, someone should apologize to you for Bennington’s behaviour. He’s not likely to do it for himself.”

“It really didn’t matter.”

“Of course it mattered,” he said sharply. “It was insufferable. For both of us.”

She was too distressed to recognize as one of pleasure the small shock this last phrase gave her.

“You realize, of course, how this nonsense started,” he was saying. “You’ve seen something of the play. You’ve seen me. It’s not a matter for congratulation, I dare say, but you’re like enough to be my daughter. You’re a New Zealander, I understand. How old are you?”

“Nineteen, sir.”

“You needn’t bother to pepper your replies with this ‘sir’ business. It’s not in character and it’s entirely unconvincing. I’m thirty-eight. I toured New Zealand in my first job twenty years ago, and Bennington was in the company. That, apparently, is good enough for him. Under the circumstances, I hope you won’t mind my asking you who your parents are and where you were born.”

“I’ve no objection whatever,” said Martyn with spirit. “My father was Martin Tarne. He was the son and grandson of a high-country run-holder — a sheep-farmer — in the South Island. He was killed on Crete.”

He turned and looked directly at her for the first time since she had come into the room.

“I see. And your mother?”

“She’s the daughter of a run-holder in the same district”

“Do you mind telling me her maiden name, if you please?”

Martyn said: “I don’t see what good this will do.”

“Don’t you, indeed? Don’t you, after all, resent the sort of conjecture that’s brewing among these people?”

“I certainly haven’t the smallest desire to be thought your daughter.”

“And I couldn’t agree more. Good Lord!” he said. “This is a fatheaded way for us to talk. Why don’t you want to tell me your mother’s maiden name? What was the matter with it?”

“She always thought it sounded silly. It was Paula Poole Passington.”

He brought the palm of his hand down crisply on the back of her chair. “And why in the world,” he asked, “couldn’t you say so at once?” Martyn was silent. “Paula Poole Passington,” he repeated. “All right. An old cousin of my father’s — Cousin Paula — married someone called Passington and disappeared. I suppose to New Zealand. Why didn’t she look me up when I went out there?”