CAST
JAMES MEADE … Sir Vincent Fair
MRS MEADE … Violet Madden
CHARLES WYNNE … Humphrey St John
CLARE HARGREAVES … Beatrice Atherton
GRIBBLE MANSERVANT – A … Augustus King
FRENCH MAID … Kitty le Strange (wife of Humphrey St John)
DOCTOR, SERVANTS, AND HARRY BRAIDE, taking a small part as Miss Hargreaves’ chauffeur, who tells the story.
AUTHOR
LAWRENCE KESTERVON
Is it possible for the actors and actresses in a play to become so obsessed by it, so worked upon by the frenzied ardour of the author, that they lose their real characteristics and become part of it? I think so, and it is upon this that I base my conviction.
In 1887, that is, Lawrence Kestervon was seventeen years of age, he won a small scholarship for English composition.
This scholarship was intended to help promising lads to get through Cambridge. But Lawrence’s father, a bank manager, had been struck down at a comparatively early age by a paralytic seizure and there was nothing but his small pension for the family to live on. It took Mrs Kestervon all her time to wait upon her husband. She spoon-fed him like a child, a by no means amenable one; so that young Kestervon’s ideas of home were forever associated with a futile and furious man – bloodshot eyes and drawn face – throwing about everything he could lay hands on, shouting abuse at a meek, trembling woman, so nerve-ridden that she was in a perpetual state of dropping, spilling, breaking what he called for: weeping, oh yes, always weeping, in a silent, half-hearted manner. Then there was his sister Annie, with her high cheek-bones – so like her father’s – flushed scarlet, declaring shrilly that such a home was enough to send any girl to the dogs! She proved it, too, for she always did what she said, did Anne .…
Such was the beginning and end of home life for Lawrence Kestervon. His father died when he was eighteen. Annie had already dropped out of the family circle, gone Heaven only knew where. His mother, worn down to a sort of apathy, went to live with a widowed sister in the north of England. It was cheaper than trying to make a home for Lawrence, and always, always, everything had hung upon that; the need for economy, shaving life down to the bare bone.
Lawrence did not care much one way or another; if parents do not love their children their children do not love them. Is it likely that they should? Truth to tell, Mrs Kestervon’s decision fitted in with the boy’s own wishes. There was no sense of chill at his heart, for it burnt with something more potent than affection – something which was at once home, friendship, love, father, mother, food, warmth, shelter – and this was ambition. That scholarship had set him all aflame to tread the paths of literature; never, for one moment, to rest content with the level plains, the broad highways, but to make straight, whatever the cost, for those hilltops which catch the sun no matter in which direction it may turn.
He had already spent two-thirds of the sum allotted to him by his scholarship, or rather it had been engulfed in the family morass commonly termed ‘general expenses’. Fifty pounds remained; he was perfectly certain that he could live for one year on fifty pounds, and by that time his future would be assured.
By dint of denying himself everything which makes life tolerable he did live on it and wrote a play. He took a whole year over it, writing and rewriting it – half-starved, baked and frozen by turns in an attic – until the play was as intricate, involved, soulless as those geometrical puzzles which we find at the end of magazines.
To do the boy Lawrence justice, he had the astuteness to realize what was bad, the courage to destroy it. That year’s work went into the fire.
After this he descended from his attic to the basement cellar – not merely symbolically, but literally: struggled through an attack of rheumatic fever, which affected him more or less for life; started to write advertisements, got a few odd paragraphs into a few equally odd and almost unknown papers, supplied the footnotes to comic pictures; wrote verses, mostly for religious periodicals, at a shilling a verse. Then he went back to his attic; descending after a few years to the more reputable middle of the house, and bought, at twenty-three, the first new suit which he had possessed since he was eighteen. That, after all, had been one of his father’s sheared down for him. At thirty-five he found himself in a state of comparative affluence; that is, he was making about as much as the girl who stamped and addressed the refusal slips of his more serious efforts.
After this he steadily climbed upwards, but in such a small way that he never dared to look back and see how small a distance he had travelled. He had two rooms instead of one, he afforded himself an occasional meal at a cheap Italian café; once even he left London for a fortnight on the Yorkshire moors …
He would have repeated this extravagance, for it opened his eyes to a world of beauty and delight of which he had heretofore scarcely dreamed.
‘If only I could do this every year,’ he thought to himself, ‘I might really write something worth doing.’ He formed, indeed, a plan for spending six months of each year in London, making enough by any sort of hack work to last him over the next six, and then retiring to Yorkshire to work at that magnum opus which had never quite ceased to simmer in his brain.
The Yorkshire trip was, however, never to be repeated. Perhaps it had awakened him to new possibilities in life, quickened him to beauty of another kind, or perhaps it merely strengthened him physically, awakened his latent manhood. But whatever the reason it was about this time that he first began to notice women as individuals – apart from their obviously comic or possibly tragic histories, and fell in love with the sister of one of the clerks in a magazine editor’s office.
It is certain, from what he told me, that Iris Hames was beautiful, with that calculating air of dignity and innocence, that clear, creamy paleness consistent with perfect health, which is the dower of so many London girls. But it is equally certain that her brain and heart alike were empty of everything save a perpetual, petty scheming for new possessions, sensations, tastes: that in her was to be found a replica of the daughter of the horse-leech with her cry of ‘Give, give.’ Iris, however, did not say ‘give’; but ‘I wouldn’t mind if I had –’
Always, ever since the days of that scholarship, Kestervon’s trend had been in the direction of tragedy. He felt, realized tragedy; saw it in half the faces which he looked upon; deduced it from scraps of conversation in ’bus or underground, from the baldest notices of police-court processes in the daily papers. The upper crust of life might show gay and cheerful; but underneath it all lay unplumbed depths of hopelessness, misery, cruelty. All the same, it seemed to him that the only way in which he could make money was by a bald chronicling of the obvious: short paragraphs on fires and financial affairs; or serio-comic sketches and stories, connected, for the most part, with over-stout wives, jealous husbands, interfering mothers-in-law. Always he wondered drearily whether any so-called humorous writers were themselves amused by what they wrote; or merely contemptuous of the inanity and futility of the public for which they catered, sophistically aware of the ease with which loud laughter may be drawn from empty minds …
During the period of his engagement he did very little work except in the comic line. He made more money by that than by anything else, and money had now – for the first time, despite all his poverty – become the chief desire of life, apart from Iris herself. In honest truth he had never before realized what poverty really meant; the feeling of meanness and inferiority which it engenders; the annoyance of not being able to spend, to give, to make a splash; the anguish implied in the fear of not ‘making good’.
He moved from Kennington to West Kensington so as to be nearer his betrothed. ‘It is much quieter here and you will be able to write better’, that was what she said. But she was wrong. The whole atmosphere of the place depressed him. It was much more expensive, and Iris made perpetual demands upon his time.
He had never before gone about with a woman, and he could not have imagined how much it cost. It seemed that they could not venture anywhere without getting caught in a shower of rain and having to return home in a taxi; that Iris was always hungry, in need of chocolates, or tea, or fruit. Then there was that question of taking a flat, of furnishing it … It was impossible to believe how many things were absolutely necessary to the setting of love until he went over the long lists with his betrothed, and she explained how important each item really was.
At the end of two years of feverish misery and more feverish joy, the engagement was broken off. Iris had worshipped him for what she called his ‘romantic appearance’. Just when she was beginning to grow tired of his economy, which seemed like meanness, and the little time he appeared to be able to spare for her and her amusement, some friend spoke of him as ‘that seedy old thing’, and this was the end. He was seedy-looking, he was years older than she was, and where was the good of life unless you got some fun out of it?
To Lawrence Kestervon his dismissal came with the suddenness of a mortal blow. He had gone on working for Iris Hames as he had once worked for art, for the fulfilment of his ambitions: slowly, doggedly, perpetually, like some spider spinning in the dark, using up the very material of life itself.
He had never really suffered before, but now he suffered horribly. It seemed as though love had awakened him to life, and at the same time had made him more sensitive to pain. He pictured Iris in the arms of another lover, and it was hell; he looked forward over the long stretch of barren life which might yet remain to him, and it seemed worse than death.
He left West Kensington and returned to his old haunts in Kennington. He could not bear the drawing-room floor because it was too smug – faintly reminiscent of Edith Grove; the attic was too light, and he shrank from light like a wounded animal. Thus it was that he crept back to his damp basement room and seized upon paper and pen as some men might seize upon drugs. Freed from all desire to make money – the little cash which he had saved for the making of a home assured him of a livelihood for far longer than he could imagine himself as desiring to live – he produced another play.
He did not in the least mind what became of the thing, using his capacity for work as a bereaved mother uses poppy heads to her aching breast. He did not care whether it was ever finished; he ceased to hesitate between what would pay and what he felt to be real art, but poured into it the savage misery and resentment of a soul robbed of all that it ever believed itself to possess. The play was an amazing production, the sort of thing an English manager and English public goes mad over once in ten years, during some short interval or so when they are sated with burlesque.
Kestervon had gained one advantage from his engagement to Iris Hames: a passing acquaintance with the stage – for she had a sister in a beauty chorus – and a knowledge of the existence of such people as theatrical and literary agents.
It was through one of these that his play came to be placed with an actor-manager who knew a good thing when he saw it, and who had capital to risk on the work of an unknown man.
The cast was one of the very best. It seemed indeed that Kestervon was made now that he cared so little! Beatrice Atherton assumed the chief woman’s part, and that alone was enough to make the success of almost anything; Sir Vincent Fair himself was the injured husband; then there was Violet Madden as the wife; Humphrey St John, as ‘Charles Wynne’, the lover; and Augustus King in the part of ‘Gribble’, the manservant and the villain of the piece. If any one character could be so called; for it seemed as though Fate made fools of all alike. Though it is certain that I went home after each rehearsal in half a mind to dismiss all my servants for fear that one of them might prove to be a secret, second ‘Gribble’, ‘Gribble’ as Kestervon willed my friend into showing him.
And yet how King had grumbled over the smallness of the part when it was allotted to him!
The plot of the story was commonplace enough; a wife with ideas of her own; another woman; a husband; a suspected lover, and that villainous so wrongly called domestic Gribble.
It was the things Kestervon made them say which told; the amazing perversities of feeling which they betrayed. ‘Meade’, the husband, loved his wife, and yet at the same time he was mad for another woman, eating his soul out for her. ‘Meade’, as drawn by Kestervon, reminded me of nothing so much as a black panther they once had in the London Zoo, which, if it could get nothing else to feed upon and was within sight of prey it could not reach, devoured its own flesh. ‘Meade’ was a good fellow in the main, victimized by his own passions; wanting all sorts of things and never quite certain what he wanted most. One might almost have said that Fair’s ‘Meade’ was the villain, and not ‘Charles Wynne’. Though I knew, we all knew, that that was not the way Kestervon intended it to be taken …
‘Meade’ could not bear the idea of his wife belonging to another man: and yet he was unable to rid himself of the thought that, if he were able to prove that fact, he would be free to win the other woman.
As to ‘Charles Wynne’ – Humphrey St John – he made love to ‘Mrs Meade’ because he was in the habit of making love to any attractive woman he came across; while she accepted his advances for the mere sake of convincing her husband that she had, in modern jargon, a ‘right to live her own life’.
Of course the thing ended in tragedy – what else could you expect with Kestervon let loose, as it were, for the first time?
The husband watches his wife; he follows her, dogs her, torn between jealousy and hope, egged on by his detestable servant, until he actually counts upon seeing her incriminate herself. He comes home one night, finds that she is not there, and follows her to ‘Charles Wynne’s’ rooms. There he perceives a woman, wrapped in a long, loose cloak, standing with her back to him, both hands on ‘Wynne’s’ shoulders, her lips raised to his, and believes it is his wife. Overcome with sheer primitive rage, he shoots her; only to find as she swings round, facing him in her death agony, that it is the other woman, ‘Clare Hargreaves’, presented by Beatrice Atherton, the woman whom he himself had thought to put in his wife’s place, the woman who was in reality ‘Wynne’s’ passionately devoted and faithful mistress – whom he has killed.
The wife’s part was rather colourless, though Violet Madden made it live as few other actresses could have done. For the rest the whole interest of the play was centred in the eternal triangle of one woman and two men – Beatrice Atherton, Vincent Fair and St John – with Augustus King as Gribble diffusing suspicion as some plants diffuse a poisonous breath …
The rehearsals went on for a long time. Again and again the production of the play was retarded because of a series of tiresome accidents to one or another of the company. Everything went wrong which could possibly go wrong, but no one ever thought of letting the thing drop. They could not have done so, by that time, however much they wished. Even Fair, who you would have thought was pretty much his own master, could not let go of it, for the simple reason that Kestervon and his damnable story held them. From the very first rehearsal I don’t believe that the thing was clear out of the head of any one of them, down to the meanest scene-shifter, for one single moment. I can only feel thankful that the public never had a sight of it – for God only knows how many homes it might not have broken up before it ran its wicked course.
At first everyone thought Kestervon rather a nuisance, he was so immensely in earnest, behaving as though there never had been, never would be any other play. For his success seemed to have, at last, brought him back to life in a new and unfamiliar way.
I remember Fair saying that he wished he could afford to refuse all plays by living authors. And indeed one could not wonder, for Kestervon haunted the theatre, attended every rehearsal, had his own ideas upon the way in which everything ought to be done, the interpretation of pretty well every word. For, like most intensely shy and reserved men, there was no holding him once he got the bit between his teeth, no quieting him, no putting him down. It seemed as though his success had at last lit a fire within him: a fire which respected nothing, spared nothing …
He behaved as though the actors had no private duties or affections, no being apart from his play. At first everyone, very naturally, resented this attitude. Then, one by one, they began to give in to it with that half-laugh which shows the realization of weakness. They ended by declaring that, after all, he was the only person who could show them how to ‘take’ the parts he had set for them.
If you know anything of actors and actresses you will realize how extraordinary was this attitude. It was most extraordinary of all in the case of Sir Vincent Fair, who was, in his own way, a very great man, with a strong notion of his own importance. I have an immense admiration for Fair, but it is certain that he thinks it is he and not Shakespeare who created the character of ‘Hamlet’. It was thus doubly strange to watch him influenced – surrendering to the wishes of Lawrence Kestervon. For it is certain that Kestervon changed his whole attitude towards the interpretation of ‘Meade’s’ ‘character’. He altered Beatrice Atherton’s reading of her part, he altered St John; above all, he modified Augustus King, who had conceived of ‘Gribble’ as a funny man. He forced him to bring out the devilish innuendoes contained in every one of ‘Gribble’s’ rather pointless jokes. And that was not all. In forcing everyone else to realize it he literally turned King inside out. He reincarnated him, as ‘Gribble’ himself.
Yes, that was it, he deprived him of his own identity and put the identity of that sneaking scoundrel in its place.
Why, even in the early days, when there had been comparatively few rehearsals, I was walking down the Strand, and happening to see a man edging along the pavement, neat, smug, furtive – so furtive that a policeman followed him with a careful eye – I thought to myself:
‘There’s a fellow just like that “Gribble”!’ and hurrying to overtake him out of sheer curiosity, found to my amazement – my horror, nothing less – that it was Augustus King. Augustus King, usually so buoyant and debonair, walking the pavement with his hands in his pockets, his head thrown back as though the whole of London belonged to him! Augustus King! one of the frankest and best-liked men on the English stage …
As the rehearsals went on the atmosphere was overcharged, as though one of the worst thunderstorms ever known was due to burst next moment …
Everybody felt it, the very stage-carpenters and scene-shifters. For Fair was irritable in a way he had never been before, and his temper, combined with Kestervon’s exactions, was enough to try the strongest nerves.
Lady Fair, who so often used to come to rehearsal and sit in the stalls – watching, but saying nothing until she found herself alone with her husband – Lady Fair, whose opinion was, Sir Vincent said, worth hundreds a year to him, actually spoke to me on the subject. It was one day when her husband, having ordered a scene to be taken over again – Kestervon’s suggestion, this! – had asked me to see if she would not like to go across to the Savoy for a cup of tea.
She refused, saying that she would rather stay and see the thing through, and I sat down by her side. We all liked Fair’s wife, though strangers thought her cold, and perhaps she was in general rather detached and aloof. But she was one of the fairest-minded people I ever met, a rare quality in her sex. It seemed as though she saw all round every question, was determined to give everybody a patient hearing; while many a down-in-the-world actor or actress has owed more than they could ever express to Laura Fair. It was odd how her married name suited her!
She had a well-cut, rather colourless face, and beautiful blue eyes. She was always quietly and very elegantly dressed, with every line true.
She must have been a good deal upset before she could have spoken as she did. As I have said, she never discussed her husband’s affairs with anyone. Still, I was one of their very oldest friends, and she, like everyone else, I suppose, felt an occasional need for outside sympathy.
‘I hate this play,’ she said.’ I wish Vincent had never taken it. I wish he would give it up even now!’
‘You don’t think it’s good?’
‘Oh, yes, I think it’s – well, “good” isn’t the word – wonderful, powerful, clever – inhumanly clever! But all the same I think it’s a bad play in itself. A morally bad play, I mean.’
‘You feel that Kestervon –’ I hesitated.
‘Oh, I think that Mr Kestervon’s all right, poor man! Vincent brought him to dinner one night, and I felt very, very sorry for him. He struck me as the sort of man who had never known anything but the hard side of life, never been mothered. But there are – oh, well, you know there are such things as typhoid carriers. I think there is a germ of something terrible – evil – in this play; that Mr Kestervon was weak, lonely, non-resistant when he wrote it – and somehow or other he caught the infection and is transmitting it, generating it, spreading it. He can’t help himself. Look at him now, he’s like a man in high fever.’
I followed the direction of Laura Fair’s eyes.
Kestervon was facing us, speaking quickly, excitedly, with much gesture. Fair was standing with one hand to his chin – doubtful, sombre as ‘Meade’ himself, though the rehearsal was, for the moment, at a standstill. He was looking at Violet Madden too, just – well, just as ‘Meade’ might have looked at his wife, angry, suspicious, and yet half-gloating. Miss Madden herself – ‘Mrs Meade’ – seemed to be taking no notice of anyone; though I saw her slip her hand behind her back, and allow it to lie for just one moment in that of St John – ‘Charles Wynne’ – who stood behind her. The auditorium of the theatre was in darkness, and I suppose she and everyone else took it for granted that Lady Fair and I had gone out to tea.
Yet it was impossible that she should not have seen what I saw, for she had trained herself to help her husband by a fine keenness of perception. For all that her voice went on quite smoothly, almost without a break.
‘If one could take his temperature now one would probably find it above a hundred! He will kill himself if it goes on,’ she said. Remember we were still talking of Kestervon. Then she added, with such bitterness and passion as I could never have believed her capable of: ‘Well, I only hope he will – for the sake of everyone concerned.’
I was surprised. I do not know what I was about to answer, when my attention was diverted by something even more amazing.
The scene, the ‘Meades’’ drawing-room, was just roughly put together. The painted wall cloth on the right did not quite touch the floor and someone was actually lying flat, peering under it close behind ‘Wynne’ and ‘Mrs Meade’.
The folly of the action struck me most; for the back of the stage was still quite open, and anyone who had not a perfect mania for peeping and prying could see all that was going on without any difficulty. Imagine then my surprise, my disgust, when a moment later I saw this Peeping Tom rise from his lowly position, brush the dust carefully away from his trousers, glancing furtively this way and that, and realized that it was actually Augustus King! …
I do not know what Lady Fair and I talked about after that; I was too dazed, and in a way frightened. But I do remember that there was no more actual rehearsing; while just before Vincent joined us King drew him aside and stood for a moment or two whispering in his ear: whispered! though all the rest of the players had dispersed!
The more I thought over what I had seen the more puzzled I felt. I gave up the Augustus King part of it in despair; but St John – ‘Charles Wynne’ – had lately been married. His wife was the girl who took the French maid’s part, and they were supposed to be tremendously in love. He and Violet Madden had always seemed rather to dislike each other. I remember what he said when the parts were distributed: ‘After all, I’m glad I’ve only got to pretend to make love to her.’
Then why pretend to make love to her, or rather allow himself to be made love to, when the actual scene was in abeyance?
A few days after this I found little Mrs St John – ‘Kitty le Strange’ to the theatrical world – crying in a quiet corner among the wings. We were friends; but, anyhow, she was so angry that she would have confided in a scene-shifter …
‘Look at my husband and that Atherton woman,’ she said; ‘only look at them! It makes me sick, that’s what it does.’
I did look, thoroughly puzzled; for he and Beatrice Atherton were standing aside talking together, looking into each other’s eyes in a way which was unmistakable.
‘It’s all very well, it’s a different thing when he really is acting, when the play is really on, but now! Just look! He flirts with Miss Madden too; he flirts with everyone, just like that beastly “Wynne” man! One would think that he was possessed by something beastly, inherent in the play – the rotter himself.’
For a moment she was silent, dabbing at her eyes, then she broke out again: ‘That devilish Kestervon has got them all on a string, does what he likes with them!’
After this Lady Fair attended all the rehearsals. I had never known her to be so constant, and I fancy that she was anxious and oppressed, as we all were, though less nerve-ridden and harried than the rest of us.
She herself had been on the stage for a very short time, but left it for good on her marriage. She had always spoken of her efforts in that direction with a little laugh, as though she herself had no opinion of them; I was more than surprised to hear her break out one afternoon, just at that part where ‘Meade’ is hovering between his real affection for and duty to his wife, and his infatuation for the other woman. ‘If only I had the part instead of that stick Violet Madden, I could have held him; I know I could have held him!’
It seemed as though she, too, were being drawn into the vortex of horror formed by this diabolical play, made part of it. Even now I remember how, in the love scenes between ‘Meade’ and ‘Clare Hargreaves’, my cheeks burned, and how I felt shamed that she should be witness to them. Though again and again we had watched, criticized, laughed over, her husband’s love-making, which she declared to be the weakest part of his acting.
A few days later, the rehearsal being over, we went to Sir Vincent’s dressing-room to fetch him. He had been called away for a moment and we waited there.
The revolver with which ‘Meade’ was supposed to shoot his wife lay upon his dressing-table. Lady Fair took it in her hand and turned it round and round absently, listening for her husband’s step …
Stage revolvers are, in actual performances, charged with ‘blanks’; at rehearsals they are not charged at all: we had both seen Vincent Fair holding the weapon in his hand at this rehearsal, making a feint of using it. What put it into my head that the thing might be loaded I am unable to say; on the face of it the idea was ludicrous. And yet a wave of cold sweat came over me as I realized Laura Fair’s careless handling.
‘Mind! Mind!’ I cried, so sharply that my own voice startled me. I can see, even now, the amazed look in her large blue eyes as I caught her wrist hard and took the revolver from her hand. She was so sure that there could be no danger; that such things never were loaded …
Never, I say. I wonder whose face was the whitest, hers or mine, as I extracted the half-dozen cartridges, and slipped them into my pocket; for it was plain that even she recognized the blunt grey noses.
She showed her uneasiness plainly by her next remark, for she is not the sort of woman from whom one expects inane half-truths.
‘Vincent is too dreadfully careless!’
As though any man could have fully loaded a stage revolver out of sheer absent-mindedness!
She wrote to me after this and begged me to do all I could to stop the play. She might as well have asked me to check the incoming tide.
I could do nothing, nobody could do anything. As for Kestervon, he was like a creature possessed – and possessing.
I have never given you any idea of his personal appearance, have I? Well, he was tall, with rather high shoulders, so that his head seemed a trifle sunk between them; he had odd light eyes set in immense dark caves; the mouth and long thin nose of a fanatic. His arms were too long, giving him an ungainly appearance, but he had beautiful hands. The very first day I met him I had noticed and admired them. Now I began to hate the very sight of them; for he used his hands as though he were a conductor, without a baton.
Well, these people, all of them more or less my friends. He was using his will like the bunch of threads by which the operator of a marionette show animates the puppets.
And it was not only their movements, their speech, that he mastered: somehow or other the virus had gone far deeper than that: for every man and woman in that play was as restless, as unhappy, as evilly disposed, as suspicious as the people whom they were supposed to represent.
Kitty le Strange, St John’s wife, once the jolliest, frankest little creature, had sealed herself up into some tight-lipped, altogether odious collaboration with Augustus King. But no, what am I saying? Augustus King had ceased to exist, there is no other word for it. She, the French maid, was one with ‘Gribble’, the embodied essence of all foul-mouthed, foul-minded, peeping, prying menials since the world began.
Kitty peeped and peered and whispered too; was, in real life as in the play, hand and glove with ‘Gribble’. I saw them with their heads together one afternoon in a little teashop I used to frequent. And that man, who used to be one of my best pals, hid his face with one hand when I entered, while she bent so low over the menu that I could see nothing more than the white of a sidelong eye.
As to St John, he did not seem to mind what his wife did, or whom she took up with. By now he was flirting with Violet Madden – ‘Mrs Meade’ – so desperately that I did not know what to make of it.
Fair was deceived too. It seems a ridiculous thing to say, but he was more jealous of Miss Madden, as his stage wife, than he had ever been of Laura.
Laura! Such miles above any other woman I ever met!
Later on I became obsessed, gradually but none the less surely, with the idea that both he and St John (the ‘Charles Wynne’ of the play) were both desperately in love with Miss Atherton. Though ‘love’ is too good a word for the fury of passionate desire which possessed them; which changed Vincent Fair’s kind, self-satisfied face into something that only too plainly bore the mark of the beast.
I believe that among no half-dozen people in the world could there have been found a more miserable tangle of unhappy hate, no less unhappy love, evil suspicions, jealousies …
The only person who seemed happy was Kestervon; and happiness was not exactly the word to express it. In his every glance and gesture he showed an overwhelming, loathsome joy in his own freshly-discovered power.
From a quiet, almost morose man he had become obtrusive in his need for an auditor. It was at this time that I learnt something of his youth, of Iris Hames, for he talked incessantly. It was more often of his play, of the people in it, than of his real life, that he talked. Often enough it seemed to me that he was mad; and that in some awful way madness had become contagious. It was only by continually reminding myself of my own identity that I could keep clear of the contagion.
The play had been advertised for weeks now: the announcements of it flamed out at me in immense posters from every hoarding. Goodness knows I ought to have got used to the idea of it. And yet – though I knew as well as anyone when the date was at last fixed – the words ‘To-night’ struck through me like a rapier. ‘To-night’. ‘To-night’. Oddly enough, despite all my apprehension, far away at the back of my mind had lain a secret conviction that Kestervon’s play would have but an abortive bringing forth; sans audience, sans applause …
Vincent Fair did not believe in rehearsing up to the last moment, and in general gave his company a three days’ rest before the actual production of a new play. But now, for no reason whatever, as it seemed, he called a rehearsal for the last afternoon. Not that it would have needed much calling, or so one might have thought; for every member of the cast had been hanging about the theatre during the whole of that morning and the day preceding it.
And yet, at two o’clock, the time fixed for the rehearsal, there was not a single one of the cast present, apart from Violet Madden, Kitty le Strange, red-eyed and sullen, and one or two of the minor characters, while, oddly enough, Kestervon was missing for the first time on record.
We waited until half-past two. It was to be a full-dress rehearsal and everything was ready. Still no one else appeared. Violet Madden, sitting on a chair almost in the middle of the stage – not fidgeting, but with folded hands – had, I thought, an expression upon her face of mingled expectancy and triumph. It was the look of a martyr who rather enjoys martyrdom.
Kitty, leaning against the support of one of the wings, glanced at her sideways with bent head, tapping her foot, twitching all over; on wires as it seemed …
The scene-shifters and prompters stood ready.
We were all waiting, and yet I could take my oath that it was for something quite different from that quiet opening in the ‘Meades’’ drawing-room which we had grown so used to in rehearsals.
Then Lady Fair fluttered up the centre aisle of the stalls and beckoned to me. I say ‘fluttered’ because her face showed so wan and detached in the dim light and her walk was so hurried and uncertain that it reminded me of a white moth with half-folded wings.
She held a scrap of paper in her hand as she leaned towards me over the rails of the orchestra.
‘Harry, you must come with me – at once! Something dreadful is happening! Go round the other way; don’t say anything to anyone, I will wait outside … Quick – oh, quick!’
She jerked out the words and had turned away before I gathered my senses for a word. Outside the entrance of the theatre I found her waiting in a taxi.
‘Twenty-five, Filsham Road, Maida Vale,’ she said, ‘tell him to drive quickly, for God’s sake tell him to make haste! Tell him it’s a matter of life or death.’
As I seated myself she saw me glance towards the scrap of paper which she still held, and smoothed it out upon her knee so that I might read what was written there – 25, Filsham Road, Maida Vale – a typed address, no name, no message.
‘“Gribble” gave it to me.’
Only afterwards it struck me how odd it was she should say ‘Gribble’ when Augustus King was as much her friend as mine; but it only shows how completely we were all ‘engulfed’, as it were. ‘He said it might interest me, that there was no time to be lost,’ she went on. ‘He laughed – Harry, it’s awful when he laughs! There’s something dreadful at the back of all his jokes nowadays.’
For a moment or so she was silent; then she broke out again. ‘Tell that man to hurry, we shall never get there. I’m sure he’s taken the wrong turn! Why go all up Oxford Street? There must be a shorter way! Ask him if he’s certain that he knows where it is – Filsham Road.’
Almost before the words were out of her mouth she was on her feet leaning over me, confusing the man with questions and directions. Laura Fair, so self-contained and controlled! …
Filsham Road is one of those interminable thoroughfares of north-west London, where the number you want is inevitably at the opposite end to that by which you enter it.
When we saw the name on the corner house we thought we were already there; then found that there were what seemed like miles to traverse before we reached number twenty-five.
I don’t know what we had expected in the way of mystery, but what we found provided something like an anti-climax to our fears.
A shop – a corset shop!
I was wondering who we were to ask for, what we were to say, as I helped Laura Fair out of the taxi and told the man to wait.
But with that wonderful faculty which a woman has of collecting herself, of gathering some sort of hasty composure like a garment around her, she spoke to the girl behind the counter.
‘I want to see the gentleman who is lodging on the first floor,’ she said, with her usual quiet dignity.
Months later, when she was once more able to speak of the affair, she told me that she had noticed the curtains at the drawing-room windows, and realized that they did not correspond with the rest of the house.
The girl answered very civilly that the entrance was by the side door, and would we be pleased to ring? …
We went to the side door; but there was no need to ring, for it was open. The stairs – there was no hall – edged the wall of the shop just in front of us …
Even then, lacking my companion’s clear intuition, I wondered what would happen supposing we walked into the apartments of some total stranger? What was it she expected to find?
As she set her foot upon the first step, all petty doubt was at an end, for the sound of a shot rang echoing through the flimsy house.
Odd I should remember that the strip of oilcloth running up the stairs was white, with crimson flowers, green leaves, and yet retain no idea of how we reached the first floor landing! All I know is that I found myself facing in at the open door of the drawing-room, and saw Laura Fair clinging to her husband, who still held a smoking revolver in his hand, and was staring straight in front of him with blank, grey face; while Humphrey St John knelt, bending over the body of a woman who lay on the floor, with a stain, as red as the rose-decked carpet, spreading across the bodice of her white dress.
I suppose I still kept some outward semblance of self-possession, for I remember that I knelt on the floor facing St John; opened the front of Miss Atherton’s dress – for of course it was she who lay there! – and felt her heart, which St John had apparently never even thought of doing. He was gazing at her like a man in some anguished dream, as if he wondered what in the world they were both doing there …
She was not dead, and a moment later, when Lady Fair fetched some water out of the adjoining bedroom and moistened her hair and forehead, she opened her eyes; then closed them again with a little moan.
Laura Fair had put St John gently on one side when she bent over the woman; and he had sunk into a chair; stared from one to another; desperate enough, but even more puzzled.
The girl from the shop below appeared in the open doorway with bleached face.
‘Will you go and find a doctor, there has been an accident,’ said Lady Fair, glancing up at her, and murmuring something which sounded like ‘Just over the way,’ the girl vanished.
Laura Fair’s eyes met mine, and I knew of what she was thinking.
‘What are we to tell him when he comes? St John – Fair – you must pull yourselves together! What are we to tell the doctor?’ I asked.
At this St John’s wavering eyes fixed themselves, not on me, but on Vincent Fair, with a look of dazed uncertainty. ‘We were rehearsing – it was an accident. I –’
‘But these rooms,’ I put in. ‘Do they belong to you?’
‘Yes, I took them – a week ago.’
‘To meet her – Miss Atherton here?’
‘I suppose so,’ he spoke doubtfully, as though he did not know why he had taken them, and was trying to remember. Then, quite suddenly, his whole face began to twitch.
‘Good God – there’s Kitty, what about Kitty? My God, I had forgotten! … Kitty! … Laura! …’
Laura Fair came to the rescue, as I knew she would.
‘The doctor’s the first difficulty, Humphrey. We must all say the same thing. Tell the doctor that we were rehearsing. Give me that.’
She moved to her husband’s side, took the revolver from his hand, and opening it, coolly extracted the remaining cartridges and put them in her own handbag.
‘It was an accident, remember – an accident. He’ll have to understand that it must be kept out of the papers. It will be all right, if –’ she glanced at Miss Atherton, and seemed to change what she had been about to say – ‘It has only grazed the shoulder; she’ll be all right. We’ve got to try not to make things worse than they are. Anyhow, thank Heaven, this is the end of that terrible play – of all of this.’
‘Laura, you don’t think – you know … It wasn’t me – it was – my God, I don’t know what it was! But you – you – you knew, all the time –’
Fair spoke stammeringly; he was deathly white, his face was drawn, but in an odd way purged of all traces of guilty passion.
‘Know! Of course I know! It wasn’t you – it was none of you, my friends – my dearest, my best friends,’ cried Laura Fair. ‘If I didn’t know that, would I be here now, speaking like this, trying to help you?’
She broke off at the sound of a man’s step upon the stairs. It was the doctor, with the white-faced girl from the shop, and another woman peering over his shoulder. He gave an odd, half-surprised glance at Miss Atherton, whom we had lifted on to a sofa.
‘This – this is the patient? I had half thought –’ he said.
Then he turned to me in a puzzled way – perhaps he thought I looked the calmest, most matter of fact person in the room. ‘There’s someone sitting on your doorstep … something wrong down there … Now, let me see –’
He bent over Miss Atherton and I went downstairs.
It was Lawrence Kestervon who sat upon the doorstep. He held one hand raised, flourishing it about, as though manipulating the antics of a bunch of marionettes. With the other hand he beat time. He was laughing, his wide, light grey eyes were all alight with childish, mad glee …
Bending over him, one hand upon his shoulder, was Augustus King. Thank goodness, it was the real Augustus King, as I realized the moment he raised himself and looked straight into my eyes with his own frank blue ones.
‘I followed him,’ he said. ‘I saw him in the Edgware Road and thought something was wrong. He’s, he’s – oh, I say, Harry, old chap, look here, he’s –’ he touched his own forehead significantly.
One must be hardened indeed to call a man mad to his own face, though poor Kestervon would not have cared, could not have known …
‘And not only him, but something … something …’ went on King. ‘Look here, Harry, there’s been something damned odd about the whole thing. He had us like – like that!’ he added, and pointed to the raised hand, the twitching fingers – ‘had me, had all of us – well, just on a string!’