Black Beech and Honeydew

by Ngaio Marsh

  Mr Wilkie had been brought a sheaf of telegrams at Palmerston. He stood at the far end of the swaying carriage in what appeared to be a portentous discussion with Kingston Hewett. The guard came through and joined them. Everybody settled down and after a timeless interval we prepared for the night. The train had worked itself into its accustomed uproar. The guard came through again and turned down the lights to a cadaverous blue. I tipped back my seat, arranged my hired pillow and twisted myself into a series of unpromising postures. The clamour of our progress swelled and faded, became grotesque and was lost in a scurrying flight of images.

  I opened my eyes. Kingston Hewett and Pat Scully were lurching down the corridor. They leant over the occupants of the seats and shook them. Because one could not hear what they were saying they seemed to behave secretively. They left behind them a wave of consternation and bemused activity. As they came near I heard their message. The Company would leave the train at Frankton Junction. A general strike was coming into force on New Zealand Railways and the Auckland season would be delayed. We had The Luck scenery on board and would fill in by playing at Hamilton and Cambridge.

  I had only just crammed my oddments into a suitcase and scrambled into my overcoat when we drew into Frankton Junction. It was now, I think, about two o’clock in the morning.

  When the train had gone and we were left in a huddle on the silent and deserted station, it seemed to me that now we were displayed, for nobody to see, in our irreducible element. Our rugs and suitcases might have been bundles of swords, goblets, tinselled doublets and a tarnished crown or two. Nothing of moment had altered since the days of the strolling players: we were on the road. I remember that this notion seemed to be confirmed by Henri Doré who croaked sardonically:

  ‘For us and for our traged-eye.’

  The porter lit a fire in the waiting room and we sat round it on hard benches. Somebody – could our touring manager have met us there? – said that before morning a vehicle of sorts would pick us up and take us into Hamilton. It was only about three miles away. One or two of the men, I think Mr Wilkie was among them, decided to walk. We heard them tramp off down the frosty road. I slid to the floor and leant my head against the bench.

  Time passed in a blur of half-sleep, aching bones and a feeling of immense satisfaction. At dawn a motor-lorry came. The cocks were crowing when I stumbled into a bedroom in a sleeping hotel.

  My first two nights on tour had not been without incident.

  V

  All through that winter we moved up and down New Zealand with our four plays. The places changed, the routine was constant. One arrived and, in the jargon of actors, ‘found a home’. One went down to the theatre, collected one’s mail, saw the familiar set mounted on a new stage and attended the run-through for words. Somewhere or another I have a sketch in oils that I made one morning from the stalls. In the foreground, looming over the footlights, is the rearward aspect of the actor-manager. His overcoat makes a dark rectangle, his hands are in his pockets and a trace of cigarette smoke rises above his bullet-shaped head. He watches rehearsal, picks up any bits that have lost tone and will move into the action when his cue comes. Pat Scully sits at his table on the prompt side. The actors are dabbed in with broad touches. The play is A Temporary Gentleman.

  More evocative than this sketch was the tune broadcast the other day, and heard after a forty years’ interval, of a raucous song the men used to bawl offstage during the second act.

  Après la guerre fin-ee

  Soldats anglais par-tee

  Maddymazelle, O what will she say

  When she finds all ‘er best customers gawn away?

  What ‘ave they left be’ind?

  Souvenir for Yvonne.

  They spent all their pay and they alleyed away

  Beaucoup zig-zag très bong.

  Yes, I feel sure A Temporary Gentleman would revive, given the right treatment: say, by Miss Joan Littlewood.

  In the afternoons I sometimes went for a walk with Mrs Wilkie who was indefatigable in such exercise. How very unlike she was to the actress gay of popular imagination! Both she and her husband loathed parties from the bottom of their souls, dressed quietly, read widely and were happiest in each other’s company and that of a few close friends. If every human being has an affinitive creature, Mrs Wilkie’s was the gazelle. She was delicately in accord with Viola and Rosalind and alighted on their comedy lines with a warmth and sureness of touch that surprised and delighted by its freshness. As Ophelia she solved, without excess, the problem of reconciling ‘distraction’ with lyricism. When she first studied this part she used to visit a mental hospital where the resident psychiatrist was a personal friend of the Wilkies. He told her that from a professional point of view the characteristics were most accurately observed by Shakespeare and he arranged that she should meet parallel cases: adolescent girls whose behaviour, she said, was uncannily evocative of the part. She discovered their colour preferences: magenta and a morbid dull blue and these she wore in the mad scene. When they played Hamlet in Christchurch, my mother used to make Ophelia’s crazy bouquets, going to infinite pains over them. Mrs Wilkie said they were the most demented flowers she ever had and they delighted her.

  One of my clearest remembrances of her is on the nights when she played the errant mill-girl in Hindle Wakes. When she was made-up, she liked to murmur through her lines in the first scene, a demanding one, and asked me to go to her dressing-room and feed her the cues while she held her hands, which were delicate, in a basin of almost scalding water. It was better, she said, than making them up. She used to keep them there until she was called: they emerged scarlet and swollen. She was very good indeed in this part, the only one of any real significance that she played during that tour.

  I am not a great hoarder. The fragment of a scarlet and white stick-on-label still clings to the lid of an old suitcase in my cellar but if it was opened I doubt if I should find any forgotten programmes or press notices or photographs of the Wilkie Company on Tour and I don’t know where the sketchbook can be in which I made drawings of the actors. But on my bookshelves there is a copy of Maeterlinck’s Monna Vanna with an inscription in Mrs Wilkie’s hand on the flyleaf.

  ‘I had an idea that a man might pass a very pleasant life in this manner: – Let him on a certain day read a certain page full of poetry or distilled prose, and let him wander with it and muse upon it and reflect from it and dream upon it…Any one grand and spiritual passage serves him as a starting-post towards all “the two-and-thirty Palaces". How happy is such a voyage of conception, what delicious, diligent indolence!’

  The quotation is from Keats.

  In her continuous travels through the Far East, North America and Australasia, Mrs Wilkie could not be said to have a golden opportunity for the enjoyment of this delicious indolence but in general terms the excerpt does express something of her temperament.

  But how strange that forty years ago an intelligent, highly civilized and deeply read woman could have thought so well of Monna Vanna and that I could have so eagerly concurred in her opinion. Literary criticism of the time supported this view: Maeterlinck was a seriously regarded dramatist and Monna Vanna not the least respected of his works. It is true that the central act (the ‘great love scene’ it was inevitably called) was held to be superior to the others and I can see that even now its lily-fingered swoonery might be rewarding material in the hands of two romantic players. Did Garbo ever play Vanna?

  But what fustian, after all, it is and how wonderfully funny the opening of the play with three quattrocentist Pisans in a kind of bastard chorus getting great chunks of undigested plot-material off their chests. Played as it stands, with these gentlemen exchanging items of information that all of them knew beforehand, it could set a contemporary audience rolling in the aisles. How, with Shakespeare’s offhand, careless mastery before us, could we imagine that such stuff would serve? I see, by my English papers, that there is a revival in Art Nouveau. I trust it will languish
before it includes this particular form of romanticism: from here, it is but a short step to Wilde’s Salome which, by the way, the Wilkie Company played with great success in India. As an unrepentant Shakespearean I sometimes wonder if, with one or two exceptions there are no lasting criteria in dramatic writing but only fashions. Already in the anger of the young men we begin to hear whining overtones. M. Genet’s black plays may soon look merely grey. He may even achieve, before he is forgotten, his full intention: he may end by disgusting us.

  In the days I am writing about, the Angries, the Dirties, the Blacks, the Existentialists, the Symbolists and the Frankly Dotties were not yet in action. The talk was of Miss Horniman’s authors, of Granville-Barker, Schiller, Ibsen, Shaw, Galsworthy, Masefield, Bjørnson, Strindberg (abhorred by Mr Wilkie) and interminably, of course, Shakespeare. It is diverting to speculate on what our reaction would have been if the far-out plays of today had, by some Einsteinian sleight-of-time suddenly flooded our stages: diverting but idle, since there was no element in us to call them up, and plays, like players, are indeed the abstracts and brief chronicles of their times. We were still on the sunny side of chaos in those days. The excruciating need for screams of protest was yet to come.

  That was a winter of halcyon days for me. Nothing was lacking: not even the addition of a blameless romance which for some reason woke a massive playfulness in Mr Wilkie.

  ‘Has he popped the question?’ he would hiss as I waited offstage to make an entrance. Or: ‘It’s only a matter of persistence: you’ll take him in the end.’ And once in a sort of schoolboy ecstasy: ‘I’ve had seven marriages in my company. All disastrous.’

  I managed to draw and paint, lugging my heavy gear about the country, and, without knowing it, I laid down a little cellar of experiences which would one day be served up as the table wines of detective cookery.

  I went on learning about the techniques of theatre: of the differences between one performance and another, of the astonishing effects that may result from an infinitesimal change in timing, of how, in comedy, audiences are played like fish by the resourceful actor. I grew to recognize the personality of audiences: how no two are alike and how they never behave as a collection of individuals but always as a conglomerate.

  ‘What are they like, dear?’ the waiting actress asks as someone comes off.

  ‘Slow.’ Or ‘Eating it.’ Or ‘Bone, dear, from the eyes up.’ Or, with upcast eyes: ‘Frightening, darling, but just frightening.’

  Mr Wilkie used to say he knew what they would be like as he walked in at the Stage Door. There is no other sound in the actor’s world like the sound on the far side of the curtain. If it swells and fills the auditorium with its multiple voice so that the theatre is alive with it, then his heart takes a leap and his diaphragm contracts. If it is quiet, he is apprehensive. If it is small he tries to think it is appreciative and warm. If it is big he rejoices and hopes to contain it.

  I dressed with our elderly ‘character’ actress who was a dragon for superstitions. One must not whistle in the dressing-room, look through the curtain on an opening night, speak the tag at rehearsals or quote from Macbeth. Mrs Wilkie paid no attention to any of these shibboleths but I must confess that even now, if I catch one of my student-players whistling in the dressing-rooms, I send him out and make him knock to come in. This is a reflex action from the rockets I received forty-odd years ago.

  At last, in the spring, the notices for the end of the tour went up. The present company would be disbanded and a new Shakespearean one formed in Australia. Some of my fellow players would rejoin but I would not be among them. I really could not pretend even to myself that there was a place for me in those plays.

  On a wet night in Wellington I said goodbye and returned alone in the ferry to Christchurch. One of the first things I did was to wrap up Gramp’s book and send it to Mr Wilkie. In return I received a ring of which, he wrote (and I could hear the Micawberish roll): ‘It is a trifle of some reputed antiquity.’ It was and is an enchanting ring.

  There were to be other tours with other companies and many solitary train journeys in many parts of the world. In all of them, whenever I have found myself in a half-empty Pullman carriage, I have re-peopled it with those long-remembered companions. There is the flighty hat of Miss St John, and there, the toque of the character lady. A Pre-Raphaelite head is bent over a book, and beside it, a bullet poll with an impressive (if vaguely Humpty-Dumptyish) face. All the other hats and pates, bobbing in a constant rhythm with the motion of the train: The Allan Wilkie Company on tour in the year 1920.

  CHAPTER 7

  Enter the Lampreys

  It wasn’t easy to settle down again: to return to a pattern, that, however freely designed, turned about a small house, one’s parents and a circle of quiet friends.

  A new and lasting tie was formed in the person of an English cousin who, following the family tradition, had come out to seek his fortune in the colonies. He had gone straight from his Public School into the Great War, endured the shambles of the trenches and emerged, as I daresay some authorities would not scruple to put it, unscathed. He stayed with us for some time and from then until today has been ‘a son of the house’ whenever he enters it. His name is Hal. Later on his father and mother, who was my father’s eldest sister, and their daughters and youngest son, Richard, settled in the North Island. They are still my closest family tie and the relationship, in many ways, is more like that of brothers and sisters than of cousins.

  After my return to Christchurch I joined a group of fellow painters and worked away with only occasional, tantalizing meetings between intention and achievement. I went on writing and here I felt there was some kind of improvement. There came an offer from an English Comedy Company and I went off again for a three months’ tour, this time with little encouragement from my mother.

  ‘It will lead to nothing,’ she said. ‘Why do you want to do it? It’s not the right kind of thing for you. I know.’

  ‘I want to go.’

  ‘You’re making a mistake.’

  I said I would find that out for myself and she withdrew from the argument.

  Once more I was confronted by her attitude to the theatre. She knew about acting, she enjoyed meeting actors, she was ironically diverted by their shop-talk: she did not wish her daughter to adopt any part of their life or their behaviour. I believe her deep attachment to the Wilkies was first engendered by their avoidance of theatrical catchphrases or easy emotionalism.

  The company I now joined was formed by Miss Rosemary Rees, a New Zealand actress who had spent her professional life in the English theatre. She is the author of a number of romances and had written a light comedy which we were to play throughout the ‘smalls’ in the North Island. Here was one of the earliest attempts to found a permanent theatre in this country.

  We travelled in buses, trains and small coastal steamers and our audiences, never very big, were composed for the most part of provincial people, both Maori and Pakeha (European). It was a happy company: in it I made lasting friendships and learned a great deal about the tougher aspects of theatrical endeavour.

  I began by playing a brazen adventuress of uncertain years and made, if possible, rather less of a success of it than of my somewhat similar part in The Rotters. Not, however, for long.

  We had scarcely embarked upon our tour when the young actor who played the lively juvenile went down with scarlet fever and disaster stared us in the face. He had no understudy. For one hectic Saturday night our business manager was pressed into the service and the middle-aged character man grotesquely essayed the skittish boy. At the end of this extraordinary performance I heard Miss Rees lamenting that if only it had been one of the female roles, she could have engaged an English actress who happened to be at large in Wellington. I heard myself saying that I thought I could play the boy, ‘Jimmy’. She leapt at it. All that night and all Sunday I memorized the lines. The newcomer arrived on Sunday afternoon and took over my old role. In the evening we re
hearsed. The real Jimmy’s suits were fumigated and found to fit.

  Miss Rees suggested that I have my hair cut off but, willing though I was, I blenched at the thought of my mother’s reaction. A wig was obtained from I don’t know where.

  On Monday we rehearsed all day and in the evening our character woman, a magnificent and much-loved old-timer called Katie Towers, screwed my abundant hair into a system of tightly strained worms and skewered them to my scalp. The wig was then adjusted over this hellish arrangement. I dressed and was called. I think I may say that I succeeded. The audience laughed, the company nobly backed me up and at the final curtain I was kissed by Miss Rees and the leading man.

  Flushed with my unlikely triumph I wrote excitedly to my mother and received a snorter by return of post. I confided this reaction to Miss Rees who wrote, as she thought, tactfully and enthusiastically to my mother. With exquisite misjudgement, she held up as an exemplar, the late Miss Vesta Tilley whom she was careful to call by her title, ‘Lady de Freece’.

  I did not see the reply but to me my mother wrote that she was unable to discover why it should be imagined the antics of a musichall soubrette could reconcile her to the thought of her daughter masquerading in male attire in a third-rate company. It was clear that she was miserable about the whole thing but I think the repressed but very real professionalism that lay at the back of her feeling for theatre, prevented her from precisely ordering me home. She realized that I had, however regrettably, staved off disaster. The show had gone on.

  In the matter of short hair, although it was already fashionable, she was adamant.