“You’re at ten-thirty,” Christie told him; she had adroitly manoeuvred him into a corner on the way out. “Darling, do be marvellous. I know you will be. Rollo wants you for Agamemnon, but don’t for God’s sake tell any one I said so. He isn’t supposed to have any ideas, of course, till people have been heard.”
“In Greek?” said Kit, alarmed. “I don’t remember any.”
“No, ass, of course not, Gilbert Murray. If you are, you’ll wear the Greek armour. You’ll look so lovely in it. I’ve got it all polished up. Darling, I’ve put your dressing gown back in your room. Why didn’t you wake me?”
“I don’t know. You looked as if you could do with a sleep.”
“I thought you’d wake me when you came. You’re always so much sweeter even than I think you’ll be. Don’t be late for the audition, will you? I know you’ll be good.”
The auditions were taking place behind a door at the top of the first flight of stairs. At 10.25 Kit found himself waiting his turn by the door, next to a stooping, big-boned girl in glasses, who seemed to have been arrested for several years at the school-prefect stage. She was clutching a piece of exercise-book paper, and her extreme of apprehension made his own look, and even feel, like self-confidence.
“Have you been to any of these things before?” he asked her, to encourage himself rather than her.
She looked up at him with clumsy eagerness, like a cart-horse to which a sugar-lump is held out. “No. I haven’t at all. Is it dreadful? I expect you’ve done a lot of it?”
“Never in my life,” said Kit, almost cheerfully. Her admiring awe almost induced him to feel that he had, and was modestly concealing it.
“Haven’t you really? What are you going to say?”
“Well, actually,” said Kit, speaking with great carelessness to hide his mounting panic, “I haven’t learnt anything. I didn’t know one had to.”
“Oh, you’re one of those brave people who just dash at whatever they give you. I do think that’s marvellous. I wish I had the nerve to do that.”
The door opened and one of the younger-set girls came out, radiant and evidently bursting with some esoteric joke, to be received loudly by the cabal on the stairs.
“Miss West,” said Rollo, looking round the door.
“Oh, dear. It’s me now.”
“Cheer up,” said Kit paternally. “You’ll be all right when it comes to the point.”
“Thanks ever so for bucking me up.” She went in.
Kit waited, listening to the indistinct vocal murmurs within. The door handle rattled uncertainly, and turned. Miss West’s audition was over. She came out with her bit of manuscript twisted grubbily round her fingers, stumbled over her own feet, and carefully averted her eyes from the tiers of faces below.
“Dr. Anderson,” said Rollo, appearing again.
“How did it go?” asked Kit over his shoulder.
Miss West gulped. In her soul a longing for comfort warred with loyal resolve not to say anything which could impair this magnificent being’s chance. “Oh, not too bad,” she said, grinned desperately, and strode away down a corridor which avoided the stairs.
Kit went in.
The room was Anna Sable’s private sanctum. He was vaguely and generally conscious of Morris fabrics, of a signed photograph of Ellen Terry in doublet and hose and one of Lewis Waller in armour. But these impressions were swamped at once by the vision of Anna Sable, sitting upright on a chair with a tall back like a throne, her blue-veined hands folded, in a perfect attitude, on a book in her lap. Cross-legged on a humpty, diminished by her neighbourhood to the stature of an anonymous clerk in a presence-chamber, sat Rollo, taking notes.
Kit acknowledged an inclination from the throne, and shot a side glance at Rollo, in some despairing hope of encouragement or even a supporting wink. But Rollo, bent with the application of a monkish chronicler, scribbled on. Kit’s worst fears had not painted anything so awful as this. He had vaguely expected a straightforward ordeal on school lines, with some one—male, he had taken for granted—to be cheerfully caustic afterwards. No, he told Miss Sable (feeling his breathing located somewhere in his esophagus) he was afraid he hadn’t prepared anything to say.
Anna Sable unclasped her hands from the missal on her knee, delicately fingered its silk markers, and opened it. “Well, Dr. Anderson, suppose you begin by reading me this speech.” She extended the book with her marquise’s smile, pointing to the place with a brittle, unvarnished, meticulous nail.
Kit took the book, drew himself upright, and, anxious only that he should not have time to forget where the passage started, read rapidly, “Desdemona’s chamber, Desdemona sleeping, enter Othello.”
“Perhaps,” said Miss Sable gently, “you might like to read it over to yourself for a moment or two first.”
Kit ran his eye along the passage. Paralyzed by the certainty that Miss Sable’s eyes were fixed on him, he took in scarcely a word. Distant recollections of Paul Robeson mingled with the thought that this was one he hadn’t done at school. Good God, there were yards of it. Had he got to read it all? He glanced up. Just as he expected, Anna Sable was gazing at him inscrutably.
“Er—yes, all right,” he said.
Miss Sable nodded. Rollo poised his pencil. Kit cleared his throat, and began to read.
“It is the cause, it is the cause, my soul—”
“Perhaps just a little slower, to get the full value of the rhythm?”
“—Let me not name it to you, you chaste stars,
It is the cause.”
Suddenly, as sound clothed the disembodied spirit of the words, they began to stir into life in his mind. He saw the small lamplit room, the sleeping girl on the bed, the light catching a gleam in her hair; the shadow leaning forward from among shadows. Horrified by the approach of emotion at so grotesque a moment, he kept it in its place by reading with careful precision and calm.
“Yet I’ll not shed her blood,
Nor scar that whiter skin of hers than snow,
And smooth as monumental alabaster …
If I quench thee, thou flaming minister, I can again thy former light restore,
Should I repent me; but once put out thy light,
Thou cunning’s pattern of excelling nature—”
An aching tenderness pierced his heart. All that had moved him last night without analysis—her sleep, her poverty; the terrifying transience and frailness of mortal delight; the sense of her helplessness, of all her power to hurt him folded innocently like a child’s curled hands; the sense of his own strength, which had turned to a painful compassion as he covered her against the cold—all these became crystallized, and, like shapes of incantation, more than themselves. He felt a tightness in his vocal cords. The shocking sensation rallied all his defence mechanisms; with feelings of unspeakable relief and satisfaction he got himself in order, and read on with as little untoward disturbance as if it had been the minutes of the last meeting.
“One more, one more,
Be thus when thou art dead—”
He saw the worn open silk of the blue dressing gown, the babyish fold between the shoulder and the arm. “And I will kill thee,” he continued with well bred lack of emphasis, “and love thee after.”
“Thank you,” said Miss Sable. “I think that will be sufficient.”
Rollo removed his eyes from the ceiling, and wrote down a single word, with an emphasis which broke the point of his pencil.
CHAPTER 21
THE SHEEP HAD BEEN sorted from the goats. Produced by Rollo, the sheep were rehearsing for the Agamemnon. The goats had been turned over to the pastorship of Florizelle Fuller. They were presenting Justin Huntly M’Carthy’s If I Were King; a play not only dear to Florizelle’s heart, but containing a quantity of very small parts and an elastic crowd.
Kit was Noel de Jolys. His function was to be rejected by the heroine almost at once in favour of the hero, and, principally, to stand about looking effective in tunic and long hose, with scal
loped sleeves reaching to his heels. All this he did with very good manners. The younger set had long since, in its private counsels, christened him the Dumb Blond.
He was quite content. The lectures on stage technique, lighting, and so on, roused his mechanical interest; the human fauna fascinated him. In one way and another, the days slipped by. And in the night there was Christie.
They were together till morning. She had chosen his room with perfect strategy, which had passed unnoticed because the fitting-in of single and double rooms, with groups who wanted to be together and friends who wanted to share, was a job so intricate that, as with the lady preacher, one wondered not that it was done well, but that it was done at all. In Christie’s room, even more remote at night-time than his own, they might have been in a separate building.
There was only a single contretemps, when Rollo drifted into his room for a chat on a night when Christie looked in with the object of telling him she was coming to bed. Kit’s heart stopped when he saw her, but he reckoned without his guest; Rollo had not been liaison officer at the Abbey for several years to no purpose. He greeted Christie with a cheerful wave of his cigarette, and at once included her in the conversation. Kit himself was almost persuaded that mixed dressing-gown parties must be an accepted social rite which went on all over the house. The event developed a positive swing. They had a sherry on it. Once or twice, on later evenings, Rollo displayed a charming and ingenuous readiness to look in again; but something always happened at the last moment to prevent him.
“Oh, Rollo’s all right,” said Christie, when Kit scolded her about it afterwards. “He never gossips. He’s as safe as a bank.”
“Never gossips ! My God, if you could have heard some of the things he was telling me—”
“Yes, I daresay. But you need to know some of the ones he doesn’t tell. You wouldn’t get a thing out of Rollo with thumbscrews if he thought it was going to do any real harm. He’s like that.”
“It’s queer,” said Kit thoughtfully, “careful as we are, that we’ve managed to go on so long without getting in some kind of jam.”
“You’ve forgotten,” said Christie with a shiver. “Pedlow.”
“Oh, yes, Pedlow. Yes, that was pretty sticky. Thank God it turned out all right.”
“Look out. Touch wood or something.” He laughed, but she pushed down his hand against the framework of the bed.
Kit remembered something. “By the way, if you’re still trying to invest that hundred pounds, I can probably put you on to something slightly more solid than Mr. Cowen.” He thought, idly, that it was surprising she hadn’t spent it all in one great burst, on clothes, or an ocean cruise.
“Can you? That would be nice. It’s all in the bank. I haven’t touched any of it.” She changed the subject quickly. He puzzled for some time, afterwards, over this oddly uncharacteristic thrift, but presently forgot about it.
As the time drew on for the final performances, tension became heightened all round in the indefinable way that can be observed at such times. The curious, highly charged little intimacies sprang up of people who have known each other only for a matter of days, but who, interpreting emotions as amateurs do with the heart rather than the head, have found out things about one another which might not have transpired in an acquaintanceship of years.
Now, with Christie for the first time in a crowd which included several reasonably attractive young men of her own age, he was aware at last, after months of tormenting doubt, of his power to hold her. She played about with the younger set, in the rare intervals when she had time to play, as if with a gang of school friends. He knew, the more surely because she never troubled to point it out to him, that she never looked seriously at any one but himself. His débâcle at the audition seemed only to have increased her fondness; she behaved to him like a mother whose favourite son has scored a duck in a House match. She had spent, he knew, hours over the costume he was to wear as Noel de Jolys, easing it out where it pulled a little across the shoulders, sponging and pressing it, locking up the best pair of tights in her room, lest they should go astray to some one else. Often at meals or in the evening, when they could scarcely see one another for the press of people between, they would catch one another’s eyes for a moment, and without any show of recognition be alone together. He tried not to think about the future. It was something to know that this was his when he was there to claim it. He was sick of the folly of deceitful dreams.
The plays were to be done on successive nights; first the Agamemnon, which would attract the critics and the intelligentsia with cars, then If I Were King, which would attract the Paxton locals. It was on the eve of the first performance of Agamemnon that the Watchman, a pillar of the younger set, went off on his motor-cycle to visit a girl of his acquaintance, swerved to avoid a dog in the road, and was removed to hospital with concussion and a fractured femur.
“Well,” said Kit, when Christie, distraught, brought him this news, “he’s got an understudy, I suppose?”
“Don’t be silly, darling, how could he have? People who pay to come to a thing like this expect to get parts, if they’re good enough. And anyhow, there aren’t enough good people to go round. No, poor old Rollo will have to do it. Goodness knows how he’ll learn it all in the time. The Watchman’s got the first quarter or so of the play practically to himself. He’ll be up all night, I should think. Anyhow, he seems in an awful way. I’ve promised to take him in some black coffee last thing.”
“I’ve got a spot of brandy somewhere. Better put that in it.”
Kit scarcely realized how much, in a cautious and defensive way, he had got to like Rollo, till he was waiting for the curtain to go up. His own stomach felt quite sick with apprehension for him. Had he really been fool enough to stay up all night, in which case anything might happen? How he would hate to be prompted even once! Kit was finding, in these weeks, an unusual amount of time for the problems of other people; he was experiencing a relief, so deep that he scarcely dared to think about it, from problems of his own.
He could have relieved himself of worry about Rollo as well. His annoyance at being pressed into a major part had been entirely feigned, and, in the course of production, he had learned not only the Watchman’s part but most of the play by heart. Moreover, he had the chance to wear a very tall helmet and a very long cloak. It was, in fact, Rollo’s night out. His silhouette against the beacon-lit sky was graceful and impressive; his sombre voice, hinting at unspeakable dooms, sent through the theatre a frisson which was almost palpable. While the applause at the end was still going on, a visitor sitting next to Kit turned round and said, “I wonder, could you tell me who took the Watchman? I didn’t have time to get a programme on the way in.”
Kit passed his own, looking with a moment’s interest at his neighbour, whose face was vaguely familiar. He tried to place the fine-drawn, melancholy profile, which he dissociated somehow from the stoop, the slight inefficiency of hair and tie which was forlorn rather than slovenly, and the general air of a lost dog of excessively noble breed. “You won’t find the Watchman there, though,” he said. “The producer had to do it at the last moment.”
“Good heavens, did he produce as well?” The stranger stared abstractedly before him, rising late for God Save the King. When it was over he turned and, without remembering to return Kit’s programme, went shouldering through the out-going stream in the direction of the wings.
“Extraordinary chap,” Kit remarked to Miss West, who had contrived to be sitting on his other side.
“Didn’t you know who it was?” Delight at having, at last, something really interesting to say to him irradiated her face. “That was Carlos Traherne.”
“Good Lord,” said Kit, when astonishment allowed him speech. “Doesn’t he look different off the stage?”
Kit dressed in his room in good time to be made up, absently hooking on to his sky-blue doublet the huge hanging sleeves lined with white, and smoothing out creases in his tights; too much occupied with his t
houghts to feel stage-fright yet. To-night would be the last. To-morrow the magic island, with its curious inhabitants and its secret cave, would be behind him. Well, there was to-night. He buckled on his gold brocade sword-belt, gave a last tug to the doublet, and went out, feeling a certain pleasure in the deep swing of the sleeves from his shoulders.
On the way down he encountered a tall wall-mirror and was, in spite of himself, a little impressed. For a moment he regretted, in an inarticulate way, the period which could put such a flourish on life with such good taste. It was a costume for huge gestures, for men who polished their passions, set them exquisitely, and wore them like jewels in their caps. It was queer, he thought, that the shifts and concealments which he accepted so naturally would have made squalid nonsense to the wearers of these clothes. The shining extravagance in the glass made thirty years’ accumulated convention look curiously like accumulated grime. As he walked on, with his head up and the long folds swinging, he met a handful of the younger set who greeted him with an undisguised, admiring “Phew!”
Passing the door of the costume room, he felt a tug at his sleeve.
“Come in, beautiful. I want to look at you.” Christie pulled him inside.
No one else was there. She sat on the top of a hamper, looking him up and down. Mixed emotions chased each other over her unconcealing face; wonder, a tender amusement, a tragic nostalgia. She went up to him, and, when he put his arms round her, his long sleeves covered her in from her shoulders to the ground, which made him laugh.
“Don’t,” she said, hugging him. “Don’t laugh. I can’t bear it; you look so terribly like you.”
“Silly child.” He said it a little shyly, stroking a strand of her hair over the blue cloth.
“Don’t laugh at me.” She fingered the gold chain round his neck.
“It’s queer, one does feel different. Everything about us seems all right. I’m only scared I shall forget and suddenly behave as if it were.”
“Hollo my name to the reverberate hills, and make the voiceless gossip of the air cry out Christina? Wouldn’t it be fun if you did?”