The Spanish Virgin

by V. S. Pritchett

  “Oh, please …” pleaded Crystal.

  “Oh!” exclaimed Miss O’Malley excitedly. “I can see through it now. It’s an insult. He thinks he can trample on me. I’ll show them both!”

  “But surely Mr. Dufaux . .” Crystal began. “Is Mr. Dufaux here?”

  “He is. You know that as well as I do. Sure it’s no use pretending. He’s producing. He’s poisoning Benny against me.”

  Crystal lay awake through the night saying her lines over and over again, quarrelling with Miss O’Malley and unable to sleep because of this coming meeting with the man for whom she had acted in her first play. She hurried down to rehearsal in the morning bewildered and fearful, trying to calm herself, dreading the humiliation of the meeting and yet longing for it. The streets were wet and the roofs of the houses seemed to have been cut out of the clean raw sky with a knife. Oh, what has he been thinking about me? How he must have despised me!

  She went into the theatre listening for his voice, and expecting to see him coming down the stairs towards the stage. She pushed open the stage door and went down the steps. The safety curtain was down, and the tattered back cloths were hanging like cold wet blankets above. The scenery was stacked against the whitewashed walls. The electricians were up in the flies arguing about the lights, and twitching them on and off continuously. The stage was as draughty and bare as an empty wharf. The members of the company were standing about in their overcoats, smoking. Miss O’Malley came up to Crystal with the other girls and said accusingly:

  “He’s gone!”

  “Mr. Dufaux has gone!” Crystal exclaimed despairingly.

  “No, no, no. Mr. Spears. I went round to the hotel, and he had gone off to Sheffield on the eight-three to see his first company. God help them.” She said this before the other girls to widen the sense of open battle.

  Then the stage door opened and Fontenoy Dufaux came in. Crystal turned and he went up to her, talking to the stage manager.

  “Hullo, Crystal,” he said, merely glancing at her. “Mr. Spears told me you were coming. Excellent. Now we’ll begin.”

  He passed from her smiling, and the indifferent smile seemed to trail away to nothing in his wake like the smoke of his cigarette.

  “He despises me,” she feared.

  Fontenoy Dufaux was a fair-haired young man, long-legged, active and restless. His hair was brushed back obliquely from an acute peak above the forehead. His eyes were deeply set. They had small keen brown pupils, and, being set almost too close together, gave his face a narrowness and sharpness. His straight nose was built out on his face prominently and lorded over a slightly lifted, overhanging lip. This curl of his upper lip made him appear to be whistling. His face was pink and healthy, and he spoke in a soft impersonal voice which gave the cynicism of his conversation an air of painful sincerity. When he was angry his voice became quieter and laboured, as though he were scoring his words with a knife. Unlike the other actors, he wore no overcoat. He wore instead a brown sweater which made him seem looser and more alive than the other actors, who disliked him because he appeared younger than he was. They thought him a snob. Crystal could not cease watching him, pleading for a glance of confidence, but he rehearsed her as if quite unaware of her, and would appear to be listening to the talk going on in the flies. Then unexpectedly his mouth would droop into a vague smile of annoyance and superiority, and he would say:

  “No, like this!”

  And would repeat the words, swaying his long arms in the air, like a conductor.

  “Now again.”

  And once more he would be looking up at the flies, as though suspecting the subject of the conversation was himself. The further away his mind appeared to be, the more hers tried to pursue it. Miss O’Malley watched them and soon interfered. She began to tell Crystal to change this and stop there, and generally to overact.

  “Crashando it,” she said. “Crashando it up because this is my entrance. You’ve got to work up for it.”

  Dufaux clenched his fists, but said nothing. It was one of Mr. Spears’ principles to give no one member of the cast complete power. He believed in undermining his producer’s authority and playing one against the other. It made each one’s position precarious, destroyed confidence, kept the whole company in a state of nerves and in salutary terror of losing their jobs. They stood saying their parts over, thinking of the sausages and fish they had ordered for lunch, the alterations they were going to make in the trimmings of their hats, visits to drapers, chemists and hairdressers, and how they would laugh in the face of Mr. Spears when they got good parts in London. They told Crystal what their best parts were, and how Lionel this or Maurice the other had promised them jobs. Only the Doris who was leaving that week did not speak to her.

  “Come round the front of the house this evening,” they each said. “And tell me what you think of me”

  In the evening she had to tell them what superb actors they were.

  “Ah, this place is no good,” said Mr. Geelong dismally—he was the comedian—“York’s the place. You wait till we get there. That’s where I get my best laughs. I’ve had more laughs in York than in any other town in England. They know what acting is.”

  Dufaux passed her as she was going out, but said nothing. She saw him walk sharply along the street into another part of the town which was now deserted. The trams had stopped. The soundless lines shone in the faint, reflected light of the closed shops. She walked home alone, relieved that Dufaux had been kind to her, but also resenting that he had taken so little notice of her. She found herself wishing he had been spiteful and sarcastic, that his speech had disclosed fine innuendoes of suspicion in regard to her and her mother.

  She followed him about with the slavish hope that he would speak to her. She felt she was chained to him by her mother’s act, and as she walked about the Rows of the town she would be surprised to see only one reflection of herself in the shop windows, when, in her mind, she was one of three enemies: her mother, Dufaux and herself. Her fear of them had made both Dufaux and her mother intimate and silent inhabitants of her body, and she loved them both and submitted to them.

  It was not until the end of that week that Dufaux spoke to her again. One night after the second act she found him standing on the stairs drinking a glass of sherry beaten up with egg. Mrs. Hawkins, the wife of the business manager, a severe, warm-hearted, gypsy-like old actress who had been working for Spears these thirty years, had made it for him.

  Dufaux smiled at Crystal.

  “I can’t eat anything,” he said. “I am reduced to this. What was it like this evening?”

  “I thought it was awfully good.”

  “We were all damn rotten,” he said. “It was dreadful. Old Melford was sitting up in my dressing-room crying like a baby before he went on. He was in an awful condition, going off every ten minutes to be sick downstairs!”

  “He looked splendid,” Crystal lied.

  He smiled maliciously at her.

  At this moment Miss O’Malley came out of her dressing-room and cried out, for Crystal’s ears:

  “Fonty, I am in a rage with you. You did it again. You weren’t at the door at all on my second entrance. You ruined it completely. My lines, there, are the best in the play, and you spoiled them entirely! I’m going to speak to Mr. Hawkins.”

  And then she went upstairs to find him.

  “My God!” said Fontenoy, “you’re digging with that woman, aren’t you? Don’t you hate her?”

  “I think she is awfully funny.”

  This evidently had not occurred to Dufaux, who had little sense of humour. He looked at Crystal uncomprehendingly.

  “I don’t see anything funny about the things I hate,” he said with quiet vehemence. “When you laugh at people it means you accept them, and I do not intend to accept Miss O’Malley.”

  They stood looking at each other uncomfortably. Now will he say something about mummy, Crystal wondered. Every few seconds the stage door banged, and a strong draught of cold
wind blew into the passage. The naked gas flame flapped. The stage hands trooped up from the basement and descended noisily on to the stage. A large printed notice on the board read:

  By Order of the Management.

  No Fish to be brought into the Theatre.

  Crystal stood smiling and silent. She could think of nothing to say, but she perceived they could be united on enemy ground: her mother and Miss O’Malley.

  Melford’s thick voice bawled at the top of the stairs as he came running down:

  “Beginners for the 3rd Act, please.”

  There was no call-boy.

  “Good luck!” said Crystal with almost affectionate confidence. Dufaux grimaced and went on to the stage.

  They did not speak to each other again until the company was entrained for York. The men went into one compartment and played whist on a newspaper stretched across their knees; and one by one the other girls went to gossip with Mr. and Mrs. Hawkins about diseases, on which subject she had a frightening amount of anecdote and reminiscence.

  “You know what Melford has got?” she would begin, and all heads leaned towards her. Crystal was wondering if she was going to be left alone to travel with Miss O’Malley who, now she had exhausted her rage, would tell Crystal about her love affairs and break into a few tears. One day she was going to poison Dufaux, another day Spears, more frequently herself. But the train had scarcely started when she got up and went into the swaying corridor, saying:

  “Come on! I’m after seeing a man. He’s got lots of money. Sure, he might give us lunch!”

  Her voice rang louder than the pealing wheels. Crystal was left alone to watch the thin rain weeping over the green and level country. The windows were steaming, and the smoke of the engine curled down in rococo billows, wiping out everything.

  Dufaux passed down the corridor twice before Crystal had the courage to call to him. She knew she was afraid of him only when he was silent and alone. She decided now was the moment to speak to him about Miss O’Malley’s anger.

  Perplexed by her call, he came and sat down in the compartment and listened to the story which Crystal dramatically told.

  “It doesn’t matter at all,” he said.

  Crystal was disappointed. Surely he might have said something about her hair! She persisted.

  “But she is dreadfully angry. She says she has written to Mr. Spears.” This moved him.

  “Has she, by Jove! Then I will jolly well write to him. You have been very good. I can see you are going to do excellently in the part. In fact,” he added, gathering support for his opinion, “I know. I remember your acting quite well. Of course I do. You wait till we get to York.”

  He was very annoyed, Crystal saw, that his judgment should be suspected even by himself.

  “But she is more valuable than me, and she is better too,” Crystal continued, because he still seemed to be looking over her head at the enemy and not at her. Was he looking at some image of her mother?

  “Nobody is valuable in this company. Nobody could make it worse than it is.”

  “Not even me?”

  He glanced down at her. She had gained that much.

  “Not even you.” He smiled slightly, but the smile went out quickly, as though she had ceased to be visible to him. But, how obtuse he was not to see that all this talk was about her hair and not that O’Malley woman’s; her tongue melodiously inquiring, insisting and ringing in a bell of bronze.

  “Of course,” she persisted. “I could wear a wig.”

  “Wig?”

  “Yes. It is bad to have two people with the same kind of hair.…”

  “Oh that! Well, it is unusual. But it is Spears’s fault, not mine. What does it matter? O’Malley is just the kind of woman who would make a fuss about her hair. She never stops talking about it. That is what is absurd about the profession nowadays. It doesn’t matter a damn if you can act. All they want to know is what colour your hair is!”

  “As if it mattered!” said Crystal desperately, pulling off her hat and making her eyes big and round. His gaze passed suddenly over her head like a light and mysterious hand; her head filled with a faint and mysterious music when she felt that same hand of immaterial light passed over. The music froze when he asked her suspiciously:

  “How is your mother?”

  The blood rose in her cheeks.

  “Quite well.”

  “Oh. Did she mind you coming away?”

  “Well, you know.…”

  “I know! I know!” He held up his hand to stop her. “They want to live inside you.”

  They?

  He was going out into the corridor again when he looked back happily at her:

  “The next time that woman says anything to you, tell her to change her dye! I’ll come back and see you if I may.”

  “Ah, I think I have won,” Crystal hummed to herself, and, taking a mirror from her bag, studied her victory. But she was still his slave, bought for ten pounds, and when he came back again she cried out as though her voice was made of light:

  “How glorious of you to come and talk to me. I am left alone, you see!” Altering her tone with slight malice, “Miss O’Malley hasn’t come back yet.”

  They opened in York on the Monday evening. At the first house she played nervously, and her voice could scarcely be heard. Dufaux called her out of the dressing-room and said quietly, “Keep your voice up.”

  “Yes, I must, I must,” she said, distracted with excitement. “Was I terribly bad?”

  “On the contrary.” And he patted her on the head. She waited for him at the stage door afterwards. She was breathless with apologies for her bad acting. He was moved by her sincerity. He took her to her lodgings. He stood at the foot of the steps talking and looking at her with amusement and interest as though he were seeing her for the first time. When she asked him to come in and have supper with her, he was startled, and refused. If only he would be sarcastic and brutal, then this beseeching slavery would end.

  Between the two houses one night soon after that he surprised her by becoming suddenly confidential.

  “I am going to clear out of this company as soon as I can,” he said.

  “Oh, what should I do? It would be awful without you,” she exclaimed.

  “When you’ve known old Spears as long as I have you’ll think as I do. My wife used to play for him for years.”

  He had scarcely ever mentioned his wife before, and now he spoke as though leaving Spears were the same thing as leaving her.

  “Oh, dear,” sighed Crystal, “I shall feel so abandoned and afraid.”

  “Well, the sooner you can clear out the better for you too,” he said. “I know some people I could put you on to. It’s no good wasting time.”

  “But it is experience. That awful looking for work!”

  “Yes. But I’m not going to do that. I know some people. And I’ll have a little money, too. I’m going to put it into a show of my own. You’ve got to gamble.”

  “Why yes.” The word ‘gamble’ excited her. He was a god. He smiled at her triumphantly. He was always exalted in moments of anger; but there was a fatalism in her nature and a melancholy in his that drew them together, as well.

  She followed him about the theatre, asked for him every night, wanted to know if he had come or gone, and sought him avidly in his rooms. Her cheeks would be flushed, and her voice high and exalted, her eyes hot, and her gestures were restless wings until she found him; and then before him she was watchful and slavish, and never ventured more than the slightest malice.

  One afternoon she had persuaded him to go for a walk with her. She had promised to go with Miss O’Malley, but had broken that promise, and had fluttered about her own room scarcely able to wait for the hour.

  At last she hurried round to his rooms and brought him out. They walked along the banks of the Ouse. There were green fields listlessly caught between bare hedges and skeleton trees in which the swollen grey sky was ragged and glistening. Crows flew about very low, as thou
gh pressed down towards the earth by the sinking clouds. The green ribbed water of the river, with the coldness and the even light of the sky levelled in it, bore slowly its burden of earthly odours. At some places where the bank was lower Crystal could see the green drowned hair of the weeds, bowed as in silent and ever unavailing woe before the suasion of the current, while the willows stood with gnarled and silver feet on the bank of the water graves of shadow that opened beneath them. The neighbourhood of the river had a derelict silence as though the water was wearing away, not only the banks and the roots of the trees, but hollowing the air too by the myriad silver influences of its presence and passage. The silence was broken every quarter of an hour by the poppling of barges. They came like big square black mouths pushing their wide grins of water before them, and enlivening the banks with the bony chuckle of the wash, which died rapidly away as the hollows of the river silence opened once more.

  Crystal and Dufaux, caught by the influences of the stream, walked slowly, and it bore its melancholy into their words.

  “Members of the company,” said one or two dawdling people whom they passed. In a provincial city the stranger is soon noticed: he has not the air of being quarried from the native stone. His voice cuts into the air and does not blend with it. Dufaux heard this remark and smiled at Crystal.

  “Charmed Beings, Good God!” Dufaux said. “To begin with: O’Malley pretending she is Kathleen na Haulihan and making a scene every night because she hasn’t got her darling Spears.”

  “It is a pity she can’t marry him,” Crystal said. “I do sometimes feel very sorry for her.”

  “Ho, ho,” laughed Dufaux, and his laughter carried over the water. “That would be a good revenge. I could even pity old Spears.”

  “But if they love each other.”

  “Good Lord!” said Dufaux in a quiet voice that pretended surprise. “I had never thought of the divine flame of love being in those two mountains of flesh.”