“Thank you,” she said vaguely.
“The question is, what are we going to do about it?”
Martyn turned away to the ranks of dresses, and with business-like movements of her trembling hands tweaked at the sheets that covered them. She said briskly: “I realize of course that I’ll have to go. Perhaps Miss Hamilton—”
“You think you ought to go?” his voice said behind her. “I suppose you’re right. It’s an awkward business.”
“I’m sorry.”
“But I’d like to — it’s difficult to suggest—”
“I’ll be perfectly all right,” she said with savage brightness. “Please don’t give it another thought.”
“Why, by the way, are you still in the theatre?”
“I was going to sleep here,” Martyn said loudly. “I did last night. The night-watchman knows.”
“You would be paid on Friday.”
“Like the actors?”
“Certainly. How much is there in the exchequer between now and Friday?” Martyn was silent and he said with a complete change of voice: “My manners, you will already have been told, are notoriously offensive, but I don’t believe I was going to say anything that would have offended you.”
“I’ve got two and fourpence.”
He opened the door and shouted “Jacko!” into the echoing darkness. She heard the Greenroom door creak and in a moment or two Jacko came in. He carried a board with a half-finished drawing pinned to it. This he exhibited to Poole. “Crazy, isn’t it?” he said. “Helena’s costume for the ball. What must I do but waste my beauty-sleep concocting it. Everybody will have to work very hard if it is to be made. I see you are in need of counsel. What goes on?”
“Against my better judgement,” Poole said, “I’m going to follow your advice. You always think you’re indispensable at auditions. Give me some light out there and then sit in front.”
“It is past midnight. This child has worked and worried herself into a complete bouleversement. She is as pale as a Pierrot.”
Poole looked at her. “Are you all right?” he asked her. “It won’t take ten minutes.”
“I don’t understand, but I’m all right.”
“There you are, Jacko,” Poole said and sounded pleased. “It’s over to you.”
Jacko took her by the shoulders and gently pushed her down on the chair. “Attention,” he said. “We make a bargain. I live not so far from here in an apartment house kept by a well-disposed French couple. An entirely respectable house, you understand, with no funny business. At the top one finds an attic room as it might be in a tale for children, and so small, it is but twice the size of its nice little bed. The rental is low, within the compass of a silly girl who gets herself into equivocal situations. At my recommendation she will be accommodated in the attic, which is included in my portion of the house, and will pay me the rent at the end of a week. But in exchange for my good offices she does for us a little service. Again, no funny business.”
“Oh, dear!” Martyn said. She leant towards the dressing-shelf and propped her face in her hands. “It sounds so wonderful,” she said and tried to steady her voice, “a nice little bed.”
“All right, Jacko,” Poole said. She heard the door open and shut. “I want you to relax for a few minutes,” his voice went on. “Relax all over like a cat. Don’t think of anything in particular. You’re going to sleep sound to-night. All will be well.”
The gas fire hummed, the smell of roses and cosmetics filled the warm room. “Do you smoke?” Poole asked.
“Sometimes.”
“Here you are.” She drew in the smoke gratefully. He went into the passage and she watched him light his own cigarette. Her thoughts drifted aimlessly about the bony structure of his head and face. Presently a stronger light streamed down the passage. Jacko’s voice called something from a great distance.
Poole turned to her. “Come along,” he said.
On the stage, dust-thickened rays from pageant-lamps settled in a pool of light about a desk and two chairs. It was like an island in a vague region of blueness. She found herself seated there at the desk, facing him across it. In response to a gesture of Poole’s she rested her arms on the desk and her face on her arms.
“Listen,” he said, “and don’t move. You are in the hall of an old house, beautiful but decaying. You are the girl with the bad heredity. You are the creature who goes round and round in her great empty cage like a stoat filled with a wicked little desire. The object of your desire is the man on the other side of the desk, who is joined to you in blood and of whose face and mind you are the ill reflection. In a moment you will raise your face to his. He will make a gesture and you will make the same gesture. Then you will say: ‘Don’t you like what you see?’ It must be horrible and real. Don’t move. Think it. Then raise your head and speak.”
There was a kind of voluptuousness in Martyn’s fatigue. Only the chair she sat on and the desk that propped her arms and head prevented her, she felt, from slipping to the floor. Into this defencelessness Poole’s suggestions entered like those of a mesmerist, and that perfection of duality for which actors pray and which they are so rarely granted now fully invested her. She was herself and she was the girl in the play. She guided the girl and was aware of her and she governed the possession of the girl by the obverse of the man in the play. When at last she raised her face and looked at him and repeated his gesture it seemed to her that she looked into a glass and saw her own reflection and spoke to it.
“Don’t you like what you see?” Martyn said.
In the pause that followed, the sound of her own breathing and Poole’s returned. She could hear her heart beat.
“Can you do it again?” he said.
“I don’t know,” she said helplessly. “I don’t know at all.” She turned away and with a childish gesture hid her face in the crook of her arm. In dismay and shame she let loose the tears she had so long denied herself.
“There, now!” he said, not so much as if to comfort her as to proclaim some private triumph of his own. Out in the dark auditorium Jacko struck his hands together once.
Poole touched her shoulder. “It’s nothing,” he said. “These are growing pains. They will pass.” From the door in the set he said: “You can have the understudy. We’ll make terms to-morrow. If you prefer it, the relationship can be forgotten. Good night.”
He left her alone and presently Jacko returned to the stage carrying her suitcase.
“Now,” he said, “We go home.”
Chapter IV
SECOND DRESS REHEARSAL
When Martyn opened her eyes on the second morning of her adventure it was with the sensation of having come to rest after a painful journey. At first the events of the previous night seemed to be incorporated in the sleep that had followed them, and her happiness had something of the precarious and transitory quality of a remembered dream. It was difficult to believe that nine hours ago she had faced Adam Poole across a table on the stage of the Vulcan Theatre and had done so, for the moment at least, as an actress. The subsequent drive in a taxi with the unusually silent Jacko, their entrance into a sleeping house, creaking tiptoe up the stairs, the rapture of a hot bath and her subsequent oblivion — all these events flowed together in her memory and she felt she was as yet neither asleep nor fully wakened.
She lay quiet and looked about her. It was a bright morning and the sun came in at the attic window above her bed. The room had an air of great cleanliness and freshness. She remembered now that Jacko had told her he occasionally made use of it and indeed, tiny as it was, it bore his eccentric imprint. A set of designs for Twelfth Night was pinned to a wall-board. Ranged along the shelf were a number of figures dressed in paper as the persons in the play and on the wall facing her bed hung a mask of the fool, Feste, looking very like Jacko himself.