Night at the Vulcan by Ngaio Marsh Page B

appearance!’ It doesn’t matter to them that I’ve had to dye my hair because they don’t like wigs. I still haven’t got the appearance. I’m a shoulder-length natural ash-blonde, and I’ve had to have an urchin cut and go black and all I get is insults. In any other management,” she continued wildly, “the author wouldn’t be allowed to speak to the artists as that man speaks to me. In any other management an artist would be protected against that kind of treatment. Adam’s worse, if anything. He’s so bloody patient and persistent and half the time you don’t know what he’s talking about.”
    She drew breath, sobbed and hunted in her bag for her handkerchief.
    Martyn said: “I’m so terribly sorry. It’s awful when things go badly at rehearsals. But the worst kind of rehearsals
do
have a way of turning into the best kind of performances. And it’s a grand play, isn’t it?”
    “I loathe the play. To me it’s a lot of high-brow hokum and I don’t care who knows it. Why the hell couldn’t Uncle Ben leave me where I was, playing leads and second leads in fortnightly rep? We were a happy family in fortnightly rep; everyone had fun and games and there wasn’t this ghastly graveyard atmosphere. I was miserable enough, God knows, before you came but now it’s just
more
than I can stand.”
    “But I’m not going to play the part,” Martyn said desperately. “You’ll be all right. It’s just got you down for the moment. I’d be no good, I expect, anyway.”
    “It’s what they’re all saying and thinking. It’s a pity, they’re saying, that you came too late.”
    “Nonsense. You only imagine that because of the likeness.”
    “Do I? Let me tell you I’m not imagining
all
the things they’re saying about you. And about Adam. How you
can
stay here and take it! Unless it’s true.
Is
it true?”
    Martyn closed her hands on the material she had been sewing. “I don’t want to know what they’re saying. There’s nothing unkind that’s true for them to say.”
    “So the likeness is purely an accident? There’s no relationship?”
    Martyn said: “It seems that we are very distantly related, so distantly that the likeness is a freak. I didn’t want to tell anyone about it. It’s of no significance at all. I haven’t used it to get into the theatre.”
    “I don’t know how and why you got in but I wish to God you’d get out. How you
can
hang on, knowing what they think, if it isn’t true! You can’t have any pride or decency. It’s so cruel. It’s so
damnably
cruel.”
    Martyn looked at the pretty tear-blubbered face and thought in terror that if it had been that of Atropos it could scarcely have offered a more dangerous threat. “Don’t!” she cried out. “Please don’t say that; I need this job so desperately. Honestly,
honestly
you’re making a thing of all this. I’m not hurting you.”
    “Yes, you are. You’re driving me completely frantic. I’m nervously and emotionally exhausted,” Miss Gainsford sobbed, with an air of quoting somebody else. “It just needed you to send me over the borderr line. Uncle Ben keeps on and on and on about it until I think I’ll go mad. This is a beastly unlucky theatre anyway. Everyone knows there’s something wrong about it and then you come in like a Jonah and it’s the rock
bottom
. If,” Miss Gainsford went on, developing a command of histrionic climax of which Martyn would scarcely have suspected her capable, “if you have
any
pity at all,
any
humanity, you’ll spare me this awful ordeal.”
    “But this is all nonsense. You’re making a song about nothing. I won’t be taken in by it,” Martyn said and recognized defeat in her own voice.
    Miss Gainsford stared at her with watery indignation and through trembling lips uttered her final cliché. “You can’t,” she said, “do this thing to me,” and broke down completely.
    It seemed to Martyn that beyond a facade of stock emotionalism she recognized a real and a