Night at the Vulcan Read Online Free PDF Page B

down over the dresser’s head directly into Martyn’s eyes.
    “This young lady,” Bob Cringle explained with an air of discovery, “is the new dresser for Miss Hamilton. I just been showing her the ropes, Mr. Poole, sir.”
    “You’d much better attend to your work. I want you.” He glanced again at Martyn. “Good morning,” he said and was gone. “Look at this!” she heard him say angrily in the next room. “Where
are
you!”
    Cringle paused in the doorway to turn his thumbs down and his eyes up. “Here we are, sir. What’s the little trouble?” he was saying pacifically as he disappeared.
    Martyn thought: “The picture in the Greenroom is more like him than the photographs.” Preoccupied with this discovery she was only vaguely aware of a fragrance in the air and a new voice in the passage. The next moment her employer came into the dressing-room.
    An encounter with a person hitherto only seen and heard on the cinema screen is often disconcerting. It is as if the two-dimensional and enormous image had contracted about a living skeleton and in taking on substance had acquired an embarrassing normality. One is not always glad to change the familiar shadow for the strange reality.
    Helena Hamilton was a blonde woman. She had every grace. To set down in detail the perfections of her hair, eyes, mouth and complexion, her shape and the gallantry of her carriage would be to reiterate merely that which everyone had seen in her innumerable pictures. She was, in fact, quite astonishingly beautiful. Even the circumstance of her looking somewhat older than her moving shadow could not modify the shock of finding her its equal in everything but this.
    Coupled with her beauty was her charm. This was famous. She could reduce press conferences to a conglomerate of eager, even naïve, males. She could make a curtain-speech that every leading woman in every theatre in the English-speaking world had made before her and persuade the last man in the audience that it was original. She could convince bit-part actresses playing maids in first acts that there, but for the grace of God, went she.
    On Martyn, however, taken off her balance and entirely by surprise, it was Miss Hamilton’s smell that made the first impression. At ten guineas a moderately sized bottle, she smelt like Master Fenton, all April and May. Martyn was very much shorter than Miss Hamilton but this did not prevent her from feeling cumbersome and out-of-place, as if she had been caught red-handed with her own work in the dressing-room. This awkwardness was in part dispelled by the friendliness of Miss Hamilton’s smile and the warmth of her enchanting voice.
    “You’ve come to help me, haven’t you?” she said. “Now, that
is
kind. I know all about you from Mr. Grantley and I fully expect we’ll get along famously together. The only thing I
don’t
know, in fact; is your name.”
    Martyn wondered if she ought to give only her Christian name or only her surname. She said: “Tarne. Martyn Tarne.”
    “But what a charming name!” The brilliant eyes looked into Martyn’s face and their gaze sharpened. After a fractional pause she repeated: “Really charming,” and turned her back.
    It took Martyn a moment or two to realize that this was her cue to remove Miss Hamilton’s coat. She lifted it from her shoulders — it was made of Persian lamb and smelt delicious — and hung it up. When she turned round she found that her employer was looking at her. She smiled reassuringly at Martyn and said: “You’ve got everything arranged very nicely. Roses, too. Lovely.”
    “They’re from Mr. Grantley.”
    “Sweet of him but I bet he sent you to buy them.”
    “Well—” Martyn began and was saved by the entry of the young man in the red sweater with a dressing-case for which she was given the keys. While she was unpacking it the door opened and a middle-aged, handsome man with a raffish face and an air of boldness came in. She remembered the photographs in