“Yet I was rehearsed carefully, and it seemed to me that I was doing well. I was trying to capture Sir John’s rhythm, and now, to my surprise, he was helping me. We spent quite a lot of time on Two, two. I did my juggling with my back to the audience, but as I was to wear a costume identical with Sir John’s, the audience would assume that was who I was, if I could bring off another sort of resemblance.
“That was an eye-opener. I was vaudeville trained, and my one idea of stage deportment was to be fast and gaudy. That wasn’t Sir John’s way at all. ‘Deliberately; deliberately,’ he would say, over and over again. “Let them see what you’re doing. Don’t be flashy and confusing. Do it like this.’ And then he would caper across the stage, making motions like a man juggling plates, but at a pace I thought impossibly slow. ‘Its not keeping the plates in the air that’s important,’ he would say. ‘Of course you can do that. It’s being Scaramouche that’s important. It’s the character you must get across. Eh? You understand the character, don’t you? Eh? Have you looked at the Callots?’
“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 half-way 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.
” ‘M’boy, what does that gesture mean to you?’ he asked, fixing me with a lustrous brown eye.
” ‘Kiss my arse, Sir John,’ said I, bashfully: I wasn’t sure he would know such a rude word. He looked grave, and shook his head slowly from side to side three or four times.
” ‘You have the essence of it, but only in the sense that the snail on the garden wall is the essence of Escargots a la Nicoise. What you convey by that gesture is all too plainly the grossly derisive invitation expressed by your phrase. Kiss my arse; it doesn’t even get as far as Baisez mon cul. What I want is a Rabelaisian splendour of contempt linked with a Cailotesque elegance of grotesquerie. What it boils down to is that you’re not thinking it right. You’re thinking Kiss my arse with a strong American accent, when what you ought to be thinking is –‘ and suddenly, though he was standing on the stage, he swayed perilously and confidently as though he were on the wire, and raised one eyebrow and opened his mouth in a grin like a leering wolf, and allowed no more than the tip of a very sharp red tongue to loll out on his lips and there it was! Kiss my arse with class, and God knows how many years of actors’ technique and a vivid memory of Henry Irving all backing it up.
” ‘I think I get it,’ I said, and had a try. He was pleased. Again. Better pleased. ‘You’re getting close,’ he said; ‘now, tell me what you’re thinking when you do that? Mph? Kiss my arse, quonk? But what kind of Kiss my arse? Quonk? Quonk?’
“I didn’t know what to tell him, but I couldn’t be silent. ‘Not Kiss my arse at all,’ I said.
” ‘What then? What are you thinking? Eh? You must be thinking something, because you’re getting what I want. Tell me what it is?’
“Better be truthful, I thought. He sees right into me and he’ll spot a lie at once. I took my courage in my hand. ‘I was thinking that I must be born again,’ I said. ‘Quite right, m’boy; born again and born different, as Mrs. Poyser very wisely said,’ was Sir John’s comment. (Who was Mrs. Poyser? I suppose its the kind of thing Ramsay knows.)
“Born again! I’d always thought of it, when I thought about it at all, as a spiritual thing; you went through a conversion, or you found Christ, or whatever it was, and from that time you were different and never looked back. But to get inside Sir John I had to be born again physically, and if the spiritual trick is harder than that. Heaven must be thinly populated. I spent hours capering about in quiet places offstage, whenever Macgregor didn’t need me, trying to be like Sir John, trying to get style even into Kiss my arse. What was the result? Next time we rehearsed Two, two, I was awful. I nearly dropped a plate, and for a juggler that’s a shattering experience. (Don’t laugh! I don’t mean it as a joke.) But worse was to come. At the right moment I stepped out on the swaying wire, capered toward middle stage, thumbed my nose at Gordon Barnard, who was playing the Marquis, lost my balance, and fell off; Duparc’s training stood by me, and I caught the wire with my hands, swung in mid-air for a couple of seconds, and then heaved myself back up and got my footing, and scampered to the opposite side. The actors who were rehearsing that day applauded, but I was destroyed with shame, and Sir John was grinning exactly like Scaramouche, with an inch of red tongue between his lips.
” ‘Don’t think they’ll quite accept you as me if you do that, m’boy,’ said he. ‘Eh, Holroyd? Eh, Barnard? Quonk? Try it again.’
“I tried it again, and didn’t fall, but I knew I was hopeless; I hadn’t found Sir John’s style and I was losing my own. After another bad try Sir John moved on to another scene, but Milady beckoned me away into a box, from which she was watching the rehearsal. I was full of apologies.
” ‘Of course you fell,’ she said. ‘But it was a good fall. Laudable pus, I call it. You’re learning.’