“Anything to add to that, John?” Poole asked.

“Apart from a passing observation that I regard the whole thing as a tour de force of understatement and with reservations that I keep to myself”—here Dr. Rutherford looked fixedly at Parry Percival—“I am mum. I reserve my fire.”

“Act II, then,” said Poole, and began again.

Martyn became aware after a few minutes that Dr. Rutherford, like Bennington, was staring at her. She was as horridly fascinated as a bird is said to be by the unwinking gaze of a snake. Do what she could to look elsewhere about the stage, she must after a time steal a glance at him, only to meet again his speculative and blood-shot regard. This alarmed her profoundly. She was persuaded that a feeling of tension had been communicated to the others, and that they too were aware of some kind of impending crisis. This feeling grew in intensity as Poole’s voice went steadily on with his notes. He had got about half-way through the second act when Dr. Rutherford ejaculated: “Hi! Wait a bit!” and began a frenzied search through his own notes, which seemed to be in complete disorder. Finally he pounced on a sheet of paper, dragged out a pair of spectacles and, with a hand raised to enjoin silence, read it to himself with strange noises in his breathing.

Having scattered the rest of his notes over his person and the floor, he now folded this particular sheet and sat on it

“Proceed,” he said. The cast stirred uneasily. Poole continued. He had come to the scene between himself and Miss Gainsford, and beyond a minor adjustment of position said nothing about it. Miss Hamilton, who had arrived at the final stage of her street make-up, dusted her face with powder, nodded good-humouredly at Martyn and turned to face Poole. Martyn thankfully shut the dressing-case and made for the nearest exit.

At the same moment Poole reached the end of his notes for the second act and Dr. Rutherford shouted: “Hold on! Stop that wench!”

Martyn, with a sensation of falling into chaos, turned in the doorway.

She saw nine faces lifted towards her own. They made a pattern against the smoke-thickened air. Her eyes travelled from one to the other and rested finally on Poole’s.

“It’s all right,” he said. “Go home.”

“No, you don’t,” Dr. Rutherford shouted excitedly.

“Indeed she does,” said Poole. “Run away home, Kate. Good night to you.”

Martyn heard the storm break as she fled down the passage.

From noon until half past six on the opening night of Dr. Rutherford’s new play, the persons most concerned in its birth were absent from their theatre. Left to itself, the Vulcan was possessed only by an immense expectancy. It waited. In the auditorium rows of seats, stripped of their dust-cloths, stared at the curtain. The curtain itself presented its reverse side to Jacko’s set, closing it in with a stuffy air of secrecy. The stage was dark. Battalions of dead lamps, focussed at crazy angles, overhung it with a promise of light. Cue-sheets, fixed to the switchboard, awaited the electrician, the prompt-script was on its shelf, the properties were ranged on trestle-tables. Everything bided its time in the dark theatre.

To enter into this silent house was to feel as if one surprised a poised and expectant presence. This air of suspense made itself felt to the occasional intruders: to the boy who from time to time came through from the office with telegrams for the dressing-rooms, to the girl from Florian’s and the young man from the wig-makers, and to the piano-tuner who for an hour twanged and hammered in the covered well. And to Martyn Tarne who, alone in the ironing-room, set about the final pressing of the dresses under her care.

The offices were already active and behind their sand-blasted glass- walls typewriters clattered and telephone bells rang incessantly. The blacked-out box-plan lay across Bob Grantley’s desk, and stacked along the wall were rectangular parcels of programmes, fresh from the printer.

And at two o’clock the queues for the early doors began to form in Carpet Street

It was at two o’clock that Helena Hamilton, after an hour’s massage, went to bed. Her husband had telephoned, with a certain air of opulence which she had learnt to dread, that he would lunch at his club and return to their flat during the afternoon to rest.

In her darkened room she followed a practised routine and, relaxing one set of muscles after another, awaited sleep. This time, however, her self-discipline was unsuccessful. If only she could hear him come in, it would be better; if only she could see into what sort of state he’d got himself. She used all her formulae for repose but none of them worked. At three o’clock she was still awake and still miserably anxious.

It was no good trying to cheer herself up by telling over her rosary of romantic memories. Usually this was a successful exercise. She had conducted her affairs of the heart, she knew, with grace and civility. She had almost always managed to keep them on a level of enchantment. She had simply allowed them to occur with the inconsequence and charm of self-sown larkspurs in an otherwise correctly ordered border. They had hung out their gay little banners for a season and then been painlessly tweaked up. Except, perhaps, for Adam. With Adam, she remembered uneasily, it had been different. With Adam, so much her junior, it had been a more deeply rooted affair. It had put an end, finally, to her living with Ben as his wife. It had made an enemy of Ben. And at once her thoughts were infested with worries about the contemporary scene at the theatre. “It’s such a muddle,” she thought, “and I hate muddles.” They’d had nothing but trouble all through rehearsals. Ben fighting with everybody and jealous of Adam. The Doctor bawling everybody out. And that wretchedly unhappy child Gay (who, God, knew, would never be an actress as long as she lived) first pitchforked into the part by Ben and now almost bullied out of it by the Doctor. And, last of all, Martyn Tarne.

She had touched the raw centre of her anxiety. Under any other conditions, she told herself, she would have welcomed the appearance out of a clear sky and — one had to face it — under very odd circumstances, of this little antipodean: this throw-back to some forebear that she and Adam were supposed to have in common. She would have been inclined to like Martyn for the resemblance instead of feeling so uncomfortably disturbed by it. Of course she accepted Adam’s explanation, but at the same time she thought it rather naïve of him to believe that the girl had actually kept away from the theatre because she didn’t want to make capital out of the relationship. That, Helena thought, turning restlessly on her bed, was really too simple of Adam. Moreover, he’d stirred up the already exacerbated nerves of the company by giving this girl the understudy without, until last night, making public the relationship.

There she went, thinking about last night’s scene: John Rutherford demanding that even at this stage Martyn should play the part, Gay imploring Adam to release her, Ben saying he’d walk out on the show if Gay went, and Adam— Adam had done the right thing of course. He’d come down strongly with one of his rare thrusts of anger and reduced them to complete silence. He had then described the circumstances of Martyn’s arrival at the theatre, and had added in a voice of ice that there was and could be no question of any change in the cast. He finished his notes and left the theatre, followed by Jacko.

This had been the signal for an extremely messy row in which everybody seemed to bring to light some deep-seated grudge. Ben had quarrelled almost simultaneously with Parry Percival (on the score of technique), with Dr. Rutherford (on the score of casting), with his niece (on the score of humanity) and, unexpectedly, with J. G. Darcey (on the score of Ben bullying Gay). Percival had responded to a witticism of the Doctor’s by a stream of shrill invective which astonished everybody, himself included, and Gay had knitted the whole scene into a major climax by having a fit of hysterics from which she was restored with brutal efficiency by Dr. Rutherford himself.