Nana (Barnes & Noble Classics) - Emile Zola [145]
“Well! what are you all waiting for?” suddenly exclaimed Bordenave, thumping furiously on the boards with his heavy walking-stick. “Barillot, why don’t you begin?”
“It’s M. Bosc—he’s disappeared,” replied Barillot, who was acting as assistant stage-manager.
Then there was quite a storm of shouts. Every one called Bosc. Bordenave cursed and swore.
“Damn it all! it’s always the same. One may ring and call—they’re always where they oughtn’t to be; and then they grumble when they’re kept after four o’clock.”
Bosc, however, arrived with a serene coolness.
“Eh? what? who wants me? Ah! it’s time for my entrance! Then why didn’t you say so. Good! Simone, give me my cue, ‘There are the guests arriving,’ and I enter. How am I to enter?”
“Why, through the door, of course,” shouted Fauchery, losing patience.
“Yes, but where is the door?”
This time Bordenave attacked Barillot, cursing and swearing again, and banging his stick on the boards sufficient to split them.
“Damn it all! I said a chair was to be placed there to represent the door. Every day I have to repeat the same thing. Barillot! where’s Barillot? There’s another! they all bolt off!”
Barillot, however, bowing beneath the tempest, came and placed the chair without saying a word; and the rehearsal continued. Simone, with her bonnet on, and enveloped in her fur cloak, assumed the airs of a servant arranging some furniture. She interrupted herself to say,
“You know, I’m not very warm, so I shall keep my hands in my muff.” Then changing her voice, she greeted Bosc with a faint cry, and said, “Why! it’s the count. You are the first, sir, and madame will be very pleased.”
Bosc had on a muddy pair of trousers, a big drab overcoat, and an immense muffler rolled round his neck. With his hands in his pockets, and an old hat on his head, he said in a hollow voice, without any acting but merely dragging himself along,
“Do not disturb your mistress, Isabella; I wish to give her a surprise. ”
The rehearsal went on. Bordenave, scowling, and buried in his arm-chair, listened with an air of fatigue. Fauchery, nervous and constantly changing his position, was seized every minute with a desire to interrupt, which, however, he repressed. But he heard whispering behind him in the dark and empty house.
“Is she there?” he asked, leaning towards Bordenave.
The latter nodded his head. Before accepting the part of Géraldine which he had offered her, Nana had wished to see the piece; for she hesitated before agreeing to act the part of a gay woman. What she longed for was to appear on the stage as a lady. She was half hidden in the shadow of a box with Labordette, who was exerting himself with Bordenave for her. Fauchery glanced round at her, and then again gave all his attention to the rehearsal.
Only the front of the stage was lighted up. A large jet of gas issuing from a pipe erected at the junction of the footlights, and the glare of which was disseminated by means of a powerful reflector, looked like a great yellow eye in the semi-obscurity, where it blazed with a sort of dubious sadness. Against the slender gas-pipe stood Cossard, holding up the manuscript close to the light, which vividly exposed the outline of his hump. Then more in the shadow were Fauchery and Bordenave. In the midst of the enormous structure, this light, which illumined the distance of a few yards only, looked like the glimmer of a lantern fixed to a post at some railway station, the actors appearing like so many strange phantoms, with their shadows dancing before them. The rest of the stage, full of a kind of fine dust similar to that which hangs about houses in the course of demolition, resembled a gigantic nave undergoing repair, with its ladders, its frame-works, and its side-scenes, the faded paint on which imitated heaps of rubbish; and the drop-scenes suspended up aloft had an appearance of frippery hanging to the beams of some vast rag warehouse,