Web and the Rock (40 page)

 She came to him presently through the crowd, still flushed with pleasure, beaming with excitement and delight, and took him with her into the strange and fascinating world backstage. This transition was accomplished simply by opening a small door. Now they were in a corridor which flanked the theatre on one side and which led back into the wings and to the stage. The corridor was filled with the performers: many of them had come out here to smoke and gossip, and the place was filled with their noisy chatter.
 He noticed that most of the performers were quite young. He passed a pretty girl whom he recognized as one of the young dancers in the show. She had been charming on the stage, a quick and graceful dancer and a comedienne, also, but now the illusion of the stage was shattered. She was bedaubed with make-up and paint, he noticed that her costume was somewhat soiled, and the lashes of her eyes had been so brilliantly lighted and the lids and under surfaces so heavily darkened with some purplish substance that the whole face had a drugged and hectic look, the eyes especially having the feverish bril- liance of a cocaine addict. She was surrounded by two or three young men whom he also recognized as performers. Their faces, too, were heavily rouged, which gave them the appearance of a feverish flush.
 They all turned to greet Mrs. Jack as she went past, and although she referred to them later as "those kids," there was in their appearance something that belied these words. Certainly, all of them were still quite young, but already they had lost a good deal of the freshness and the eager and naïve belief that is a part of youth. Monk felt powerfully that they "knew" too much--and that in knowing too much they did not know enough: had lost a good part of the knowledge that should be a part of life before they had ever had a chance to gain it through experience, and now must live blind on one side and confirmed in error.
 He noticed that the girl off stage had a strong quality of sexual attraction. And this, too, potent and unmistakable now, was too wise, too shameless, and too old. The young men who had clustered around her also showed the tarnish of this corrupt experience: there was something soft and loose about their eyes, their mouths, their faces, and somehow in their rouged checks and lidded eyes something un natural and unmanly. The comedian in the show had just come up and joined them. He was wearing the costume he was going to wear in the next act. It was a woman's dress, he wore a woman's wig of fluffy, carroty-looking hair, and his face, seen in this light, was hide ously painted and bedaubed. His manner off stage was just the same as it was on: as he approached his companions, he flounced his skirts and wiggled his shoulders, glared at them with his lidded eyes in a gesture of lewd refinement, and said something to them in a throaty, sug gestive tone that made them all laugh. As Mrs. Jack and the young man approached, he glanced up quickly at them, then murmured something out of the corners of his mouth that made them all laugh again. Aloud, however, he raised his voice and said, "Oh, hello," to Mrs. Jack in his suggestive parody and yet also in a friendly way.
 "Oh, hello, Roy," she cried eagerly, then turning to the other young people with her eager smiling look of slight surprise and inquiry, she said, "What are you kids up to now--hah?"
 They greeted her affectionately. It was evident they were all very fond of her. They all called her "Esther," and one of the young actors put his arm around her affectionately and called her "darling."
 This familiar use of hands and bestowing of caresses filled Monk with a hot surge of anger and dislike, but Mrs. Jack did not seem to notice it at all, or, if she did, she accepted it naturally and almost unconsciously as part of the easy fellowship that existed backstage.
 In fact, now when she had entered through that door into this familiar world, there had been a subtle yet a pronounced change in her whole manner. She seemed to be just as happy and as eagerly ex cited as before, but now her manner was more familiar and assured.
 If anything, she had dropped off just that veil of "party manner" which people inevitably assume in more formal social relations. Her manner now was more accustomed: this whole world back here fitted her like an old shoe. She stepped right into it, and for the first time now Monk noticed a quality in her that he was to discover came from the truest and finest source of her whole character. It was evident that she had now left the world of play and entered the world of work, and that it was the world of work that meant most to her.
 Her conversation now with these young people was different from what it had been with the people outside. It was a matter of quiet familiarity and complete informality, and in its simplest accent one could somehow read a deep feeling of affection and understanding.
 This was evident every time she spoke to any of the people who kept passing along the corridor--"Oh, hello, Ed"--"Hello, Mary"--"Sorry, was the coat all right?--Yes, it looked perfect in front." And in the way these people spoke to her, calling her "darling,"
 "Esther," and touching her familiarly with their hands when they passed, as the others had done, there was this same feeling of quiet affection and understanding.
 She introduced Monk to some of the performers. In response to his greeting, the comedian tilted his head to one side and surveyed him languourously through his lidded eyes.
 The others laughed and Monk's face burned with anger and embarrassment. A moment later, when he and Mrs. Jack had gone on back into the wings, she turned to him brightly, with a smile, and said: "Well, are you enjoying it, young fellow? Do you like to meet show people--hah?"
 His face was still smouldering, and he muttered, "I know, but that damn fellow--"
 She looked at him startled for a moment, then she understood, and said quietly: "Oh--Roy. Yes, I know." He made no reply, and in a moment, still quietly, she went on: "I've known all these people for years. Roy--" she was silent for a moment and then added very simply: "in many ways he is a very fine person.... Those other kids," she went on smiling, after a brief pause, "I watched most of them grow up. A lot of them are just kids from the neighborhood here. We've trained them all."
 He knew that she had intended no reproof in her quiet words, but had simply been trying to tell him something that he did not under stand; and, suddenly remembering the painted faces of the young actors, he remembered also, beneath their bright, unnatural masks, something that was naked and lonely. And he was touched with pity and regret.
 They had reached the wings of the stage now. Here all seemed to be action, confusion, and excited haste. He could see the scene shifters rushing across the stage, wheeling into place with amazing speed the wings of a big set. Still further back in the mysterious depths, there were thumping noises. He could hear the foreman of the stage hands shouting orders in a thick Irish tone, people were scuttling back and forth, dodging each other nimbly, jumping out of the way of big flats as they shot past. It seemed to be a case of every man for himself. For a moment he felt bewildered and confused, like a country fellow caught smack out in the middle of the four corners of a city square, not knowing where to turn, and feeling that he is about to be run down from all directions.
 And yet it was a thrilling scene as well. The whole thing reminded him of a circus. In spite of the apparent disorder, he noticed that things were slipping miraculously into structural form. It was a wonderful place. It had the beauty of all great instruments, of all great engines built for fluent use. Back here, the flim-flam and flummery of the front was all forgotten. The truth of the matter was, "the illusion of the stage" did not elude him. It never had. He had never been able to fool himself into believing that the raised platform before him, with one side open, was really Mrs. Cartwright's drawing room, or that the season, as the program stated, was September. In short, "realism" in the theatre had never seemed very real to him, and it got less real all the time.
 His was increasingly the type of imagination which gains in strength as it grows older because it is rooted to the earth. It was not that since his childhood he had grown disillusioned, nor that the aerial and en chanted visions of his youth had been rubbed out by the world's coarse thumb. It was now just that Pegasus no longer seemed to him to be as interesting an animal as Man-O'-War--and a railroad round house was more wonderful to him than both of them. In other words, as he grew older his efforts to escape were directed in instead of out. He no longer wanted to "get away from it all," but rather to try "to go get into it all"--and he felt now powerfully, as he stood there in the wings, that here again he was in contact with the incredible, the palpable, the real, the undiscovered world--which was as near to every man alive as a touch of his hand, the beat of his heart, and farther away from most men's finding than the rivers of the moon.
 Mrs. Jack was now in the center of her universe. She was no longer smiling. Her manner, as she stood there in the wings, rapidly snap ping the old ring on and off her finger, taking in every detail of that confused but orderly activity with an experienced eye, was serious, quietly concerned. And again he noticed a rather worn look about the woman's eyes and head that he had observed when he first saw her that evening, waiting for him on the curb.
 Above her, on a kind of raised platform, one of the electricians was manipulating a big spotlight that was to do service in the next act.
 In her quick and intent inspection of the stage she had not seemed to notice him at all, but now she looked up quickly, and said: "No.
 Up." As she spoke the words, she raised her hand a little. "You want it up more."
 "Like this?" he said, and raised it.
 "A little more," she said, and watched. "Yes, that's better."
 At this moment, the stage manager came up to her with an air of haste.
 "Mrs. Jack," he said, "you've got that new backdrop too small.
 There is that much left," he measured quickly with his hands, "be tween it and the wings."
 "Oh, no," she said impatiently, "there's not, either. The thing's all right. I made the measurements myself. You've got the wing too far out. I noticed it tonight. Try bringing it in a bit."
 He turned and shouted to two shifters. They moved the wing in, and the scene closed up. She studied it a moment, then she and the man walked out upon the stage, stepped over a tube of insulated wiring, and turned, facing the set, in the center of the curtain. For a moment they both looked at it, she turned and said something to the man, he nodded his head curtly, but in a satisfied way, then turned away and began to give orders. Mrs. Jack came back into the wings, turned, and began to watch the stage again.
 The appearance of the stage from this position--behind the proscenium--was wonderful. To one side there was a complication of great ropes that extended far up into the vaulted distance overhead.
 Looking up, one saw suspended a series of great drops which some how gave a sense of being so perfectly hung in balance that they could drop or rise swiftly and without a sound. On the other side there was the dynamic complication of the switchboard. A man was manipulating the switches, keeping his eye upon the row of foot lights. Mrs. Jack watched this intently for a moment: the lights brightened, softened, suffused, changed, and mixed with a magic fluency. She said: "A little more blue, Bob--no, towards the center more--no, you've got too much now--there!" She watched them while that magic polychrome of light like a chameleon changed its qualities, and presently, "Hold it there," she said.
 In a moment she turned and, smiling, touched the young man lightly on the arm and led him back into a little corridor and up a flight of stairs. Some of the performers, costumed for the new act, were clattering down the steps. All called out greetings to her as they passed, in the same casual and affectionate way he had observed before.
 Upstairs, there was a row of dressing rooms, and as he went by he could hear the voices of the performers, excited, busy, occasionally laughing.
 They mounted another flight of stairs that led up to the third floor, and entered a large room that opened at the end of the corridor. The door was open and the room was lighted.
 This was the costume room. Compared to the sharp excitement, the air of expectation and of hurried activity which he had observed in other parts of the theatre, the atmosphere of this room was quiet, subdued, and even, after so much electric tension, just vaguely melancholy. The room had in it the smell of goods and cloth; it had also the kind of gentle warmth that goes with women's work--with the hum of sewing machines, the sound of the treadle, and the quiet play of busy hands--an atmosphere that is apparently a happy one for a woman, but that is likely to be a little depressing to a man. To the youth, the room, although a large one, and on the scale of ordered enterprise, nevertheless evoked somehow an instant memory of all these other more domestic things. Long rows of costumes were hung on hooks from the walls, and on two or three long tables, such as tailors use, were strewn other garments, dresses, jackets, bits of lace or trimming, the varied evidence of work and of repair.
 There were three women in the room. One, a small, plump, dark young woman, wearing glasses, was seated cross-legged at one of the tables, with a piece of cloth spread out across her knees and sewing quickly. She was a wonderfully deft and nimble-fingered person; her small, plump hands were busy as a pair of beavers, and one could see the needle flashing through the air like a flight of arrows. Facing them under a bright light and seated at a sewing machine, was a woman stitching a piece of cloth. Seated farther away, behind these two women, was a third. She also was working on a piece of goods and had a needle in her hand. She was wearing a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles, and these emphasized the lean and sunken silence of her face. Even seated as she was, engaged in homely work and somberly attired in a dress of dark material, the woman gave an impression of fastidious elegance. Perhaps this was partly due to her costume, which was so sober that a man would not even notice it, and yet so perfectly correct that he would not forget it later. But, even more, the impression was probably due to the sunken quietness of the woman's thin yet not unattractive face, the thinness of her figure which looked rather tired and yet capable of constant work, and the movement of her white and rather bony hands.