Night at the Vulcan Read Online Free PDF

Belle Tansley this morning?”
    Sucking her left hand and arranging roses with her right, Martyn wondered how she should respond to this advance. She called out tentatively: “I’m afraid it’s not Miss Tansley.”
    “What’s that?” the voice said vaguely, and a moment later she heard the brisk sound of a clothes-brush at work.
    The roses were done at last. She stood with the ends of the stalks in her hand and wondered why she had become so nervous.
    “Here we go again,” a voice said in the doorway. She spun round to face a small man in an alpaca coat with a dinner-jacket in his hands. He stared at her with his jaw dropped. “Pardon me,” he said. “I thought you was Miss Tansley.”
    Martyn explained. “Well!” he said. “That’ll be her heart, that will. She ought to have given up before this. I warned her. In hospital, too? T’ch, t’ch, t’ch.” He wagged his head and looked, apparently in astonishment, at Martyn. “So that’s the story,” he continued, “and you’ve stepped into the breach. Fancy that! Better introduce ourselves, hadn’t we? The name’s Cringle but Bob’ll do as well as anything else. I’m ’is lordship’s dresser. How are you?”
    Martyn gave him her name and they shook hands. He had a pleasant face covered with a cobweb of fine wrinkles. “Been long at this game?” he asked, and added: “Well, that’s a foolish question, isn’t it? I should have said: Will this be your first place, or Are you doing it in your school holidays, or something of that sort.”
    “Do you suppose,” Martyn said anxiously, “Miss Hamilton will think I’m too young?”
    “Not if you give satisfaction, she won’t. She’s all right if you give satisfaction. Different from my case. Slave meself dizzy, I can, and if ’is lordship’s in one of ’is moods, what do I get for it? Spare me days, I don’t know why I put up with it and that’s a fact. But
she’s
all right if she likes you.” He paused and added tentatively: “But you know all about that, I dare say.” Martyn was silent and felt his curiosity reach out as if it were something tangible. At last she said desperately: “I’ll try. I want to give satisfaction.”
    He glanced round the room. “Looks nice,” he said. “Are you pressed and shook out? Yes, I can see you are. Flowers too. Very nice. Would you be a friend of hers? Doing it to oblige, like?”
    “No, no. I’ve never seen her. Except in the pictures, of course.”
    “Is that a fact?” His rather bird-like eyes were bright with speculation. “Young ladies,” he said, “have to turn their hands to all sorts of work these days, don’t they?”
    “I suppose so. Yes.”
    “No offence, I hope, but I was wondering if you come from one of those drama-schools. Hoping to learn a bit, watching from the side, like.”
    A kind of sheepishness that had hardened into obstinacy prevented her from telling him in a few words why she was there. The impulse of a fortnight ago to rush to somebody — the ship’s captain, the High Commissioner for her own country, anyone — and unload her burden of disaster had given place almost at once to a determined silence. This mess was of her own making, she had decided, and she herself would see it out. And throughout the loneliness and panic of her ordeal, to this resolution she had stuck. It had ceased to be a reasoned affair with Martyn: the less she said, the less she wanted to say. She had become crystallized in reticence.
    So she met the curiosity of the little dresser with an evasion. “It’d be wonderful,” she said, “if I did get the chance.”
    A deep voice with an unusually vibrant quality called out on the stage. “Bob! Where the devil have you got to? Bob!”
    “Cripes!” the little dresser ejaculated. “Here we are
and
in one of our tantrums.
In here, sir! Coming, sir
!”
    He darted towards the doorway but before he reached it a man appeared there, a man so tall that for a fraction of a second he looked