He cleaned his hands, tipped her head forward and began to massage the nape of her neck. “There are all sorts of things,” he said, “that you must remember and as many more to forget. Forget the little freak and the troubles of to-day. Remember to relax all your muscles and also your nerves and your thoughts. Remember the girl in the play and the faith I have in you, and Adam and also your Uncle Bennington.”

“Spare me my Uncle Bennington, Jacko. If my Uncle Bennington had left me where I belong, in fortnightly rep, I wouldn’t be facing this hell. I know what everyone thinks of Uncle Ben and I agree with them. I never want to see him again. I hate him. He’s made me go on with this. I wanted to throw the part in. It’s not my part. I loathe it. No, I don’t loathe it, that’s not true. I loathe myself for letting everybody down. Oh, God, Jacko, what am I going to do?”

Across the bowed head Jacko looked at his own reflection and poked a face at it. “You shall play this part,” he said through his teeth. “Mouse-heart, skunk-girl. You shall play. Think of nothing. Unbridle your infinite capacity for inertia and be dumb.”

Watching himself, he arranged his face in an unconvincing glower and fetched up a Shakesperian belly-voice.

He caught his breath. Beneath his fingers, Gay’s neck stiffened. He began to swear elaborately, in French and in a whisper.

“Jacko. Jacko. Where does that line come from?”

“I invented it.”

“You didn’t. You didn’t. It’s Macbeth,” she wailed. “You’ve quoted from Macbeth!” and burst into a flurry of terrified weeping.

“Great suffering and all-enduring Saints of God,” apostrophized Jacko, “give me some patience with this Quaking Thing.”

But Gay’s cries mounted in a sharp crescendo. She flung out her arms and beat with her fists on the dressing-table. A bottle of wet-white rocked to and fro, overbalanced, rapped smartly against the looking-glass and fell over. A neatly splintered star frosted the surface of the glass.

Gay pointed to it with an air of crazy triumph, snatched up her towel and scrubbed it across her makeup. She thrust her face, blotched and streaked with black cosmetic, at Jacko.

“Don’t you like what you see?” she quoted, and rocketed into genuine hysteria.

Five minutes later Jacko walked down the passage towards Adam Poole’s room, leaving J.G., who had rushed to the rescue in his shirt-sleeves, in helpless contemplation of the screaming Gay. Jacko disregarded the open doors and the anxious painted faces that looked out at him.

Bennington shouted from his room: “What the hell goes on? Who is that?”

“Listen,” Jacko began, thrusting his head in at the door. He looked at Bennington and stopped short. “Stay where you are,” he said and crossed the passage to Poole’s room.

Poole had swung round in his chair to face the door. Bob Cringle stood beside him, twisting a towel in his hands.

“Well?” Poole said. “What is it? Is it Gay?”

“She’s gone up. Sky-high. I can’t do anything nor can J.G., and I don’t believe anyone can. She refuses to go on.”

“Where’s John? Is this his doing?”

“God knows. I don’t think so. He came in an hour ago and said he’d be back at five to seven.”

“Has Ben tried?”

“She does nothing but scream that she never wants to see him again. In my opinion, Ben would be fatal.”

“He must be able to hear all this.”

“I told him to stay where he is.”

Poole looked sharply at Jacko and went out. Gay’s laughter had broken down in a storm of irregular sobbing that could be heard quite clearly. Helena Hamilton called out, “Adam, shall I go to her?” and he answered from the passage: “Better not, I think.”

He was some time with Gay. They heard her shouting: “No! No! I won’t go on! No!” over and over again like an automaton.

When he came out he went to Helena Hamilton’s room. She was dressed and made up. Martyn, with an ashen face, stood inside the doorway.

“I’m sorry, darling,” Poole said, “but you’ll have to do without a dresser.”

The call-boy came down the passage chanting: “Half-hour. Half-hour, please.”

Poole and Martyn looked at each other.

“You’ll be all right,” he said.

Chapter VI

PERFORMANCE

At ten to eight Martyn stood by the entrance.

She was dressed in Gay’s clothes and Jacko had made her up very lightly. They had all wished her luck: J.G., Parry Percival, Helena Hamilton, Adam Poole, Clem Smith and even the dressers and stage-hands.

There had been something real and touching in their way of doing this, so that even in her terror she had felt they were good and very kind. Bennington alone had not wished her well but he had kept right away, and this abstention, she thought, showed a certain generosity.

She no longer felt sick but the lining of her mouth and throat was harsh as if, in fact, she had actually vomited. She thought her sense of hearing must have become distorted. The actors’ voices on the other side of the canvas wall had the remote quality of voices in a nightmare, whereas the hammer-blows of her heart and the rustle of her dress that accompanied them sounded exceeding loud.

She saw the frames of the set, their lashings and painted legends — ACT I, P.2—and the door which she was to open. She could look into the Prompt corner where the A.S.M. followed the lighted script with his finger, and where, high above him, the electrician leaned over his perch, watching the play. The stage lights were reflected in his face. Everything was monstrous in its preoccupation. Martyn was alone.

She tried to command the upsurge of panic in her heart, to practise an approach to her ordeal, to create, in place of these implacable realities, the reality of the house in the play and that part of it in which now, out of sight of the audience, she must already have her being. This attempt went down before the clamour of her nerves. “I’m going to fail,” she thought.

Jacko came round the set. She hoped he wouldn’t speak to her and, as if he sensed this wish, he stopped at a distance and waited.

“I must listen,” she thought “I’m not listening. I don’t know where they’ve got to. I’ve forgotten which way the door opens. I’ve missed my cue.” Her inside deflated and despair griped it like a colic.

She turned and found Poole beside her.

“You’re all right,” he said. “The door opens on. You can do it. Now, my girl. On you go.”

Martyn didn’t hear the round of applause with which a London audience greets a player who appears at short notice.

She was on. She had made her entry and was engulfed in the play.

Dr. Rutherford sat in the O.P. box with his massive shoulder turned to the house and his gloved hands folded together on the balustrade. His face was in shadow but the stage lights just touched the bulging curve of his old-fashioned shirt-front. He was monumentally still. One of the critics, an elderly man, said in an aside to a colleague that Rutherford reminded him of Watts’s picture of the Minotaur.

For the greater part of the first act he was alone, having, as he had explained in the office, no masochistic itch to invite a guest to a Roman holiday where he himself was the major sacrifice. Towards the end of the act, however, Bob Grantley came into the box and stood behind him. Grantley’s attention was divided. Sometimes he looked down through beams of spotlights at the stalls, cobbled with heads, sometimes at the stage and sometimes, sideways and with caution, at the Doctor himself. Really, Grantley thought, he was quite uncomfortably motionless. One couldn’t tell what he was thinking and one hesitated, the Lord knew, to ask him.