He came nearer and looked at her with a sort of incredulity. “Good Lord,” he said, “I believe you are! Do you mean to say you haven’t considered your own chance if she did crack up? Where’s your wishful thinking?”
Martyn slapped her palm down on the table. “But of course I have. Of course I’ve done my bit of wishful thinking. But don’t you see—”
He reached across the table and for a brief moment his hand closed over hers. “I think I do,” he said. “I’m beginning, it seems, to get a taste of your quality. How do you suppose the show would get on if you had to play?”
“That’s unfair,” Martyn cried.
“Well,” he said, “don’t run out on me. That’d be unfair, if you like. No dresser. No understudy. A damn shabby trick. As for this background music, I know where it arises. It’s a more complex business than you may suppose. I shall attend to it.” He moved behind her chair, and rested his hands on its back. “Well,” he said, “shall we clap hands and a bargain? How say you?”
Martyn said slowly: “I don’t see how I can do anything but say yes.”
“There’s my girl!” His hand brushed across her head and he moved away.
“Though I must say,” Martyn added, “you do well to quote Petruchio. And Henry the Fifth, if it comes to that.”
“A brace of autocratic male animals? Therefore it must follow you are ‘Kate’ in two places. And — shrewd Kate, French Kate, kind Kate, but never curst Kate — you will rehearse at eleven to-morrow, hold or cut bow-strings. Agreed?”
“I am content.”
“Damned if you look it, however. All right. I’ll have a word with that girl. Good day to you, Kate.”
“Good day, sir,” said Martyn.
That night the second dress rehearsal went through as for performance, without, as far as Martyn knew, any interruption during the action.
She stayed throughout in one or the other of Miss Hamilton’s dressing-rooms and, on the occasions when she was in transit, contrived to be out of the way of any of the players. In the second act, her duties kept her in the improvised dressing-room on the stage and she heard a good deal of the dialogue.
There is perhaps nothing that gives one so strong a sense of theatre from the inside as the sound of invisible players in action. The disembodied and remote voices, projected at an unseen mark, the uncanny quiet offstage, the smells and the feeling that the walls and the dust listen, the sense of a simmering expectancy; all these together make a corporate life so that the theatre itself seems to breathe and pulse and give out a warmth. This warmth communicated itself to Martyn and, in spite of all her misgivings, she glowed and thought to herself, “This is my place. This is where I belong.”
Much of the effect of the girl’s part in this act depended not so much on what she said, which was little, but on mime and on that integrity of approach which is made manifest in the smallest gesture, the least movement. Listening to Miss Gainsford’s slight uncoloured voice, Martyn thought: “But perhaps if one watched her it would be better. Perhaps something is happening that cannot be heard, only seen.”
Miss Hamilton, when she came off for her changes, spoke of nothing but the business in hand and said little enough about that. She was indrawn and formal in her dealings with her dresser. Martyn wondered uneasily how much Poole had told her of their interviews, whether she had any strong views or prejudices about her husband’s niece, or shared his resentment that Martyn herself had been cast as an understudy.
The heat radiated by the strong lights of the dressing-rooms intensified their characteristic smells. With business-like precision Miss Hamilton would aim an atomizer at her person and spray herself rhythmically with scent while Martyn, standing on a chair, waited to slip a dress over her head. After the end of the second act, when she was about this business in the star-room, Poole came in. “That went very nicely, Helena,” he said.
Martyn paused with the dress in her hands. Miss Hamilton extended her whitened arms, and with a very beautiful movement turned to him.
“Oh, darling,” she said. “Did it? Did it really?”
Martyn thought she had never seen anyone more lovely than her employer was then. Hers was the kind of beauty that declared itself when most simply arrayed. The white cloth that protected her hair added a Holbein-like emphasis to the bones and subtly turning planes of her face. There was a sort of naïveté and warmth in her posture: a touching intimacy. Martyn saw Poole take the hands that were extended to him and she turned her head away, not liking, with the voluminous dress in her arms, to climb down from her station on the chair. She felt suddenly desolate and shrunken within herself.
“Was it really right?” Miss Hamilton said.
“You were, at least.”
“But — otherwise?”
“Much as one would expect.”
“Where’s John?”
“In the circle, under oath not to come down until I say so.”
“Pray God, he keep his oath!” she quoted sombrely.
“Hullo, Kate,” Poole said.
“Kate?” Miss Hamilton asked. “Why Kate?”
“I suspect her,” said Poole, “of being a shrew. Get on with your job, Kate. What are you doing up there?”
Miss Hamilton said: “Really, darling!” and moved away to the chair. Martyn slipped the dress over her head, jumped down and began to fasten it. She did this to a running accompaniment from Poole. He whispered to himself anxiously as if he were Martyn, muttered and grunted as if Miss Hamilton complained that the dress was tight, and thus kept up a preposterous duologue, matching his words to their actions. This was done so quaintly and with so little effort that Martyn had much ado to keep a straight face and Miss Hamilton was moved to exasperated laughter. When she was dressed she took him by the arm. “Since when, my sweet, have you become a dressing-room comedian?”
“Oh God, your only jig-maker.”
“Last act, please, last act,” said the call-boy in the passage.
“Come on,” she said, and they went out together.
When the curtain was up, Martyn returned to the improvised dressing-room on the stage and there, having for the moment no duties, she listened to the invisible play and tried to discipline her most unruly heart.
Bennington’s last exit was followed in the play by his suicide, off-stage. Jacko, who had, it seemed, a passion for even the simplest of off-stage stunts, had come round from the front of the house to supervise the gunshot. He stood near the entry into the dressing-room passage with a stage-hand who carried an effects-gun. This was fired at the appropriate moment and, as they were stationed not far from Martyn in her canvas room, she leapt at the report, which was nerve-shatteringly successful. The acrid smell of the discharge drifted into her roofless shelter.
Evidently Bennington was standing near by. His voice, carefully lowered to a murmur, sounded just beyond the canvas wall. “And that,” he said, “takes me right off, thank God. Give me a cigarette, Jacko, will you?” There was a pause. The stage-hand moved away. A match scraped and Bennington said: “Come to my room and have a drink.”
“Thank you, Ben, not now,” Jacko whispered. “The curtain comes down in five minutes.”
“Followed by a delicious post mortem conducted by the Great Producer and the Talented Author. Entrancing prospect! How did I go, Jacko?”
“No actor,” Jacko returned, “cares to be told how he goes in anything but terms of extravagant praise. You know how clever you always are. You are quite as clever to-night as you have always been. Moreover, you showed some discretion.”
Martyn heard Bennington chuckle. “There’s still tomorrow,” he said. “I reserve my fire, old boy. I bide my time.”
There was a pause. Martyn heard one of them fetch a long sigh — Jacko, evidently, because Bennington, as if in answer to it, said: “Oh, nonsense.” After a moment he added: “The kid’s all right,” and when Jacko didn’t answer: “Don’t you think so?”