Theatre Shoes

by Noel Streatfeild

  Miranda, when she went off to be whipped, came down to the prompt side to await her end-of-act call. Sorrel moved nearer to the stage manager. After all, it was no good looking or smiling at a person who would not speak to you. Miranda was always surprising.

  “I don’t suppose Dad will let you play Ariel; you’re only rehearsing on approval, you know.”

  They had, of course, to talk in whispers, and even that was a risk with the stage manager so close to them. Sorrel came right up to Miranda so that she could speak in her ear.

  “Perhaps he won’t, but I’m going to try very hard to be good enough. I don’t see why you should be hateful about it, it’s not my fault that you aren’t playing it.”

  Miranda looked at her in surprise.

  “Goodness, you have changed! “She said nothing more for a moment, then she drew Sorrel to her again. “I don’t believe you’re the sort to tell tales about people. What I’m trying to do is to get everybody so sorry for me that they’ll let me play it after all.”

  Sorrel thought that was pretty cool.

  “What about me?”

  “I don’t care a bit what happens to you; I’m always going to think about me and nothing but me, that’s the way to get on.” The act was coming to an end. Miranda straightened her frock preparatory to taking her call. “There’s just one comfort I’ve got: if Daddy does allow you to play the part you’ll be simply awful in it.”

  The curtain came down and Miranda ran on with the rest of the cast. She stood in the centre of the stage holding Grandmother’s hand, smiling and bowing. The audience whispered to each other: “Isn’t that child sweet?”

  CHAPTER XIX

  REHEARSALS

  Miss Smith took Sorrel on Monday morning to the Education Officers’ Department of the London County Council, which was in the County Hall by Westminster Bridge. Fortunately, the children’s father had brought their birth certificates amongst his papers when they left Guernsey. Miss Smith said this saved a lot of trouble, as births were difficult things to prove without certificates. Grandmother could only have got a copy from Guernsey, seeing it was occupied by the Germans, through the International Red Cross, which would have taken months and months. Grandmother had already had an application for a licence sent for, and this had been filled in by her on behalf of Sorrel, and by the manager of the theatre where “The Tempest” would be produced on behalf of the theatre management. The application had then been sent back from the County Hall and Grandmother had a letter telling her to send Sorrel to the County Hall with the particulars of her birth, as she was to be examined by the medical officer and interviewed on behalf of somebody in the Education Department. Sorrel thought all this a lot of nonsense because she was perfectly well, had been to a dentist since she came to London so all her teeth were in order, and she knew she was all right at her lessons. Miss Smith said that the London County Council rules for children in the entertainment industry were good and prevented people from allowing children to earn money under bad conditions.

  “There’s absolutely nothing to be frightened of, Sorrel dear; just answer each question you’re asked, that’s all you’ve got to do.”

  Sorrel found this was perfectly true. The doctor was like any other doctor that she had ever seen, and just as friendly. He prodded her all over and sounded her heart, and told Miss Smith that she was undersized, but a tough little specimen, and though she was thin he could not find a thing the matter and supposed she was the thin kind. The education man was just as nice; he scarcely asked Sorrel any questions because he knew Miss Smith. He was, however, very interested to hear that Sorrel was going to play Ariel, and said that playing a part like that was an education in itself. Sorrel thought that was quite likely true, but wished all the same that she was playing Alice for her first part, like Pauline had done. Alice never had to say things like:

  “All hail, great master! Grave sir, hail! I come

  To answer thy best pleasure;”

  The education man pulled one of her plaits.

  “You look very solemn; aren’t you pleased to play Ariel?”

  Sorrel, having been told by Miss Smith to answer any question that was put to her, was perfectly frank.

  “I can see it’s a big opportunity, everybody says so; but, you see, I haven’t been training very long, and until we came to live with Grandmother last year I never thought of being an actress. Actually, now I want to be one very much, only—if I could have chosen—I wouldn’t have started with Ariel, and I wouldn’t have been rehearsed by my Uncle Francis. He’s a very nice man, only, of course, he’s a relation and that makes a difference.”

  “He’s a very fine Prospero,” said the education officer, “but the man for my money is your Uncle Henry—there’s an actor! What he wants to be messing about on the pictures for, I don’t know. What a Hamlet! “He gave Sorrel’s arm a pat. “If we’re going to have a child Ariel I should think you’ll be very good. You’ve got some lovely stuff to say.”

  “The most sensible line I’ve learnt so far,” said Sorrel,” is saying ‘Grave sir.’ Now that describes my Uncle Francis exactly.”

  Miss Smith took Sorrel’s hand.

  “Well, if you’ve passed her we must be getting back; she’s got her first rehearsal at twelve o’clock.”

  Uncle Francis at rehearsals was very like Uncle Francis playing a charade. He was grand, and serious, and very aloof. For a whole week he was like that, quite calm and never raised his voice. To her great surprise, Sorrel enjoyed herself. She never saw much of the play or of the actors, because her scenes were taken together as far as possible, so that when she was not wanted she was sent back to her lessons. Then suddenly, on the Monday at the beginning of the second week’s rehearsals, Uncle Francis changed. He had said on the Saturday that no one would have a book on the Monday, and Sorrel, who knew her part by now, had not minded a bit, but on Monday she found that having no book meant a lot of other things as well. Uncle Francis made a speech. He explained what the play meant; he spoke in his big booming voice and used long, grand words, and though Sorrel put on an interested face, she scarcely understood a word he was talking about. At the end Uncle Francis said:

  “That is what we have got to get over, and I want pace and, of course, full value to the prose. Clear, everybody?”

  Everybody scuttled off the stage except the people who were playing the shipmaster, the boatswain and the mariners, and the stage manager called out “thunder over” and then the rehearsal began.

  Sorrel was standing beside the girl who was playing Miranda. Her name was Rose Dean. Rose smiled.

  “It starts with a storm, you know; you’ll see some terrific goings-on in the effects department later on, thunder and lightning, wind and goodness knows what. There’s a boat, you know, being wrecked on the island.”

  Sorrel, of course, by now knew the story perfectly, for Miss Jay, as well as taking her through all her scenes, had explained it to her in a simple way. Sorrel was glad to hear about the thunderstorm and hoped, although it came before her entrance, to be allowed to come down to the side of the stage and watch it.

  In the previous week Sorrel had learnt where she came on for her various entrances, and when Uncle Francis said “Approach, my Ariel; Come!” she was ready, and she ran as she had been taught to do and knelt at his feet, then raised her head to speak.

  Uncle Francis let her get to the end of her first speech without interruption, then he told her to stand up.

  “That, my child, is said like a little girl at an elocution class. Tell me, what do you think Ariel is like?”

  Asked directly like that, Sorrel forgot the listening cast and forgot to be shy of Uncle Francis. Except for her weekly rehearsals and broadcasts for the B.B.C. and the afternoon when she had watched Grandmother’s play, she had hardly thought of anything else, and a picture of Ariel had grown in her mind.

  “It’s something not real at all, like the wind; you’ve caught it, and it does everything you ask, but all the time is s
imply longing to be up in the air again where it belongs.”

  Uncle Francis took her chin in his hand

  “Is that your idea or Miranda’s?”

  Sorrel was surprised at the question.

  “Mine. Miranda never said anything about Ariel. We didn’t know she was supposed to play it till she wasn’t going to.”

  Uncle Francis’s voice became more caramel even than usual.

  “It.” He turned to the cast who were sitting round the stage. “You notice she uses the word ‘it.’ My conception entirely.”

  Sorrel had no idea what the word “conception” meant, and only hoped that it was intended nicely.

  “Is it a he or a she?” she asked.

  “Neither,” boomed Uncle Francis. “It. And how do you suppose you look?”

  Sorrel had no idea. Miss Jay had said there were innumerable ways of dressing Ariel; the last time she had seen the play Ariel wore a tunic of rainbow silk. Sorrel thought that would be gorgeous.

  “Rainbow silk?”

  Uncle Francis roared.

  “Rainbow silk! Rainbow silk! And what else did you plan? A wreath of roses round your hair? No, my child. Ariel is a strange shape, almost terrifying in the way nature is terrifying.”

  Sorrel, though very disappointed about the rainbow silk, tried not to show it.

  “Do you mean with a long nose and big ears?”

  Uncle Francis looked for a moment as if he was going to burst. At the same moment the cast began to laugh. Uncle Francis wavered between bursting and laughing. The laugh had almost won when he turned to the stage manager.

  “Are the designs there?”

  The stage manager fumbled amongst some sketches and then brought a bit of paper to Uncle Francis.

  “Here’s the rough.”

  Uncle Francis showed the picture to Sorrel.

  It was of a strange creature with weird hair going backwards with little curls on the end of each hair. It was wearing a very tiny piece of stuff and at the back it had stiff wings rather like a beetle’s. It was so unlike what Sorrel had pictured that for a moment she could only stare at it, and while she stared she tried to think of something polite to say.

  “It’s very unusual.”

  “Your face and arms and legs are faintly blue,” said Uncle Francis. “The wig and the dress and the wings are silver.”

  Sorrel went on staring at the picture. Blue! At last she said, because she could not think of anything else and that was what she was truly thinking:

  “‘Their heads are green and their hands are blue, and they went to sea in a sieve.’”

  “Now,” said Uncle Francis, dismissing Sorrel’s quotation as if it had never been made, “you will go off and make that entrance again and don’t forget there’s nothing real about you; magic, my child, magic, magic, magic!”

  Sorrel, running to the side of the stage, thought to herself:

  “It’s all very well for Uncle Francis to talk like that, but it’s very difficult to feel magic and blue all over and dressed in silver when you’re wearing a school tunic, which you’ve outgrown, of a school you left last year.”

  Sorrel was given the part of Ariel. Not, of course, just like that. There were desperate days when both she and Uncle Francis were in despair, and almost worse days when he did not look despairing but grieved. Yet somehow the days of rehearsing on approval came to an end, and she knew they had come to an end because Miss Smith was told to take her to Garrick Street to have her wig fitted, and to see Mrs. Plum, the wardrobe mistress, about her dress.

  The situation with Miranda, of course, got worse as Sorrel’s rehearsing of the part got better. Miranda had hoped to hear her father tell her mother how shocking Sorrel was. She had hoped to hear her mother on the telephone telling Aunt Lindsey how shocking Sorrel was, and she knew that from there, for that was how things went in the family, Aunt Lindsey would ring up Grandmother and then everybody would know how shocking Sorrel was. Instead she heard the very things she most hated to hear. Her father would discuss Sorrel at meals.

  “That child has a quality. She is inexperienced, of course, almost amateur, but she has a miraculous gift for getting about the stage quickly, and being always in the right place, almost without appearing to move. Then, of course, that queer little voice of hers. Quite definitely she has something.”

  “How does she sing the song?” Aunt Marguerite asked.

  Uncle Francis very consciously acted when he was acting and, in spite of being pleased with Sorrel, he thought there must be something wrong with a performance which came naturally and easily.

  “Just sings it, true and clear like a boy. Sometimes I say to myself that I’d like it this way, or that way, and in the end I leave it. It seems very right as it is. Extraordinary!”

  Miranda’s anger with Sorrel and her wish to hear her criticised were not really jealousy. She was jealous of her for having the luck to play the part, but never once did it cross her mind that Sorrel might be as good an Ariel as she would have been. Miranda knew that her speaking of Shakespeare was outstanding, and that she had only to appear in a good part for her gift to be admitted. She had heard Sorrel speak Shakespeare and she knew she was not in the same class as herself. Her jealousy was entirely professional. Somebody else was getting the chance that should have been hers. She really minded so much that she got pale and quite ill looking, and when she found that her father and mother were looking at her anxiously she added to the effect of illness by acting being much worse than she was. She had her reward at last. One evening when she came in from the theatre her father called her to him. He stroked her hair. He spoke in his most caramel voice.

  “Your management have consented to allow you to play Ariel at a few matinées. Will that bring back the roses into your cheeks, little daughter?”

  Miranda was enchanted. She felt sure she could trust her father to see that some influential people were in to see her play, and apart from that she would at least have the occasional pleasure of acting the part in the way she knew it should be acted. “Poor Sorrel,” she thought, “I’ll show them what’s what.”

  Miranda arrived in the wardrobe for her lessons the next morning with shining eyes. Miss Smith was talking to Mrs. Plum about Sorrel’s dress, so Miranda drew Sorrel into a corner.

  “Have you heard? I’m going to play Ariel at some of the matinées.”

  Sorrel remembered the conversation she had with Miranda on the side of the stage.

  “So you’ve won.”

  Miranda shrugged her shoulders.

  “As far as I could. If my management won’t release me they won’t, though I think it’s pretty mean of them. Even a few matinées are better than nothing. I’ll always get my way, Sorrel, because I know what I want. You’ll see.”

  What with Sorrel’s rehearsals and broadcasts and her lessons, she did not know that anything else was going on in the world, but, of course, quite a lot was. Mark sang in a children’s revue on the air and got immediately, or rather the B.B.C. got, the most enormous fan mail, particularly from old ladies and clergy and inmates of hospitals and nursing homes, all of whom said Mark’s voice had done them good. Mark was not himself very interested in the broadcast except that after it he had two letters from boys who had been at school with him at Wilton House. They both said they had heard him sing, and one said it had made the matron’s cat sick and the other that the headmaster’s wireless had broken in half, but, as well, they told him all about what was going on, about cricket and school rows, and how somebody or other had cheeked somebody else. Mark, drifting along at the Academy, had accepted life as it was, partly because it was new, partly because he had enjoyed being a Polar bear, and partly because there did not seem to be anything else, but getting these two letters made Wilton House come vividly back. He saw the cricket pitch, and he could remember the feel of the short, dry grass round it while he and a friend lay watching a match and eating cherries. He remembered lots of other things, too, and though, of course, he had not
really liked a lot of it at the time, he liked all of it when seen in his memory. He was not caring for the summer term at the Academy; it was hot in London and nobody played any proper games. He never had cared for his dancing classes, and now he pictured what the boys at Wilton House would say if they could see him in a bathing dress and white socks and sandals dancing every day.

  When Mark had come home from his broadcast he had been quite pleased when Hannah had said: “You ought to be in a church choir singing ‘Oh, for the wings of a dove,’ like the boy I heard once in a cathedral.” And the next morning he had been charmed when Grandmother had said: “I heard you yesterday, grandson. It was beautiful.” And he had been entirely satisfied with Alice when she had said: “We weren’t half proud of ourselves last night, my old china.” He knew that china was short for china plate, and that Alice was calling him mate. It was a friendly term with her and it showed that she was thinking affectionately about a person. He was pleased too when the Academy staff said he had been good, and really delighted when Dr. Lente patted him on the head and said, “That a delight was.” But when he got his two letters and heard about the cat being sick and the wireless broken in half, he knew that was the real way to think about singing, and how he would feel himself if he heard any of the boys at Wilton House caterwauling over the air. Because she had always been the leader of the family since their father went away, Mark went first to Sorrel.

  “I do wish I needn’t go to that awful Academy. I do wish I could go back to Wilton House.”

  He was standing at Sorrel’s bedroom door. Sorrel was crouched on the floor practising how, by moving her shoulder blades, she could keep her wings continually on the move. She gave Mark only half her attention.

  “So do I, but I shouldn’t think you could, but you’ll go somewhere different in the autumn.”

  Mark glared at her back view.

  “Ever since you started to act in that awful old Shakespeare you don’t pay any attention to what anybody says.”