“No, I hadn’t looked at the Callots, and didn’t know what they were. ‘Here m’boy; look here,’ he said, showing me some funny little pictures of people dressed as Scaramouche, and Polichinelle and other Commedia characters. ‘Get it like that! Make that real! You must be a Callot in motion!’

“It was new and hard work for me to catch the idea of making myself like a picture, but I was falling under Sir John’s spell and was ready to give it a try. So I capered and pointed my toes, and struck exaggerated postures like the little pictures, and did my best.

“ ‘Hands! Hands!’ he would shout, warningly, when I had my work cut out to make the plates dance. ‘Not like hooks, m’boy, like this! See! Keep ’em like this!’ And then he would demonstrate what he wanted, which was a queer trick for a juggler, because he wanted me to hold my hands with the little finger and the forefinger extended, and the two middle fingers held together. It looked fine as he did it, but it wasn’t my style at all. And all the time he kept me dancing with my toes stuck out and my heels lifted, and he wanted me to get into positions which even I could see were picturesque, but couldn’t copy.

“ ‘Sorry, Sir John,’ I said one day. ‘It’s just that it feels a bit loony.’

“ ‘Aha, you’re getting it at last!’ he shouted, and for the first time he smiled at me. ‘That’s what I want! I want it a bit loony. Like Scaramouche, you see. Like a charlatan in a travelling show.’

“I could have told him a few things about charlatans in travelling shows, and the way their looniness takes them, but it wouldn’t have done. I see now that it was Romance he was after, not realism, but it was all a mystery to me then. I don’t think I was a slow learner, and in our second rehearsal in the theatre, where we had the plates, and the cloaks, and the tightrope to walk, I got my first real inkling of what it was all about, and where I was wrong and Sir John—in terms of Romance—was right.

“I told you I had to caper across the tightrope, as Scaramouche escaping from the angry aristocrats. I was high above their heads, and as I had only about thirty feet to go, at the farthest, I had to take quite a while over it while pretending to be quick. Sir John wanted the rope—it was a wire, really—to be slackish, so that it rocked and swayed. Apparently that was the Callot style. For balance I carried a long stick that I was supposed to have snatched from Polichinelle. I was doing it circus-fashion, making it look as hard as possible, but that wouldn’t do: I was to rock on the wire, and be very much at ease, and when I was halfway across the stage I was to thumb my nose at the Marquis de la Tour d’Azyr, my chief enemy. I could thumb my nose. Not the least trouble. But the way I did it didn’t please Sir John. ‘Like this,’ he would say, and put an elegant thumb to his long, elegant nose, and twiddle the fingers. I did it several times, and he shook his head. Then an idea seemed to strike him.