He says he dreamed of the three weird sisters. Macbeth replies that he thinks not of them and then goes on, against every nerve in the listener’s body, to ask Banquo to have a little talk about the sisters when he has time. Talk? What about? He goes on, with sickening ineptitude, to say the talk will “make honour” for Banquo, who at once replies that as long as he loses none he will be “counsell’d,” and they say good-night.
Peregrine thought: Right. That was right. And when Banquo and Fleance went off he clapped his hands softly but not so softly that Banquo didn’t hear him.
Now Macbeth is alone. The ascent to the murder is begun. Up and up the steps, following the dagger that he knows is a hallucination. A bell rings. Hear it not, Duncan.
Dougal was not firm in his lines. He started off without the book but depended more and more on the prompter, couldn’t pick it up, shouted “What!” flew into a temper, and finally started off again with his book in his hand.
“I’m not ready,” he shouted to Peregrine.
“All right. Take it quietly and read.”
“I’m not ready.”
Peregrine said: “All right, Dougal. Cut to the end of the speech and keep your hair on. Give your exit line and off.”
“Summons thee to heaven or to hell,” Dougal snapped and stamped off through the mock-up exit at the top of the stair.
Reenter the Lady at stage-level.
Maggie was word-perfect. She was flushed with wine, overstrung, ready to start at the slightest sound but with the iron will to rule herself and Macbeth. When his cue for reentry came Dougal was back inside his part. His return at stage-level was all Peregrine hoped for.
“I have done the deed. Didst thou not hear a noise?”
“I heard the owl scream and the crickets cry. Did not you speak?”
“When?”
“Now.”
“As I descended?”
“Ay.”
“Hark! Who lies i’ the second chamber?”
“Donalbain.”
“This is a sorry sight.”
“A foolish thought to say a sorry sight.”
She glances at him. He stands there, blood-bedabbled and speaks of sleep. She sees the two grooms’ daggers in his hands and is horrified. He refuses to return them. She takes them from him and climbs up to the room.
Macbeth is alone. The cosmic terrors of the play roll in like breakers. At the touch of his hands the multitudinous seas are incarnadined, making the green one red.
The Lady returns.
Maggie and Dougal had worked together on this scene and it was beginning to take shape. The characters were the absolute antitheses of each other: he, every nerve twanging, lost to everything but the nightmarish reality of murder, horrified by what he has done. She, self-disciplined, self-schooled, logical, aware of the frightful dangers of his unleashed imagination. “These deeds must not be thought after these ways: so it will make us mad.”
She says a little water will clear them of the deed, and takes him off, God save the mark, to wash himself.
“We’ll stop here,” said Peregrine. “I’ve a lot of notes, but it’s shaping up well. Settle down, please, everybody.”
They were in the theatre. The stage was lit by working lights, and the shrouded house waited, empty, expectant, for whatever was to be poured into it.
The stage manager and his assistant shifted chairs onstage for the principals and the rest sat on the stairs. Peregrine laid his notes on the prompter’s table, switched on the lamp, and sat down.
He took a minute or two, reading his notes and seeing they were in order.
“It’s awfully stuffy in here,” said Maggie suddenly. “Breathless, sort of. Does anybody else think so?”
“The weather’s changed,” said Dougal. “It’s got much warmer.”
Blondie said: “I hope it’s not a beastly thunderstorm.”
“Why?”
“They give me the jimjams.”
“That comes well from a witch!”
“It’s electrical. I get pins and needles. I can’t help it.”
Ascendant thunder, startling, close, everywhere, rolled up to a sharp, definitive crack. Blondie screamed.
“Sorry!” she said. “I’m sorry.” She put her fingers in her ears. “I can’t help it. Truly. Sorry.”
“Never mind, child. Come over here,” said Maggie.
She held out her hand. Blondie, answering the gesture rather than the words, ran across and crouched beside her chair.
Rangi said: “It’s true, she can’t help it. It affects some people like that.”
Peregrine looked up from his notes. “What’s up?” he asked and then, seeing Blondie, said, “Oh. Oh, I see. Never mind, Blondie. We can’t see the lightning, can we, and the whole thing’ll be over soon. Brace up, there’s a good girl.”
“Yes. Okay.”
She straightened up. Maggie patted her shoulder. Her hand checked and then closed. She looked at the other players, made a long face, and briefly quivered her free hand at them.
“Are you cold, Blondie?” she asked.
“I don’t think so. No. I’m all right. Thank you. Ah!” She gave a little cry.
There was another roll of thunder; not so close, less precipitate.
“It’s moving away,” said Maggie.
It died out in an indeterminate series of three or four thuds and bumps. Then, without warning, the sky opened and the rain crashed down.
“ ‘Overture and Beginners, please,’ ” Dougal quoted and got his laugh.
By the time, about an hour later, when Peregrine finished his notes and recapped the faulty passages, the rain stopped almost as abruptly as it had begun, and the actors left the theatre on a calm night with stars shining, brilliant, above the rain-washed air. London glittered. A sense of urgency and excitement was abroad and when Peregrine whistled the opening phrase of a Brandenburg concerto it might have been a whole orchestra giving it out.
“Come back to my flat for an hour, Maggie,” said Dougal. “It’s too lovely a night to go home on.”
“No, thank you, Dougal. I’m tired and hungry and I’ve ordered a car and here it is. Good-night.”
Peregrine saw them all go their ways. Still whistling, he walked toward the car park and only then noticed that a little derelict shed on the waterfront lay in a ramshackle heap of rubble.
“I hadn’t realized it’s been demolished,” he thought.
Next morning a workman operating a scoop-lift pointed to a black scar on one of the stones.
“See that?” he said cheerfully to Peregrine. “That’s the mark of the devil’s thumb, that is. You don’t often see it. Not nowadays, you don’t.”
“The devil’s thumb?”
“That’s right, Squire. Lightning.”
Simon Morten had taken the part of Macduff by storm. His dark good looks and dashing, easy mockery of the Porter on his first entrance with Lennox, his assertion of his hereditary right to wake his King, his cheerful run up the stairs, whistling as he went into the bloodied chamber while Lennox warmed himself at the fire and talked cosily about the wild intemperance of the night, all gave him an easy ascendancy.
Macbeth listened, but not to him.
The door opens. Macduff stumbles, incoherent, ashen-faced, the former man wiped out as if by the sweep of the murderer’s hand. The stirred-up havoc, the alarum bell, the place alive, suddenly, with the horror of assassination. The courtyard is filled with men roused from their sleep, nightgowns hastily pulled on, wild and disheveled. The bell jangling madly.