Doomsday Morning M Read online

  “We’ll finish it,” I said automatically. She gave me the bright, compliant glance of the opportunist. I could almost see the thought go through her head that I had been a big name once and might easily be again. She’d be happy to play along with me about as far as I cared to go if she could think there was much in it for her. I know that “I want to be a star” look pretty well. I looked at heir meditatively. “Cressy, I want to ask you a question. Have you got a bathing suit on?”

  She met my eyes gravely. A ripple of the quick, shadowy amusement crossed her face fleetingly. She shook her head.

  I nodded. “That’s what I thought.” I stood there looking down at her face and the smooth wet shoulders and their reflections on the water. The murmuring silences of the redwoods and the river closed us in together. Half my mind felt as buoyant as a balloon as I stood there in the stillness looking down. But the other half of my mind was not my own. And as long as I lay down every night and woke every morning with Miranda still beside me, how could I let myself think of Cressy or anyone at all?

  After a long pause Cressy said, “Well?”

  I shook my head. “We start rehearsals in about twenty minutes. There’s a lot of work to do. You’d better come up as quickly as you can. We’ll be waiting for you.” And I turned away.

  CHAPTER XI

  THE SUN SLANTED at an angle between the trees as we laid out our stage among the redwoods. In the dusty carpet of pine needles we paced off a city street. Guthrie measured the shape and length of the bleachers our audience would sit in. They closed off opposite ends of the stage. The other two sides would be the business buildings that lined the street. We scratched out the pavement areas and stuck dead branches upright to mark doors and windows. And that was our stage.

  I would have liked a leisurely reading rehearsal, with all of us sitting around discussing the play, working out characterizations, getting acquainted. I would have liked a lot of things, including more time. Even though all of us had sleep-learned our lines, the hardest part of the job was still to do, and we had a fantastically short time to do it in.

  The cast didn’t like me. It didn’t matter much. I made myself ignore everything in the world outside the job at hand. I ignored the time pressure, and how much I wanted a drink, and what I had or hadn’t let myself in for with the rebels. Nothing mattered now except getting on with the play.

  We walked through it fast once, blocking in the action and getting a general idea of the stage business each of the actors had worked out for his own part. We found out where these conflicted. We found out how terrible things looked. They always do, at first. We ran into each other at entrances, exits, and crossing. We found we didn’t have either time or space to make the proper crosses and still get the lines said. We discovered long dead stretches that looked hopeless to fill up with any sort of stage business. At one point we all piled up together in one corner of the stage, everybody having to be on the same spot at the same time to make any sense of the scene. It didn’t look as if anybody on God’s earth could make a play out of this script and this cast.

  Working on an arena stage like this, with the audience on two sides, made it a lot harder than it really needed to be, on top of everything else. On a normal stage you start all your crosses with the upstage foot to keep your body turned toward the audience, but when there are people on two sides, how are you going to work out your movements to face both ways? All you can do is keep moving. When we had floundered through the last scene I said dispiritedly, “All right, take ten,” and walked over to Guthrie, sucking his pipe beside the fire.

  “Is there any good reason,” I asked, “why we can’t hire a hall and put this thing on the easy way? None of us knows enough aut circle staging to keep from falling over our own feet. Even if we had time enough for rehearsals, we’d still——”

  “Sorry, Mr. Rohan. Orders are orders.”

  “Where are you going to get the bleachers?”

  Guthrie nodded toward his truck. “In there. I’ve got lightweight risers and benches enough to seat more than we’ll probably draw.”

  “In there?” It was incredulous. “I don’t believe it.”

  “Come and see.” I think he was proud of the packing Comus had done for us. He got up a little stiffly (I remembered with some guilt that he’d taken a licking himself in San Andreas today) and threw open the back door of the sound truck.

  It was like looking into the belly of the whale. So many visceral-looking coils and compact masses of cables. So many folded steel beams and benches all cramped tight into fetal positions like the unborn young of the truck. There was a clear space about three feet wide and less than six feet high running down the middle of the visceral cavity, with a panel board and a bench along one side of it, and at the end a blind television screen with very technical-looking controls all around it. It occurred to me that I could probably talk to Ted Nye any time I wanted simply by stepping into the truck and turning the right knobs.

  It also occurred to me that if there was any covert purpose behind our tour of California some of the answers to what it was probably lay right under my nose here, if I had the training to see them, which I hadn’t. Anybody who stood where I stood now and leaned forward like this—I leaned, and something caught in the door hinge tickled my cheek. I brushed at it absently, and found I had a strand of raveling brown wool between my fingers. Guthrie gave me a sharp glance over his shoulder.

  “What’s that?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “A pine needle. Could you get New York on that television set?”

  But I didn’t listen to his answer. I’d covered up the ravel of brown wool without conscious thought, instinct moving faster than reason. But reason caught up fast. I’d seen brown wool today—where? A sweater with a torn place at the cuff. On one of the men at the Medical Building, leaning over the lie box while my truths and false-hoods flowed out on the moving tape. The man who had spoken of word-keeping and Jeffersonian political philosophy. So maybe somebody had leaned here and looked, and probably seen and understood a lot more than I did. When? After my interview, while I sat waiting by the highway with the afternoon turning slowly overhead.

  Suddenly I knew why that truck of lettuce had overturned and caught fire just when and where it did. I saw the whole thing taking place a long way off, puppet-sized, planned and executed to get Guthrie away from his sound truck just long enough for an expert to probe its secrets. They were fast, these rebels. Fast and flexible in their thinking.

  I could be wrong, of course. It was a lot to build on one ravel of brown wool. But I knew I wasn’t wrong. And I knew that they knew now what ever there was to be learned about the belly of the metal whale. Maybe, in their own good time, they’d let me in on the secret.

  “So you see, Mr. Rohan,” Guthrie was saying, “there’s a complete setup here. And we have good raisons for everything we do this trip.”

  I said, “All right. We do it the hard way.” And turned back to the camp.

  I whistled for attention and gathered the cast together around the fire. “We’ll talk about the play a little bit,” I said. Then we’ll break for supper. And from then on in until we fall flat we’ll rehearse. Okay? Sit down, then; and get comfortable. Now——”

  I told them what I thought about the play. What we were trying to get at in it, how it seemed to me the moods built and changed, where the main conflict points were and how we built up to them. I asked for comments and got them. We talked over the characters and how they fitted the theme and how they lined up against each other. I complimented them on their interpretations, and meant it. They were all good, competent actors with enough experience behind them to make me hope we might really work this thing out by Saturday after all.

  We seemed to me in pretty smooth accord when we broke up for supper. But the minute the meeting ended the freeze-out set in again. The cast went to its meal around the cook-stove, working together to get it ready, turning collective backs on me. All of them. I walked up to the resta
urant and ate in morose solitude, thinking about the play and making notes.

  When we assembled again the darkness had come on and the fire was sending up its streamers of red and gold sparks. The air smelted exhilaratingly of woodsmoke and pine. In the underlighting of the fire, the red woods leaned together overhead, their enormous floating continents of foliage swaying silently. At the very top of the well a few stars burned. One of them winked red and blue and white in rapid, endless succession. I could see a strip of the Milky Way, which I had almost forgotten was up there in the sky. I looked at the winking star. Red, white, blue. The rebels’ star, I thought. And then, with a silent laugh, Charlie Starr.

  Guthrie had strung one glaring incandescent lantern on a rope above the stage. We went to work in a tent of white light whose edges swayed soundlessly around us when the wind blew.

  We walked through the play once fast, script in hand. Everybody but me knew his speeches by now, and I was learning rapidly. On this it didn’t matter. Each of us read his first few words and then gabbled a quick blah-blah-blah until the last few, speaking only the cue words clearly. It was still rough, but already it began to take shape. We didn’t fall over each other quite so much and we began to grasp the necessities of playing to two audiences at once. Possibilities opened up we hadn’t thought of at first. It went pretty well, considering.

  We took another break. The rebels’ star had slid percebly down the sky and my scrapes and bruises were stiffening in the chilly air. I borrowed a sweater from Guthrie and whistled up the cast.

  “All right, now let’s take it through from the start. On stage for Eleven—Eileen, Pod. Ready?”

  Eleven means Act One, Scene One. Eileen Henken put down her coffee cup and trotted briskly to her station between two upright twigs in the door of what would, we hope, be a hotel when we got to San Andreas. Pod shuffled calmly after her and sat down on what would be a curb, going through the motions of a whittler without a knife or wood.

  “Dad!” Eileen called loud and clear. “Dad, you hear me? With all these people in town tonight, seems like you’d find something better to do than sit here whittling.”

  “Now, Mother”—Pod whittled imperturbably—”you’d holler a lot louder if I was in——” He glanced at me.

  “It’s the Irish Rose in San Andreas,” I supplied.

  “If I was in the Irish Rose tonight,” he went on, and then waited, making elaborate play out of holding up his unseen knife and thumbing the blade to fill in the pause for laughter that was sure to follow a local reference.

  And so it went.

  It was a good play for its purpose, which seemed as nearly as I could judge to be simply pure entertainment plus extreme realism and immediacy. It all took place within the most rigid set of unities I ever saw worked out. (And that made me think a little of Comus, rigid and functional.) All the action happened right out there in the street at the heart of any town. It happened within a few hours of one evening, and it referred freely to local places, current politics, the troubles of the time. But it wasn’t about politics at all. At least, not on the surface.

  I’d be willing to bet a lot of the less sophisticated people in the audience went home afterward convinced all this had actually happened just as it seemed to. That some local girl they didn’t quite recognize had really made a date to meet a city slicker (me) and got into serious disagreements with her local lover and her grandparents about it. Polly as a farcical Comus cop had a song toward the end of the play, and right afterward Roy and I put on a fight. And it all worked out to a happy ending in about an hour’s playing time.

  The lines were fast and packed, and though for convenience the play had been broken down into acts and scenes, it had to be played with no real breaks at all, like an Elizabethan play. We had no curtains, of course, and we couldn’t darken the stage, so it had to be that way. But the playwright had taken advantage of the handicap and made it into a virtue. The thing was going to put over a very strong effect of happening spontaneously before your eyes. If we got it into shape in time, of course.

  You learn a lot about people after you’ve been through a play with them a time or two. I’d thought rather enviously when I first saw them what a compact in-grou this seemed. I should have known better. There’s no such thing as a theatrical troupe without conflicts.

  I hadn’t realized, for instance, how heavily Roy Copley depended on his wife until I put him through his first scenes. He had a lot of boyish charm and he projected the impact of it quite well, but what it sprang from was the freshness and ease of man who has never had to make a decision in his life. Polly carried his burdens for him, and the result was the curious effect of a man not quite present before us. He was quick enough, he gave his part a good, well-thought-out interpretation, picked up his cues promptly. But I never had the feeling Roy Copley was there before me.

  Eileen Henken was surprising. Strong and hostile tensions centered around her all the time she was on stage with anyone else. I found out why right away. She was the most expert scene stealer I ever saw. She didn’t give a damn about the rest of the cast, the play, anything I said to her. All she wanted was to be the center of attention on stage. Off it she was as sweet and mild an old lady as you could hope to find, on stage a demon.

  She knew every trick in the book, and believe me, it’s hard to upstage another actor when the audience is on two sides of you at once. The actor you maneuver with his back to the audience on one side will be facing them on the other. But I knew that five minutes after the play started Eileen would know instinctively where the dead areas in the audience were and get her rivals facing that way with a minimum of effort.

  She knew how to throw unexpected changes in stress into her lines so the other player’s answers would sound flat. She knew how to start a speech on a key just high enough to force the other actor to flat his voice into a squawk if he tried to top her. Twice she stole the key word out of somebody else’s line and left him dangling. The first time I thought it was an accident. There was a scene in which Roy played up to Polly in the hope of rousing the ingénue’s jealousy. Eileen was supposed to ask him if he liked his coffee hot, and he, with a roll of the eye at Polly’s Comus coat, answered, “Red-hot.” It was amusing the way he did it and would certainly draw a laugh from most audiences. But Eileen Henken asked innocently, “How do you like your coffee—red-hot?” And Roy stood there without an answer.

  If I thought it was an accident, Polly didn’t. She was sewing a button on the red coat as she sat beside me, and when Roy’s voice failed to come in on the right beat she looked up sharply, realized what had happened, and jumped to her feet, shouting, “Damn you, Eileen Henken, if you pull that once more I’ll—I’ll kick your playbox in!”

  Eileen apologized, very mild and sweet. Polly sat down again and stabbed the button’s eye ferociously. “Just watch it,” she muttered. “I warned you.”

  Guthrie held the prompt book for us, and he seemed to be paying abnormally close attention to the timing of some of the lines, entering the exact second of a speech every time we went through the scene. I thought of asking him why, then thought again. I knew it wouldn’t get me anywhere. So far we hadn’t openly clashed. Ostensibly he was a sort of second-class citizen of the troupe, deliberately making and keeping himselat way. If he defied me, people would start to wonder.

  I watched Cressy make delicate byplay with a redwood, gazing up at it reproachfully and saying, “I wasn’t out of your sight ten minutes, and now you start yelling as if you owned me.” She paused as if listening to what she had just said, then backtracked and began again. “I wasn’t out of your sight ten minutes——” After that she tried, “I wasn’t out of your sight ten minutes——” Then she gave the redwood a little stroke, shoulder-high, very delicately and placatingly, and looked down at her own thrust-out toe as if she felt suddenly shy.

  She was good. She had subtlety and imagination, and that inner authority over a scene that only good actors have. I felt suddenly that I
wanted to see her make her entrance into a scene perfectly paced for her, and I yelled at Roy to pick up his cues faster. He said, “All right, let’s go back to ‘Have you seen Susan anywhere, I can’t find her.’” I said okay, and everybody on stage paused for a moment, looked a little unfocused as they cast themselves back in time about a minute and a half, and then began the scene from “Have you seen Susan.”

  It was a pleasure to watch her go on.

  But watching carried me back. I thought of the stage of the Raleigh Theater at a point in rehearsals like this, everybody working hard against time. I wondered who was directing there now. Whoever it was. I knew what he’d be seeing. The actors going doggedly through their lines while the stage sets went up around them, the sound of sawing and hammering sometimes drowning out the speeches. Nobody paying any attention to any job but his own. Maybe the lights being tested, so the stage was flooded with warm sunshine and darkened with dramatic suddenness as if some tremendous event were about to happen. Out of the darkness the voice of the actors would be going imperturbably on. That sense of complex forces working all together—the electricians and carpenters, the stage manager, the set and costume designers, the elaborate production schedules set up—I wondered why I didn’t miss them more.

  And then I thought, This is how it all started, a long time ago, little groups of people rehearsing simple plays outdoors, under the trees. Time had set the stage for us, reared the redwoods, ignited the stars. There was a lot to be said, I thought, for preparing a play in a forest clearing, with a lantern’s glare hollowing out a stage for us under the redwoods. If you could forget about the unknown elements outside, a countryside seething on the very brink of explosion.