The new courage went out of me like water down a chute. “But Siddy, I can’t start tonight,” I protested, half pleading, half outraged.
“Tonight or never! ’Tis an emergency—we’re short-handed.” Again his voice changed. “When was it she last walked?”
“But Siddy, I don’t know the part.”
“You must. You’ve heard the play twenty times this year past. When was it she last walked?”
Martin was back and yanking down a blonde wig on my head and shoving my arms into a light gray robe.
“I’ve never studied the lines,” I squeaked at Sidney.
“Liar! I’ve watched your lips move a dozen nights when you watched the scene from the wings. Close your eyes, girl! Martin, unhand her. Close your eyes, girl, empty your mind, and listen, listen only. When was it she last walked?”
In the blackness I heard myself replying to that cue, first in a whisper, then more loudly, then full-throated but grave, “Since his majesty went into the field, I have seen her rise from her bed, throw her nightgown upon her, unlock her closet, take forth—”
“Bravissimo!” Siddy cried and bombed me again. Martin hugged his arm around my shoulders too, then quickly stooped to start hooking up my robe from the bottom.
“But that’s only the first lines, Siddy,” I protested.
“They’re enough!”
“But Siddy, what if I blow up?” I asked.
“Keep your mind empty. You won’t. Further, I’ll be at your side, doubling the Doctor, to prompt you if you pause.”
That ought to take care of two of me, I thought. Then something else struck me. “But Siddy,” I quavered, “how do I play the Gentlewoman as a boy?”
“Boy?” he demanded wonderingly. “Play her without falling down flat on your face and I’ll be past measure happy!” And he smacked me hard on the fanny.
Martin’s fingers were darting at the next to the last hook. I stopped him and shoved my hand down the neck of my sweater and got hold of the subway token and the chain it was on and yanked. It burned my neck but the gold links parted. I started to throw it across the room, but instead I smiled at Siddy and dropped it in his palm.
“The Sleepwalking Scene!” Maud hissed insistently to us from the door.
VII
I know death hath ten thousand several doors
For men to take their exits, and ’tis found
They go on such strange geometrical hinges,
You may open them both ways.
—The Duchess
There is this about an actor on stage: he can see the audience but he can’t look at them, unless he’s a narrator or some sort of comic. I wasn’t the first (Grendel groks!) and only scared to death of becoming the second as Siddy walked me out of the wings onto the stage, over the groundcloth that felt so much like ground, with a sort of interweaving policeman-grip on my left arm.
Sid was in a dark gray robe looking like some dismal kind of monk, his head so hooded for the Doctor that you couldn’t see his face at all.
My skull was pulse-buzzing. My throat was squeezed dry. My heart was pounding. Below that my body was empty, squirmy, electricity-stung, yet with the feeling of wearing ice cold iron pants.
I heard as if from two million miles, “When was it she last walked?” and then an iron bell somewhere tolling the reply—I guess it had to be my voice coming up through my body from my iron pants: “Since his majesty went into the field—” and so on, until Martin had come on stage, stary-eyed, a white scarf tossed over the back of his long black wig and a flaring candle two inches thick gripped in his right hand and dripping wax on his wrist, and started to do Lady Mack’s sleepwalking half-hinted confessions of the murders of Duncan and Banquo and Lady Macduff.
So here is what I saw then without looking, like a vivid scene that floats out in front of your mind in a reverie, hovering against a background of dark blur, and sort of flashes on and off as you think, or in my case act. All the time, remember, with Sid’s hand hard on my wrist and me now and then tolling Shakespearan language out of some lightless storehouse of memory I’d never known was there to belong to me.
* * * *
There was a medium-size glade in a forest. Through the half-naked black branches shone a dark cold sky, like ashes of silver, early evening.
The glade had two horns, as it were, narrowing back to either side and going off through the forest. A chilly breeze was blowing out of them, almost enough to put out the candle. Its flame rippled.
Rather far back in the horn to my left, but not very far, were clumped two dozen or so men in dark cloaks they huddled around themselves. They wore brimmed tallish hats and pale stuff showing at their necks. Somehow I assumed that these men must be the “rude fellows from the City” I remembered Beau mentioning a million or so years ago. Although I couldn’t see them very well, and didn’t spend much time on them, there was one of them who had his hat off or excitedly pushed way back, showing a big pale forehead. Although that was all the conscious impression I had of his face, he seemed frighteningly familiar.
In the horn to my right, which was wider, were lined up about a dozen horses, with grooms holding tight every two of them, but throwing their heads back now and then as they strained against the reins, and stamping their front hooves restlessly. Oh, they frightened me, I tell you, that line of two-foot-long glossy-haired faces, writhing back their upper lips from teeth wide as piano keys, every horse of them looking as wild-eyed and evil as Fuseli’s steed sticking its head through the drapes in his picture “The Nightmare.”
To the center the trees came close to the stage. Just in front of them was Queen Elizabeth sitting on the chair on the spread carpet, just as I’d seen her out there before; only now I could see that the braziers were glowing and redly high-lighting her pale cheeks and dark red hair and the silver in her dress and cloak. She was looking at Martin—Lady Mack—most intently, her mouth grimaced tight, twisting her fingers together.
Standing rather close around her were a half dozen men with fancier hats and ruffs and wide-flaring riding gauntlets.
Then, through the trees and tall leafless bushes just behind Elizabeth, I saw an identical Elizabeth-face floating, only this one was smiling a demonic smile. The eyes were open very wide. Now and then the pupils darted rapid glances from side to side.
* * * *
There was a sharp pain in my left wrist and Sid whisper-snarling at me, “Accustomed action!” out of the corner of his shadowed mouth.
I tolled on obediently, “It is an accustomed action with her, to seem thus washing her hands: I have known her continue in this a quarter of an hour.”
Martin had set down the candle, which still flared and guttered, on a little high table so firm its thin legs must have been stabbed into the ground. And he was rubbing his hands together slowly, continually, tormentedly, trying to get rid of Duncan’s blood which Mrs. Mack knows in her sleep is still there. And all the while as he did it, the agitation of the seated Elizabeth grew, the eyes flicking from side to side, hands writhing.
He got to the lines, “Here’s the smell of blood still: all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand. Oh, oh, oh!”
As he wrung out those soft, tortured sighs, Elizabeth stood up from her chair and took a step forward. The courtiers moved toward her quickly, but not touching her, and she said loudly, “Tis the blood of Mary Stuart whereof she speaks—the pails of blood that will gush from her chopped neck. Oh, I cannot endure it!” And as she said that last, she suddenly turned about and strode back toward the trees, kicking out her ash-colored skirt. One