Night at the Vulcan Read Online Free PDF Page A

some roses for Miss Helena Hamilton. He didn’t give me any money and I’m afraid I haven’t got any. Is all this very irregular and tiresome?”
    “That will be quayte O.K.” the girl said in a friendly manner. “Mr. Grantley has an account.”
    “Perhaps you know what sort of roses I should get,” Martyn suggested. She felt extraordinarily light and rather loquacious. “You see, I’m Miss Hamilton’s dresser but I’m new and I don’t know what she likes.”
    “Red would be quayte in order, I think. There are some lovely Bloody Warriors just in.” She caught Martyn’s eye and giggled. “Well, they do think of the weirdest names, don’t they? Look: aren’t they lovelies?” She held up a group of roses with drops of water clinging to their half-opened petals. “Gorgeous,” she said, “aren’t they? Such a colour.”
    Martyn, appalled at the price, took a dozen. The girl looked curiously at her and said: “Miss Hamilton’s dresser. Fancy! Aren’t you lucky?” and she was vividly reminded of Fred Badger.
    “I feel terribly lucky this morning,” she said and was going away when the girl, turning pink under her makeup, said: “Pardon me asking, but I don’t suppose you could get me Miss Hamilton’s autograph. I’d be ever so thrilled.”
    “I haven’t even seen her yet but I’ll do my best.”
    “You
are
a duck. Thanks a million. Of course,” the girl added, “I’m a real fan. I never miss any of her pictures and I do think Adam Poole — pardon me, Mr. Poole — is simply mawvellous. I mean to say I think he’s just mawvellous. They’re so mawvellous together. I suppose he’s crazy about her in real life, isn’t he? I always say they couldn’t act together like that — you know, so gorgeously — unless they had a pretty hot clue on the sayde. Don’t you agree?”
    Martyn said she hadn’t had a chance of forming an opinion as yet and left the florist in pensive contemplation of the remaining Bloody Warriors.
    When she got back to the theatre its character had completely changed: it was alive and noisy. The dock-doors were open and sunlight lay in incongruous patches on painted canvas and stacked furniture. Up in the grid there was a sound of hammering. A back cloth hung diagonally in mid-air and descended in jerks, while a man in shirtsleeves shouted: “Down on yer long. Now yer short. Now bodily. Right-oh! Dead it. Now find yer Number Two.”
    A chandelier lay in a heap in the middle of the stage, and above it was suspended a batten of spotlights within reach of an elderly mechanist who fitted pink and straw-coloured mediums into their frames. Near the stage-door a group of men stared at a small Empire desk from which a stage-hand had removed a cloth wrapping. A tall young man in spectacles, wearing a red pullover and corduroy trousers, said irritably: “It’s too bloody chi-chi. Without a shadow of doubt, he’ll hate its guts.”
    He glanced at Martyn and added: “Put them in her room, dear, will you?”
    She hurried to the dressing-room passage and found that here too there was life and movement. A vacuum-cleaner hummed in the Greenroom, a bald man in overalls was tacking cards on the doors, somewhere down the passage an unseen person sang cheerfully and the door next to Miss Hamilton’s was open. These signs of preparation awakened in Martyn a sense of urgency. In a sudden fluster she unwrapped her roses and thrust them into the vase. The stalks were too long and she had nothing to cut them with. She ran down the passage to the empty room, and reflected as she rootled in her suitcase that she would be expected to have sewing materials at hand. Here was the housewife an aunt had given her when she left New Zealand but it was depleted and in a muddle. She ran back with it, sawed at the rose stems with her nail-scissors and, when someone in the next room tapped on the wall, inadvertently jammed the points into her hand.
    “And how,” a disembodied voice inquired, “is La