Read Online Night at the Vulcan by Ngaio Marsh - Free Book Online Page B

it.”
    “Did you come looking for the job of dresser to Miss Hamilton?”
    “For any job,” she said desperately. “I heard by accident about the dresser.”
    “But it was not to be a dresser that you came all the way from New Zealand, and yet it was to work in the theatre, and so perhaps after all you hoped to be an actress.”
    “Yes,” Martyn said, throwing up her hands, “all right, I hoped to be an actress. But please let’s forget all about it. You can’t imagine how thankful I am to be a dresser, and if you think I’m secretly hoping Miss Gainsford will get laryngitis or break her leg, you couldn’t be more mistaken. I don’t believe in fairy-tales.”
    “What humbugs you all are.”
    “Who?” she demanded indignantly.
    “All you Anglo-Saxons. You humbug even yourselves. Conceive for the moment the
mise-en-scène
, the situation, the coincidence, and have you the cheek to tell me again that you came thirteen thousand miles to be an actress and yet do not wish to play this part? Are you a good actress?”
    “Don’t,” Martyn said, “don’t. I’ve got a job and I’m in a sort of a trance. It makes everything very simple and I don’t want to come out of it.”
    Jacko grinned fiendishly. “Just a little touch of laryngitis?” he suggested.
    Martyn got up. “Thank you very much for my nice dinner,” she said. “I ought to be getting on with my job.”
    “Little hypocrite. Or perhaps after all you know already you are a very bad actress.”
    Without answering she walked out ahead of him, and they returned in silence to the Vulcan.
    Timed to begin at seven, the dress rehearsal actually started at ten past eight. They were waiting, it appeared, for the author. Miss Hamilton had no changes in the first act, and told Martyn she might watch from the front. She went out and sat at the back of the stalls near the other dressers. There was a sprinkling of onlookers, two of whom were understudies, in the auditorium. About half-way down the centre-aisle Adam Poole, made up and wearing a dressing-gown, sat between Jacko and a young man whom Martyn supposed to be a secretary. Jacko had told her that Poole’s first entrance came at the end of the act. The atmosphere that hangs over all dress rehearsals seeped out into the auditorium. The delay seemed interminable. Poole turned from time to time and peered up towards the circle. At last a door slammed upstairs, somebody floundered noisily down the circle steps, a seat banged and a voice — Dr. John James Rutherford’s — shouted:
     
    “Hung be the heavens with black, yield day to night!
    Comets, importing change of times and states,
    Brandish your crystal tresses in the sky,
    And with them scourge the bad revolting stars—
    Repeat,”
     
    Dr. Rutherford bawled, leaning over the balustrade, “repeat:
bad revolting stars
. I’m here, my hearties. Take it away and burn it.”
    Martyn saw Poole grin. “You behave yourself, up there,” he said. “Have you got your paper and pencil?”
    “I am provided in that kind.”
    “Good.”
    The lights went up along the fringe of the curtain, Martyn’s flesh began to creep. Poole called “All right,” and lit a cigarette. Throughout the auditorium other little flames sprang up, illuminating from below, like miniature footlights, the faces of the watchers in front. A remote voice said: “O.K. Take it away”; a band of gold appeared below the fringe of the curtain, widened and grew to a lighted stage. Parry Percival spoke the opening line of Dr. Rutherford’s new play.
    Martyn liked the first act. It concerned itself with the group of figures Jacko had already described — the old man, his son, his son’s wife, their daughter and her fiancé. They were creatures of convention, the wife alone possessed of some inclination to reach out beyond her enclosed and aimless existence. In his production Adam Poole, with Jacko’s décor to help him, delicately underlined the playwright’s symbolic treatment of