Martyn tried, as the morning wore on, to get some idea of the content of the play, but was unable to do so. Occasionally the players would speak snatches of dialogue leading up to the moment when a photograph was to be taken, and from these she gathered that the major conflict of the theme was between the characters played by Adam Poole and Clark Bennington and that this conflict was one of ideas. About a particular shot there was a great deal of difficulty. In this Poole and Gay Gainsford confronted each other, and it was necessary that her posture, the arrested gesture of her hand, and even her expression should be an exact reflection of his.
To Martyn, Poole had seemed to be a short-tempered man, but with Gay Gainsford he showed exemplary patience. “It’s the old story, Gay,” he said. “You’re over-anxious. It’s not enough for you to look like me. Let’s face it—” he hesitated for a moment and said quickly: “We’ve had all this, haven’t we — but it’s worth repeating — you can’t look strikingly like me, although Jacko’s done wonders. What you’ve got to do is to be me. At this moment, don’t you see, you’re my heredity, confronting me like a threat. As far as the photograph is concerned, we can cheat — the shot can be taken over your shoulder, but in the performance there can be no cheating, and that is why I’m making such a thing of it. Now let’s take it with the line. Your head’s on your arms, you raise it slowly to face me. Ready now. Right, up you come.”
Miss Gainsford raised her face to his as he leaned across the writing desk and whispered: “Don’t you like what you see?” At the same moment there was a cascade of laughter from Miss Hamilton. Poole’s voice cracked like a whip-lash: “Helena, please,” and she turned from Parry Percival to say: “Darling, I’m so sorry,” and in the same breath spoke her line of dialogue: “But it’s you, don’t you see? You can’t escape from it. It’s you.” Gay Gainsford made a hopeless little gesture and Poole said: “Too late, of course. Try again.”
They tried several times, in an atmosphere of increasing tension. The amiable Jacko was called in to make an infinitesimal change in Gay’s make-up, and Martyn saw him blot away a tear. At this juncture a disembodied voice roared from the back of the circle:
“Madam, have comfort: all of us have cause
To wail the dimming of our shining star!”
Poole glanced into the auditorium. “Do shut up like a good chap, John,” he said.
“Pour all your tears! I am your sorrow’s nurse,
And I will pamper it with la-men-ta-ti-ons.”
The man called Jacko burst out laughing and was instantly dismissed to the dressing-rooms by Poole.
There followed a quarter of an hour of mounting hysteria on the part of Gay Gainsford and of implacable persistence from Adam Poole. He said suddenly: “All right, we’ll cheat. Shift the camera.”
The remaining photographs were taken without a great deal of trouble. Miss Gainsford, looking utterly miserable, went off to her dressing-room. The man called Jacko reappeared and ambled across to Miss Hamilton. There was an adjustment in make-up while Martyn held up the mirror.
“Maybe it’s lucky,” he said, “you don’t have to look like somebody else.”
“Are you being nice or beastly, Jacko?”
He put a cigarette between her lips and lit it “The dresses are good,” he said. He had a very slight foreign accent.
“You think so, do you?”
“Naturally. I design them for you.”
“Next time,” she said grimly, “you’d better write the play as well.”
He was a phenomenally ugly man, but a smile of extraordinary sweetness broke across his face.
“All these agonies!” he murmured. “And on Thursday night everyone will be kissing everyone else and at the Combined Arts Ball we are in triumph and on Friday morning you will be purring over your notices. And you must not be unkind about the play. It is a good play.” He grinned again, more broadly. His teeth were enormous and uneven. “Even the little niece of the great husband cannot entirely destroy it.”
“Jacko!”
“You may say what you like, it is not intelligent casting.”
“Please, Jacko.”
“All right, all right. I remind you instead of the Combined Arts Ball, and that no one has decided in what costume we go.”
“Nobody has any ideas. Jacko, you must invent something marvellous.”
“And in two days I must also create out of air eight marvellous costumes.”
“Darling Jacko, how beastly we are to you. But you know you love performing your little wonders.”
“I suggest then, that we are characters from Tchekhov as they would be in Hollywood. You absurdly gorgeous, and the little niece still grimly ingenue. Adam perhaps as Vanya if he were played by Boris Karloff. And so on.”
“Where shall I get my absurdly gorgeous dress?”
“I paint the design on canvas and cut it out and if I were introduced to your dresser I would persuade her to sew it up.” He took the glass from Martyn and said: “No one makes any introductions in this theatre, so we introduce ourselves to each other. I am Jacques Doré, and you are the little chick whom the stork has brought too late, or dropped into the wrong nest. Really,” he said, rolling his eyes at Miss Hamilton, “it is the most remarkable coincidence, if it is a coincidence. I am dropping bricks,” he added. “I am a very privileged person but one day I drop an outsize brick, and away I go.” He made a circle of his thumb and forefinger and looked through it, as though it were a quizzing-glass, at Martyn. “All the same,” he said, “it is a pity you are a little dresser and not a little actress.”
Between the photograph call and the dress rehearsal, which was timed for seven o’clock, a state of uneven ferment prevailed at the Vulcan. During the rare occasions on which she had time to reflect, Martyn anticipated a sort of personal zero hour, a moment when she would have to take stock, to come to a decision. She had two and fourpence and no place of abode, and she had no idea when she would be paid, or how much she would get. This moment of reckoning, however, she continually postponed. The problem of food was answered for the moment by the announcement that it would be provided for everyone whose work kept them in the theatre throughout the day. As Miss Hamilton had discovered a number of minor alterations to be made in her dresses, Martyn was of this company. Having by this time realized the position of extraordinary ubiquity held by Jacko, she was not surprised to find him cooking a mysterious but savoury mess over the gas ring in Fred Badger’s sink-room.
This concoction was served in enamel mugs, at odd intervals, to anyone who asked for it, and Martyn found herself eating her share in company with Bob Cringle, Mr. Poole’s dresser. From him she learnt more about Mr. Jacques Doré. He was responsible for the décor and dressing of all Poole’s productions. His official status was that of assistant to Mr. Poole, but in actual fact he seemed to be a kind of superior odd-job man.
“General dogsbody,” Cringle gossiped, “that’s what Mr. Jacko is. ‘Poole’s Luck,’ people call him, and if the Guv’nor was superstitious about anything, which ’e is not, it would be about Mr. Jacko. The lady’s the same. Can’t do without ’im. As a matter of fact it’s on ’er account ’e sticks it out. You might say ’e’s ’er property, a kind of pet, if you like to put it that way. Joined up with ’er and ’is nibs when they was in Canada and the Guv’nor still doing the child-wonder at ’is posh college. ’E’s a Canadian-Frenchy, Mr. Jacko is. Twenty years ago that must ’ave been, only don’t say I said so. It’s what they call dog-like devotion, and that’s no error. To ’er, not to ’is nibs.”