Contrary to what one might expect, Marden and Fisher were not rivals in the normal sense of the word. They did not quarrel or divide the company into warring factions and they rarely spoke of one another except to pay compliments. Superficially they appeared to be on the best of terms, even to the extent of occasionally sharing lodgings, but under the surface they were very different beings. Marden was breezy, outgoing and addicted to long walks when he had the leisure; Fisher was more thoughtful and inward looking. If he took a walk it was to investigate sixpenny bookstalls in the town, or study the architecture of the local church.
Our first weeks were harmonious and successful. Marden and Fisher had equal status and billing in our first two plays, but I was conscious of a certain atmosphere developing between them when Mr Manville decided to put into the repertoire that fine drama The Honour of the Tremaines. This ever popular play was to be his chief attraction, and he decided to cast Marden in the leading role with Fisher supporting him as the hero’s friend.
The play is in four acts but the great moment comes at the end of the third. In case anyone is unfamiliar with The Honour of the Tremaines I must, for purposes which will become evident, briefly summarise the plot. Apart from the first act, the scene is laid in India, where Roger Tremaine and his friend Hubert La Rose are officers in the Loamshire Regiment. Tremaine has come to India under a cloud, having in the first act taken the blame for an incident of cheating at the card table of which Roger Tremaine’s elder brother the Marquess of Tremaine was actually guilty. Tremaine takes the guilt upon himself in order to protect the honour of the Tremaines and save the title from disgrace. In India he becomes popular with the regiment and falls in love with Emily, the Colonel’s daughter. Unfortunately there is a rival for her heart in the shape of one Captain Frederick Vosper. Vosper, the villain of the piece, contrives that Tremaine should fall into the hands of Nazir Ali, a ferocious local bandit. So all is set for the great third act, the final scene of which is laid in the officer’s mess of the Loamshires at Bangrapore. After dinner the conversation turns to the incident which drove Tremaine from England at which point Captain Vosper says: ‘I say Tremaine is a blackguard!’ Incensed by this, Tremaine’s friend Hubert La Rose rises from the table and thunders: ‘To any man who says that Roger Tremaine is a blackguard I give the lie!’ Tremendous applause. But this fine moment is eclipsed by what follows, for through the double doors of the mess staggers a man in the tattered uniform of an officer of the Loamshires. It is Tremaine himself who has escaped from the clutches of Nazir Ali! ‘I give the lie myself!’ he cries and collapses onto the table. Tumultuous applause. Curtain. It was a moment, like ‘I am Hawkshaw the detective!’ in Tom Taylor’s Ticket of Leave Man, which never failed.
When I say that it was Marden who took the role of Tremaine and Fisher who played his faithful friend Hubert La Rose, you can imagine what a gulf was fixed between them in the eyes of the public, despite their ostensibly equal standing in the company. For that part alone Marden became ‘the idol of the ladies and the envy of the men’.
It has to be said that Marden took full advantage of the benefits conferred by the role. His success with the ladies of each town he visited was remarkable, a success he took with an easy careless arrogance which was not altogether likeable. He began to put on airs.
In Doncaster there occurred an incident which significantly worsened relations between Fisher and Marden. They had taken lodgings together at a Mrs Pardoe’s. Mrs Pardoe had a daughter named Judith, a beautiful girl of nineteen, to whom Fisher was greatly attracted. Indeed, I believe that he had formed an attachment to her during a previous stay in the town and they had corresponded. However, the long and the short of it was that in the course of the week Marden managed to seduce the young lady and, worse still, boasted of the conquest to some of his cronies in the company. When they pointed out to him that his friend Fisher had an interest in that direction he winked. ‘Ah, you see,’ he said, pointing meaningfully to his magnificent locks, ‘I won that race by a head’. The remark was accounted a great witticism in the company and was oft repeated. Not surprisingly when Fisher came to hear of it he was enraged. He said little at the time, but when Marden approached him at the end of the week and suggested they share lodgings once again, Fisher turned on his heel and stalked away from him in silence.
Relations between the two appreciably worsened in the ensuing weeks so that they barely spoke a word except on stage. The frost was greatly exacerbated by the extraordinary success of The Honour of the Tremaines. The Guv’nor dropped the other plays in his repertoire, and Marden’s personal triumph was reflected in the billing. His name now appeared above the title and in letters twice as large as anyone else’s (except, of course, the Guv’nor’s).
However, by the time we reached Slowbridge, that drab and deleterious Midlands town, Fisher and Marden seemed to be on better terms. For the first time in many weeks they exchanged cordial greetings in the theatre. It appeared that Fisher had become reconciled to playing second fiddle, though, in the light of what happened next, I have my doubts.
On the Thursday evening of the Slowbridge week I was making up in a dressing room of the Regent Theatre with several of my fellow performers, when the call boy knocked to call the quarter, twenty minutes before curtain up. Unusually for him, having knocked he entered and announced to us that Mr Marden was not in his dressing room; indeed, had not come into the theatre at all. We said that he should tell Mr Manville, but the boy seemed fearful. No doubt he realised that he should have alerted the management when Marden had not arrived at the half. I agreed to go with the boy to beard the Guv’nor in his lair. When Manville heard the news he gave instructions that we should hold the curtain for no longer than five minutes in case Marden turned up, but that meanwhile Mr Fisher should prepare to take over the role of Tremaine, and I that of the hero’s friend, Hubert La Rose. Mr Willington, the junior character man, was deputised to double my part, the small but showy role of Lieutenant Beauhampton, with that of his own, the comic Indian servant Babu. So it was. Marden failed to appear and we all went on and were word perfect in our altered parts.
Marden had disappeared without a trace. His movements on that day, as far as could be ascertained by the police, were as follows. The morning had been spent at his lodgings in Wendell Street. At noon he had ventured out for a walk and met Mr Fisher outside the White Hart Hotel in the centre of town and there they had lunch together. Witnesses declared that the two men had appeared to be on the most convivial terms. At two o’clock they left the White Hart together and then, according to Fisher, had gone their separate ways: Marden to walk by the canal, Fisher to examine the famous misericords in the choir stalls of Slowbridge church. After that there had been only one doubtful sighting of Marden. He had been seen by an itinerant match-seller from the other side of the canal running along the towpath, apparently in a state of some agitation. When asked if anyone had been following Marden the witness replied that he could not be sure.
Naturally some suspicion fell on Fisher, but no evidence could be found to contradict his account of events. Moreover, there was no body and so no certainty that there had been any foul play. Marden’s disappearance cast a shadow over the company, but the great principle of ‘the show must go on’ prevailed. Only one member of the company was inconsolable and this was our leading lady Miss Rose Manville, the Guv’nor’s daughter, with whom, it would appear, Marden had ‘an understanding’.
Fisher took the role of Tremaine very well indeed and if he was not quite as dashing as Marden he was perhaps more soulful, especially in the scenes with Miss Manville. (Miss Manville, however, had a great aversion to Fisher though, trouper that she was, she never showed it on stage.) Fisher’s wig, it was true, was not wholly satisfactory and often provoked a few derisive titters on his first entrance, but even this problem was solved.
Three weeks after Marden’s disappearance we were playing at the Alhambra Theatre, Derby (now alas a cinematograph palace). On our first
night there Fisher sent a note by the call boy summoning me to his dressing room. Fisher had befriended me and I had responded after a fashion. We had similar, bookish tastes, but there was always something remote about him that I could never get behind. Closeness was barred and companionship taken up and dropped very much at his whim.
That night, as I entered his dressing room, Fisher seemed to be in a state of high excitement. A square cardboard box with a printed label on the top was situated in the middle of his dressing table. His eyes glittered and he wore a gleeful smile which did not seem to me entirely pleasant.
‘What do you think this is?’ he asked, indicating the box. ‘It came by carrier today!’ Obviously baffled astonishment was called for and I duly obliged.
Like a conjurer performing an important trick, he removed the lid of the box with a flourish and from a nest of tissue paper drew forth a magnificent copper-coloured wig. Then, with another flourish, he placed the wig on his head. It was astonishing. Even without the gauze stuck down with spirit gum the hair looked as if it belonged to him. It was a triumph of the wigmaker’s art. I congratulated him and he beamed exultantly. Once again I was conscious of something not quite nice about all this elation. I searched for a reason for my unease, and then it suddenly occurred to me: the hair was identical in colour and consistency to poor Marden’s! For a moment my horror must have become apparent because he looked at me enquiringly.
‘Are you going to wear that tonight?’ I asked.
‘Yes. Of course. Why not?’
‘Well, if I were you,’ I said, ‘I’d show it to Miss Manville first, before you go on stage with her.’
‘Why?’
I was amazed that he should ask, but somehow I could not tell him the true reason. The name of Marden would have stuck to my lips. Instead I reminded him of the theatrical etiquette which stipulated that if an actor was going to wear something radically different from his normal garb on stage, he should go round the dressing rooms and show his fellow performers beforehand. At this Fisher merely nodded, patted me on the back and went off in the direction of Miss Manville’s dressing room.
About half a minute later I was standing in the backstage corridor when I heard a woman scream. I arrived outside Miss Manville’s dressing room to find her being revived by her dresser with smelling salts. She had her hysterics but by the time the curtain went up she had recovered and, like the trouper she was, gave the usual admirable performance. However, she never again spoke a single word to Mr Fisher other than on stage.
Something else of note happened at Derby. Towards the end of the week news reached us that the body of a man had been found floating in a backwater of the Slowbridge Canal. There were signs that the body had been weighted down with stones, but that these weights had come loose and the corpse had floated to the surface. No watch or pocket book was found on the body to identify him, but the clothes were similar to the ones Marden had been wearing on the day he disappeared. Certain identification was impossible because of one dreadful fact: the head was missing. Indeed, despite extensive draggings of the canal and other searches, it was never found.
Our next few weeks were the most successful so far of the tour. The wig seemed to give Fisher a confidence he had never known before so that he managed to combine his own subtlety with some of Marden’s dash. He became a firm favourite with the public, but off stage he remained his old subdued and introspective self.
One oddity about him that I noticed was that he would never let the wig out of his sight. Once the performance was over he would place the wig on its block, into the cardboard box and take it back to his lodgings. Sometimes he would wear it during the day. One morning I saw him from the back walking down Acker Street in Manchester. For a moment I could have sworn it was Marden. When I asked him who had made this wonderful wig for him he gave an evasive reply, and on looking for the label on the top of the cardboard box I noticed that it had been carefully removed.
I also began to notice something strange happening during the performance. There were moments when it seemed to me that Fisher’s lines were spoken by two people at once. This was particularly the case during the third act which I have described. There were nights when that great curtain line ‘I give the lie myself!’ seemed to have an odd echo in the theatre, an echo which did not quite correspond with Fisher’s intonation of the line. On one of these occasions I saw that Fisher too had noticed the echo. A split second before he crashed dramatically onto the mess table a terrible look of fear and rage passed across his face.
Fisher started to have an aversion to being alone and, when we reached Castleford, he asked me to rent with him what is known in theatrical parlance as a ‘combined chatsby’, a sitting room with two adjoining bedrooms. I was reluctant, but he seemed very anxious that I should join him, and his gratitude when I agreed was effusive and pathetic. In those days the landladies used to come to meet the theatrical Sunday trains to tout for custom on the platform. Fisher spent some time haggling with a number of these women before deciding on one of them.
We settled in to our digs late that morning and the landlady served us a passable Sunday dinner in our shared sitting room. After dinner Fisher urged me to accompany him on a walk, so we went out to tramp dully about the town. Though he seemed to need me to be with him, he was not much of a companion: his conversation was desultory and monosyllabic. He led the way but in no particular direction as if bent only on filling the time strenuously between dinner and tea. I noticed also, rather to my relief, that he had given up wearing the wig during the day, settling for a grey bowler alone to cover his baldness.
By the time we had returned from our walk I was exhausted, but Fisher was still imbued with nervous energy. On entering the sitting room, Fisher, ahead of me, said, apparently to no one in particular: ‘What did you do that for?’
Thinking he must mean me, I asked what he meant. He started, as if he had forgotten I was there. Then he pointed to the mantelpiece on which stood the copper wig on its wig block. It had its back to us, and it occurred to me that the thing could have been mistaken for a severed head.
‘Did you put that there?’ he asked me, but I knew that he knew that I hadn’t. He did not wait for my denial but immediately went to the fireplace, snatched the wig off the mantelpiece and took it into his room. I was reminded irresistibly of a mother carrying a fractious child off to bed. From the bedroom I could hear what sounded like muttered scoldings. Fortunately at this moment our landlady came in with the tea. I began to wish devoutly that I had never accepted his offer of a combined chatsby.
My bedroom looked onto the street and on my first morning there I remember being woken before dawn by the clatter of clogs on cobbles as the mill workers went to the factory. It did not disturb me; in fact it gave me the selfish pleasure of knowing that I could turn over deliciously in bed and not think about work until the evening. I was warm and drowsy, safe in the knowledge that I would soon be asleep again, but something was preventing me. In my half-woken state it took me some time to identify the disturbance. It was voices, one clear, the other muffled, which seemed to come from the sitting room, or from Fisher’s bedroom, which opened onto it. I tried to ignore the voices but I could not because there was something familiar about their rhythm and pace which tortured me. It was like hearing a tune that for the life of you you can’t quite place. I crept to the door of my bedroom and opened it a crack.
The sitting room was empty, but Fisher’s bedroom door was open and it was from there that the voices emanated. The clearer of the two voices was Fisher’s. What he was saying was still indistinct, but I could recognise it because I knew it so well. It was Roger Tremaine’s great speech from the last act of The Honour of the Tremaines:
I say to you, Hubert, that a man’s honour is like a precious jewel: once shattered it is never repaired. If a man has honour he will hold it dearer than life itself: for he gives it away at the cost of his immortal soul. Be he the poorest of the poor, the humblest of the humble, if a m
an has honour, he is a prince among men. But if he has lost it, then, be he as rich as Croesus, as mighty as a king, I declare him to be the vilest dog on earth.
Quite why Fisher should be rehearsing a speech he both knew and performed to perfection was a mystery. But the second voice was an even greater mystery. It seemed to be repeating the speech, though at times it anticipated Fisher. The sound of it was like a muffled groan, only the cadences of the speech being identifiable. It was as if someone or something was struggling to speak with a gag in its mouth. Who was it? What was happening? I put on my dressing gown and entered the sitting room. As soon as I did so the voices stopped and the door of Fisher’s bedroom was slammed shut.
I heard those voices more than once during our week at Castleford, always at our digs, sometimes late at night, sometimes very early in the morning. I wondered at times whether I was dreaming them. Certainly they wove their way into my dreams which were of nameless things, things that were trying to struggle out of miserable dark holes into our world, things which even now I would give all my worldly goods to forget.
As for Fisher, I frankly avoided him. We had no quarrel; I took my meals with him at the digs, but even then I contrived to be reading a book or otherwise occupied, so that I would not be obliged to exchange too many words with him. I cannot altogether explain my feelings: it was nothing so simple as an aura of wickedness which repelled me. I can best express it by saying that Fisher seemed to me to be living in a different world to ours while still existing in this one. His eyes seemed to focus on points in empty space. He would suddenly address words to no-one in particular. They were often strange words belonging to a language of his own, ugly words of loathing and despair.
The Dreams of Cardinal Vittorini and other Strange Stories Page 28
