Night at the Vulcan (6 page)

“Maybe it’s lucky,” he said, “you don’t have to look like somebody else.”

“Are you being nice or beastly, Jacko?”

He put a cigarette between her lips and lit it “The dresses are good,” he said. He had a very slight foreign accent.

“You think so, do you?”

“Naturally. I design them for
you
.”

“Next time,” she said grimly, “you’d better write the play as well.”

He was a phenomenally ugly man, but a smile of extraordinary sweetness broke across his face.

“All these agonies!” he murmured. “And on Thursday night everyone will be kissing everyone else and at the Combined Arts Ball we are in triumph and on Friday morning you will be purring over your notices. And you must not be unkind about the play. It is a good play.” He grinned again, more broadly. His teeth were enormous and uneven. “Even the little niece of the great husband cannot entirely destroy it.”

“Jacko!”

“You may say what you like, it is not intelligent casting.”

“Please, Jacko.”

“All right, all right. I remind you instead of the Combined Arts Ball, and that no one has decided in what costume we go.”

“Nobody has any ideas. Jacko, you must invent something marvellous.”

“And in two days I must also create out of air eight marvellous costumes.”

“Darling Jacko, how beastly we are to you. But you know you love performing your little wonders.”

“I suggest then, that we are characters from Tchekhov as they would be in Hollywood. You absurdly gorgeous, and the little niece still grimly ingenue. Adam perhaps as Vanya if he were played by Boris Karloff. And so on.”

“Where shall I get my absurdly gorgeous dress?”

“I paint the design on canvas and cut it out and if I were introduced to your dresser I would persuade her to sew it up.” He took the glass from Martyn and said: “No one makes any introductions in this theatre, so we introduce ourselves to each other. I am Jacques Doré, and you are the little chick whom the stork has brought too late, or dropped into the wrong nest. Really,” he said, rolling his eyes at Miss Hamilton, “it is the most remarkable coincidence, if it is a coincidence. I am dropping bricks,” he added. “I am a very privileged person but one day I drop an outsize brick, and away I go.” He made a circle of his thumb and forefinger and looked through it, as though it were a quizzing-glass, at Martyn. “All the same,” he said, “it is a pity you are a little dresser and not a little actress.”

Between the photograph call and the dress rehearsal, which was timed for seven o’clock, a state of uneven ferment prevailed at the Vulcan. During the rare occasions on which she had time to reflect, Martyn anticipated a sort of personal zero hour, a moment when she would have to take stock, to come to a decision. She had two and fourpence and no place of abode, and she had no idea when she would be paid, or how much she would get. This moment of reckoning, however, she continually postponed. The problem of food was answered for the moment by the announcement that it would be provided for everyone whose work kept them in the theatre throughout the day. As Miss Hamilton had discovered a number of minor alterations to be made in her dresses, Martyn was of this company. Having by this time realized the position of extraordinary ubiquity held by Jacko, she was not surprised to find him cooking a mysterious but savoury mess over the gas ring in Fred Badger’s sink-room.

This concoction was served in enamel mugs, at odd intervals, to anyone who asked for it, and Martyn found herself eating her share in company with Bob Cringle, Mr. Poole’s dresser. From him she learnt more about Mr. Jacques Doré. He was responsible for the décor and dressing of all Poole’s productions. His official status was that of assistant to Mr. Poole, but in actual fact he seemed to be a kind of superior odd-job man.

“General dogsbody,” Cringle gossiped, “that’s what Mr. Jacko is. ‘Poole’s Luck,’ people call him, and if the Guv’nor was superstitious about anything, which ’e is
not
, it would be about Mr. Jacko. The lady’s the same. Can’t do without ’im. As a matter of fact it’s on ’er account ’e sticks it out. You might say ’e’s ’er property, a kind of pet, if you like to put it that way. Joined up with ’er and ’is nibs when they was in Canada and the Guv’nor still doing the child-wonder at ’is posh college. ’E’s a Canadian-Frenchy, Mr. Jacko is. Twenty years ago that must ’ave been, only don’t say I said so. It’s what they call dog-like devotion, and that’s no error. To ’er,
not
to ’is nibs.”

“Do you mean Mr. Bennington?” Martyn ventured.

“Clark Bennington, the distinguished character actor, that’s right,” said Cringle dryly. Evidently he was not inclined to elaborate this theme. He entertained Martyn, instead, with a lively account of the eccentricities of Dr. John Rutherford. “My oaff,” he said, “what a daisy! Did you ’ear ’im chi-iking from the front this morning? Typical! We done three of ’is pieces up to date and never a dull moment. Rows and ructions, ructions and rows from the word go. The Guv’nor puts up with it on account he likes the pieces and what a time ’e ’as with ’im, oh dear! It’s something shocking the way Doctor cuts up. Dynamite! This time it’s the little lady and ’is nibs and Mr. Parry Profile Percival ’e’s got it in for. Can’t do nothing to please ’im. You should ’ear ’im at rehearsals. ‘You’re bastardizing my play,’ ’e ’owls. ‘Get the ’ell aht of it,’ ’e shrieks. You never see such an exhibition. Shocking! Then the Guv’nor shuts ’im up and ’e ’as an attack of the willies or what-have-you and keeps aht of the theaytre for a couple of days. Never longer, though, which is very unfortunate for all concerned.”

Martyn tried to find out from Cringle what the play was about. He was not very illuminating. “It’s ’igh-brow,” he said. “Intellectually, it’s clarse. ‘A Modern Morality’ he calls it, the Doctor does. It’s all about whether you’re brought up right makes any difference to what your old pot ’ands on to you. ‘ ’Eredity versus enviroment’ they call it. The Guv’nor’s enviroment, and all the rest of ’em’s ’eredity. And like it always is in clarse plays, the answer’s a lemon. Well, I must go on me way rejoicing.”

To Martyn, held as she was in a sort of emotional suspension, the lives and events enclosed within the stage walls and curtain of the Vulcan Theatre assumed a greater reality than her own immediate problem. Her existence since five o’clock the previous afternoon, when she had walked into the theatre, had much of the character and substance of a dream with all the shifting values, the passages of confusion and extreme clarity, which make up the texture of a dream. She was in a state of semi-trauma and found it vaguely agreeable. Her jobs would keep her busy all the afternoon and tonight there was the first dress rehearsal.

She could, she thought, tread water indefinitely, half in and half out of her dream, as long as she didn’t come face to face with Mr. Adam Poole in any more looking-glasses.

Martyn’s official jobs were all finished by about three o’clock, but by some curious process of which she herself was scarcely aware she had by that time turned into a sort of odd-job girl, particularly where Jacko was concerned. He was engaged in re-painting a piece of very modern decoration above the main and central entrance of the second act set.

“It was lousy in the design,” he said, “and it was therefore twelve times lousier when it was twelve times bigger, so now I make it a little worse. Before the first dress rehearsal it is a good thing to be at one’s wits’ ends, or else one would lose them altogether. When there is not a job, I invent it, because after all there must be someone sane to watch the dress rehearsal. Now if you pass me up the pot of pink, I make a very civilized little flourish in the mode of the second act, and we take time off for you to tell me how clever I am, and why you are such a simpleton as to turn yourself into a dresser.”

“I wish,” Marryn said, “I knew what the play was about. Is it really a modern morality and do you think it good?”

“All good plays are moralities,” said Jacko sententiously, and he leant so far back on the top of his step-ladder that Martyn hurriedly grasped it. “And this is a good play with a very old theme.” He hesitated for a moment and she wondered if she only imagined that he looked worried. “Here is a selected man with new ideas in conflict with people who have very old ones. Adam is the selected man. He has been brought up on an island by a community of idealists; he represents the value of environment. By his own wish he returns to his original habitat, and there he is confronted by his heredity, in the persons of his great-uncle, who is played by J. G. Darcey, his brilliant but unstable cousin, who is played by Clark Bennington, this cousin’s wife, who is Helena, and with whom he falls in love, and their daughter, who is freakishly like him, but vicious, and who represents therefore his inescapable heredity. This wretched girl,” Jacko continued with great relish, looking at Martyn out of the corner of his eyes, “is engaged to a nonentity but finds herself drawn by a terrible attraction to Adam himself. She is played by Gay Gainsford. Receive again from me the pink pot, and bestow upon me the brown. As I have recited it to you so baldly, without nuance and without detail, you will say perhaps if Ibsen or Kafka or Brecht or even Sartre had written this play it would be a good one.”

Inexplicably, he again seemed to be in some sort of distress. “It has, in fact,” he said, “a continental flavour. But for those who have ears to hear and eyes to see, it has a wider implication than I have suggested. It is a tale, in point of fact, about the struggle of the human being in the detestable situation in which from the beginning he has found himself. Now I descend.” He climbed down his step-ladder, groaning lamentably. “And now,” he said, “we have some light, and we see if what I have done is good. Go out into the front of the house and in a moment I join you.”

By the time Martyn reached the sixth row of the stalls the stage was fully illuminated, and for the first time she saw the set for Act II as Jacko had intended it.

It was an interior, simple in design and execution, but with an air of being over-civilized and stale. “They are,” Jacko explained, slumping into a seat beside her,

“bad people who live in it. They are not bad of their own volition, but because they have been set down in this place by their heredity and cannot escape. And now you say, all this is pretentious nonsense, and nobody will notice my set except perhaps a few oddities who come to first nights; and in any case will get it all wrong. And now we wash ourselves and go out to a place where I am known, and we eat a little, and you tell me why you look like a puppy who has found his tail but dare not wag it. Come.”

The restaurant where Jacko was known turned out to be hard by the theatre, and situated in a basement. He insisted on paying for a surprisingly good meal, and Martyn’s two and fourpence remained in her pocket Whereas the curiosity of Fred Badger and Bob Cringle, and in some degree of the actors, had been covert and indirect, Jacko’s was unblushing and persistent.

“Now,” he said, over their coffee, “I ask you my questions. If there is a secret you tell me so, and with difficulty I shut myself up. If not, you confide in me, because everybody in the Vulcan makes me their confidant and I am greatly flattered by this. In any case we remain friends, no bones broken, and we repeat our little outings. How old do you think I am?”

With some embarrassment, Martyn looked at his scrawny neck, at the thin lichen-like growth of fuzz on his head, and at his heavily scored and indented face. “Fifty-seven,” she ventured.

“Sixty-two,” said Jacko complacently. “I am sixty-two years old, and a bit of a character. I have not the talent to make a character of myself for the people who sit in front, so instead I play to actors. A wheel within wheels. For twenty years I have built up my role of confidant, and now if I wanted to I couldn’t leave off. For example, I can speak perfect English, but my accent is a feature of the role of Papa Jacko and must be sustained. Everybody knows it is a game and, amiably, everyone pretends with me. It is all rather ham and jejune, but I hope that you are going to play too.”

Martyn thought: “It would be pleasant to tell him: I’m sure he’s very nice and so why don’t I do it? I suppose it’s because he looks so very odd.” And whether with uncanny intuition or else by a queer coincidence he said: “I’m not nearly as peculiar as I look.” Martyn said tentatively: “But I honestly don’t know what you want me to tell you.”

On the opposite wall of the restaurant there was a tarnished looking-glass, upon the surface of which someone had half-heartedly painted a number of water-lilies and leaves. Among this growth, as if drowned in Edwardiana, Jacko’s and Martyn’s faces were reflected. He pointed to hers.

“See,” he said. “We rehearse a play for which it is necessary a secondary-part actress should resemble, strikingly, the leading man. We have auditions, and from the hundreds of anxious ingenues we select the one who is least unlike him, but she is still very unlike him. Incidentally,” Jacko continued, looking Martyn very hard in the eye, “she is the niece of Clark Bennington. She is not very like him, either, which is neither here nor there and perhaps fortunate for her. It is her unlikeness to Adam that we must deplore. Moreover, although I am a genius with make-up, there is very little I can do about it. So we depend instead on reflected emotions and echoed mannerisms. But although she is a nice little actress with a nice small talent, she cannot do this very well either. In the meantime our author, who is a person of unbridled passion where his art is in question, becomes incensed with her performance and makes scenes and everybody except her Uncle Bennington retires into corners and tears pieces of their hair out. The little actress also retires into corners and weeps and is comforted by her Uncle Bennington, who nevertheless knows she is not good.

“Upon this scene there enters, in the guise of a dresser—” he jabbed his finger at the fly-blown mirror— “this. Look at it. If I set out to draw the daughter or the young sister of the leading man, that is what I should draw. Everybody has a look at her and retires again into corners to ask what it is about. Because obviously, she is not a dresser. Is she perhaps — and there are many excited speculations. ‘A niece for a niece?’ we ask ourselves, and there is some mention of Adam’s extreme youth — you must excuse me — and the wrong side of the rose-bush, and everybody says it cannot be an accident and waits to see, except Papa Jacko, whose curiosity will not permit him to wait.”

Martyn cried out: “I’ve never seen him before, except in films in New Zealand. He knows nothing about me at all. Nothing. I came here from New Zealand a fortnight ago and I’ve been looking for a job ever since. I came to the Vulcan looking for a job, that’s all there is about 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:

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 his theme. It was, as all first acts should be, anticipatory in character. The group awaited the arrival of the islander, the man from outside. Their behaviour suggested that of caged creatures who were completely resigned to their confinement, and in his arrival already saw a threat to their tranquillity. Again Helena Hamilton, as the wife, alone suggested, and she did so with great artistry, a kind of awareness of their sterility and decadence. Bennington, as her hard-drinking, brilliant and completely defeated husband, was giving an exciting performance, though at times Martyn wondered if he was not playing against his author’s intention. Was he not, with facile bits of business and clever, unexpected inflections, superimposing upon the part a false quality? Wouldn’t the audience, against the tenor of the play, find themselves liking this man, and become increasingly tolerant of the very traits with which the author sought to disgust them? As his father, J. G. Darcey seemed to Martyn to follow adequately the somewhat conventional die-hard the author had intended. As the completely colourless, almost puppet-like juvenile, Parry Percival with his magazine-cover looks was exactly right in what actors call a most ungrateful part. She could understand his dislike of it.

Gay Gainsford’s entry as the daughter was a delayed one, and try as she might not to anticipate it, Martyn felt a sinking in her midriff when at last towards the end of the act Miss Gainsford came on. It was quite a small part but one of immense importance. Of the entire group, the girl represented the third generation, the most completely lost, and in the writing of her part Rutherford displayed the influence of Existentialism. It was clear that with few lines to carry her she must make her mark, and clever production was written over everything she did. Agitated as she was by Jacko’s direct attack, Martyn wondered if she only imagined that there was nothing more than production there, and if Miss Gainsford was really as ill at ease as she herself supposed. A specific gesture had been introduced and was evidently important, a sudden thrust of her fingers through her short hair, and she twice used a phrase—“That was not what I meant” — where in the context it was evidently intended to plant a barb of attention in the minds of the audience. When this moment came, Martyn sensed uneasiness among the actors. She glanced at Poole and saw him make the specific gesture he had given Miss Gainsford, a quick thrust of his fingers through his hair.