Night at the Vulcan by Ngaio Marsh

failure, she was just another colourless understudy and nothing had happened.
    When it was over, Clem Smith shut the book and said: “Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. Eleven in the morning, if you please.” He lit a cigarette and went down into the auditorium and out through the front of the house.
    Left alone on the stage, Martyn struggled with an acute attack of deflation. She tried to call herself to order. This in itself was a humiliating, if salutary, exercise. If, she thought savagely, she had been a Victorian young lady, she would at this juncture have locked herself away with a plush-bound journal and, after shedding some mortified tears, forced a confession out of herself. As it was, she set her jaw and worked it out there and then. The truth was, she told herself, she’d been at her old tricks again: she’d indulged in the most blatant kind of day-dream. She’d thought up a success-story and dumped herself down in the middle of it with half a dozen pageant-lamps bathing her girlish form. Because she looked like Poole and because last night she’d had a mild success with one line by playing it off her nerves she’d actually had the gall to imagine— Here Martyn felt her scalp creep and her face burn. “Come on,” she thought, “out with it.”
    Very well, then. She’d dreamt up a further rehearsal with Poole. She’d seen herself responding eagerly to his production, she’d heard him say regretfully that if things had been different— She had even— At this point, overtaken with self-loathing, Martyn performed the childish exercise of throwing her part across the stage, stamping violently and thrusting her fingers through her hair.
    “
Damn and blast and hell
,” said Martyn, pitching her voice to the back row of the gallery.
    “Not quite as bad as all that.”
    Adam Poole came out of the shadowed pit and down the centre-aisle of the stalls. He rested his hands on the rail of the orchestral well. Martyn gaped at him.
    “You’ve got the mechanics,” he said. “Walk through it again by yourself before to-morrow. Then you can begin to think about the girl. Get the lay-out of the house into your head. Know your environment. What has she been doing all day before the play opens? What has she been thinking about? Why does she say the things she says and do the things she does? Listen to the other chaps’ lines. Come down here for five minutes and we’ll see what you think about acting.”
    Martyn went down into the house. Of all her experiences during these three days at the Vulcan Theatre, she was to remember this most vividly. It was a curious interview. They sat side by side as if waiting for the rise-of-curtain. Their voices were deadened by the plush stalls. Jacko could be heard moving about behind the set and in some distant room back-stage, somebody in desultory fashion hammered and sawed. At first Martyn was ill at ease, unable to dismiss or to reconcile the jumble of distracted notions that beset her. But Poole was talking about theatre and about problems of the actor. He talked well, without particular emphasis but with penetration and authority. Soon she listened with single hearing and with all her attention to what he had to say. Her nervousness and uncertainty were gone, and presently she was able to speak of matters that had exercised her in her own brief experience of the stage. Their conversation was adult and fruitful. It didn’t even occur to her that they were getting on rather well together.
    Jacko came out on the stage. He shielded his eyes with his hand and peered into the auditorium.
    “Adam?” he said.
    “Hullo? What is it?”
    “It is Helena on the telephone to inquire why have you not rung her at four, the time being now five-thirty. Will you take it in the office?”
    “Good Lord!” he ejaculated and got up. Martyn moved into the aisle to let him out.
    He said: “All right, Miss Tarne. Work along the lines we’ve been talking about and you should be able to cope