“Should we have them down again?”
“I trust,” Jeremy said suddenly, “that somebody knows how to work the safe. I’ve locked it, you might remember.”
“Don’t worry,” said little Meyer, whose reaction to opening nights took the form of getting slightly above himself. “I know. It was all cooked up at the offices and Greenslade, of course, told me. Actually The Great Man himself suggested the type of code. It’s all done on a word. You see? You think of a word of five letters—”
Down below the front doors had opened to admit a number of people and two cameras.
“—and each letter stands for a figure. Mr. Conducis said he thought easily the most appropriate word would be—”
“Mr. Meyer.”
Winter Meyer stopped short and swung round. Alleyn moved out on the landing.
“Tell me,” he said. “How long has this safe been in position?”
“Some days. Three or four. Why?”
“Have you discussed the lock mechanism with your colleagues?”
“Well — I — well — I — only vaguely, you know, only vaguely.”
“Don’t you think that it might be quite a good idea if you kept your five-letter word to yourself?”
“Well I — well, we’re all — well—”
“It really is the normal practice, you know.”
“Yes — but we’re different. I mean — we’re all—”
“Just to persuade you,” Alleyn said, and wrote on the back of an envelope. “Is the combination one of these?”
Meyer looked at the envelope.
“Christ,” he said.
Alleyn said, “If I were you I’d get a less obvious code word and a new combination and keep them strictly under your Elizabethan bonnet. I seriously advise you to do this.” He took the envelope back, blacked out what he had written and put it in his breast pocket.
“You have visitors,” he said, amiably.
He waited while the pictures were taken and was not at all surprised when Trevor Vere reappeared, chatted shyly to the pressman whom he had instinctively recognized as the authority and ended up gravely contemplating the glove with Destiny Meade’s arm about him and his cheek against hers while lamps flashed and cameras clicked.
The picture, which was much the best taken that morning, appeared with the caption: Child player, Trevor Vere, with Destiny Meade, and the Shakespeare glove. “It makes me feel kinda funny like I want to cry,” says young Trevor.
Peregrine answered half-a-dozen extremely intelligent questions and for the rest of his life would never know in what words. He bowed and stood back. He saw himself doing it in the glass behind the bar: a tall, lank, terrified young man in tails. The doors were swung open and he heard the house rise with a strange composite whispering sound.
Mr. Conducis, who wore a number of orders, turned to him.
“I must wish you success,” he said.
“Sir — I can’t thank you—”
“Not at all. I must follow.”
Mr. Conducis was to sit in the Royal box.
Peregrine made for the left-hand doors into the circle.
“Every possible good luck,” a deep voice said.
He looked up and saw a grandee who turned out to be Superintendent Alleyn in a white tie with a lovely lady on his arm.
They had gone.
Peregrine heard the anthem through closed doors. He was the loneliest being on earth.
As the house settled he slipped into the circle and down to the box on the O.P. side. Jeremy was there.
“Here we go,” he said.
“Here we go.”
Mr. Peregrine Jay successfully negotiates the tightrope between Tudor-type schmaltz and unconvincing modernization. His dialogue has an honest sound and constantly surprises by its penetration. Sentimentality is nimbly avoided. The rancour of the insulted sensualist has never been more searchingly displayed since Sonnet CXXIX was written.
After all the gratuitous build-up and deeply suspect antics of the promotion boys I dreaded this exhibit at the newly tarted-up Dolphin. In the event it gave no offense. It pleased. It even stimulated. Who would have thought—
Marcus Knight performs the impossible. He makes a credible being of the Bard.
For once phenomenal advance-promotion has not foisted upon us an inferior product. This play may stand on its own merits.
Wot, no four letter words? No drag? No kinks? Right. But hold on, mate—
Peregrine Jay’s sensitive, unfettered and almost clinical examination of Shakespeare is shattering in its dramatic intensity. Disturbing and delightful.
Without explicitly declaring itself, the play adds up to a searching attack upon British middle-class mores.
—Met in the foyer by Mr. Vassily Conducis and escorted to a box stunningly tricked out with lilies of the valley, she wore—
It will run.
Six months later Peregrine put a letter down on the breakfast table and looked across at Jeremy.
“This is it,” he said.
“What?”
“The decision. Conducis is going to sell out. To an American collector.”
“My God!”
“Greenslade, as usual, breaks the news. The negotiations have reached a point where he thinks it appropriate to advise me there is every possibility that they will go through.”
The unbecoming mauvish-pink that belongs to red hair and freckles suffused Jeremy’s cheeks and mounted to his brow. “I tell you what,” he said. “This can’t happen. This can’t be allowed to happen. This man’s a monster.”
“It appears that the B.M. and the V. and A. have shot their bolts. So has the British syndicate that was set up.”
Jeremy raised the cry of the passionately committed artist against the rest of the world. “But why! He’s lousy with money. He’s got so much it must have stopped meaning anything. What’ll he do with this lot? Look, suppose he gives it away? So what! Let him give William Shakespeare’s handwriting and Hamnet Shakespeare’s glove away. Let him give them to Stratford or the V. and A. Let him give them to the nation. Fine. He’ll be made a bloody peer and good luck to him.”
“Let him do this and let him do that. He’ll do what he’s worked out for himself.”
“You’ll have to see him, Perry. After all he’s got a good thing out of you and The Dolphin. Capacity business for six months and booked out for weeks ahead. Small cast. Massive prestige. The lot.”
“And a company of Kilkenny cats as far as good relations are concerned?”
“What do you mean?”
“You know jolly well. Destiny waltzing over to Harry Grove. Gertrude and Marco reacting like furies.” Peregrine hesitated. “And so on,” he said.
“You mean me lusting after Destiny and getting nowhere? Don’t let it give you a moment’s pause. I make no trouble among the giants, I assure you.”
“I’m sorry, Jer.”
“No, no. Forget it. Just you wade in to Conducis.”
“I can’t.”
“For God’s sake! Why?”
“Jer, I’ve told you. He gives me the jim-jams. I owe him nothing and I don’t want to owe him anything. Still less do I want to go hat in hand asking for anything. Anything.”
“Why the hell not?”
“Because I might get it.”
“Well, if he’s not an old queer and you say you don’t believe he is, what the hell? You feel like I do about the glove and the letter. You say you do. That they ought to be here among Shakespeare’s people in his own city or country town—here. Well?”
“I can’t go pleading again. I did try, remember, when he came to The Dolphin. I made a big song and dance and got slapped right down for my trouble. I won’t do it again.”
Jeremy now lost his temper.