Marcus was an actor of whom it was impossible to say where hard thinking and technique left off and the pulsing glow that actors call star-quality began. At earlier rehearsals he would do extraordinary things: shout, lay violent emphasis on oddly selected words, make strange, almost occult gestures and embarrass his fellow players by speaking with his eyes shut and his hands clasped in front of his mouth as if he prayed. Out of all this inwardness there would occasionally dart a flash of the really staggering element that had placed him, still a young man, so high in his chancy profession. When the period of incubation had gone by the whole performance would step forward into full light “And,” Peregrine thought, “there’s going to be much joy about this one.”
Act Two encompassed the giving of the dead child Hamnet’s gloves on her demand to the Dark Lady: a black echo, this, of Bertram’s and Bassanio’s rings and of Berowne’s speculation as to the whiteness of his wanton’s hand. It continued with the entertainment of the poet by the infamously gloved lady and his emergence from “the expense of passion in a waste of shame.” It ended with his savage reading of the sonnet to her and to W.H. Marcus Knight did this superbly.
W. Hardy Grove lounged in a window seat as Mr. W.H. and, already mingling glances with Rosaline, played secretly with the gloved hand. The curtain came down on a sudden cascade of his laughter. Peregrine spared a moment to reflect that here, as not infrequently in the theatre, a situation in a play reflected in a cock-eyed fashion the emotional relationships between the actors themselves. He had a theory that, contrary to popular fancy, this kind of overlap between the reality of their personalities in and out of their roles was an artistic handicap. An actor, he considered, was embarrassed rather than released by unsublimated chunks of raw association. If Marcus Knight was enraged by the successful blandishments of Harry Grove upon Destiny Meade, this reaction would be liable to upset his balance and bedevil his performance as Shakespeare, deceived by Rosaline with W.H.
And yet, apparently, it had not done so. They were all going great guns and Destiny, with only the most rudimentary understanding of the scene, distilled an erotic compulsion that would have peeled the gloves off the hands of the dead child as easily as she filched them from his supersensitive father. “She really is,” Jeremy Jones had said, “the original overproof femme fatale. It’s just there. Whether she’s a goose or a genius doesn’t matter. There’s something solemn about that sort of attraction.”
Peregrine had said, “I wish you’d just try and think of her in twenty years’ time with china-boys in her jaws and her chaps hitched up above her lugs and her wee token brain shrunk to the size of a pea.”
“Rail on,” Jeremy had said. “I am unmoved.”
“You don’t suppose you’ll have any luck?”
“That’s right. I don’t. She is busily engaged in shuffling off the great star and teaming up with the bounding Grove. Not a nook or cranny left for me.”
“Oh, dear, oh dear, oh dear,” Peregrine had remarked and they let it go at that.
On this particular evening Peregrine himself had at last succeeded after several rather baffling refusals in persuading Emily Dunne to come back to supper at the studio. Jeremy, who supervised and took part in the construction and painting of his sets at a warehouse not far away, was to look in at The Dolphin and walk home with them over Blackfriars Bridge. It had appeared to Peregrine that this circumstance, when she heard of it, had been the cause of Emily’s acceptance. Indeed, he heard her remark in answer to some question from Charles Random: “I’m going to Jeremy’s.” This annoyed Peregrine extremely.
Jeremy duly appeared five minutes before the rehearsal ended and sat in the front stalls. When they broke, Destiny beckoned to him and he went up to the stage through the pass-door. Peregrine saw her lay her hands on Jeremy’s coat and talk into his eyes. He saw Jeremy flush up to the roots of his red hair and glance quickly at him. Then he saw Destiny link her arm in Jeremy’s and lead him upstage, talking hard. After a moment or two they parted and Jeremy returned to Peregrine.
“Look,” he said in stage Cockney, “Do me a favour. Be a pal.”
“What’s all this?”
“Destiny’s got a sudden party and she’s asked me. Look, Perry, you don’t mind if I go? The food’s all right at the studio. You and Emily can do very nicely without me: damn sight better than with.”
“She’ll think you’re bloody rude,” Peregrine said angrily, “and she won’t be far wrong, at that.”
“Not at all. She’ll be enchanted. It’s you she’s coming to see.”
“I’m not so sure.”
“Properly speaking, you ought to be jolly grateful.”
“Emily’ll think it’s a put-up job.”
“So what? She’ll be pleased as Punch. Look, Perry, I—I can’t wait. Destiny’s driving us all and she’s ready to go. Look, I’ll have a word with Emily.”
“You’d damn well better, though what in decency’s name you can find to say!”
“It’ll all be as right as a bank. I promise.”
“So you say,” Peregrine contemplated his friend, whose freckled face was pink, excited and dreadfully vulnerable. “All right,” he said. “Make your excuse to Emily. Go to your party. I think you’re heading for trouble but that’s your business.”
“I only hope I’m heading for something,” Jeremy said. “Fanks, mate. You’re a chum.”
“I very much doubt it,” said Peregrine.
He stayed front-of-house and saw Jeremy talk to Emily onstage. Emily’s back was towards him and he was unable to gauge her reaction but Jeremy was all smiles. Peregrine had been wondering what on earth he could say to her when it dawned upon him that, come hell or high water, he could not equivocate with Emily.
Destiny was up there acting her boots off with Marcus, Harry Grove, and now Jeremy, for an audience. Marcus maintained a proprietary air, to which she responded like a docile concubine, Peregrine thought. But he noticed that she managed quite often to glance at Harry with a slight widening of her eyes and an air of decorum that was rather more provocative than if she’d hung round his neck and said: “Now.” She also beamed upon poor Jeremy. They all talked excitedly, making plans for their party. Soon they had gone away by the stage-door.
Emily was still onstage.
“Well,” Peregrine thought, “here goes.”
He walked down the aisle and crossed to the pass-door in the box on the Prompt side. He never went backstage by this route without a kind of aftertaste of his first visit to The Dolphin. Always, behind the sound of his own footsteps on the uncarpeted stairway, Peregrine caught an echo of Mr. Conducis coming invisibly to his rescue.
It was a slight shock now, therefore, to hear, as he shut the pass-door behind him, actual footsteps beyond the turn in this narrow, dark and widening stair.
“Hullo?” he said. “Who’s that?”
The steps halted.
“Coming up,” Peregrine said, not wanting to collide.
He went on up the little stairway and turned the corner.
The door leading onto the stage opened slightly, admitting a blade of light. He saw that somebody moved uncertainly as if in doubt whether to descend or not and he got the impression that whoever it was had actually been standing in the dark behind the door.
Gertrude Bracey said, “I was just coming down.”
She pushed open the door and went onstage to make way for him. As he came up with her, she put her hand on his arm.
“Aren’t you going to Destiny’s sinister little party?” she asked.
“Not I,” he said.