Tempest-Tost

by Robertson Davies

  He had, in the course of a few weeks, learned much about himself. He had learned that he had no talent as a joker. But then, he was comforted to notice, Griselda did not seem to care for jokes, and never smiled at Shortreed’s finest strokes, though she often laughed at young Bridgetower’s nonsense, which meant nothing to Hector. He learned that his youth was gone, and that his attempts to dress youthfully made him ridiculous. Larry Pye, who was over fifty, could wear anything he liked, including very old Army shorts, and no one laughed; but when Hector wore a sports shirt he felt naked and looked foolish. He had learned that it was possible for him to throw himself in Griselda’s way constantly, without her taking any notice of him. She, who had smiled so meaningfully at him, did not even heed his presence now. And yet when it was necessary to the action of the play that she, as Ariel, should sing softly into his ear as he pretended to be asleep, he knew that his face reddened, that his breathing was hard and that the blood beat in his ears and eyes; he thought “I love you, I love you,” as she knelt by him, and was hurt and dismayed that in some way the message was not plain to her. Wild schemes, as they appeared to him, kept coming into his mind by which he would make his love known. He would write a letter—but he knew his limitations as a writer. He would ask to see her privately some evening, ask for an hour uninterrupted; but would he be able to speak? No, he could not face such an ordeal; the old gods of planning and common sense had deserted him. He would wait until some lucky chance brought them together, and then, on the spur of the moment, he would speak. But chance never did bring them together. He did not know what to do.

  His love for Griselda had undergone a change which frightened him. When he had awakened that morning, sure that he loved her, he had enjoyed the happiness of the sensation. For perhaps a week he had thought of his attachment chiefly as an appurtenance to himself. In his little mental drama he was the principal figure, and Griselda was a supporting player. But as time wore on the emphasis shifted, and Griselda became the chief person of the drama, and he was a minor character, a mere bit player, aching for a scene with her. For the first time in his life Hector discovered that it was possible for someone to be more important to him than himself.

  He had no need now to look ruefully at the item in his Plan of Conduct which urged him to give up pie. His appetite waned, and his accustomed waitress at the Snak Shak commented on it. He did not lose any of his bulk, but he looked puffy and distressed. One day he tore the Plan of Conduct out of his book and burned it; it seemed to him to be stupid and worthless, an insult to what he felt. Indeed his whole concept of life as something which could be governed by schemes in pocketbooks appeared to him suddenly to be trivial and contemptible.

  He wanted to talk to somebody about his love, but he knew no one to whom he could even hint of such a thing. He engaged Mr. Adams in conversation about The Tempest, and led up to the character of Ariel. “I think you’ll like that in our production,” said he; “we have a very clever girl playing Ariel, a Miss Webster.”

  “She’ll have to be clever,” said Adams; “Shakespeare wrote that part for a boy, and it’s always a mistake to cast a woman for it. I don’t know that I care to see some great lolloping girl attempt it.” This last remark was pure spite, and Adams did not really know why he made it. But there is a spirit of Malignance which makes people say offensive things to lovers about those they love, even when that love is hidden, and Mr. Adams was, for the moment, the instrument of it. Hector was wounded, but he could say nothing, for fear of revealing what might, he knew, bring him into derision.

  Sexual desire played no conscious part in what he felt for Griselda. Indeed, it had never entered his life since that incident at the Normal School Conversazione. He did not long to possess her physically; he wanted to dominate her mentally. He wanted her to think of him as he thought of her, as of someone who stood high above and apart from the rest of mankind. He wanted to defend her from dangers; he wanted to bring her great gifts of courage and wisdom; he wanted to take her from the world and keep her to himself, and to know that she was blissfully happy to renounce the world for him. He thought that once he had declared his love, she might permit him to kiss her, but his imagination shrank quickly from that kiss; it would, he was sure, be a thing of such pain and joy that it might rob him of his senses. He had never, in all his forty years, kissed any woman but his mother.

  Nevertheless, he was strongly conscious that Griselda was a woman, and was subject to the disabilities which he believed to be a special and unjust burden to her sex. When, at rehearsals, she seemed to be a little out of sorts, or flung herself on the grass to rest, or wore the look of weary beauty which had worked so powerfully upon Solly at the casting meeting, Hector grieved that she might be in the throes of those “illnesses peculiar to women” of which, as a boy, he had read in patent medicine almanacs. Thinking this, he could become quite maudlin on her account, and once remarked to the astonished Mr. Leakey, out of the blue, that women had a great deal to bear which men could only guess at.

  If only he could tell someone about his love! The urge to talk about it was mastered, but only just, by his fear of making himself foolish, or of destroying the magic of his feelings by giving them a voice. Once he thought seriously of seeking an interview with Mr. Webster, and telling that gentleman that he, Hector, loved his daughter and wanted her father’s consent to seek her hand. This was, he realized, no longer the custom, but what he felt for Griselda demanded the fullest measure of formality. Besides, he was nearer in age to Mr. Webster than to his daughter; an older man, and the father of such a girl, would surely understand the frankness and nobility which prompted such an action. Fortunately better sense prevailed, and Mr. Webster was spared an interview which he would have found embarrassing and depressing.

  FREDDY WAS NOT SO FORTUNATE. Hector found her in the grounds at St. Agnes’ one afternoon when he had, as usual, arrived early for rehearsal; she lay on the grass, memorizing her words as the goddess Ceres. Hector had no fear of adolescent girls, for he had taught hundreds of them. Here, he thought, was someone he could pump about Griselda.

  “I see you are getting your words by heart,” said he.

  “Yes,” said Freddy.

  “That’s right. We won’t make much progress until we are all perfect in our words.”

  “I suppose not.”

  “Do you find memorizing hard?”

  “Not when I’m allowed to concentrate on it.”

  “You should memorize each night, the last thing before you go to sleep. That is the best way to memorize formulae, or anything like that.”

  “Really?”

  “Why are you not at school?”

  “I’ve been ill; I’m taking a term off.”

  “Pity, pity; you shouldn’t break the flow of your education until it is complete. That is, if you can afford to keep up the continuity, which not everyone is able to do.”

  “The doctor told my father to keep me at home. I’ve nothing to say about it.”

  “Ah. Pity, pity.”

  A pause, during which Freddy and Hector regarded one another solemnly.

  “A very fine old house you have here.”

  “Thank you.”

  “How old, now?”

  “Oh, about a hundred and thirty years, I suppose. Prebendary Bedlam built most of it.”

  “Who?”

  “You aren’t a native of Salterton, are you?”

  “No.”

  “Then it’s not likely you’d have heard of him.”

  “You have a lovely big room, I expect.”

  “No, quite small.”

  “But your sister has a lovely big room, I expect?”

  “She has two rooms; a sitting-room and a bedroom with the biggest bed in it you ever saw, with a crimson silk bedspread,” said Freddy, who was getting tired of this and decided to give the pryer some well-deserved mis-information. “She has a marvellous bathroom, with a sunken tub, and a peach basin, and a black John and a toilet roll which plays The
Lass of Richmond Hill when you pull it,” she continued, beginning to enjoy herself.

  Hector was not sure how he should take this. Long experience of girls of Freddy’s age told him that she was lying. Nevertheless, she was Griselda’s sister, and to that extent sacred. He decided to give her the benefit of the doubt.

  “That’s very interesting,” said he. “And which would be her window, now?”

  “Those big ones there,” said Freddy, pointing to her father’s windows. Was he a Peeping Tom, she wondered.

  “Has your sister finished school?”

  “Yes.”

  “Ah, she didn’t lose terms like you. She’ll have been very clever at school?”

  “Not very,” said Freddy.

  “Really? But she was a leader, I suppose? I expect she was very much admired?”

  So that’s it, thought Freddy. This silly old clown is stuck on Gristle. The dirty old man, chasing a girl less than half his age. Just another John Knox. With the concentrated spite of the eunuch, or the sexless, she said:

  “No, she wasn’t liked, really, except by a few. But she was the champion burper of the school. She can swallow an awful lot of air, you know, and belch the first few bars of God Save the King, while saluting. She was always begged to do it on stunt nights.”

  Hector walked away, saddened. The child was a liar, and perhaps not quite right in the head, but her blasphemy had wounded him, none the less.

  HECTOR WAS WRONG IN SUPPOSING that Griselda did not notice him. She noticed that he seemed often to be in the way, that he changed colour and breathed heavily when she sang her little piece into his ear, and that he seemed to be physically timid and fearful of accidents. This last observation was unjust, and was the outcome of Hector’s solicitude for her; as Ariel she had to climb about on some platforms which Tom had put up at the back of the stage and disguised with greenery; it never entered her head to be frightened of these trivial heights, but whenever she had to get down from them, she was likely to find Hector there, with a hand outstretched, and a look of apprehension on his face; he would assist her to the ground, gingerly, and walk away, as though embarrassed. Larry Pye sometimes wanted to do the same thing, but she knew Larry; he wanted to squeeze her legs as he lifted her, and she usually jumped straight at him, causing him to skip ungallantly out of danger. But she assumed that Hector was a fusspot who thought that she could not jump six or eight feet without breaking something.

  Hector, like everyone else in the company, came into the game which she played with Roger, as well. That young man had not fallen under the spell of Valentine Rich’s personality, as everyone else connected with the production had done in some degree. There was between them one of those unaccountable antipathies which occasionally occur, and which nothing can be done to remedy. Roger admitted that Valentine was an unusually capable director, but he did not like her; he set her down as a Bossy Woman; perhaps this was because he knew that she could never be influenced by his sort of charm. Valentine considered Roger a godsend as a juvenile lead in an amateur play, but she did not like him; he was a type which she had met many times in the theatre, and which, except for theatrical purposes, she could not endure. And although she was fully as tactful in her dealings with him as with the rest of the company, he sensed her dislike beneath her courtesy, just as she sensed his dislike beneath his compliance. Shut out from the group which was warmed and enspirited by Valentine, he made fun of it to Griselda.

  She was quickly attracted by anything which savoured of sophistication, and to the young the easy, ill-founded cynicism which finds everybody and everything just a little second-rate is a kind of fool’s gold. It was flattering that Roger should make fun of the others to her; to be chosen as the confidante of a superior spirit is always flattering. Griselda was very far from being a fool; she had what Dr. Johnson called “a bottom of good sense”, but she was not quite nineteen, and she had never met anyone like Roger before.

  He, in his turn, was delighted that he had so quickly found a way to attract her. She was not, he recognized, like any girl upon whom he had tried his skill before. She was wealthy, which meant that he must be very careful, for one does not lightly seduce rich girls; they have too many powerful relatives, and are too much accustomed to getting the better of all things. He seriously questioned whether he could proceed to the usual conclusion of his plan with Griselda. Indeed, he marvelled dimly that gold, which could make an attractive girl so much more attractive, should also protect her so thoroughly. And as well as money, Griselda had the manners and the conversation of a well-bred girl who has read a great many books of the easier sort, and these qualities Roger mistook for worldly wisdom and unusual intelligence. For the first time in his life Roger had met a girl with whom he felt that a “nice”—well, fairly nice—relationship was worth cultivating. Griselda was capable of giving him something which he valued even more than physical satisfaction; she could give him class. The other thing he could find elsewhere when he wanted it. Never any shortage of that.

  Thus they struck up an amused conspiracy against the rest of the company. Nobody cared except Valentine, who thought it bad for the play; except Hector, who did not understand it but who saw that Griselda was too often laughing in a corner with Tasset; except Pearl Vambrace, who had fallen as much in love with Roger as it is possible to fall in love with a man who never speaks to you except in lines written by Shakespeare, lines charged with a noble love which is nothing but play-acting.

  Bad for the play—yes, Valentine thought that. But she knew that she was nettled by anything which gave Roger satisfaction, and she was angry with herself for being so petty. She could not keep up her accustomed tact one day at rehearsal when Roger repeatedly fluffed his lines in a scene with Pearl.

  “Roger, it’s far past the time when you should know this scene,” said she.

  “Sorry,” said Roger, in a tone which suggested that he thought she was being wearisome and must be humoured.

  “It’s useless to say that you are sorry if you have no intention of improving,” she said; “you have said ‘sorry’ in very much that tone at the last four rehearsals. I am growing tired of it.”

  Pearl, moved by the desire for self-sacrifice which is one of the most dangerous characteristics of unwanted lovers, spoke:

  “It’s really my fault, Miss Rich,” said she; “I make a move there which puts him off, I think.”

  “No, you don’t do anything of the kind,” said Valentine crossly; “you are perfectly all right and you would be much better if you had something to act against.”

  “If I am really such a nuisance, Miss Rich,” said Roger, “perhaps it isn’t too late to reconsider the casting.”

  “Oh, don’t talk like an idiot,” said Valentine, angrily conscious that she was growing red in the face. “You are the best person for the part, and you know it. You can do it very well, and you will do it very well. If you drop out now you will make all sorts of difficulties for everybody. But I want you to work at rehearsals, and spend less time giggling in the background with Griselda. You are both of you behaving like children. A production like this depends on everybody’s good work and good will. It simply is not fair to behave as you are doing.”

  Roger was very angry. That he, a man who had got the better of so many women should be spoken to in that tone by a woman, and in front of a lot of nincompoops! He turned to leave the stage.

  “Go back to your place, Roger, and finish your scene,” said Valentine in the voice which had caused two London critics to call her the best Lady Macbeth among the younger generation of actresses.

  To Roger’s intense astonishment, he did so, and under the stress of anger, he acted quite well. But as he looked into Pearl’s eyes he saw pity and love there, and he hated her for it until the rehearsal was over, when he promptly forgot her.

  AAT ELEVEN O’CLOCK THAT NIGHT Griselda sat at her window, studying her lines. She had been alarmed and shamed by Valentine’s words; she was also angry. If that was the way
Valentine thought about her, she would show that she could behave in any way she pleased, and act Ariel too. She looked out of her window at the upper lawn; there was the spot, there by that tree, where Solly had kissed her. She remembered it with pleasure. But what a mess he had turned out to be! Afraid of his mother! Griselda, who had forgotten what it was like to have a mother, and who could not know what the relationship between a man and his mother can be, was scornful. Roger wasn’t such a softy. It was only since she had met Roger that she had really known how silly most people are.

  Was she in love with Roger? She didn’t really know, but she half suspected that she was. Anyhow, she knew who did love Roger, and that was that stupid Pearl Vambrace, whose hems were always uneven, and whose hair looked as if it needed a good wash. But Pearl wasn’t going to get Roger until Griselda had quite made up her mind about him. Yes, very likely she was in love with Roger.

  The fact was that Griselda’s notions about love, allowing for differences of sex, were no more clear-cut than those of Hector Mackilwraith. But as she leaned out of her window and took a long breath of the warm spring night, she felt that it was a very fine thing to be eighteen and in love.

  ON THE OTHER SIDE of the house Freddy crept to the window of a darkened closet and looked out. Yes; there it was; just what she had expected to see. A dark shape standing among the trees, not easy to make out, but apparently with its head thrown back and its eyes raised, undoubtedly in worship, toward the windows of her father’s bedroom.

  Putting half a walnut shell in her mouth she popped her head out of the window and shouted in her deepest voice: “Who’s that down there?”

  There was a wild trampling of shrubbery, and a thickset figure rushed toward the road.