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Chapter III
FIRST DRESS REHEARSAL
Martyn’s official jobs were all finished by about three o’clock, but by some curious process of which she herself was scarcely aware she had by that time turned into a sort of odd-job girl, particularly where Jacko was concerned. He was engaged in re-painting a piece of very modern decoration above the main and central entrance of the second act set.
“It was lousy in the design,” he said, “and it was therefore twelve times lousier when it was twelve times bigger, so now I make it a little worse. Before the first dress rehearsal it is a good thing to be at one’s wits’ ends, or else one would lose them altogether. When there is not a job, I invent it, because after all there must be someone sane to watch the dress rehearsal. Now if you pass me up the pot of pink, I make a very civilized little flourish in the mode of the second act, and we take time off for you to tell me how clever I am, and why you are such a simpleton as to turn yourself into a dresser.”
“I wish,” Marryn said, “I knew what the play was about. Is it really a modern morality and do you think it good?”
“All good plays are moralities,” said Jacko sententiously, and he leant so far back on the top of his step-ladder that Martyn hurriedly grasped it. “And this is a good play with a very old theme.” He hesitated for a moment and she wondered if she only imagined that he looked worried. “Here is a selected man with new ideas in conflict with people who have very old ones. Adam is the selected man. He has been brought up on an island by a community of idealists; he represents the value of environment. By his own wish he returns to his original habitat, and there he is confronted by his heredity, in the persons of his great-uncle, who is played by J. G. Darcey, his brilliant but unstable cousin, who is played by Clark Be
Inexplicably, he again seemed to be in some sort of distress. “It has, in fact,” he said, “a continental flavour. But for those who have ears to hear and eyes to see, it has a wider implication than I have suggested. It is a tale, in point of fact, about the struggle of the human being in the detestable situation in which from the begi
By the time Martyn reached the sixth row of the stalls the stage was fully illuminated, and for the first time she saw the set for Act II as Jacko had intended it.
It was an interior, simple in design and execution, but with an air of being over-civilized and stale. “They are,” Jacko explained, slumping into a seat beside her,
“bad people who live in it. They are not bad of their own volition, but because they have been set down in this place by their heredity and ca
The restaurant where Jacko was known turned out to be hard by the theatre, and situated in a basement. He insisted on paying for a surprisingly good meal, and Martyn’s two and fourpence remained in her pocket Whereas the curiosity of Fred Badger and Bob Cringle, and in some degree of the actors, had been covert and indirect, Jacko’s was unblushing and persistent.
“Now,” he said, over their coffee, “I ask you my questions. If there is a secret you tell me so, and with difficulty I shut myself up. If not, you confide in me, because everybody in the Vulcan makes me their confidant and I am greatly flattered by this. In any case we remain friends, no bones broken, and we repeat our little outings. How old do you think I am?”
With some embarrassment, Martyn looked at his scrawny neck, at the thin lichen-like growth of fuzz on his head, and at his heavily scored and indented face. “Fifty-seven,” she ventured.
“Sixty-two,” said Jacko complacently. “I am sixty-two years old, and a bit of a character. I have not the talent to make a character of myself for the people who sit in front, so instead I play to actors. A wheel within wheels. For twenty years I have built up my role of confidant, and now if I wanted to I couldn’t leave off. For example, I can speak perfect English, but my accent is a feature of the role of Papa Jacko and must be sustained. Everybody knows it is a game and, amiably, everyone pretends with me. It is all rather ham and jejune, but I hope that you are going to play too.”
Martyn thought: “It would be pleasant to tell him: I’m sure he’s very nice and so why don’t I do it? I suppose it’s because he looks so very odd.” And whether with unca
On the opposite wall of the restaurant there was a tarnished looking-glass, upon the surface of which someone had half-heartedly painted a number of water-lilies and leaves. Among this growth, as if drowned in Edwardiana, Jacko’s and Martyn’s faces were reflected. He pointed to hers.
“See,” he said. “We rehearse a play for which it is necessary a secondary-part actress should resemble, strikingly, the leading man. We have auditions, and from the hundreds of anxious ingenues we select the one who is least unlike him, but she is still very unlike him. Incidentally,” Jacko continued, looking Martyn very hard in the eye, “she is the niece of Clark Be
“Upon this scene there enters, in the guise of a dresser—” he jabbed his finger at the fly-blown mirror— “this. Look at it. If I set out to draw the daughter or the young sister of the leading man, that is what I should draw. Everybody has a look at her and retires again into corners to ask what it is about. Because obviously, she is not a dresser. Is she perhaps — and there are many excited speculations. ‘A niece for a niece?’ we ask ourselves, and there is some mention of Adam’s extreme youth — you must excuse me — and the wrong side of the rose-bush, and everybody says it ca