Night at the Vulcan by Ngaio Marsh Page A

Shift the camera.”
    The remaining photographs were taken without a great deal of trouble. Miss Gainsford, looking utterly miserable, went off to her dressing-room. The man called Jacko reappeared and ambled across to Miss Hamilton. There was an adjustment in make-up while Martyn held up the mirror.
    “Maybe it’s lucky,” he said, “you don’t have to look like somebody else.”
    “Are you being nice or beastly, Jacko?”
    He put a cigarette between her lips and lit it “The dresses are good,” he said. He had a very slight foreign accent.
    “You think so, do you?”
    “Naturally. I design them for
you
.”
    “Next time,” she said grimly, “you’d better write the play as well.”
    He was a phenomenally ugly man, but a smile of extraordinary sweetness broke across his face.
    “All these agonies!” he murmured. “And on Thursday night everyone will be kissing everyone else and at the Combined Arts Ball we are in triumph and on Friday morning you will be purring over your notices. And you must not be unkind about the play. It is a good play.” He grinned again, more broadly. His teeth were enormous and uneven. “Even the little niece of the great husband cannot entirely destroy it.”
    “Jacko!”
    “You may say what you like, it is not intelligent casting.”
    “Please, Jacko.”
    “All right, all right. I remind you instead of the Combined Arts Ball, and that no one has decided in what costume we go.”
    “Nobody has any ideas. Jacko, you must invent something marvellous.”
    “And in two days I must also create out of air eight marvellous costumes.”
    “Darling Jacko, how beastly we are to you. But you know you love performing your little wonders.”
    “I suggest then, that we are characters from Tchekhov as they would be in Hollywood. You absurdly gorgeous, and the little niece still grimly ingenue. Adam perhaps as Vanya if he were played by Boris Karloff. And so on.”
    “Where shall I get my absurdly gorgeous dress?”
    “I paint the design on canvas and cut it out and if I were introduced to your dresser I would persuade her to sew it up.” He took the glass from Martyn and said: “No one makes any introductions in this theatre, so we introduce ourselves to each other. I am Jacques Doré, and you are the little chick whom the stork has brought too late, or dropped into the wrong nest. Really,” he said, rolling his eyes at Miss Hamilton, “it is the most remarkable coincidence, if it is a coincidence. I am dropping bricks,” he added. “I am a very privileged person but one day I drop an outsize brick, and away I go.” He made a circle of his thumb and forefinger and looked through it, as though it were a quizzing-glass, at Martyn. “All the same,” he said, “it is a pity you are a little dresser and not a little actress.”
    Between the photograph call and the dress rehearsal, which was timed for seven o’clock, a state of uneven ferment prevailed at the Vulcan. During the rare occasions on which she had time to reflect, Martyn anticipated a sort of personal zero hour, a moment when she would have to take stock, to come to a decision. She had two and fourpence and no place of abode, and she had no idea when she would be paid, or how much she would get. This moment of reckoning, however, she continually postponed. The problem of food was answered for the moment by the announcement that it would be provided for everyone whose work kept them in the theatre throughout the day. As Miss Hamilton had discovered a number of minor alterations to be made in her dresses, Martyn was of this company. Having by this time realized the position of extraordinary ubiquity held by Jacko, she was not surprised to find him cooking a mysterious but savoury mess over the gas ring in Fred Badger’s sink-room.
    This concoction was served in enamel mugs, at odd intervals, to anyone who asked for it, and Martyn found herself eating her share in company with Bob Cringle, Mr. Poole’s dresser. From him