“ ‘Don’t try to drag your sleeves down m’boy; they’re intended to be short, to show your hands to advantage, mphm? Keep ’em up, like this, and if you use your hands the way I showed you, everything will fit, eh? And your hat—it’s not meant to keep off the rain, m’boy, but to show your face against the inside of the brim, quonk? Your breeches aren’t too tight; they’re not to sit down in—I don’t pay you to sit down in costume—but to stand up in, and show off your legs. Never shown your legs off before, have you? I thought as much. Well, learn to show ’em off now, and not like a bloody chorus-girl either, but like a man. Use ’em in masculine postures, but not like a butcher boy either, and if you aren’t proud of your legs they’re going to look damned stupid, eh, when you’re walking across the stage on that rope.’

“I was green as grass. Naive, though I didn’t know the word at that time. It was very good for me to feel green. I had begun to think I knew all there was about the world, and particularly the performing world, because I had won in the struggle to keep alive in Wanless’s World of Wonders, and in Le grand Cirque forain de St Vite. I had even dared in my heart to think I knew more about the world of travelling shows than Sir John. Of course I was right, because I knew a scrap of the reality. But he knew something very different, which was what the public wants to think the world of travelling shows is like. I possessed a few hard-won facts, but he had artistic imagination. My job was somehow to find my way into his world, and take a humble, responsible part in it.

“Little by little it dawned on me that I was important to Scaramouche; my two short moments, when I juggled the plates, and walked the wire and thumbed my nose at the Marquis, added a cubit to the stature of the character Sir John was creating. I had also to swallow the fact that I was to do that without anybody knowing it. Of course the public would tumble to the fact that Sir John, who was getting on for sixty, had not learned juggling and wire-walking since last they saw him, but they wouldn’t understand it until they had been thrilled by the spectacle, apparently, of the great man doing exactly those things. I was anonymous and at the same time conspicuous.

“I had to have a name. Posters with the names of the actors were already in place outside the theatre, but in the programme I must appear as Macgregor’s assistant, and I must be called something. Holroyd mentioned it now and again. My name at that time, Jules LeGrand, wouldn’t do. Too fancy and, said Holroyd, a too obvious fake.

“Here again I was puzzled. Jules LeGrand an obvious fake? What about the names of some of the other members of the company? What about Eugene Fitzwarren, who had false teeth and a wig and, I would bet any money, a name that he had not been born to? What about C. Pengelly Spickernell, a withered, middle-aged fruit, whose eyes sometimes rested warmly on my legs, when Sir John was talking about them. Had any parents, drunk or sober, with such a surname as Spickernell, ever christened a child Cuthbert Pengelly? And if it came to fancy sounds, what about Milady’s stage name? Annette de la Borderie? Macgregor assured me that it was indeed her own, and that she came from the Channel Islands, but why was it credible when Jules LeGrand was not?