Tempest-Tost

by Robertson Davies

  It was curious that during this dreadful week, when Hector’s sufferings were real and intense, he found time to regret that he had not had a more literary education. His passions were too big for his vocabulary, and he could not put all that he felt into words, even to himself. As for planning and common sense, he saw them for the extremely limited servants that they were, and the foundations of his whole scheme of life were shaken.

  He knew that he was wretchedly insufficient in the part of Gonzalo. He accepted the rather mild rebuke which Valentine gave him without rancour, and almost without hearing it. He was numbed by his pain, and all that he could do was to stand as much out of sight as possible, and watch Griselda. The sight of her eased his heart. But when she went off to the lower lawn with Roger, he turned into the shrubbery like a sick animal, to be alone. The sight of Solly and Valentine was bitter to him, but only as a blow on the back hurts a man who has been stalked to the heart. He thought of the chow mein, or a cup of coffee, but suddenly all food was repugnant to him. He found a bench hidden among the fragrantly flowering shrubs, and sat upon it. From the lawn came the song of the Cobbler family, light and free on the summer air:

  Gentle Love,

  Draw forth thy wounding dart;

  Thou canst not pierce her heart;

  For I, that do approve,

  By sighs and tears

  More hot than are thy shafts,

  Did tempt, while she

  For triumph laughs.

  He broke into a cold sweat and a horrible nausea seized him. Not far away was Griselda, and Roger with her. What were they doing? He clung to the back of the bench, his eyes shut, retching horribly.

  HECTOR SLEPT NOT AT ALL that night. As a general thing, when that expression is used, people mean that they slept five hours instead of their accustomed eight. But Hector went to bed at one o’clock and lay awake until seven, when he rose and tried to rouse himself with a shower. The pelting of cold water on his weary flesh brought him some refreshment of body, but none of mind. In his room he tried to beguile the time with a batch of examination papers. Mechanically he spotted errors; mechanically he wrote TOSASM when that comment was justified, but he was like a man with a mortal sickness, and no temporary distraction could make him forget Griselda. At last he rose and went to the Snak Shak, where he could take nothing but a glass of orange juice—a small glass, not the Mammoth Jumbo Special.

  He had no school work that morning, for examinations were nearly over, and he intended to correct papers in the Men Teachers’ Room for the greater part of the day. He was free, therefore, to go to a florist’s, where he ordered a large bunch of flowers.

  “To whom shall we send it?” asked the clerk.

  He could not speak her name. A flush spread over his face and his head ached.

  “I’ll write the address for you,” said he.

  “You’ll find a nice selection of cards on the desk.”

  A nice selection of cards. The first one he saw said “In deepest Sympathy”; the next, “For a Joyous Occasion”; a third, bearing the picture of what might have been a baboon, but was perhaps intended for an Irishman, said “May good luck go wid ye, And throuble forgit ye”. He chose a plain white card, and pondered long over his message. Dared he make a declaration of love in this way? No, no; the florist’s men might read it, and know what was for her eye alone. But could he not say something which would mean nothing to the idly curious, but which would carry his meaning to her? He wrote:

  Whatever you may have been, you can count on me for anything, even Death itself.

  Hector Mackilwraith

  He read it several times. He could not put his finger on what was wrong with it, but somehow it would not do. When he tried to crush the immensities of his emotions into words, he could not get his meaning clear. At last he wrote:

  You can count on me for anything.

  Hector Mackilwraith

  He addressed the envelope and hurried out of the shop before the florist should learn his secret.

  “HALF AN HOUR. This is your half hour call. You will receive a call at the quarter hour, and another at five minutes before curtain time. The beginners will then assemble backstage.” Larry Pye’s voice, vastly amplified, rang through The Shed. He spoke solemnly, as befitted a man using a public address system of his own devising, and his enunciation was pedantically clear.

  Roger Tasset leapt from the chair in which he was being made up, and seized a small microphone which hung near the loud-speaker.

  “Stage Management? Stage Management? Message received. Wilco.”

  Larry’s voice was heard again, excited and quite normal in tone.

  “How’s it coming in, Rodge?”

  “Fine, Larry; couldn’t be better.”

  Delighted, Roger submitted himself again to the hands of the makeup artist.

  What babies men are, thought Valentine. All this fuss about messages that could be much better done by a call-girl.

  The Shed was filled with people. Tom had cleared it for the use of the Little Theatre, and tables and chairs for makeup had been brought in. Several experienced hands were at work on the faces of the actors, under Valentine’s watchful eye, and in a corner Auntie Puss laboured over Hector Mackilwraith. She treated his face as though it were a blackboard; if an effect did not please her, she roughly scrubbed it off with a towel and tried another. She would examine him intently through her magnifying glass, and then go to work without its aid.

  “A little white at the temples, I think,” said she. “What we call a Distinguished Gray. Very becoming.”

  “Miss Pottinger, why are you putting yellow in Mr. Mackilwraith’s hair?” said Valentine.

  “Dear dear; I must have picked up the wrong stick in error. Ah, well; a little powder will mend that; it’s a very neutral sort of yellow.”

  “Perhaps one of the others will put on Mr. Mackilwraith’s beard, Miss Pottinger. You must not tire yourself.”

  “Please do not worry about me, Miss Rich. I understand all about beards.”

  “I am sure you do. But I do not want to impose on your good nature.”

  “Miss Rich, the Earl of Minto once told me that he considered me to be a real artist at this work. And as you know, he painted china beautifully. Give me time, and I shall finish Mr. Mackilwraith and put touches on all the others.”

  Not if I know it, thought Valentine. She had contrived to have all the girls made up elsewhere, in a room which Griselda had offered inside the house, and she felt that she could protect the men against Auntie Puss. Great God! Look at her! With a black lining-stick she was drawing what appeared to be comic spectacles around Mackilwraith’s eyes. Oh well, he’s so bad anyway that it doesn’t matter too much what he looks like. We’ll just have to write him off as a total loss; every amateur show has at least one.

  The door opened and Freddy bounced in, dressed as the goddess Ceres.

  “Miss Rich,” said she, “Mr. Cobbler wants to know whether you want God Save the King played at the beginning or end of the performance.”

  “At the beginning,” said Valentine; “we decided that days ago.”

  “He said you had, but Mrs. Forrester told him to play it at the end.”

  “I’ll talk to them about it,” said Valentine, and hurried out.

  “You’re quite a cute kid, painted up like that,” said Roger to Freddy.

  “I object very much to being called a cute kid,” she replied. “If it is God’s will that I should be pretty, I’ll be pretty; if I am to be plain, I shall be plain without complaint. But come what will, I shall never be vulgar. Only vulgar people are cute kids.”

  “You’re going to be pretty, like your sister,” said Geordie Shortreed, hideously made up as Caliban.

  “Griselda is very pretty,” said Freddy. “It’s a shame she has no brains. If brains ever came back into fashion for girls, it would be a bad day for her. The Torso’s a bit squiffed. I can’t stand people who don’t know how to hold their drink.”

&nbs
p; “The old Torso squiffed?” said Roger. “Why?”

  “She says she took just a nip to give her courage for the performance. That nip went to her head, so she had another to straighten her out, and they both went to her legs.”

  “As who wouldn’t?” said Geordie, and was crushed by an austere look from Professor Vambrace, who now had a beard two feet long.

  “She’s been nipping at intervals ever since,” Freddy continued. “She has a flask in the girls’ dressing-room. She may have to be put down with a strong hand.”

  Solly had come in. “Talking about The Torso?” said he. “Juno has certainly been hitting the jug. When I last saw her Griselda was holding an ice-bag on her head, and Cora Fielding was laying hot-water bottles to her feet. A gay girl, lovable and undependable.”

  The door opened and an elderly man with two teeth, carrying a violin case, entered The Shed, followed by a colourless thin woman, and a dark and greasy man with a piano accordion hanging around his neck on a leather strap.

  “This where we come?” asked the old man. He then caught sight of Solly.

  “Oh, hello there,” said he. “Glad to see you, Mr. Bridgetower. Can we just have a little run over the play before we start? You tell me where you want the music to come, and we’ll fit it in somehow.”

  Solly turned white. “Good evening, Mr. Snairey,” said he, and fled through the door.

  “IT IS USELESS TO APPEAL to me in this matter,” said Humphrey Cobbler when, a few minutes later, he, Valentine, Mrs. Forrester, Solly and the Snairey Trio gathered on the lawn outside The Shed. “I am a musician, and as such I have come here to provide music for this play. I have devoted approximately twenty hours of rehearsal to it. I have assembled a choir of ten and an orchestra of eight, and they are all in readiness at this moment. We have rehearsed the music with the full company six times. Now, if you want me to go away, I shall do so. If you want me to stay, I shall be delighted. But what I positively will not do is wrangle with Mr. Snairey.”

  “Solly, I told you to tell Mr. Snairey that we had changed our plans,” said Nellie, close to tears.

  “You told me to get Mr. Cobbler, which I did,” said Solly. “You distinctly said that you would see Mr. Snairey yourself.”

  “You were the fella come to see me first,” said Mr. Snairey. “I’m a reasonable man, but I got my living to make, same’s anybody else. Joe here coulda had two other jobs tonight, but he come here to oblige me. Either we play or we sit out, and we get paid either way. Don’t know’s I ever seen you before, young fella,” he said, turning toward Cobbler with what he probably intended as a look of menace.

  “I don’t suppose you have,” said Humphrey; “I’ve only been in Salterton about five years.”

  “Oh, what shall we do?” moaned Nellie. “Val, do something.”

  “I don’t altogether see why I should,” said Valentine. “You and Solly have created this situation. I suppose you must pay Mr. Snairey; I don’t imagine his rates can be very high.”

  “Union scale,” said Joe the accordionist. “You got a big show here. Musicals come high.”

  “It’s not the money so much as my feelings,” said Mr. Snairey. “Fella my age doesn’t like to get pushed around like he was some young punk. We come here to play, and I guess we better play.”

  From inside The Shed Larry’s voice boomed through the loud-speaker, announcing that it was five minutes till curtain time.

  “Oh, what shall we do?” cried Nellie, weeping openly. “I must get to Larry. We can’t possibly begin till all the people are in their seats. He may want to start before some really important people have come. Oh, I wish we’d never attempted this damned play!”

  “What’s the trouble, hon?” said a bland voice behind them. It was Roscoe Forrester. In a rush, Nellie explained, assisted by Valentine and Solly.

  “I’ll handle this,” said Roscoe. “The rest of you just get on with what you have to do. Now, Snairey, you listen to me.”

  Oh, sweet relief! Oh, miraculous lightening of hearts! How they thanked God for Roscoe, the man of business, accustomed to dealing with difficult situations. Valentine could subdue a group of hostile actors or dominate an unfriendly audience, but the Snaireys of this world, the pushing incompetents, daunted her. Solly and Nellie hurried away, blaming each other in their hearts. And after three brisk minutes with Roscoe the Snairey Trio climbed into its Ford and struggled down the drive of St. Agnes’, against the steady stream of cars bringing people to the play.

  Behind the scenes Nellie bustled up to Larry. “It’s all right,” she said. “We can begin at once. They’re all here. Mrs. Caesar Augustus Conquergood has just taken her seat.”

  Larry pressed a button. In the shrubbery where Humphrey Cobbler was established a red light flashed on his music desk, and then a green. The National Anthem burst forth, somewhat blurred by the sound of eight hundred people rising to their feet. The Tempest had begun.

  SENDING FLOWERS TO GRISELDA in June was carrying coals to Newcastle indeed. The gardens at St. Agnes’ were filled with flowers, and Hector’s two dozen roses could add nothing to the splendour of the arrangements which Mr. Webster’s housekeeper placed at every advantageous spot in the house. Further, Hector’s card disturbed Griselda. So she could count on him for anything, could she? But she didn’t want to count on him. He was a bore, and he had a dreadful habit of staring at her. Griselda knew that she was well worth looking at, but she hated to be followed by what appeared to her to be a fixed and baleful glare. After a moment of brief annoyance at his card, she decided to put Hector’s roses in the girls’ dressing room, and if necessary to explain that they were a tribute from Mr. Mackilwraith to the female members of the cast.

  It was from the window of that dressing-room that she leaned out as the actors trooped along a garden path from The Shed to the back of the stage, immediately after Larry’s five-minutes call. Roger looked up and caught sight of her.

  “You’d better hurry up,” he called, “or Larry will be in a stew.” He looked more intently at her, and blew a kiss. “You look like the Blessed Damozel, leaning down from the golden bar of Heaven,” he said.

  How nice he looks as Ferdinand, thought Griselda. And he’s obviously not angry any more. I must have made myself quite clear last night. He doesn’t think I’m a Pill. From the dressing-table nearby she took one of Hector’s roses from its vase, kissed it, and tossed it down to Roger, who fielded it expertly, fastened it to his doublet and hurried on toward the stage.

  “Who was that for?” asked The Torso, who was sitting miserably in a chair, with her head almost between her knees. Pearl Vambrace was putting cold compresses on the back of her neck.

  “For Roger,” said Griselda.

  “Pearl, honey,” said Bonnie-Susan in a controlled voice. “Don’t squeeze that damned cold water down my back.”

  “I’m sorry, Bonnie-Susan,” said Pearl. “My hand jerked.”

  “A likely story,” said The Torso. “Just leave me alone and run down there and fascinate the open-mouthed throng. With that makeup and my falsies you should get yourself a beau or two. They just dote on us painted creatures of the theayter.”

  Exhausted by this flight of irony she dropped her head between her knees again, and moaned softly. Moaning seemed to ease her pain.

  HECTOR HAD SEEN THE ROSE thrown from the window; there were roses everywhere, but he was sure that it was one of his. However, he had no time to brood deeply about it, for he was needed in the first scene. To simulate the rolling and pitching of a ship at sea Larry Pye had devised an ingenious contraption upon which the actors stood, partly screened by shrubbery, while they were tossed and heaved hither and thither by the tempest, the sound of which was simulated by Cobbler’s orchestra and a variety of wind-machines and thunder-strips backstage. It was a taxing scene and Hector, who had never been good at doing two things at once, had to exert all his wits in order to keep his balance and recognize his cues when they came. When this ordeal was over, and the au
dience was applauding heartily (as audiences always do when they see actors being put to great inconvenience and indignity) Hector was just able to roll seasickly to a bench and close his eyes, trying to calm his queasy stomach; he had had virtually nothing to eat for the past forty-eight hours, and the world swam giddily about him while the great voice of Professor Vambrace was heard from the stage, in Prospero’s seemingly interminable narrative of misfortune.

  It was a long wait until Act Two, when he appeared again, and Hector sat lonely on his bench, with bustle all about him. Griselda, lovely in the costume of Ariel, seemed once about to approach him, and he raised his eyes to hers, but then she knit her brows and turned away. Wherever she was, he was conscious of her. He was by no means sensitive to music, but when she sang “Come unto these yellow sands” and “Full fathom five” his soul was ravished because it was Griselda who was singing. When she stood ready to run onto the stage in the costume of a water-nymph, which Mrs. Crundale conceived as the merest wisp of sea-green gauze, his bowels yearned at her beauty, and his heart ached because so much of it was to be seen by any member of the audience who had paid his dollar for a seat. But most of all he grieved because the rose which she had thrown to Roger—one of his own roses—was conclusive proof to him that she was frail, that she was no better than those hired girls, taken in sin, whom it had been the Reverend John Mackilwraith’s duty to scold, exhort and pray over in the manse parlour in the days of his childhood.

  At the beginning of Act Two of The Tempest Gonzalo is required to appear as a rather jolly and witty old gentleman. Hector had never fully succeeded in rising to the demands of this scene, though he never failed in it with such thoroughgoing dismalness as on the first night. But one thing happened which puzzled sharp-sighted members of the audience: when Ariel bent over the form of the sleeping Gonzalo and sang in his ear