Death and the Dancing Footman. Ngaio Marsh
of them it had unexpectedly paid its way and had established their liking for one another. Mandrake’s latest play, ‘Bad Blackout’ (finished since the outbreak of war but, as far as the uninstructed could judge, and in spite of its title, not about the war), was soon to go into rehearsal with an untried company of young enthusiasts. He had spent two days at Winton St Giles rectory with his leading lady and her father, and Jonathan had asked him to come on to Highfold for the weekend.
His entrance into Jonathan’s library was effective, for he had motored over Cloudyfold bareheaded with the driving-window open, and the north wind had tossed his hair into elf-locks. He usually did the tossing himself. He advanced upon Jonathan with his hand outstretched, and an air of gay hardihood.
‘An incredible night,’ he said. ‘Harpies and warlocks abroad. Most stimulating.’
‘I trust,’ said Jonathan, shaking his hand and blinking up at him, ‘that it hasn’t stimulated your Muse. I cannot allow her to claim you this evening, Aubrey –’
‘O God!’ said Mandrake. He always made this ejaculation when invited to speak of his writing. It seemed to imply desperate æsthetic pangs.
‘– because,’ Jonathan continued, ‘I intend to claim your full attention, my dear Aubrey. Our customary positions are reversed. For tonight, yes, and for tomorrow and the next day, I shall be the creator and you the audience.’ Mandrake darted an apprehensive glance at his host.
‘No, no, no,’ Jonathan cried, steering him to the fireside, ‘don’t look so alarmed. I’ve written no painful middle-aged belles-lettres, nor do I contemplate my memoirs. Nothing of the sort.’
Mandrake sat opposite his host by the fire. Jonathan rubbed his hands together and suddenly hugged them between his knees. ‘Nothing of the sort,’ he repeated.
‘You look very demure,’ said Mandrake. ‘What are you plotting?’
‘Plotting! That’s the word! My dear, I am up to my ears in conspiracy.’ He leant forward and tapped Mandrake on the knee. ‘Come now,’ said Jonathan, ‘tell me this. What do you think are my interests?’
Mandrake looked fixedly at him. ‘Your interests?’ he repeated.
‘Yes. What sort of fellow do you think I am? It is not only women, you know, who are interested in the impressions they make on their friends. Or is there something unexpectedly feminine in my curiosity? Never mind. Indulge me so far. Come now.’
‘You skip from one query to another. Your interests, I should hazard, lie between your books, your estate, and – well, I imagine you are interested in what journalists are pleased to call human contacts.’
‘Good,’ said Jonathan. ‘Excellent. Human contacts. Go on.’
‘As for the sort of fellow you may be,’ Mandrake continued, ‘upon my word, I don’t know. From my point of view a very pleasant fellow. You understand things, the things that seem to me to be important. You have never asked me, for instance, why I don’t write about real people. I regard that avoidance as conclusive.’
‘Would you say, now, that I had a sense of the dramatic?’
‘What is the dramatic? Is it merely a sense of theatre, or is it an appreciation of æsthetic climax in the extroverted sense?’
‘I don’t know what that means,’ said Jonathan impatiently. ‘And I’m dashed if I think you do.’
‘Words,’ said Mandrake. ‘Words, words, words.’ But he looked rather put out.
‘Well, damnit, it doesn’t matter two ha’po’th of pins. I maintain that I have a sense of drama in the ordinary un-classy sense. My sense of drama, whether you like it or not, attracts me to your own work. I don’t say I understand it, but for me it’s got something. It jerks me out of my ordinary reactions to ordinary theatrical experiences. So I like it.’
‘That’s as good a reason as most.’
‘All right. But wait a bit. In me, my dear Aubrey, you see the unsatisfied and inarticulate artist. Temperament and no art. That’s me. Or so I thought until I got my Idea. I’ve tried writing and I’ve tried painting. The results have on the whole been pitiable – at the best negligible. Music – out of the question. And all the time, here I was, an elderly fogey plagued with the desire to create. Most of all have I hankered after drama, and at first I thought my association with you, a delightful affair from my point of view, I assure you, would do the trick; I would taste, at second-hand as it were, the pleasures of creative art. But no, the itch persisted and I was in danger of becoming a disgruntled restless fellow, a nuisance to myself and a bore to other people.’
‘Never that,’ murmured Mandrake, lighting a cigarette.
‘It would have been the next stage, I assure you. It threatened. And then, in what I cannot but consider an inspired moment, my dear Aubrey, I got My Idea.’
With a crisp movement Jonathan seized his glasses by their nose-piece and plucked them from his face. His eyes were black and extremely bright.
‘My Idea,’ he repeated. ‘One Wednesday morning four weeks ago, as I was staring out of my window here and wondering how the devil I should spend the day, it suddenly came to me. It came to me that if I was a ninny with ink and paper, and brush and canvas, and all the rest of it, if I couldn’t express so much as a how-d’ye-do with a stave of music, there was one medium that I had never tried.’
‘And what could that wonderful medium be?’
‘Flesh and blood!’
‘What!’
‘Flesh and blood!’
‘You are not,’ said Mandrake, ‘I implore you to say you are not going in for social welfare.’
‘Wait a bit. It came to me that human beings could, with a little judicious arrangement, be as carefully “composed” as the figures in a picture. One had only to restrict them a little, confine them within the decent boundaries of a suitable canvas, and they would make a pattern. It seemed to me that, given the limitations of an imposed stage, some of my acquaintances would at once begin to unfold an exciting drama; that, so restricted, their conversation would begin to follow as enthralling a design as that of a fugue. Of course the right, how shall I put it, the right ingredients must be selected, and this was where I came in. I would set my palette with human colours and the picture would paint itself. I would summon my characters to the theatre of my own house and the drama would unfold itself.’
‘Pirandello,’ Mandrake began, ‘has become quite –’
‘But this is not Pirandello,’ Jonathan interrupted in a great hurry. ‘No. In this instance we shall see, not six characters in search of an author, but an author who has deliberately summoned seven characters to do his work for him.’
‘Then you mean to write, after all?’
‘Not I. I merely select. As for writing,’ said Jonathan, ‘that’s where you come in. I make you a present of what I cannot but feel is a golden opportunity.’
Mandrake stirred uneasily. ‘I wish I knew what you were up to,’ he said.
‘My dear fellow, I’m telling you. Listen. A month ago I decided to make this experiment. I decided to invite seven suitably chosen characters for a winter weekend here at Highfold, and I spent a perfectly delightful morning compiling the list. My characters must, I decided, be, as far as possible, antagonistic to each other.’
‘O God!’
‘Not antagonistic each one to the other seven, but there must at least be some sort of emotional intellectual tension running like a connecting thread between them. Now a very little thought showed me that I had not far to seek. Here, in my own corner of Dorset, here in the village and county undercurrents, still running high in spite of the war, I found my seven characters.