Cue For Murder полностью

From that moment on the actors on stage completely lost their heads. Wanda forgot her next line, and the prompter’s voice could be heard plainly. A moment later the same thing happened to the veteran Hutchins. They could not recover the sympathy of the audience. Giggles greeted the most serious lines in the play. At first Basil thought it was purely the hysteria of a morbid audience. Then he realized that the hysteria was in the actors, not in the audience. Their acting was so bad tonight that they were making the play a burlesque of itself. It was vividly brought home to Basil that the acting of Wanda’s company rather than Sardou’s lines and situations had made the performance two nights ago seem interesting and lifelike. This play was anything but “actor-proof.”

Everything that was false or faded in Sardou’s ideas of love or politics or play construction was mercilessly emphasized by the ragged performance. Every flaw in each individual actor’s technique and personality was exposed. Wanda seemed a gushing poseuse; Hutchins a pompous, declamatory windbag. When Hutchins said: He cannot escape now, every hand is against him a male voice laughed outright. Yet Hutchins didn’t say it so very differently from the way he had said it the other evening. The ambassadorial dignity was only a shade more flamboyant. Even Leonard lost his magic touch and gabbled the part of Grech. Rod was phlegmatic as usual when he first came on as Dr. Lorek, but the giggling of the audience soon got him so on edge he could hardly remember a single line. An almost clinical demonstration of partial amnesia from shock, Basil decided.

“Oh, God!” muttered Milhau.

“What now?”

“He skipped ten whole lines. They can’t go back and pick them up. That this should happen to me! My best company—Wanda and Leonard and Rod—laughed at when they’re in a serious play! It’ll ruin them and me too! What will the critics say?”

Margot looked as if she could bear it.

“I saw something like this in London once,” said Pauline. “The Gate Theatre players did a version of Little Lord Fauntleroy. They didn’t alter a single line of the original play but by acting absurdly and putting the wrong emphasis on every line they made it perfectly hilarious—much more subtle than an ordinary burlesque.”

“Sure, and look what happened to the Broadway version of Vient de Paraitre,” added Milhau. “That was the play about the little nobody who became a best selling author overnight through a fluke. When the curtain rises on the second act he’s sitting at an enormous desk with an enormous portrait of himself on the wall behind him. It was supposed to be serious, but the minute the curtain rose on that scene the first night the audience laughed its head off. So after that they played the whole thing as low comedy.”

“Couldn’t you pretend that you had intended this as a travesty of Fedora all along?” suggested Basil.

“Too late for that now,” moaned Milhau. “All the write-ups have been serious. Wanda’s a serious actress!”

The climax of the first act had come. Dr. Lorek came down stage from the alcove. This is the end.

Vladimir! Wanda, now a vision in white velvet and ermine instead of gold tissue and sable, sped upstage to Adeane. Speak! She lifted slender arms like a white swan spreading its wings, and suddenly, like the legendary death cry of the swan, a raucous shriek came from her lips. She dropped like a bird winged in flight and rolled down the three shallow steps that led from the alcove to the rest of the stage. The audience laughed and laughed and laughed. It was so funny the way everyone on stage was overacting this evening—even Wanda Morley!

Milhau was at the telephone. “Ring down that curtain! Tell ’em Wanda is sick. We can’t go on like this, or we’ll be ruined! Give ’em their dough back, and tell ’em to get the hell out of here—politely, of course. . . . What? WHAT?”

Milhau put the receiver back as if it were too heavy for him to hold. His plump cheeks sagged. Pauline looked at him, her blue eyes bright with fear of the unknown. Margot was still cool and composed, even smiling a little. Would anything short of a kick from a mule ever stir that woman wondered Basil. It was Margot who spoke: “Something wrong? Wanda?” she asked in her small, crisp voice. Basil realized that she hoped something was wrong with Wanda. Perhaps that was her inmost reason for reviving Fedora.

“No.” Milhau answered her, but he was looking at Basil, dully, uncomprehendingly. “No, not Wanda. I could understand that. I mean . . .”

“What is it?” cried Pauline in a voice that cracked.

Milhau answered in the same lost voice. “Adeane. Just like the first time. Only there was more blood and—Wanda saw it. That was when she shrieked.”

II