in his and kissed them and she was overwhelmed with shyness.
‘But your face,’ he said, wrinkling his own into a monkey’s grimace. ‘It shines like a good deed in a naughty world. Do not touch it yourself. To your dressing-room. I come in two minutes. Away, before your ears are blasted.’
He moved down-stage, applied his eye to a secret hole in the set through which he could watch the action and held out his arm in warning to the stage-hand who then lifted the effects gun. Martyn went down the passage as Bennington came off. He caught her up: ‘Miss Tarne. Wait a moment, will you?’
Dreading another intolerable encounter Martyn faced him. His make-up had been designed to exhibit the brutality of the character and did so all too successfully. The lips were painted a florid red, the pouches under the eyes and the sensual drag from the nostrils to the mouth had been carefully emphasized. He was sweating heavily through the greasepaint and his face glistened in the dull light of the passage.
‘I just wanted to say’ – he began and at that moment the gun was fired and Martyn gave an involuntary cry; he went on talking –’when I see it,’ he was saying, ‘I suppose you aren’t to be blamed for that. You saw your chance and took it. Gay and Adam tell me you offered to get out and were not allowed to go. That may be fair enough: I wouldn’t know. But I’m not worrying about that.’ He spoke disjointedly. It was as if his thoughts were too disordered for any coherent expression. ‘I just wanted to tell you that you needn’t suppose what I’m going to do – you needn’t think – I mean –’
He touched his shining face with the palm of his hand. Jacko came down the passage and took Martyn by the elbow. ‘Quick,’ he said, ‘into your room. You want powdering, Ben. Excuse me.’
Bennington went into his own room. Jacko thrust Martyn into hers, and leaving the door open followed Bennington. She heard him say: ‘Take care with your upper lip. It is dripping with sweat.’ He darted back to Martyn, stood her near the dressing-shelf and, with an expression of the utmost concentration effected a number of what he called running repairs to her make-up and her hair. They heard Percival and Darcey go past on their way to the stage. A humming noise caused by some distant dynamo made itself heard, the tap in the wash-basin dripped, the voices on the stage sounded intermittently. Martyn looked at Gay’s make-up box, at her dressing-gown and at the array of mascots on the shelf and wished very heavily that Jacko would have done. Presently the call-boy came down the passage with his summons for the final curtain. ‘Come,’ said Jacko.
He took her round to the prompt side.
Here she found a group already waiting: Darcey and Percival, Clem Smith, the two dressers and, at a distance, one or two stagehands. They all watched the final scene between Helena Hamilton and Adam Poole. In this scene Rutherford tied up and stated finally the whole thesis of his play. The man was faced with his ultimate decision. Would he stay and attempt, with the woman, to establish a sane and enlightened formula for living in place of the one he himself had destroyed or would he go back to his island community and attempt a further development within himself and in a less complex environment? As throughout the play, the conflict was set out in terms of human and personal relationships. It could be played like many another love scene, purely on those terms. Or it could be so handled that the wider implications could be felt by the audience and in the hands of these two players that was what happened. The play ended with them pledging themselves to each other and to an incredible task. As Poole spoke the last lines the electrician, with one eye on Clem below, played madly over his switchboard. The entire set changed its aspect, seemed to dissolve, turned threadbare, a skeleton, a wraith, while beyond it a wide stylized landscape was flooded with light and became as Poole spoke the tag, the background upon which the curtain fell.
‘Might as well be back in panto,’ said the electrician leaning on his dimmers, ‘we got the transformation scene. All we want’s the bloody fairy queen.’
It was at this moment, when the applause seemed to surge forward and beat against the curtains, when Clem shouted: ‘All on,’ and Dr Rutherford plunged out of the OP pass-door, when the players walked on and linked hands, that Poole, looking hurriedly along the line, said: ‘Where’s Ben?’
One of those panic-stricken crises peculiar to the theatre boiled up on the instant. From her position between Darcey and Percival on the stage Martyn saw the call-boy make some kind of protest to Clem Smith and disappear. Above the applause they heard him hare down the passage, yelling: ‘Mr Bennington! Mr Bennington! Please! You’re on!’
‘We can’t wait,’ Poole shouted. ‘Take it up, Clem.’
The curtain rose and Martyn looked into a sea of faces and hands. She felt herself led forward into the roaring swell, bowed with the others, felt Darcey’s and Percival’s hands tighten on hers, bowed again and with them retreated a few steps up-stage as the first curtain fell.
‘Well?’ Poole shouted into the wings. The call-boy could be heard beating on the dressing-room door.
Percival said: ‘What’s the betting he comes on for a star call?’
‘He’s passed out,’ said Darcey. ‘Had one or two more since he came off.’
‘By God, I wouldn’t cry if he never came to.’
‘Go on, Clem,’ said Poole.
The curtain rose and fell again, twice. Percival and Darcey took Martyn off and it went up again on Poole and Helena Hamilton, this time to those cries of ‘bravo’ that reach the actors as a long open sound like the voice of a singing wind. In the wings, Clem Smith with his eyes on the stage was saying repeatedly: ‘He doesn’t answer. He’s locked in. The b____doesn’t answer.’
Martyn saw Poole coming towards her and stood aside. He seemed to tower over her as he took her hand. ‘Come along,’ he said. Darcey and Percival and the group offstage began to clap.
Poole led her on. She felt herself resisting and heard him say: ‘Yes, it’s all right.’
So bereft was Martyn of her normal stage-wiseness that he had to tell her to bow. She did so and wondered why there was a warm sound of laughter in the applause. She looked at Poole, found he was bowing to her and bent her head under his smile. He returned her to the wings.
They were all on again. Dr Rutherford came out from the OP corner. The cast joined in the applause. Martyn’s heart had begun to sing so loudly that it was like to deafen every emotion but a universal gratitude. She thought Rutherford looked like an old lion standing there in his out-of-date evening-dress, his hair ruffled, his gloved hand touching his bulging shirt, bowing in an unwieldy manner to the audience and to the cast. He moved forward and the theatre was abruptly silent: silent, but for an obscure and intermittent thudding in the dressing-room passage. Clem Smith said something to the ASM and rushed away, jingling keys.
‘Hah,’ said Dr Rutherford with a preliminary bellow. ‘Hah – thankee. I’m much obliged to you, ladies and gentlemen and to the actors. The actors are much obliged, no doubt, to you but not necessarily to me.’ Here the audience laughed and the actors smiled. ‘I am not able to judge,’ the doctor continued with a rich roll in his voice, ‘whether you have extracted from this play the substance of its argument. If you have done so we may all felicitate each other with the indiscriminate enthusiasm characteristic of these occasions: if you have not, I for my part am not prepared to say where the blame should rest.’
A solitary man laughed in the audience. The doctor rolled an eye at him and, with this clownish trick, brought the house down. ‘The prettiest epilogue to a play that I am acquainted with,’ he went on, ‘is (as I need perhaps hardly
