Lovers, Make Moan (Mrs. Bradley)

by Gladys Mitchell

  Meanwhile the play romped on and reached the point where Theseus and his train find the lovers asleep in the woods. Young Yolanda, slim and looking tall in her doublet and hose, and permitted, for this one scene, to wear her dagger (one of the prize pieces of Marcus Lynn’s collection) proudly led in the dogs. Her father, magnificent boots and all, praised them in the most beautiful description of hounds ever penned:

  ‘My hounds are bred out of the Spartan kind,

  So flew’d, so sanded; and their heads are hung

  With ears that sweep away the morning dew;

  Crook-knee’d and dew-lapp’d like Thessalian bulls;

  Slow in pursuit, but match’d in mouth like bells,

  Each under each,’

  Brian Yorke declaimed thus, while his daughter, determined that on this occasion the dogs should receive their due meed of applause, paraded them across the front of the stage. It was against orders, but to good effect.

  What was less effective was the exit of Bottom from the wood. After the huntsmen had been bidden to blow their horns and wake the lovers and these had gone off with Theseus and the rest, Bottom scrambled dizzily to his feet. Awakened and not at all sure of what had been happening to him among the woodland sprites, Rinkley was supposed to have communed with himself, planned to have Quince write a ballad about the amazing dream he thought he had had in the wood, and then crossed the stage to the prompt side ready to come on again when the workmen meet in Quince’s house.

  Instead of this, as soon as the stage was clear, Rinkley, having got unsteadily to his feet, went off on the O.P. side in the wake of the hunting-party.

  To the majority of the audience this deviation from the rehearsed procedure made no difference at all. Even those who were familiar with the full text of the play probably thought that the producer was responsible for the innovation. As for Rinkley himself, he staggered away and when he reached the trestle tables which held the “props,” among the trees, was violently sick.

  Yorke, who was taken aback by the actor’s unscripted and unrehearsed exit, hastened after him. All questions were obviously unnecessary and Yorke asked only one. “I say,” he said, “what’s come over you?”

  “Those damned mussels. I should never have eaten them.” Another indescribable upheaval followed and then Rinkley zigzagged blindly away and lay on a patch of grass shivering and sweating. Yorke went off to look for assistance.

  “What is it?” asked Robina Lester, who was picking up her bits and pieces for the workmen’s play and had witnessed Rinkley’s unrehearsed exit.

  “Food poisoning. Dr. Jeanne-Marie is in the audience. I’ll stay with him if you’ll go and get her. Be as quick as you can.”

  Deborah came up. Yorke said, “I don’t think he can go on again tonight. Go in front and beg the indulgence of the audience for a few minutes, would you, while we get the understudy changed and briefed?”

  “Mussels?” said Dr. Jeanne-Marie. “He had better go to hospital, although it seems there can be little left in his stomach. He may have an allergy to shellfish, but one thinks also of myelotoxin, so to get the stomach washed out is precautionary.” Some of the men carried the sweating, trembling, mottled Rinkley up the slope to the house, ready for the ambulance to pick him up, using the stretcher which was in readiness for carrying Pyramus off the stage in the workmen’s play. While, accompanied by Deborah, who was not needed again until the very end of the show, and Dr. Jeanne-Marie who was to do the telephoning, the bearers carried the feebly protesting man up through the woods, Brian Yorke went to find Donald Bourton and urge him to change as quickly as he could from the Fairy King’s fantastic trappings into the tunic and armour of Pyramus.

  He found his Oberon in a little clearing, but was perturbed to note a half-empty bottle of whisky at Bourton’s side and Bourton seated on the ground.

  “Here!” he said urgently. “On your feet, Don, and make it slippy.”

  “Ur?”

  “Rinkley has passed out on us. Get into the Pyramus outfit. You’ll have to stand in.”

  “Can’t. Got to go on again as Oberon.” He was slightly glassy-eyed, but his speech was clear and when he rose to his feet he was quite steady.

  “Never mind about Oberon. Look, I’m cutting out the little scene where Bottom turns up again at Quince’s house and I’ve told the scene-shifters to put on the palace back-drop. We’ll go straight into the workmen’s play.”

  As he talked he had Bourton by the arm and was urging him towards the table on which the armour, sword-belt, and helmet were laid out. An anxious Marcus Lynn was standing there and received their advent with relief.

  “Oh, good man, Donald!” he said. “Come on. I’ll help you.”

  “And I’ll go in front again and hold the audience for another few minutes,” said Yorke.

  To release the men who had carried Rinkley up to the house and who were needed in the next scene, Deborah remained with the patient until the ambulance came for him and so she missed the extraordinary conclusion of the third night of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. As the play, in view of Rinkley’s retirement and the necessity to put on Bourton as his understudy, was to conclude with the burgomask dance, leaving out the fairy ending except for Puck’s last lines, she would not be required on stage again, for there was no time for Bourton to change back again from Pyramus to Oberon.

  With him in Rinkley’s part, the workmen’s scene went even better than it had done at the two previous performances, and he, whether influenced or not by the whisky, appeared to be enjoying himself. The interruptions, essays of wit, ripostes and responses from the court party, sparkled and crackled as they had never done before. Then came the point at which Pyramus, believing that the lion had killed Thisbe and carried her off, decides to commit suicide.

  Pyramus usually stands up to make his farewell speech before stabbing himself and falling to the ground, and Rinkley had played it this way. He did a particularly good theatrical fall and liked to show it off to the audience. Bourton changed this. He lay down with great care and a meticulous arrangement of his tunic after Quince had helped him to get out of his body-armour, and then, having declaimed that he was dead, fled and that his soul was in the sky, he raised himself slightly on one elbow, gave an unexpected hiccup, raised the dagger and plunged it into his body. Picking up her cue, Susan Hythe, as Thisbe, capered on to the centre of the stage and gazed concernedly down on him.

  “‘What, dead, my dove?’” she enquired, and continued: “‘O Pyramus, arise! Speak, speak. Quite dumb? Dead, dead? A tomb must cover thy sweet eyes.’”

  This was almost the cue for Quince and Lion to come in with their stretcher (which had been returned) and convey Pyramus into the wings, but before this happened Thisbe was supposed to pull out the dagger so that at the end of her speech she could commit suicide with it.

  This she failed to do because the dagger remained stuck fast. The audience thought that this was all part of the fun, but Susan signalled to the pall-bearers to come on, and the rigid body of Pyramus was carried off with the dagger still fixed in position. Susan turned her back on the audience and mouthed at Yorke, who was looking truly ducal as Theseus, “No dagger! It won’t come unstuck. What shall I do?”

  “Drop dead,” he said, in a voice the audience could hear. There was a roar of appreciative laughter at this unscripted addendum, and Thisbe, clutching her heart, dropped slowly, gracefully and without hurting herself, on to the turf. Quince, without Lion, came galloping back. He went up to Theseus and muttered, “Something’s happened. He can’t come on again. Passed out.”

  “Oh, damn! We must play on, though. Do the dance,” said Yorke, “and we’ll finish.”

  “Right,” said Marcus Lynn. “‘Will it please you to see the epilogue?’” he demanded loudly, “‘or to hear a burgomask dance between two of our company?’”

  “‘No epilogue, but come, your burgomask,’” shouted Yorke, hoping that this truncated speech would indicate to the ladies of the orchestra that he
had decided to cut the play short at this point. To make certain, however, that they would get the message, he murmured a word to Jonathan, who, as Demetrius, was standing behind him, and Jonathan slipped out. The orchestra produced some music from Capriole Suite, Quince and Lion performed their clodhoppers’ dance and, when this was over, they and the rest of the workmen retired into the wings. Theseus spoke the lines which took the court party off the stage and there was only a short pause (which, anyway, was covered by applause from the audience) before Puck came on and spoke the last few lines of the play.

  When the bouquets to Valerie Yorke, Barbara Bourton, Emma Lynn, and Deborah had been presented and, with some difficulty, the mayor had been prevented from making his threatened speech, Marcus Lynn alone saw the notables off as the audience drifted out. There was much revving-up of cars, Lynn’s business friends departed, and then an appalled producer had to give the cast the news. The totally unexpected collapse of Donald Bourton which had prevented his return on stage was not due to drink or to natural causes. By some so-far unexplained mischance, he had been given the wrong dagger and, ail-unwittingly, had stabbed himself to death with it.

  7

  Bare Bodkin

  Ah, me, for pity!—what a dream was here!

  It was well after midnight before the actors were able to leave, but all was over at last and the body removed to the mortuary. Deborah offered Barbara Bourton a bed, but she, calm and poised as ever, politely declined the offer. Her sister and her sister’s husband, she said, had been in the audience and would still be waiting to drive her home.

  “Are they staying with you?” Deborah asked.

  “Oh, yes. Please don’t worry. I shall be all right.” So Deborah let her go and walked up to the house with Jonathan. At last they were alone and in their own drawing-room. Jonathan opened one of the bottles of champagne which had been destined for the celebrations and, having poured out two glassfuls, sat down and stared at the electric fire which, finding Deborah shivering, he had switched on.

  “But how could the wrong dagger have got into that sword-belt?” she asked.

  “Very easily,” he replied. “It almost happened when I was in College, although the circumstances were not quite the same. We were doing Hamlet and some of the chaps were fooling about in the dressing-room and somebody picked up the wrong dagger and went lunging about with it, thinking it was a harmless one. Luckily somebody caught his arm before he could do any damage; otherwise we might have had just the same sort of horrible accident as we’ve had here tonight. People really should be more careful, even with theatrical properties they think are safe to handle.”

  “I suppose it was an accident?” said Deborah.

  “An accident? What else could it have been?”

  “I don’t like accidents which kill people.”

  “Who does? But they happen every day.”

  “Yes, crashed cars and falls and burns in people’s homes and old people and young children knocked down crossing the street, but this was quite different and it could only have happened to Donald.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “If Rinkley had not been taken ill, Donald would not have played Pyramus.”

  “So?”

  “Well, don’t you think that the minute Rinkley drew it out, he would have known it was the wrong dagger? Don’t you remember how nervous he was about the right one until he had convinced himself it was harmless? He had used it at rehearsals, remember. There’s such a thing as the kinaesthetic sense, you know, in all of us. The very first feel of the dagger as he handled it would have warned him. He would never have risked using it on himself. I suppose there will have to be an enquiry to find out what led to the daggers being changed, and we shall have the police and the reporters and goodness knows what number of gaping sightseers. Oh, God! What an ending to the play!”

  “Yes. Well, that can’t be helped. Naturally there will have to be an official enquiry, even although the death was accidental.”

  “Are you trying to convince yourself that it was? Quite a number of people may not have liked Donald, you know.”

  “I was one of them. He was far too forthcoming with you to meet with my approval.”

  “And he was a lot more forthcoming with some people than ever he was with me. And, although I wouldn’t say this to anybody but you, his Barbara wasn’t altogether overwhelmed by his sudden death, you know.”

  “Suffering from shock, but the whole realisation of what happened hadn’t hit her.”

  “That could be so. Very well, I’ll be charitable. Drink up and let’s go to bed. There will be plenty to do tomorrow and the next day. For one thing, Marcus Lynn’s workmen will be here on Monday to dismantle the set-up and take away the amplifiers and the lights and the painted scenery. Oh, and I expect someone will come along tomorrow to collect Ganymede and Lucien. Jeanne-Marie let them sleep on instead of waking them and taking them home.”

  This someone turned out to be Dr. Jeanne-Marie herself. She did not work on Sundays, she explained, except to answer emergency calls. She accepted a drink and came out with a direct reference to the tragedy of the previous evening.

  “That was a very bad thing,” she said. “Is there any chance, do you think, that one of the small children who were in the play—I am thinking of the little boys rather than of the little girls—that one of them could have been playing with the weapons, probably before the performance began?”

  “It took a little girl to sneak the bloodhounds away, so children can get at the props,” said Deborah.

  “So I am right about the children?”

  “Not a chance,” said Jonathan. “At the dress-rehearsal we had a bit of trouble, but of a very different kind. Supervision was not very strict and our two, Rosamund and Edmund, contrived to purloin the two bloodhounds and take them to bed. They were severely scolded—I put Rosamund as the organiser of the enterprise—and Signora Moretti was asked to keep a particularly vigilant eye on her charges during the actual performances.”

  “Nobody would manage to elude that old lady, as I think you will agree,” said Deborah. “Besides, the properties were not put out until the children were being dressed up. I know that for a fact, and once the performance started there were always people in the wings. No child could have got away with touching anything on the props tables.”

  “What must have happened, I think,” said Jonathan, “was that either Yorke or one of the Lynns, who carried the things down and laid them out on the tables, dropped the daggers out of the belts quite by accident and put the wrong dagger into the belt meant for Pyramus. There were four daggers and two swords. Yorke had a sword and, as Oberon, Bourton had one, but the swords don’t come into it. I myself had a dagger, so had Tom Woolidge. We found them less troublesome than swords. Then young Yolanda Yorke as Philostrate carried one in her belt, but only in the hunting scene and, even then, hers was only a very short sgian dhu, the little knife Highlanders carry stuck into their stockings, not the one she was first given.”

  “The blade which killed Mr. Bourton was six inches long. I was present when the police surgeon took it out,” said Dr. Jeanne-Marie.

  “What I don’t understand,” said Jonathan, “is how those two fellows, Lynn and young David Lester, who dumped Bourton on that stretcher and carried him off-stage, did not see that there was something very seriously wrong with him.”

  “There was nothing to see except the hilt of the dagger protruding from his body.”

  “Blood, surely?”

  “No. The only person who might have suspected something was the girl who found that she could not immediately pull the weapon out.”

  “But I thought stab wounds bled like the very dickens, Doctor.”

  “It depends in what part of the body the wound is made. In this case the most that would be noticed would be some blood from the nose and the mouth, but this could be attributed by a non-medical person to the patient’s having had a nose-bleed. Actually, there was not even this sympto
m on Mr. Bourton when we examined him, neither should I have expected it.”

  “But poor Donald died of the wound!” exclaimed Deborah. “Could you explain what you mean, Doctor?”

  “Why not? It will come out at the inquest. It depends on the position the body is in when the blow is struck. I was in the front row of the audience and saw what happened. Of course, until I was called to the side of the stage, I had no idea that the weapon was anything but a theatrical toy, although I did think that Mr. Bourton was a very good actor. To stab himself he first raised his head and shoulders a little off the ground, but not enough to make any real difference to the prone position in which he had been lying, then he stabbed himself and fell flat again. He would have lost consciousness immediately and was dead by the time Mr. Lynn and young Mr. Lester had carried him off the stage, but there was no outward sign of bleeding.”

  “Lord, yes,” said Jonathan. “I read about it in Professor Keith Simpson’s autobiography. What poor Bourton gave himself when the dagger went in was an internal haemorrhage. The blade must have gone in between two ribs and may not have pierced the lung. The blood would have seeped into the cavity of the chest and there might have been no outward sign at all except the hilt of the dagger sticking out of him.”

  When Dr. Jeanne-Marie had collected her sons, and Rosamund and Edmund had been sent to play in the garden, Marcus Lynn called to confirm that his demolition squad would be coming next day and, under the eye of their employer, would make short work of the clearing up. Marcus stayed for sherry. He was gloomy.

  “That was one hell of an ending to the show,” he said. “I’ve been to the hospital and it seems it was simply one of those things. If the poor chap had struck on a rib instead of the dagger going between two of them, there might have been some chance of saving him. As it was, there was no hope at all. Emma is terribly distressed and I suppose there will be every sort of a hooha about how the daggers got changed over.”