by Frances
The group in front of the theater already was dissolving into it when Brian Halder and Liza O’Brien again reached the sidewalk. Three men, one of them inconspicuous yet, to Liza, vaguely familiar, were standing together, smoking, as if reluctant to return to the reticent carnage going on within. They did not look at Brian and Liza; were still talking after the tall, dark-eyed young man and the slight girl had gone into the lobby. They continued to talk for several minutes longer. Then two of the men, one the markedly inconspicuous one, went into the theater and the third went down the passage toward the stage door. The two who had entered the theater were late for the start of the last act, but they did not seem to mind, nor did they seek to find seats. They stood, at some distance from each other, leaning lightly on the barrier, looking toward the stage.
Sherman Pine was already on-stage when the last act curtain rose. He was kneeling beside the collapsed maid servant, with a black bag on the floor near him. It was clear at once that he was a physician, summoned to the vicarage to give succor, although not to the contents of the hatbox. The hatbox, its purpose served, had been removed. After the audience had rustled to its seats, Sherman Pine arose and announced, with gravity and a British intonation, that he thought she’d do. “Shock, y’know,” he said to the vicar. “A peculiarly nasty business.”
Shortly thereafter the vicar left the room, announcedly to wash his hands; the inspector, after looking protractedly at the door through which the vicar had departed, appeared to reach a decision and went after him and the physician was left alone with the inert body of the maid servant. He looked around, including the audience in his survey, and then puckered his lips to whistle. No sound came, however, and he reached toward his black bag. But at that moment the pretty girl, whose activities during the second act had been so intermittent that the audience had almost forgotten her, came in through another door and began to whistle. She did not seem to see the again kneeling physician at once; then did so with a start of surprise, and with the surprise ceased to whistle the phrase from the madrigal.
Sherman Pine arose again, greeted the girl (whom he had, it now appeared, known all the time) and was moving toward her, perhaps to take her hand, when the inspector appeared at his door and beckoned with emphasis, his manner indicating that, elsewhere in the vicarage, something—not hell, perhaps, but purgatory—had broken loose. Pine, expressing bewilderment with his back, went to the door and, with the inspector, through it.
Somewhat later, after several other characters had, absently as it seemed, whistled the madrigal phrase, the vicar, the inspector, and the couple from London were in the room, wondering about things, when there was a scream off-stage right. They were frozen for a moment, turning toward that side of the stage. Then a door there opened, rather convulsively, and Sherman Pine fell in, headlong.
Since the available actors were already expressing alarm and horror to the tops of their respective bents, there was nothing immediately in their attitudes to indicate that this was not an expected method of entrance on the part of Mr. Pine. But then the vicar, not at all in the voice he had used before, said, “My God!” and ran toward the fallen man. And then, more or less stepping over Pine, a man in the unmistakable uniform of the New York police force entered, looked at the audience in horrified surprise, and turned back to call, in a loud, uncultivated voice, “Hey! Sergeant!” into the backstage area. And that, as the author of the play might well have said had he been present, tore it. That really tore it.
Realization that this was a variation on the theme of violence, was something not written in advance and acted out with calculation, spread slowly through the audience. (Some of its members, indeed, only dimly realized that things had not gone according to plan until they read, the next morning, the continuing story of the Halder case in the Daily News.) A wave of sound, which became conversation, which was punctuated by sharp demi-screams, rolled through the theater and then people began to stand up, and to point, as if this no longer merely mimicked violence demanded some special gesture of attention.
Liza O’Brien turned in her seat and then, to see better, she too stood up. But she did not look at the stage, where now there were several men around the fallen actor. She looked back, searching anxiously, desperately, for sight of Brian Halder. But Brian was not in his seat, or standing in front of it. Brian was not anywhere she could see.
10
Wednesday, 10:33 P.M. to Thursday, 12:25 A.M.
Liza looked around, looked every place, but still she could not see Brian’s tall figure. Where he had been there was now no one; still only the stage lights illuminated the auditorium of the Wrayburn Theater, and the people in it were shadows. Only those behind her, touched by the light which emanated from the stage, had faces. Looking down toward the stage, she could see only the backs of shadows.
The uniformed policeman who had come onto the stage a moment after Sherman Pine had pitched forward through the door, was standing now, having moved farther on-stage. He was looking, still with an expression of unhappy surprise, at the people who almost filled the orchestra section. Then, curiously, he looked up at the balcony and his surprise seemed to be enhanced. It was incongruous, Liza thought, that this policeman, doing nothing, had somehow managed to become the dominating figure on the stage.
The actors who had ruled there, had been characters in an intricate mimicry of violence, stood now close together, their faces expressing nothing more marked, more projected, than any ordinary human faces. They looked toward stage right, looked down, ignored the uniformed patrolman who appeared to ignore them in turn. Now there were two men, both in civilian clothes, squatting by Pine and one of them apparently was a doctor. And still the curtain stayed up, as if there were, on the part of someone, an obligation to give the audience all, and more than, it had paid for. Then one of the men squatting beside Pine, the one who was not the physician, stood up and turned toward the off-stage area and called out, loudly, “Somebody put the damn thing down.”
Almost at once the curtain went down, was hurried down; it was as if a bedroom shade, left up, forgotten, had suddenly been remembered, almost convulsively pulled against intruding eyes. As the curtain went down, there was a little sigh through the audience. After a moment then a man came out in front of the curtain, pushing it back again and again with his right hand as if he were swimming against it, while he worked in from the wings. He held up his hand. He said, “Please.” The audience rustled still, and again he said “please.” Then Liza recognized that the man was the actor who had played the part of the vicar.
He got attention, finally. He spoke carefully, projecting his voice, giving each word, each syllable, value.
“The management has asked me to say that there is no cause for alarm,” he said. “No cause of any kind. One of the actors, Mr. Sherman Pine, has been slightly injured by—er, by a fall. The management asks your forbearance for a few moments and then, if Mr. Pine is unable to continue, the play will go on with an understudy.” He stopped, looked around, smiled with formal informality, spoke in a lighter tone. “Won’t you just sit down and wait a few moments?” he said. “I assure you it’s nothing serious.”
For an instant, Liza could feel doubt and uncertainty in the people around her; could feel a reluctance to accept this minimization of unscheduled drama, a kind of disappointment that what had promised so well had come to so little. But then, here and there, a man or a woman did sit down, accepting what the actor said and then he, knowing his job was done, began to work his way back across the stage to the side from which he had come. And then the house lights, tardily, came up.
With the light, with the gradual subsidence of those around her, Liza, still standing, could look anxiously for Brian, could look with a kind of desperate hopefulness. But she could not see him anywhere. And then a man who, unnoticed, had come down the right center aisle, stopped at the end of her row and, very politely, spoke her name.
“Miss O’Brien?” he said, as if he were in doubt. She turned towa
rd him. “Could I see you a minute, Miss O’Brien?” he asked. He seemed to hesitate. “I have a message for you,” he said. He was still polite, his voice very quiet, almost small.
She heard what he said with, at first, relief—relief that Brian had sent her a message—but then with rising fear that the message was about, not from, Brian Halder, and that it would be that something had happened to Brian. She nodded, quickly, anxiously, and at once began to work her way to the man at the end of the row. “Really!” somebody behind a pair of the plump, reluctant knees said, in a tone meant to be audible. “Really!” But Liza paid no attention.
When she reached the man he touched her arm, kept his hand on it, but without closing his fingers, leaving the touch a friendly suggestion only, and began to walk up the aisle. She went with him, felt herself hurrying. At the end of the aisle he spoke, without stopping, without indicating that she could stop. “They want you back there, Miss O’Brien,” he said.
Fear was in her throat, now; her throat was dry and stiff with it. And now she realized that fear had been in her throat, at her throat, since Sherman Pine had pitched forward into the lighted box which was a vicar’s living room in Surrey.
She started obediently toward the doors opening from the theater, but the man—and now she thought she had seen him before, recently, but could not remember where—said, “No, this way,” and directed her, still with the slight pressure on her arm, toward the aisle which ran down on the extreme right of the auditorium. When they reached the head of the aisle he said again, “This way,” and they walked down it, he half a step behind her, but his fingers still on her arm. Those sitting nearest, along the extreme right aisle, looked at them curiously; she could feel question in the way they looked.
The aisle led them behind the boxes, which were cut off by drawn curtains. At the very end of the aisle there were several steps leading up and, at the top of them, a door. The man reached around her when she stopped on the lowest of the stair treads and pulled the door toward him and said, “Watch your step, miss.” She went through and heard the door closed behind them, and was in a narrow passage which was dimly lighted and oddly cluttered. On her right, leaning against a brick wall, were great flats of canvas; on her left were other flats, but these were fixed upright, in a solid wall, and the name of the play and numerals were painted on them in white. She realized that she was outside the vicar’s living room; that this was the outside of the box which, to the audience, seemed authentically a room. “Watch it,” the man said again, and she realized she had almost stumbled into a platform built against the outside of the box set and then, looking at it, realized that it was like a porch outside a door, and that the door was one of those (one set a little higher than the others, on a low balcony) which opened onto the set, and through which the actors had all evening been coming and going.
To her right, after a moment, the outer wall became a corridor, fairly wide but still cluttered—there were several boxes, and on one of them two men were sitting and now were looking at her. She realized that the corridor was the one leading to the stage door; could see, at the far end, the opening behind which the stage doorman sat. But the man who had been sent for her said, “This way, miss,” and led her to the left, along a very narrow passage which took them, she realized, behind the set. After they had traversed this, they came out into a relatively open space, but one which seemed crowded with people.
“Well,” one man said, and he was excited, spoke excitedly, kept pulling at his necktie, already pulled far to one side. “Well, do we or don’t we?” He jerked his necktie from one side to the other, and used, in a tone inappropriate, words appropriate to prayer.
“Keep your shirt on,” the man he was speaking to told him. “The lieutenant will be here any minute.”
“But listen,” the excited man said. “You o.k.’d the announcement. Now you hold us up.”
“I told you why,” the other man said, and now Liza realized he was the tall, dark detective she had seen with Lieutenant Weigand at the Sutton Place house, and again with Brian at the Norths’ apartment. “I told you I wanted to—see who was there. Didn’t want them rushing out.” He sounded as if he had explained this several times, were tired of explaining it. “Try to get it through your head that the show doesn’t have to go on,” he said. “There’s no law it has to. There’s a law—” He broke off. He said, to the man behind Liza, “Oh, got her all right?” and then to Liza, “Hello, Miss O’Brien.”
She tried to say something, and her throat was too dry for words.
“Take her—” the man began, and then looked again beyond her, and this time also beyond the man who had brought her, and said, in a surprised tone, “Well, hello.”
“Hello, Mr. Stein,” Pamela North said. “And before you ask, we came to see Mr. Pine act and it was a theater a man Jerry knows had a play in once and he showed us around, so we came.” She paused, “I mean, we knew how to come,” she said. “Down the right aisle. Where’s Bill? And is Mr. Pine—?” Pam stopped.
“No,” Detective Sergeant Stein said, “he isn’t. He got slugged, knocked out, apparently concussed. He isn’t—” Then he seemed to feel he had already said too much, and looked at Liza O’Brien.
“Listen,” the man with the wandering necktie said. “For God’s sake, listen! Do we or don’t we? That’s all I want to know. Do we or don’t we?”
“What,” Bill Weigand said from behind the Norths, “does this man want to do, or not do?”
Stein showed relief.
“Finish the performance with the understudy,” Stein said. “I didn’t know whether you—?”
“How long will it take?” Weigand asked the excited man, who threw up both hands in what seemed to be incipient madness and then said, quietly enough, “Twenty minutes.”
“Anything on the stage we need?” Bill asked, this time of Stein, and Stein shook his head.
“Hit back here,” Stein said. “Standing at the door, waiting for cue. Somebody hit him just as he started to open the door and he fell in.” Stein paused. “Very startling,” he added. “Quite an entrance.”
“Can you finish without using this door?” Weigand asked the excited man, who threw up his hands again, stopped midway and said, mildly, “Yes, Lieutenant.”
He was told that, in that case, he might get on with it. His response was to jerk his necktie to the other side of his collar, then throw both hands into the air, then cry out for someone named Tom. “For God’s sake,” he cried, “where’s Tom for God’s sake?” A man ten feet from him got up from the box he had been sitting on and said that there he was. “For God’s sake where have you been?” the excited man said, but did not wait to be answered. “You’ll have to go from the other side,” he said. “But work over to this side, so the grouping will be right. It’s—” Then he flung his hands into the air again. “For God’s sake,” he demanded, and now of Bill Weigand, “why can’t we use this door? Do you realize he’ll have to make a complete cross? Without a line? While the others just wait?”
Bill Weigand smiled faintly. He looked at Stein, who shrugged. “Actually,” Stein said, “I don’t know what we’ll get, Lieutenant. Or even what we’ll look for.”
“Right,” Bill said to the excited man. “Use the door, then. But get on with it.”
“Get on!” the excited man said then. “Get on!”
Four people detached themselves from shadows and Liza saw that they were the vicar, Inspector Brunk and the couple from London. The vicar stepped on a cigarette.
“Take it from the scream,” the excited man said. “Di. For God’s sake where’s Di?”
Nobody seemed to respond to his excitement, but the woman who had been playing poor dear Agatha, and whose head, it was now evident, was not really in the hatbox, spoke from another window and said, “I’m right here, darling.”
“Then get on, everybody,” the excited man said, and jerked his necktie under his left ear. “Oh, for God’s sake!”
The vicar, the
inspector and the couple from London went through the door, into the box set, out of sight. The excited man went to the door and looked in at them. Now he whispered, carryingly. “Move in, darling,” he said. “For God’s sake move in.” What resulted from this was invisible, but apparently satisfactory. The excited man withdrew from the door and the man named Tom took his place. The man named Tom, Liza noticed—was amazed to find herself noticing—licked his lips, then rubbed his hands together as if they were damp and he hoped to dry them. “Di,” the excited man said to poor dear Agatha. “Are you ready, darling?”
The woman merely sighed, but she stood up.
“I’ll cue you,” the excited man said. He looked back into the set. What he saw seemed to content him, since he pulled his head back out, closed the door, took a deep breath and said, suddenly, in the same tense whisper, “Take her up!”
One could hear the curtain going up. But more than that, one could suddenly hear silence. The sound which ended had touched only the subconscious—a dim, multitudinous sound it had been, of some hundreds of people moving restlessly, talking, making the strange, inchoate noise of humanity en masse. But when it stopped, as the curtain rose, the silence rang in the conscious ear.
There was a period during which one might have counted, slowly, up to five. Then the excited man whirled toward the actress who had been poor dear Agatha and gestured violently with both hands. And the actress screamed.
Pam North jumped into the air and almost screamed herself; through Liza O’Brien the scream ran jaggedly, laceratingly. The excited man beamed and then Tom, standing by the door, leaning forward, like a spring runner crouching for a start, whistled the first bar of the passage from the madrigal. He was off in pitch; the excited man threw up his hands, in pantomime of horror, but he had moved by then to a place where Tom could not see him. Tom finished the phrase, getting back on pitch midway; they could see his shoulders rise with a deep breath. Then he opened the door and walked into the set. The show was going on; the excited man collapsed on a box, spent.