“Money.” Russell grew thoughtful. “I could certainly use fifty bucks a week, but I don’t much like stepping into a dead man’s shoes and a murdered man’s at that. . . . Do you think it would be—well—dangerous?”
“I don’t see how,” answered Basil. “You have no connection with anyone else in the cast or with the Ingelow family, have you?”
“No. I’ve seen Miss Morley and her company on the stage from a gallery seat, and I’ve been turned down by Milhau’s secretary once or twice when I asked for a job; but that’s the sole extent of my connection with any of them. I never even heard of this Ingelow and his wife.”
“Then I should think you could enjoy your fifty bucks a week without worrying,” said Basil.
“Coming, Russell?” called Milhau from the footlights.
“Yes, sir!” The boy hurried down to the stage.
Basil followed more slowly, taking in every detail of the scene. Instead of a shadowy auditorium with a single work light dangling from a wire on stage, all the lights were blazing. Evidently Milhau was a sufficiently shrewd practical psychologist to realize that his cast would see all sorts of ghosts in dark corners and shady vistas. Adeane was standing near the footlights at the edge of the stage with a new book in a fresh dust jacket tucked under one arm. As he saw Basil and the others coming down the aisle from Milhau’s office, Adeane leaned forward to greet Basil. “Well, doc, have you found out who killed Cock Robin yet?”
As Basil disliked being called “doc” by anyone except Inspector Foyle, he did not reply in kind to Adeane’s jarring laugh.
Adeane seemed in unusually high spirits. His freckled, usually sallow face was flushed, and there was a reddish glint in his hazel eyes. Had he been drinking? Or had something more subtle than alcohol intoxicated him? He called loudly across the footlights:
“It was I,
Said the Fly,
With my little Eye . . .”
“Is this a confession?” murmured Basil.
Adeane laughed again. “Oh, no—I didn’t do it, and I didn’t even see it done. But I know whom I’d make the murderer if I were writing a play about it.”
“Who?”
“That’s telling.” Adeane rattled on. “I must thank you for sending me to that medical library. I got enough dope on disease there to last me twenty years. When I got home I had aches and pains in every part of my body—head, heart, lungs, stomach, kidneys, and I would have had a pain in the pancreas if I’d known where the pancreas is! I read a lot about diseases of the pancreas in your friends Barr, Tice, and Cushny. A bit too technical for me, they were. But I got hold of a book by Victor Heiser that was really something. A lot of stuff about native medicine in India and so forth that was very interesting . . . ve-ry interesting indeed!” Adeane smiled his slow, thick-lipped smile which Basil had found so unpleasant from the first moment they had met.
On stage the first-act set looked as if it had not been touched since the other evening. Already the actors playing Vladimir’s servants were gathering around the domino table for the opening scene, only this time they were in shirts and slacks instead of high-collared Russian blouses. Adeane’s reddish hair and mustard tweed jacket stood out among them as he thrust his way to his seat at the domino table. Russell crossed the stage to the couch in the alcove. Adeane looked up and drawled with almost impish malice the very words he had spoken to Ingelow: “Hello, so you’re the corpse!”
Russell stopped short. There was a deathly stillness. Then Milhau called out: “That isn’t funny, Adeane! Go in the alcove and shut the door, Russell. We’re ten minutes late already.”
His top sergeant brusqueness restored order. But it could not scatter the unpleasant aftertaste of that moment. Russell entered the alcove. The double doors closed slowly, hiding him from view.
Leonard’s voice spoke in Basil’s ear. “It’s absurd, but I hate the look of those closed doors. After what happened last time I wish I weren’t the one who has to open them. I can’t help being afraid I’ll find him dead, though I know it’s entirely unreasonable. I wonder why I feel that way?”
“Suggestion,” answered Basil. “A scene can revivify memory just as intensely as an odor or a musical phrase. Memory has more to do with the senses than reason.”
Leonard turned away to take up his place in the wings ready for his entrance a few minutes later. Milhau was sitting with an assistant producer in the second row center. Basil took a place beside Pauline in the third row.
“I don’t like this,” she whispered.
“Been reading about ‘eternal recurrence’ like Hutchins?”
“No, it’s just—”
“What?”
“Suppose that by taking the part of Vladimir and seeing the action of the play from Vladimir’s angle of vision this boy, Russell, will discover something about the action of the play that proves only one person could possibly murder Vladimir during the first act? And suppose the murderer realizes this? Then the boy wouldn’t be too safe would he?”
“You do have the nicest ideas,” said Basil. “But I’ve been over the script thoroughly, and I don’t see any way Vladimir could learn something that was not known to any other observer on stage or in the audience.”
“Everybody ready?” cried Milhau. “Shoot!”
The orchestra lights were dimmed but the stage remained a brightly lighted box.
One of the servants moved a domino. Four!
Six! cried Adeane.
Rehearsal had begun.
The full force of all Hutchins had said about eternal recurrence came home to Basil in the next few moments. To a layman there was something uncanny and even a little frightening about the way the actors repeated every word and inflection and gesture of the other evening as if they had ceased to be human beings and become mechanical toys who always did and said certain things when you wound up their springs. While one part of Basil’s brain kept his eyes on his watch and his hands busy with a pencil noting the time of each entrance and exit on the margin of Rod’s time table, another part of his brain was considering that law of intertia that makes momentum or habit such a tremendous power in the physical and psychical worlds. Everything was a part of it—planets and electrons going round and round the same orbits; Hindu marriage ritual still performed though its significance is forgotten; the intricate instincts of insects who also performed elaborate rituals without knowing why; the child who had to repeat a poem from the beginning in order to remember the last line; the embryo that has to recapitulate the development of the whole species before it can turn a cell into a man. No wonder the most evil and the most ridiculous beliefs became sacred once they were sanctioned by tradition. No wonder that “thinking is hard work while prejudice is a pleasure.” Obviously it was initiative in both act and thought which taxed the nervous system most exhaustingly and unpleasantly. But habit like a buoyant tide of psychic momentum bore the actors through their parts and enabled them to perform prodigious feats of memory repeating page after page of dialogue without mistake or omission.
Once more the domino game was broken up by the ring of the doorbell. Once more Wanda swept into the room saying: Is the master away? This morning her stage presence had the same quality that had held Basil’s attention the other evening; but she was less imposing in her plain black dress, and her lines seemed to come a little more rapidly.
“Are they taking it at the same pace they did the other night?” he asked Pauline.
“A shade faster,” she answered. “They’re nervous. That’s why Sam made them have this run-through. It’ll break the ice so they’ll be all right tonight.”