“Is that an entrance,” thought Martyn, pressing her hands together, “or is it an entrance?”
The curtain came down almost immediately. The secretary gathered his notes together and went backstage. Dr. Rutherford shouted: “Hold your horses,” thundered out of the circle, reappeared in the stalls, and plunged through the pass-door to back-stage where he could be heard cruelly apostrophizing the Almighty and the actors. Jacko stretched elaborately and slouched down the centre-aisle, saying into the air as he passed Martyn: “You had better get round for the change.”
Horrified, Martyn bolted like a rabbit. When she arrived in the dressing-room she found her employer, with a set face, attempting to unhook an elaborate back fastening. Martyn bleated an apology which was cut short.
“I hope,” said Miss Hamilton, “you haven’t mistaken the nature of your job, Martyn. You are my dresser and as such are expected to be here, in this dressing-room, whenever I return to it. Do you understand?”
Martyn, feeling very sick, said that she did, and with trembling fingers effected the complicated change. Miss Hamilton was completely silent, and to Martyn, humiliated and miserable, the necessary intimacies of her work were particularly mortifying.
A boy’s voice in the passage chanted: “Second act, please. Second act,” and Miss Hamilton said: “Have you got everything on-stage for the quick change?”
“I think so, madam.”
“Very well.” She looked at herself coldly and searchingly in the long glass and added: “I will go out.”
Martyn opened the door. Her employer glanced critically at her. “You’re as white as a sheet,” she said. “What’s the matter?”
Martyn stammered: “Am I? I’m sorry, madam. It must have been the first act.”
“Did you like it?”
“Like it?” Martyn repeated. “Oh yes, I liked it.”
“As much as that?” As easily as if she had passed from one room into another, Miss Hamilton re-entered her mood of enchantment. “What a ridiculous child you are,” she said. “It’s only actresses who are allowed to have temperaments.”
She went out to the stage, and as Martyn followed her she was surprised to feel in herself a kind of resistance to this woman who could so easily command her own happiness or misery.
An improvised dressing-room had been built on the stage for the quick change, and in or near it Martyn spent the whole of the second act. She was not sure when the quick change came, and didn’t like to ask anybody. She therefore spent the first quarter of an hour on tenterhooks, hearing the dialogue, but not seeing anything of the play.
After a short introductory passage the act opened with a long scene between Helena Hamilton and Adam Poole in which their attraction to each other was introduced and established, and her instinctive struggle against her environment made clear and developed. The scene was admirably played by both of them, and carried the play strongly forward. When Miss Hamilton came off she found her dresser bright-eyed and excited. Martyn managed the change without any blunders and in good time. Miss Hamilton’s attention seemed to be divided between her clothes and the scene which was now being played between J. G. Darcey, Poole and her husband. This scene built up into a quarrel between Poole and Bennington which at its climax was broken by Poole saying in his normal voice, “I dislike interrupting dress rehearsals, Ben, but we’ve had this point over and over again. Please take the line as we rehearsed it.”
There was complete silence, perhaps for five seconds, and then, unseen, so that Martyn formed no picture of what he was doing or how he looked, Bennington began to giggle. The sound wavered and bubbled into a laugh. Helena Hamilton whispered: “Oh, my God!” and went out toward the stage. Martyn heard the stage-hands who had been moving round the set stop dead as if in suspended animation. She saw Parry Percival, waiting off-stage, turn with a look of elaborate concern toward Miss Hamilton and mime bewilderment
Bennington’s laughter broke down into ungainly speech. “I always say,” he said, “there is no future in being an actor-manager unless you arrange things your own way. I want to make this chap a human being. You and John say he’s to be a monster. All right, all right, dear boy, I won’t offend again. He shall be less human than Caliban, and far less sympathetic.”
Evidently Poole was standing inside the entrance nearest to the dressing-room, because Martyn heard Bennington cross the stage and when he spoke again he was quite close to her, and had lowered his voice. “You’re grabbing everything, aren’t you?” the voice wavered. “On and off stage, as you might say — domestically and professionally. The piratical Mr. Poole.”
Poole muttered: “If you are not too drunk to think, we’ll go on,” and pitching his voice threw out a line of dialogue: “If you knew what you wanted, if there was any object, however silly, behind anything you say or do, I could find some excuse for you—”
Martyn heard Helena Hamilton catch her breath in a sob. The next moment she had flung open the door and had made her entrance.
Through the good offices of Jacko, Martyn was able to watch the rest of the act from the side. Evidently he was determined she should see as much as possible of the play. He sent her round a list, scribbled in an elaborate hand, of the warnings and cues for Miss Hamilton’s entrances and exits and times when she changed her dress. Stand in the O.P. corner, he had written across the paper, and think of your sins. She wouldn’t have dared to follow his advice if Miss Hamilton, on her first exit, had not said with a sort of irritated good nature: “You needn’t wait in the dressing-room perpetually. Just be ready for me, that’s all.”
So she stood in the shadows of the O.P. corner and saw the one big scene between Adam Poole and Gay Gainsford. The author’s intention was clear enough. In this girl, the impure flower of her heredity, the most hopelessly lost of all the group, he sought to show the obverse side of the character Poole presented. She was his twisted shadow, a spiritual incubus. In everything she said and did the audience must see a distortion of Poole himself, until at the end they faced each other across the desk, as in the scene that had been photographed, and Helena Hamilton re-entered to speak the line of climax: “But it’s you, don’t you see? You can’t escape from it. It’s you,” and the curtain came down.
Gay Gainsford was not good enough. It was not only that she didn’t resemble Poole closely: her performance was too anxious, too careful a reproduction of mannerisms without a flame to light them. Martyn burnt in her shadowy corner. The transparent covering in which, like a sea-creature, she had spent her twenty-four hours respite now shrivelled away and she was exposed to the inexorable hunger of an unsatisfied player.
She didn’t see Bennington until he put his hand on her arm as the curtain came down, and he startled her so much that she cried out and backed away from him.
“So you think you could do it, dear, do you?” he said.
Martyn stammered: “I’m sorry. Miss Hamilton will want me,” and dodged past him towards the improvised dressing-room. He followed, and with a conventionally showy movement barred her entrance.
“Wait a minute, wait a minute,” he said. “I want to talk to you.”
She stood there, afraid of him, conscious of his smell of grease-paint and alcohol, and thinking him a ridiculous as well as an alarming person.
“I’m so angry,” he said conversationally, “just literally so angry that I’m afraid you’re going to find me quite a difficult man. And now we’ve got that ironed out perhaps you’ll tell me who the bloody hell you are.”
“You know who I am,” Martyn said desperately. “Please let me go in.”
“M’wife’s dresser?”
He took her chin in his hand and twisted her face to the light. Poole came round the back of the set. Martyn thought: “He’ll be sick of the sight of me. Always getting myself into stupid little scenes.” Bennington’s hand felt wet and hot round her chin.