Ngaio Marsh - Killer Dolphin

Mr. Conducis said: “Good morning to you, Grove.” He stood in the doorway looking straight in front of him.

“ And to you, wonderful fairy godfather, patron, guiding light and all those things,” Harry said. “Have you come to see your latest offspring, your very own performing Dolphins?”

“Yes,” said Mr. Conducis.

“Look at dear Perry!” Harry said. “He’s stricken dumb at my misplaced familiarity. Aren’t you, Perry?”

“Not for the first time,” Peregrine said and felt himself to be the victim of a situation he should have controlled.

“Well!” Harry said, glancing with evident amusement from one to the other of his hearers. “I mustn’t double-blot my copybook, must I? Nor must I keep lovely ladies waiting.” He turned to Mr. Conducis with an air of rueful deference. “I do hope you’ll be pleased with us, sir,” he said. “It must be wonderful to be the sort of man who uses his power to rescue a drowning theatre instead of slapping it under. All the more wonderful since you have no personal interest in our disreputable trade, have you?”

“I have little or no knowledge of it.”

“No. Like vinegar, it doesn’t readily mix with Oil,” Harry said. “Or is it Shipping? I always forget. Doing any yachting lately? But I mustn’t go on being a nuisance. Goodbye, sir. Do remember me to Mrs. G. See you later, Perry, dear boy.”

He ran downstairs and out by the main door.

Mr. Conducis said: “I am late. Shall we—?” They went downstairs and crossed the foyer to the portico. There was the Daimler and, at its door, Peregrine’s friend the chauffeur. It gave him quite a shock to see them again and he wondered for a dotty moment if he would be haled away once more to Drury Place.

“Good morning,” Mr. Conducis said again. He was driven away and Peregrine joined Jeremy Jones at their habitual chop-house on the Surrey Side.

He told the company and Jeremy Jones about the glove before afternoon rehearsal. They all made interested noises. Destiny Meade became very excited and confused on learning that the glove was “historic” and persisted in thinking they would use it as a prop in the production. Marcus Knight was clearly too angry to pay more than token attention. He had seen Destiny return, five minutes late and in hilarious company with W. Hartly Grove. Gertrude Bracey was equally disgruntled by the same phenomenon.

When Harry Grove heard about the glove he professed the greatest interest and explained, in his skittish manner, “Someone ought to tell Mrs. Constantia Guzmann about this.”

“Who in earth,” Peregrine had asked, “is Mrs. Constantia Guzmann?”

“Inquire of the King Dolphin,” Harry rejoined. He insisted on referring to Marcus Knight in these terms, to the latter’s evident annoyance. Peregrine saw Knight turn crimson to the roots of his hair and thought it better to ignore Harry.

The two members of the company who were wholeheartedly moved by Peregrine’s announcement were Emily Dunne and Charles Random and their reaction was entirely satisfactory. Random kept saying: “Not true! Well, of course . Now, we know what inspired you. No—It’s incredible. It’s too much.”

He was agreeably incoherent.

Emily’s cheeks were pink and her eyes bright, and that, too, was eminently satisfactory.

Winter Meyer, who was invited to the meeting, was in ecstasy.

“So what have we got?” he asked at large. “We have got a story to make the front pages wish they were double elephants.”

Master Trevor Vere was not present at this rehearsal.

Peregrine promised Jeremy that he would arrange for him to see the glove as often as he wanted to, at the museum. Meyer was to get in touch with Mr. Greenslade about safe-housing it in the theatre and the actors were warned about secrecy for the time being, although the undercover thought had clearly been that a little leakage might be far from undesirable as long as Mr. Conducis was not troubled by it.

Stimulated perhaps by the news of the glove, the company worked well that afternoon. Peregrine began to block the tricky second act and became excited about the way Marcus Knight approached his part.

Marcus was an actor of whom it was impossible to say where hard thinking and technique left off and the pulsing glow that actors call star-quality began. At earlier rehearsals he would do extraordinary things: shout, lay violent emphasis on oddly selected words, make strange, almost occult gestures and embarrass his fellow players by speaking with his eyes shut and his hands clasped in front of his mouth as if he prayed. Out of all this inwardness there would occasionally dart a flash of the really staggering element that had placed him, still a young man, so high in his chancy profession. When the period of incubation had gone by the whole performance would step forward into full light “And,” Peregrine thought, “there’s going to be much joy about this one.”

Act Two encompassed the giving of the dead child Hamnet’s gloves on her demand to the Dark Lady: a black echo, this, of Bertram’s and Bassanio’s rings and of Berowne’s speculation as to the whiteness of his wanton’s hand. It continued with the entertainment of the poet by the infamously gloved lady and his emergence from “the expense of passion in a waste of shame.” It ended with his savage reading of the sonnet to her and to W.H. Marcus Knight did this superbly.

W. Hardy Grove lounged in a window seat as Mr. W.H. and, already mingling glances with Rosaline, played secretly with the gloved hand. The curtain came down on a sudden cascade of his laughter. Peregrine spared a moment to reflect that here, as not infrequently in the theatre, a situation in a play reflected in a cock-eyed fashion the emotional relationships between the actors themselves. He had a theory that, contrary to popular fancy, this kind of overlap between the reality of their personalities in and out of their roles was an artistic handicap. An actor, he considered, was embarrassed rather than released by unsublimated chunks of raw association. If Marcus Knight was enraged by the successful blandishments of Harry Grove upon Destiny Meade, this reaction would be liable to upset his balance and bedevil his performance as Shakespeare, deceived by Rosaline with W.H.

And yet, apparently, it had not done so. They were all going great guns and Destiny, with only the most rudimentary understanding of the scene, distilled an erotic compulsion that would have peeled the gloves off the hands of the dead child as easily as she filched them from his supersensitive father. “She really is ,” Jeremy Jones had said, “the original overproof femme fatale . It’s just there. Whether she’s a goose or a genius doesn’t matter. There’s something solemn about that sort of attraction.”

Peregrine had said, “I wish you’d just try and think of her in twenty years’ time with china-boys in her jaws and her chaps hitched up above her lugs and her wee token brain shrunk to the size of a pea.”

“Rail on,” Jeremy had said. “I am unmoved.”

“You don’t suppose you’ll have any luck?”

“That’s right. I don’t. She is busily engaged in shuffling off the great star and teaming up with the bounding Grove. Not a nook or cranny left for me.”

“Oh, dear, oh dear, oh dear,” Peregrine had remarked and they let it go at that.

On this particular evening Peregrine himself had at last succeeded after several rather baffling refusals in persuading Emily Dunne to come back to supper at the studio. Jeremy, who supervised and took part in the construction and painting of his sets at a warehouse not far away, was to look in at The Dolphin and walk home with them over Blackfriars Bridge. It had appeared to Peregrine that this circumstance, when she heard of it, had been the cause of Emily’s acceptance. Indeed, he heard her remark in answer to some question from Charles Random: “I’m going to Jeremy’s.” This annoyed Peregrine extremely.