Free Night at the Vulcan by Ngaio Marsh Page A

held in suspense, poised and adjusted, and into the prepared silence, with judgement and precision, at the head of Jacko’s twisted flight of steps, came Adam Poole.
    “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
!”