“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 Bennington, this cousin’s wife, who is Helena, and with whom he falls in love, and their daughter, who is freakishly like him, but vicious, and who represents therefore his inescapable heredity. This wretched girl,” Jacko continued with great relish, looking at Martyn out of the corner of his eyes, “is engaged to a nonentity but finds herself drawn by a terrible attraction to Adam himself. She is played by Gay Gainsford. Receive again from me the pink pot, and bestow upon me the brown. As I have recited it to you so baldly, without nuance and without detail, you will say perhaps if Ibsen or Kafka or Brecht or even Sartre had written this play it would be a good one.”
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 beginning he has found himself. Now I descend.” He climbed down his step-ladder, groaning lamentably. “And now,” he said, “we have some light, and we see if what I have done is good. Go out into the front of the house and in a moment I join you.”
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 cannot escape. And now you say, all this is pretentious nonsense, and nobody will notice my set except perhaps a few oddities who come to first nights; and in any case will get it all wrong. And now we wash ourselves and go out to a place where I am known, and we eat a little, and you tell me why you look like a puppy who has found his tail but dare not wag it. Come.”
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 uncanny intuition or else by a queer coincidence he said: “I’m not nearly as peculiar as I look.” Martyn said tentatively: “But I honestly don’t know what you want me to tell you.”
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 Bennington. She is not very like him, either, which is neither here nor there and perhaps fortunate for her. It is her unlikeness to Adam that we must deplore. Moreover, although I am a genius with make-up, there is very little I can do about it. So we depend instead on reflected emotions and echoed mannerisms. But although she is a nice little actress with a nice small talent, she cannot do this very well either. In the meantime our author, who is a person of unbridled passion where his art is in question, becomes incensed with her performance and makes scenes and everybody except her Uncle Bennington retires into corners and tears pieces of their hair out. The little actress also retires into corners and weeps and is comforted by her Uncle Bennington, who nevertheless knows she is not good.
“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 cannot be an accident and waits to see, except Papa Jacko, whose curiosity will not permit him to wait.”
Martyn cried out: “I’ve never seen him before, except in films in New Zealand. He knows nothing about me at all. Nothing. I came here from New Zealand a fortnight ago and I’ve been looking for a job ever since. I came to the Vulcan looking for a job, that’s all there is about it.”
“Did you come looking for the job of dresser to Miss Hamilton?”
“For any job,” she said desperately. “I heard by accident about the dresser.”
“But it was not to be a dresser that you came all the way from New Zealand, and yet it was to work in the theatre, and so perhaps after all you hoped to be an actress.”
“Yes,” Martyn said, throwing up her hands, “all right, I hoped to be an actress. But please let’s forget all about it. You can’t imagine how thankful I am to be a dresser, and if you think I’m secretly hoping Miss Gainsford will get laryngitis or break her leg, you couldn’t be more mistaken. I don’t believe in fairy-tales.”