“Gründgen’s? But that’s Hitler’s tame actor, isn’t it?”
“Yes, yes.” Mr. Falls made a little movement, gave a little yelp, and clapped his hand to the small of his back. “This odious complaint!” he lamented. “Yes, that is the fellow. A ridiculous performer. You never saw anything like the Hamlet. Madder and madder and madder does he grow, and they think he’s marvellous. I witnessed it. Before the war, of course. Naturally.”
“Naturally!” said Questing with a loud laugh.
“But we were speaking of the play. I have always considered — ” And Mr. Falls was off on an extremely knowledgeable discussion of the minor puzzles of the play. Six years’ association with Shakespearean productions had not killed Dikon’s passion for Hamlet and he listened with interest. Falls was a good talker if an affected one. He had all sorts of mannerisms, nervous movements of his hands that accorded ill with his face, which was tranquil and remarkably comely. He had taken out a pipe, but, instead of lighting it, emphasized the points in his argument by knocking it out against the leg of his deck-chair. “To make three acts where in the text there are five!” he said excitedly, and the dottle from his pipe flew about Mrs. Claire’s clean verandah as he illustrated his theme with appropriate and angry raps on the chair leg: “Three, mind you, three, three! In God’s name, why not leave the play as he wrote it?”
“But we do play it in its entirety, sometimes.”
“My dear sir, I know you do. I am enormously grateful as all Shakespeareans must be. Do forgive me. I am riding my hobby-horse to death, and before you of all people. Arrogant presumption!”
“Not a bit of it,” said Gaunt cheerfully. “I’ve been off my native diet long enough to have developed an inordinate appetite for it. But I must say I fail to see your point about the acts. Since we must abridge…”
Barbara looked out of the dining-room door, saw Questing still there, and hesitated. Without pausing in his argument, Gaunt put out his hand, inviting her to join them. She sat beside Dikon on the step. “This will be good for you, my child,” said Gaunt in parenthesis, and she glowed ardently. “What on earth has happened to her?” Dikon wondered. “That’s the same dress, better than the others because it’s simpler, but the same. She’s brushed her hair back since we came in, and that’s an improvement, of course, but what’s happened to her? I haven’t heard a hoot from the girl for days, and she’s stopped pulling faces.” Gaunt had begun to talk about the more difficult plays, of Troilus and Cressida, of Henry VI, and finally of Measure for Measure. Falls, still beating his irritating tattoo, followed him eagerly.
“Of course he was an agnostic,” he cried — “the most famous of the soliloquies proves it. If further proof is needed this play provides it.”
“You mean Claudio? I played him once as a very young actor. Yes, that speech! It’s death without flattery, isn’t it? It strikes cold.
“Ay, but to die, and go we know not where;
To lie in cold obstruction, and to rot …”
Gaunt’s voice flattened out to a horrid monotone and his audience stirred uneasily. Mrs. Claire came to one of the windows and listened with a doubtful smile. Falls’s pipe dropped from his hand and he leant forward. The door of Dr. Ackrington’s room opened and he stood there, attentive. “Do go on,” said Mr. Falls. The icy sentences went forward.
“To be imprison’d in the viewless winds…”
Mr. Questing, always polite, tiptoed across the verandah, and retrieved the pipe. Falls seemed not to hear him. Questing stood with the pipe in his hand, his head on one side, and an expression of proprietary admiration on his face.
“… to be worse than worst
Of those that lawless and incertain thought
Imagine howling.”
A shadow fell across the pumice. Smith, unshaven and looking very much the worse for wear, appeared from the direction of the cabin, followed by Simon. They stopped dead. Smith passed a shaky hand across his face and pulled at his under lip. Simon, after a disgusted stare at Gaunt, watched Questing.
Gaunt drew to the close of the short and terrifying speech. Dikon reflected that perhaps he was the only living actor who could get away with Shakespeare at high noon on the verandah of a thermal spa. That he had not embarrassed his listeners but had made some of them coldly uneasy was very apparent. He had forced them to think of death.
Questing, after clearing his throat, broke into loud applause, tapping Mr. Falls’s pipe enthusiastically against the verandah post. “Well, well, well,” cried Mr. Questing. “If that wasn’t an intellectual treat! Quite a treat, Mr. Falls, wasn’t it?”
“My pipe, I believe,” said Mr. Falls, politely, and took it. “Thank you.” He turned to Gaunt. “Of course you may lay the agnosticism of those lines at the door of character and set against them a hundred others that are orthodox enough, but my own opinion — ”
“As You Like It has always been my favourite,” said Mrs. Claire from the window. “Such a pretty play. All those lovely woodland scenes. Dear Rosalind!”
Dr. Ackrington advanced from his doorway. “With all this modern taste for psychopathological balderdash,” he said, “I wonder you get anyone to listen to the plays.”
“On the contrary,” said Gaunt stuffily, “there is a renaissance.”
Huia came out — clanging her inevitable bell. The Colonel appeared from his study looking vaguely miserable.
“Is that lunch?” he asked. “What have you been talking about? Sounded as if someone was making a stump speech or somethin’.”
Barbara whispered hurriedly in her father’s ear.
“Eh? I can’t hear you,” he complained. “What?” He stared at Gaunt. “Out of a play, was it? Good Lord.” He seemed to be faintly disgusted, but presently an expression of complacency stole over his face. “We used to do quite a bit of theatrical poodle-fakin’ when I was a subaltern in India,” he said. “They put me into one of their plays once. Damn’ good thing. D’you know it? It’s called Charley’s Aunt.” iv
Throughout lunch it was obvious to Dikon that Simon was big with some new theory. Indeed, so eloquent were his glances that neither Questing nor anybody else, Dikon thought, could possibly mistake their meaning. Dikon himself was in a state of mind so confused that he seemed to be living in the middle of a rather bad dream. Anxiety about Barbara, based on an emotion which he refused to define, a disturbing change in his own attitude towards his employer, and an ever-increasing weight of apprehension which the war bred in all New Zealanders at that time — all these elements mingled in a vague cloud of uneasiness and alarm. And then there was Questing. In spite of Simon’s discoveries, in spite, even, of the witness of the torpedoed ship, Dikon still found it difficult to cast Questing for the rôle of spy. Indeed, he was still enough of a New Zealander to doubt the existence of enemy agents in his country at all, still inclined to think that they existed only as bugaboos in the minds of tiresome old ladies and club men. And yet… mentally he ticked off the points against Questing. Had he tried to bring about Smith’s destruction, and if so, why? Why did he pretend that he had been to Pohutukawa Bay, when, as Dr. Ackrington had proved by his pitfall, he hadn’t been near the place? If he visited the Peak only to hunt for curios, why should he have six times flashed his signal of three, five, and three, from a place where obviously no curios could be buried? He couldn’t help looking at Questing, at his smooth rather naïve face, his business man’s clothes, his not altogether convincing air of commercial acumen. Were these the outward casings of a potential murderer, who was quietly betraying his country? Irrelevantly, Dikon thought: “This war is changing the values of my generation. There are all sorts of things that we have thought funny that we shall never think funny again.” For perhaps the first time he contemplated coldly and deliberately a possible invasion of New Zealand. As he thought, the picture clarified. An emotion long dormant, rooted in the very soil of his native country, roused in him, and he recognized it as anger. He realized, finally, that he could no longer go on as he was. Somehow, no matter how uselessly, he, like Simon, must go forward to danger.