When Martyn went out on the stage she was able for the first time to see the company assembled together, and found it consisted, as far as the players were concerned, of no more than the six persons she had already encountered: first in their fixed professional poses in the show-frame at the front of the house, and later in their dressing-rooms. She had attached mental tags to them and found herself thinking of Helena Hamilton as the Leading Lady, of Gay Gainsford as the Ingénue, of J. G. Darcey as the Character Actor, of Parry Percival as the Juvenile, of Clark Bennington regrettably, perhaps unjustly, as the Drunken Actor, and of Adam Poole—but as yet she had found no label for Poole, unless it was the old-fashioned one of ‘Governor’, which pleased her by its vicarious association with the days of the Victorian actor-managers.

To this actual cast of six she must add a number of satellite figures—the author, Dr John Rutherford, whose eccentricities seemed to surpass those of his legend, with which she was already acquainted, the man in the red sweater who was the stage-manager, and was called Clem Smith, his assistant, a morose lurking figure, and the crew of stage-hands who went about their business or contemplated the actors with equal detachment.

The actors were forming themselves now into a stage ‘picture’, moving in a workmanlike manner, under the direction of Adam Poole, and watched with restless attentiveness by an elderly, slack-jointed man, carrying a paint pot and brushes. This man, the last of all the figures to appear upon the stage that morning, seemed to have no recognizable job but to be concerned in all of them. He was dressed in overalls and a tartan shirt, from which his long neck emerged, birdlike and crapulous, to terminate in a head that wobbled slightly as if its articulation with the top of the spine had loosened with age. He was constantly addressed with exasperated affection as Jacko. Under his direction, bunches of lights were wheeled into position, cameramen peered and muttered, and at his given signal the players, by an easy transition in behaviour and appearance, became larger than life. A gap was left in the middle of the group, and into this when all was ready floated Helena Hamilton, ruffling her plumage, and becoming at once the focal point of the picture.

‘Darling,’ she said, ‘it’s not going to be a flash, is it, with all of you looking like village idiots, and me like the Third Witch on the morning after the cauldron scene?’

‘If you can hold it for three seconds,’ Adam Poole said, ‘it needn’t be a flash.’

‘I can hold anything, if you come in and help me.’