He helped himself to another pinch of snuff. “Hooey!” he snorted. “You don’t do anything of the sort, my sweetie-pie. You’re going to rock ’em, you and Adam. Think of that and preen yourself. And leave all the rest — to me.”
“Don’t quote from Macbeth. If Gay Gainsford heard you doing that she really would go off at the deep end.”
“Which is precisely where I’d like to push her.”
“Oh, go away,” she cried out impatiently but with an air of good nature. “I’ve had enough of you. You’re wonderful and you’re hopeless. Go away.”
“The audience is concluded?” He scraped the parody of a Regency bow.
“The audience is concluded. The door, Martyn.”
Martyn opened the door. Until then, feeling wretchedly in the way, she had busied herself with the stack of suitcases in the corner of the room and now, for the first time, came absolutely face to face with the visitor. He eyed her with an extraordinary air of astonishment.
“Here!” he said. “Hi!”
“No, John,” Miss Hamilton said with great determination. “No!”
“Eureka!”
“Nothing of the sort. Good morning.”
He gave a shrill whistle and swaggered out. Martyn turned back to find her employer staring into the glass. Her hands trembled and she clasped them together. “Martyn,” she said, “I’m going to call you Martyn because it’s such a nice name. You know, a dresser is rather a particular sort of person. She has to be as deaf as a post and as blind as a bat to almost everything that goes on under her very nose. Dr. Rutherford is, as I expect you know, a most distinguished and brilliant person. Our Greatest English Playwright. But like many brilliant people,” Miss Hamilton continued, in what Martyn couldnt help thinking a rather too special voice, “he is eccentric. We all understand and we expect you to do so too. Do you know?”
Martyn said she did.
“Good. Now, put me into that pink thing and let us know the worst about it, shall we?”
When she was dressed she stood before the cheval-glass and looked with cold intensity at her image. “My God,” she said, “the lighting had better be good.”
Martyn said: “Isn’t it right? It looks lovely to me.”
“My poor girl!” she muttered. “You run to my husband and ask him for cigarettes. He’s got my case. I need a stimulant.”
Martyn hurried into the passage and tapped at the next door. “So they are married,” she thought. “He must be ten years younger than she is but they’re married and he still sends her orchids in the morning.”
The deep voice shouted impatiently: “Come!” and she opened the door and went in.
The little dresser was putting Poole into a dinner jacket. Their backs were turned to Martyn. “Yes?” Poole said,
“Miss Hamilton would like her cigarette case, if you please.”
“I haven’t got it,” he said and shouted: “Helena!”
“Hullo, darling?”
“I haven’t got your case.”
There was a considerable pause. The voice beyond the wall called: “No, no. Ben’s got it. Mr. Bennington, Martyn.”
“I’m so sorry,” Martyn said, and made for the door, conscious of the little dresser’s embarrassment and of Poole’s annoyance.
Mr. Clark Bennington’s room was on the opposite side of the passage and next the Greenroom. On her entrance Martyn was abruptly and most unpleasantly transported into the immediate past — into yesterday with its exhaustion, muddle and panic, to the moment of extreme humiliation when Fred Badger had smelt brandy on her breath. Mr. Bennington’s flask was open on his dressing-shelf and he was in the act of entertaining a thick-set gentleman with beautifully groomed white hair, wearing a monocle in a strikingly handsome face. This person set down his tumbler and gazed in a startled fashion at Martyn.
“It’s not,” he said, evidently picking up with some difficulty the conversation she had interrupted, “it’s not that I would for the world interfere, Ben, dear boy. Nor do I enjoy raising what is no doubt a delicate subject in these particular circumstances. But I feel for the child damnably, you know. Damnably. Moreover, it does rather appear that the Doctor never loses an opportunity to upset her.”
“I couldn’t agree more, old boy, and I’m bloody angry about it. Yes, dear, wait a moment, will you?” Mr. Bennington rejoined, running his speeches together and addressing them to no one in particular. This is my wife’s new dresser, J.G.”
“Really?” Mr. J. G. Darcey responded and bowed politely to Martyn. “Good morning, child. See you later, Ben, my boy. Thousand thanks.”
He rose, looked kindly at Martyn, dropped his monocle, passed his hand over his hair and went out, breaking into operatic song in the passage.
Mr. Bennington made a half-hearted attempt to put his flask out of sight and addressed himself to Martyn.
“And what,” he asked, “can I do for the new dresser?”
Martyn delivered her message. “Cigarette case? Have I got my wife’s cigarette case? God, I don’t know. Try my overcoat, dear, will you? Behind the door. Inside pocket. No secrets,” he added obscurely. “Forgive my asking you. I’m busy.”
But he didn’t seem particularly busy. He twisted round in his chair and watched Martyn as she made a fruitless search of his overcoat pockets. “This your first job?” he asked. She said it was not and he added: “As a dresser, I mean.”
“I’ve worked in the theatre before.”
“And where was that?”
“In New Zealand.”
“Really?” he said, as if she had answered some vitally important question.
“I’m afraid,” Martyn went on quickly, “it’s not in the overcoat.”
“God, what a bore! Give me my jacket then, would you? The grey flannel.”
She handed it to him and he fumbled through the pockets. A pocket-book dropped on the floor, spilling its contents. Martyn gathered them together and he made such a clumsy business of taking them from her that she was obliged to put them on the shelf. Among them was an envelope bearing a foreign stamp and postmark. He snatched it up and it fluttered in his fingers. “Mustn’t lose track of that one, must we?” he said and laughed. “All the way from Uncle Tito.” He thrust it at Martyn. “Look,” he said and steadied his hand against the edge of the shelf. “What d’you think of that? Take it.”
Troubled at once by the delay and by the oddness of his manner Martyn took the envelope and saw that it was addressed to Bennington.
“Do you collect autographs,” Bennington asked with ridiculous intensity—“or signed letters?”
“No, I’m afraid I don’t,” she said and put the letter face-down on the shelf.
“There’s someone,” he said with a jab of his finger at the envelope, “who’d give a hell of a lot for that one in there. A hell of a lot.”
He burst out laughing, pulled a cigarette case out of the jacket and handed it to her with a flourish. “Purest gold,” he said. “Birthday present but not from me. I’m her husband, you know. What the hell! Are you leaving me? Don’t go.”
Martyn made her escape and ran back to Miss Hamilton’s room, where she found her in conference with Adam Poole and a young man of romantic appearance whom she recognized as the original of the last of the photographs in the foyer — Mr. Parry Percival. The instinct that makes us aware of a conversation in which we ourselves have in our absence been involved warned Martyn that they had been talking about her and had broken off on her entrance. After a moment’s silence, Mr. Percival, with far too elaborate a nonchalance, said: “Yes. Well, there you have it,” and it was obvious that there was a kind of double significance in his remark. Miss Hamilton said: “My poor Martyn, where have you been?” with a lightness that was not quite cordial.