“It was not my plan to be bored, so I looked for something to do. I was a handy fellow, and a lot younger than the stage manager, so when the chairs had to be arranged in a different pattem I nipped forward and gave him a hand, which he allowed me to do without comment. Before the rehearsal was finished I was an established chair lifter, and that was how I became an assistant stage manager. My immediate boss was a man called Macgregor, whose feet hurt; he had those solid feet that seem to be all in one piece, encased in heavy boots; he was glad enough to have somebody who would run around for him. It was from him, during a break in the work, that I found out what we were doing.

“ ‘It’s the new piece,’ he explained. ‘Scaramouche. From the novel by Rafael Sabatini. You’ll have heard of Rafael Sabatini? You haven’t? Well, keep your lugs open and you’ll get the drift of it. Verra romantic, of course.’

“ ‘What am I to do, Mr Macgregor?’ I asked.

“ ‘Nobody’s told me,’ he said. ‘But from the cut of your jib I’d imagine you were the Double.’

“ ‘Double what?’

“ ‘The Double in Two, two,’ he said, in a very Scotch way. I learned long ago, from you, Ramsay, that it’s no use asking questions of a Scot when he speaks like that—dry as an old soda biscuit. So I held my peace.

“I picked up a little information by listening and asking an occasional question when some of the lesser actors went downstairs to the bar for a modest lunch. After three or four days I knew that Scaramouche was laid in the period of the French Revolution, though when that was I did not know. I had never heard that the French had a revolution. I knew the Americans had had one, but so far as detail went it could have been because George Washington shot Lincoln. I was pretty strong on the kings of Israel; later history was closed to me. But the story of the play leaked out in dribbles. Sir John was a young Frenchman who was ‘born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad’; that was what one of the other actors said about him. The astonishing thing was that nobody thought it strange that Sir John was so far into middle age that he was very near to emerging from the far side of it. This young Frenchman got himself into trouble with the nobility because he had advanced notions. To conceal himself he joined a troupe of travelling actors, but his revolutionary zeal was so great that he could not hold his tongue, and denounced the aristocracy from the stage, to the scandal of everyone. When the Revolution came, which it did right on time when it was needed, he became a revolutionary leader, and was about to revenge himself on the nobleman who had vilely slain his best friend and nabbed his girl, when an elderly noblewoman was forced to declare that she was his mother and then, much against her will, further compelled to tell him that his deadly enemy whom he held at the sword’s point was—his father!