2
Perhaps it was because of the blazing sun outside, and that cloudless blue sky, and those gentle zephyrs which barely fluttered the bunting over the entrance to the Pavilion Chalet, that its interior struck Noodles Brett as so particularly squalid and drab. “This way,” Mr. Vaughan had said, plunging into what looked like a bathing-hut clapped against the end of the tin hall. “Mind your head. Mind these steps.” And they were on a dusty platform, surrounded by dusty hangings, and furnished with some ancient bent-wood chairs and an extremely battered piano. Below them, and stretching away through a perspective which was fitfully illuminated with dusty shafts of sunlight, were rows and rows of more bent-wood chairs, all facing towards Noodles and her guide. And as her eyes grew used to this semi-obscurity, and as she also realised that she was now actually on the stage—and wondered why she didn’t feel more thrilled about it—a number of human figures became gradually visible, and appeared to be converging on her own end of the hall.
“Who are those?” she asked, in a respectful whisper—for undoubtedly there was something about this place suggesting a chapel that had seen better days. But though Lester Vaughan didn’t hear her, he was already answering her question.
“Morning, Dan,” he said. “Morning, Harry. That you, Mac? Sorry I’m late. Still, here’s Miss Brett, and we may as well get started. I’ll introduce you, Miss Brett. This is Mr. Colyer. You’ll have some numbers with him. And——”
“How do you do?” said Noodles.
“Charming,” said Mr. Colyer, wringing her hand warmly. “Are you——”
“And this is Mr. Kilburn. Here—Harry!”
“Oh, how do you do?” said Noodles.
“Grand,” said Mr. Kilburn, in a bass of such surprising profundity that Noodles nearly jumped out of her skin. “You’re joining us? How fortunate.”
He also wrung her warmly by the hand, and bowed as well—revealing a most ingenious disposition of dyed hair over a bald patch. Noodles found the spectacle at once fascinating and—as she described it to herself— “putting off.” But he seemed sad, and she felt rather sorry for him.
“Thanks awfully,” she said.
“One more,” said Lester Vaughan. “This is Mr. Mackworth. Mac’s our pianist, you know, and, oh boy, he can sure tickle the ivories.”
Nothing could have been less like an American than this supposed imitation, and Noodles blushed as sympathetically and uncomfortably as if the failure had been her own. But the men laughed, the imitator himself loudest of all, so she imagined that they didn’t know how bad it was. Later, when she had had the opportunity of hearing Mr. Vaughan deliver a monologue in the character of an Irish jarvey—whatever that was—she felt that perhaps she had been hard on his American. But at the time she was truly thankful for the imperfect lighting.
“How do?” said Mr. Mackworth—more like a comedian than a pianist. “Any relaish of Billy Brett? You know—Brett and Brewer. Lancashire comics. Met ’em up at Blackpool two years ago. Eh?”
“I’m afraid not,” said Noodles. “At least, I don’t think so.”
Because she couldn’t be absolutely positive. After all, most people have relations that they’ve never heard of, and it would be rather thrilling, in a way, to have a distant cousin who was a Lancashire comic. Though, of course, distinctly unlikely.
Mr. Mackworth seemed to think it distinctly unlikely too. He shook his head. He looked extremely gloomy. He pulled his chin into his fat neck, still shaking it from side to side. He hiccuped.
“Pardon,” he said.
Noodles smiled angelically, but decided that Mr. Mackworth wasn’t her favourite. What were they all going to do next?
Nobody seemed to know. Mr. Vaughan was telling a long, rambling story about his motor-bicycle, but with actions which appeared to have been borrowed from a fishing anecdote. Noodles couldn’t follow it. Mr. Kilburn had struck the attitude of a listener, but clearly wasn’t listening. Mr. Colyer was prowling up and down and muttering. It was very difficult to keep out of his way, because he never seemed to stick to any definite track, or to notice where it was taking him. Mr. Mackworth, still ruminating despondently over Brett and Brewer, had sunk on to one of the bent-wood chairs. His soul one might imagine to be at Blackpool. Without it his body was not an object on which anyone could wish to feast their eyes.
“I wonder what they’re all waiting for,” said Noodles to. herself. She didn’t quite like to sit on another bent-wood chair, in case it should turn out that they were waiting for her. Also, she was still feeling very nervous; not because any of these sad-looking men were in the least frightening in themselves, but because she was expecting at any moment to be asked to play or sing to them. Decidedly she would be glad when the ordeal of this rehearsal was over; but so far it showed no sign of even beginning.
She realised that they were all looking at her. That Mr. Colyer had stopped prowling, that Mr. Mackworth’s soul had returned from Blackpool, that Mr. Kilburn was watching her closely, and that Mr. Vaughan was talking about her.
“Of course,” he was saying. “That’s what I told you last night. I told you it was the same girl. You ask Miss Brett, if you don’t believe me. Didn’t you, Miss Brett? Eh? Wasn’t it you who pulled me out of the water?”
“Oh,” said Noodles. “Well, yes. I mean——”
“There you are!” interrupted Mr. Vaughan, brushing her aside. “Queer, isn’t it? But that’s not the point. The point is, how can I use the story if I can’t scrap the bills? No good giving Maisie the credit, you know. Now, haven’t you boys any ideas?”
Apparently not, though they could, and did, all talk round and about this peculiar problem with steadily increasing obscurity. The “she” who formed such a large part of the dialogue was obviously Noodles herself—or at any rate most of the time—but none of them ever spoke to her directly, or seemed aware that she was alive and present. At first she had been afraid that her adventure on the bathing-beach was to be revived and incorporated in the performance, but the danger—if it had ever existed—appeared to pass. The argument became more and more professional and remote. Each character in turn would start a story of what he or someone else had done in quite different circumstances at Bognor, or Margate, or places that she had never heard of. But they seemed incapable of listening to each other, or of keeping to their own subject even on the rare occasions when they weren’t being interrupted. It all sounded like some extraordinary game which had been played so often that its original objects had been forgotten. The only rule which still kept it going was that on no account must anyone talk of anything but how successful they had been at some other place where they had been associated with someone else.
Their actual words were often extremely offensive, but it was clear—in some odd way—that they were all enjoying the game far too much to abandon it for the sake of taking offence. And if they had abandoned it, it was also clear that they would begin again at once, because they had nothing else to talk about. And because they’d got to talk, or they would be swept away in a vacuum which would destroy their strange illusion that they were real people, and really existed.
“I feel far older than any of them,” thought Noodles; “and yet they’re not in the least like children. They’re, more like something that someone had started inventing, and then left off in the middle. They sound happy, but they don’t look it. They talk about the audiences as if they hated them, but they can’t really, or they’d all be doing something else. Only one can’t imagine them doing anything else. I wonder what on earth they all do in the winter, when the places like this are shut.”
But we doubt if anyone knows the answer to that question; least of all these unsubstantial creatures themselves, whose flimsy memories preserve nothing but the record of previous materialisations in Pavilion Chalets, and Kursaals, and Grand Grottoes. All we can say is that Noodles shows little sign so far of becoming unreal herself, or of appreciating the lotus-fruit which is being so carelessly offered for her consum
ption. She is still determined to do anything that they ask her, to sing, twang or dance, to learn whatever she is given to learn and to come and go wherever she is bidden. She is still most honourably anxious to repay that ten shillings and a penny-halfpenny, to discharge the bill at her lodgings, and with these objects in view to take orders from any Domino who will give them.
But the utmost that has happened by one o’clock—when the rehearsal is adjourned until after lunch—is that Mr. Vaughan has had a frightful scene with a man who has disturbed him by entering the body of the hall to collect a case of empty beer-bottles. He has addressed that man, and the man has cringed before him, as though the incident had taken place in the middle of a performance of Parsifal at Covent Garden—instead of in a shoddy shanty where a group of idlers are doing nothing at all. Otherwise the time has slipped away in talk and cigarettes; in reminiscence and anecdote; in imitation and detraction; but mostly in sheer, indescribable, dawdling indolence.
“Don’t they ever do anything?” Noodles has asked herself, as she waits and waits and waits. But she doesn’t like to ask the sad-looking men, for she is so conscious of her inexperience. And she doesn’t like to ask Miss Nellie Selbrook and Miss Mimi La Touche—her fellow-lodgers, who have come drifting in with vague excuses for their unpunctuality in which no one seems interested—because although they are awfully kind, she has already discovered that they never listen to you. Their eyes always seem to be wandering in search of a looking-glass, whether a looking-glass is there or not. Their minds seem always to be fixed on an invisible and slightly harassing future. One doesn’t feel, somehow, that they have any better idea why this rehearsal has been called, or when it is going to begin, than one has oneself. And they, also, like the sad-looking men, seem lulled and drugged by the mere imminence of the Pavilion Chalet—as though it is enough for them to be breathing the stuffy atmosphere and to be surrounded by the dusty stage-fittings, whether there is a performance going on or not.
So presently Mr. Vaughan says: “Well, three o’clock sharp, then, and we’ll run through the stuff again”—exactly as though they had run through it already. And with an air of swaggering self-consciousness the male Dominoes put their hats on at the same rakish angle, and the female Dominoes pick up their flamboyant hand-bags, and they all come chattering forth into the bright sunlight—just a little surprised, you might imagine, not to find a crowd waiting to cheer them—and they shout to each other, and laugh unnaturally, and disband.
And Noodles accompanies Mesdemoiselles Selbrook and La Touche back to the furnished lodgings, where they lunch untidily off sardines, pickles and cheese, and collapse into two separate trances on the only two comfortable chairs—though still muttering occasionally about Llandudno, or Yarmouth, or Bude. St. Ethelburga’s still seems extraordinarily far away, but does anything else seem very much nearer?
We may feel that Noodles is safe enough, so far, in this queer, ghostly company, but we don’t feel somehow that it is quite the company that we should have chosen for her. It is a relief to know that her letter is already well on the way to Wykeham Street, and that—thanks to Snubs—the start of the Rescue Party is not more than eighteen hours away.
3
Miss Mulberry found two remarkably lukewarm and unhelpful telegrams from Mr. Cottenham on her return to her antiseptic study, nor had her cautious investigations produced anything but bewilderment in the minds of several railway-porters, hotel-porters and garage-foremen. For the honour of the school she couldn’t bring herself to say: “An extremely good-looking pupil has run away with a wholly unaccountable stranger,” but even if she had taken this frank and dangerous line, she hadn’t applied anywhere where Noodles and the chief Domino had impressed their respective personalities. The clue of the goggles brought her nowhere, and there were no other clues at all.
So Miss Mulberry groaned, and cursed the day when she had so weakly readmitted Ursula Brett to the fold. And then groaned again, and reproached herself for looking at it so selfishly. And sent another telegram to Mr. Cottenham reporting the complete absence of progress in language which she hoped would puzzle the Post Office, and only failed to puzzle the recipient because he tore it up as soon as he had read the signature. And having done all this, she summoned Miss Maplethorpe and Miss Kent, and her secretary, Miss Thrush, and rearranged the entire educational programme for Friday afternoon, so as to permit of their absence, and sent them forth to pick up the trail where she had already so very thoroughly confused it. And sighed, and took up her ordinary burden—which was not made any lighter by the whispering of many-tongued Rumour, which no amount of discipline could check.
Noodles had run off and married a cricketer, said many-tongued Rumour—basing this report on a glimpse of Mr. Vaughan’s blazer. Or the cricketer was really her long-lost uncle. Or he was a film-actor—no one knew why, but there was something very fetching about this notion. Or she had really been expelled, but for something so awful that nobody could mention it. Or she had been recaptured, and was immured on bread-and-water in the head-gardener’s cottage. Or—a hopeful idea, this—she had contracted an infectious disease of such appalling virulence that nothing would serve but to rush her off to the isolation hospital, or to a well-known specialist, on the first motor-bicycle that came along. In that case the whole school would probably be closed, and everybody would be sent home. Hurrah for Noodles, a martyr in the cause of liberty.
But authority remained silent, and, for obvious reasons, unquestioned. No bulletins were posted, no dramatic statement was issued at evening prayers. And Rumour, destroying itself by its own excesses, began to subside. Miss Mulberry, trained to recognise the symptoms by years of subtle divination, realised that the worst—so far as the remaining pupils were concerned—was now over, and planned a supreme Nature-Ramble for Saturday afternoon as a final exorcism or counter-irritant.
But the two mistresses and the secretary had reported nothing. Though they had been far less concerned with the honour of the school, and though Miss Maplethorpe in particular had even exceeded her instructions by going round with a photographic group in which Noodles featured in an aggregation of hockey-players; and though they had all gone past the Pavilion Chalet, and two of them had been seen, and avoided, by Noodles herself, not a trace of evidence could they produce.
“She must have left the town,” they said. “Can’t her guardian suggest anything?”
“Thank you,” said the invincible Miss Mulberry. “I’m dealing with that.”
She bowed them out of the antiseptic study, and hoped and prayed for the best. But she would not have been human if she hadn’t, during the past twenty-four hours, succeeded in transferring an increasing load of responsibility on to the said guardian’s unhelpful shoulders. Who had sent Ursula back to St. Ethelburga’s? Who had done nothing at all but transmit extremely discourteous telegrams? Who, presumably, knew something of Ursula’s non-scholastic friends, and if he would only take a little trouble could say which of them would be likely to turn up on a motor-bicycle and carry her off? And who, on the other hand, had ninety-six other girls to look after, and practically twice that number of parents to take them away if this duty were forgotten?
“What more can I do?” demanded the head-mistress of her pale-green walls. “I’ve offered to go and see him, and he hasn’t even answered. All I know is that if he tries to send her back again, I won’t have her. Unless, of course …”
But this is weakness. Remember the ninety-six. Remember the half-yearly balance-sheet. Remember the sacred torch. No Ursula can fit into that scheme again, however innocent her eyes or graceful her outline; however much she may haunt this antiseptic study in the semblance of one weeping over a volume of Lord Tennyson’s poems.
Miss Mulberry shakes her head, and replaces her spectacles, and returns to the daily grind. St. Ethelburga’s picks up the rhythm of its endless activity. Upstairs in her bedroom Miss Maplethorpe is staring at a stringed instrument, only one of whose strings has survived its impris
onment in the cupboard next to the hot-water pipes. Does Miss Maplethorpe, then, typify Hope? We should say not, judging by her expression. We are glad to report that Miss Maplethorpe is looking both gloomy and conscience-stricken.
“We drove her to it,” she mutters; and though “we” clearly means “I,” and “it” bears no definable meaning at all, one may yet read into this confession a sincere and welcome note of remorse. Perhaps Noodles is a martyr after all, for we don’t think, somehow, that Miss Maplethorpe will go bagging stringed instruments or banning the bathing-beach in quite such a hurry next time. That is, if there is ever another Noodles to give her a second chance.
4
Meanwhile the original Noodles is still suspended uncomfortably on the brink of her professional career. The afternoon rehearsal had proved even vaguer and more footling than the one in the morning. Nothing that could possibly be described as a quorum of Dominoes had been raked together until nearly four o’clock, and even then nobody had seemed to know or care how the proceedings should be conducted. The whole company—except Mr. Mackworth and Miss Selbrook, who never turned up at all—complained of extreme exhaustion, which in truth appeared to have affected every power except that of ceaseless, aimless conversation. After all, they had scrambled through the show last night without their alleged comedienne, so presumably they could scramble through it again. Besides, Friday was always a rotten house, and must therefore, one gathered, expect a rotten entertainment. Besides, again, they couldn’t do anything without the pianist. But principally they were all so set and hardened in their own individual turns—and the ensembles were just a noise that they roared through anyhow—that they couldn’t seriously imagine that Noodles needed anything more than to be dressed and made-up and pushed through the dusty curtains at the right moment, when of course she would do whatever it was that Lester had engaged her for. Why tire themselves, then, by repeating stuff which they all knew in their sleep? Call it a rehearsal, by all means, because there was something matey and mystic about these gatherings in the deserted Pavilion Chalet; something which kept them alive and preserved the flattering belief that they worked far harder than anybody in a shop or an office; and something which killed time far more swiftly and satisfactorily than wandering about the town and waiting for it to be eight o’clock. But don’t let’s carry the thing to the length of singing songs or giving recitations which had done very well without private re-polishing for the past five, ten or fifteen years. Let’s bore the public, whom we hate and despise, but don’t for Heaven’s sake let’s bore ourselves or each other.
Another Part of the Wood Page 16
