Free Night at the Vulcan by Ngaio Marsh Page B

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