‘No really!’ she stammered, ‘it’s too much! This is the third time. Like the demon king in pantomime.’
‘What the devil to you mean?’
‘I’m sorry. It’s just your flair for popping up in crises. Other people’s crises. Mine in fact.’
He grimaced as if he gave her up as a bad job. ‘What’s the present crisis?’ he said and looked at Miss Gainsford who had turned aside and was uneasily painting her mouth.
‘What is it, Gay?’
‘Please!’ she choked. ‘Please let me go. I’m all right, really. Quite all right. I just rather want to be alone.’
She achieved a tearful smile at Poole and an imploring glance at Martyn. Poole stood away from the door and watched her go out with her chin up and with courageous suffering neatly portrayed in every inch of her body.
She disappeared into the passage and a moment later the door of the greenroom was heard to shut.
‘It is a case of miscasting,’ said Jacko, coming into the room. ‘She should be in Hollywood. She has what it takes in Hollywood. What an exit! We have misjudged her.’
‘Go and see what’s the matter.’
‘She wants,’ said Jacko, making a dolorous face, ‘to be alone.’
‘No, she doesn’t. She wants an audience. You’re it. Get along and do your stuff.’
Jacko put several parcels on the table. ‘I am the dogsbody,’ he said, ‘to end all dogsbodies.’ And went out.
‘Now, then,’ Poole said.
Martyn gathered up her work and was silent.
‘What’s the matter? You’re as white as a sheet. Sit down. What is all this?’
She sat behind the machine.
‘Come on,’ he said.
‘I’m sorry if it’s inconvenient for you but I’m afraid I’ve got to give notice.’
‘Indeed? As dresser or as understudy?’
‘As both.’
‘It’s extremely inconvenient and I don’t accept it.’
‘But you must. Honestly, you must. I can’t go on like this: it isn’t fair.’
‘Do you mean because of that girl?’
‘Because of her and because of everything. She’ll have a breakdown. There’ll be some disaster.’
‘She doesn’t imagine you’re going to be given the part over her head, does she?’
‘No, no, of course not. It’s just that she’s finding it hard anyway and the – the sight of me sort of panics her.’
‘The likeness?’
‘Yes.’
‘She needn’t look at you. I’m afraid she’s the most complete ass, that girl,’ he muttered. He picked up a fold of the material Martyn had been sewing, looked absently at it and pushed the whole thing across the table. ‘Understand,’ he said. ‘I won’t for a second entertain the idea of your going. For one thing Helena can’t do without you and for another I will not be dictated to by a minor actress in my own company. Nor,’ he added with a change of tone, ‘by anyone else.’
‘I’m so terribly sorry for her,’ Martyn said. ‘She feels there’s some sort of underground movement against her. She really feels it.’
‘And you?’
‘I must admit I don’t much enjoy the sensation of being in the theatre on sufferance. But I was so thankful –’ she caught her breath and stopped.
‘Who makes you feel you’re on sufferance? Gay? Bennington? Percival?’
‘I used a silly phrase. Naturally, they all must think it a bit queer, my turning up. It looks queer.’
‘It’d look a damn sight queerer if you faded out again. I can’t think,’ he said impatiently, ‘how you could let yourself be bamboozled by that girl.’
‘But it’s not all bamboozle. She really is at the end of her tether.’
Martyn waited for a moment. She thought inconsequently how strange it was that she should talk like this to Adam Poole who two days ago, had been a celebrated name, a remote legend, seen and heard and felt through a veil of characterization in his films.
‘Oh, well,’ she thought and said aloud: ‘I’m thinking of the show. It’s such a good play. She mustn’t be allowed to fail. I’m thinking about that.’
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 hand 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 V, 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 curs’t Kate – you will rehearse at eleven tomorrow, hold or cut bowstrings. 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.
IV
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 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 off-stage, 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