IT is not to be gainsaid that Tom Bradshaw heard of the flight of Mary
Ellen with relief. “I don’t know if I’m a doubting Thomas: I’m sure I’m
a doubting Quixote,” had been his thought lately when he remitted Walter
his half share of her expenses. He was very certain now that he was the
one good Bradshaw, and whatever backward glances Walter might cast Tom
closed the account of Mary Ellen with finality. He would neither see nor
hear that young woman again. “I blame myself,” he wrote to Walter. “She
is a Bradshaw and I ought to have stopped your foolishness instead of
going shares in it. I’ll stop it now, though, and when you write of
going to the police I say I won’t have it. Forget her. (If it comes to
police, owd lad, what price yon pair of white-slaving procurers, thee
and me?). This man Chown that you say you suspect. I’ve made enquiries
and there’s nothing the matter with Chown. And if he looted her from
us, who looted first? It’s a blow to you, but honestly, Walter, better
sooner than later and she would have cut and run when it suited her.
She’s a Bradshaw. Bar me, Bradshaws are muck.”
Meanwhile, the organizer of victory was making first tactical moves in
his Mary Ellen campaign. He made them in a spacious room whose admirable
furniture suggested that this was the Holy of Holies of some eminent
dealer in antiques until one noticed the large, floridly signed
photographs on the walls and the parti-colored advertising sheet which
announced all West End attractions and contradicted crudely the Persian
rugs on the floor: the private office of Mr. Hubert Rossiter, that
elderly miracle of youthful dapperness whose queer high-stepping walk
suggested, especially when he rehearsed a crowd of chorus-girls, nothing
so much as a bantam-cock. He had developed, to an extraordinary degree,
the knack of knowing what the public wanted and of fitting together,
like the pieces of a jig-saw puzzle, incongruous parts that merged under
his touch into the ordered whole of a popular entertainment. He
wasn’t, artistically, without scruple, but Hubert Rossiter with his
two sweetstuff shops in town and his several touring companies in the
country was a prophet of theatrical standardization: a safe man, with no
highbrow pretensions about him, never short of other people’s money for
the financing of his productions.
Chown had been called into the Presence about a matter which might
have caused friction on any other day. Today, Chown wanted something of
Rossiter and the threatening clouds dissolved in smiling sunshine. That
affair settled, Chown took up his hat, then stopped.
“By the way, Hubert,” he said, “whom would you say is the toughest stage
manager you’ve got on tour?”
“There’s Darley. Darley doesn’t wear kid gloves. He’s out with ‘The
Little Viennese.’ I’m told they call that company ‘The Little Ease.’”
“Just what I’m looking for. That’s the South tour, isn’t it?” asked
Chown who did not want Mary Ellen to visit Staithley.
“Yes.”
“Well, will you take a girl from me and put her in the chorus and ask
Darley with my compliments to give her hell?”
“I conclude from this that you want to get back on some one who’s been
pestering you to get a perfect lady on the stage.”
“If I were not an honest man, I’d let you go on thinking that. But when
she’s had three months of Darley, I’m going to ask you to give her a
part in another show and then a lead and--”
“My dear Lexley, you have only to command. I run my companies solely for
your convenience.”
“Seriously, Hubert, you can have first option on this girl at a hundred
a week in town two years hence, and she’ll be cheap at that. Would you
like to see her now?”
“I hate looking at raw meat. What are her points?”
“She can sing.”
Mr. Rossiter shrugged his shoulders. “She’s nothing in my life for
that,” he said.
“She’s got youth.”
“Flapper market’s depressed, Lexley. Give me experience all the time.”
“Darley’s seeing to the experience. I tell you, Hubert--”
“Oh, I know. The perfect Juliet. I’m always hearing of her. Never seen
her yet.” Mr. Rossiter pressed a bell, and the immediacy of the response
suggested that Mr. Claud Drayton, who entered, lived up to the part for
which he was cast, of Field-Marshal to the Napoleon, Rossiter. “Got her
with you, Chown?” asked Rossiter.
“I did venture to bring her.”
“You would. Drayton, Chown’s got a girl here. Chorus in ‘The Little
Viennese’ for three months. Maisie in ‘The Girl from Honolulu’ after
that. Get reports and let me see them. That’ll do. Good-by, Chown.” He
pressed another bell and a shorthand typist appeared as if by magic: he
was dictating letters to her before Chown and Drayton had left the room.
It was efficiency raised to the histrionic degree.
Drayton had eliminated surprise from his official life, but he couldn’t
restrain an instinctive gasp at the sight of Mary Ellen when Chown
urbanely ushered her into his room. He gasped because she did not
comply with, she violated, the first principle of an applicant for an
engagement in the chorus. The first principle was that to apply with any
chance of success for a job worth thirty-five shillings a week, you must
wear visible clothing worth thirty-five pounds; and Mary Ellen was in
the Sunday clothes of Staithley. Her costume was three seasons behind
the fashions when it was new, her shoes were made for durability, and
her hair-dressing made Mr. Drayton think of his boyhood, when he had
gone to Sunday school. But he had his orders and here was Lexley
Chown remarkably sponsoring this incredible applicant. He took out
a contract-form. “Name? Sign here. The company’s at Torquay. Report
yourself at the theater to Mr. Darley to-morrow. You’ll travel midnight.
Show this in the office and they’ll give you your fare.” He fired it all
at her almost without interval, sincerely flattering the manner in which
his chief addressed him, and, as a rule, he flustered the well-dressed,
experienced ladies he addressed. Here was one who was not experienced,
who was dressed so badly that he thought of her as a joke in bad taste
and, confound her, she was not flustered. She took the contract and
the payment-slip from him calmly, eyeing him with a steady gaze which
reduced his self-importance to the vanishing point. “Good-by. Good
luck,” he jerked at her with the involuntariness of an automaton.
She did not intend to seem disdainful; she was merely tired and the
summary marching orders by a midnight train bewildered her. Mr. Chown,
squiring her in her incongruous clothes from the Rossiter headquarters,
thought he had reason to congratulate himself.
There was, first, the document, terrifyingly bespattered with red seals,
which she had signed in his office. She might be a minor, but she had
set hand and seal to the statement that she was legally of age and to
the undertaking on the part of Mary Ellen Bradshaw, hereinafter known as
the artiste and for professional purposes to be known as Mary Arden, to
employ Lexley Chown as her sole agent at the continuing remuneration
of ten per cent of her salary, paid weekly by the artiste to the
agent. Formidable penalties were mentioned, two clerks witnessed their
signatures with magisterial gravity and “Altogether,” thought Mr. Chown,
refraining from handing her a copy of their agreement, “if she shuffles
out of that, she’ll be spry.”
There was, second, the compliance of Mr. Rossiter and the coming
noviciate under Darley. Deliberately he had left her in her country
clothes, trusting them to disguise in the Rossiter offices a quality he
did not wish to be clearly apparent yet: deliberately, he had rushed
her affair thinking all the while of Darley--or if not of him, of a
Darley, of some crude martinet who was to lick her into shape. He wanted
her ill-dressed, he wanted her bewildered. He wanted Darley to know how
raw she was; he wanted hot fire for her and he saw her Staithley clothes
acting upon Darley like compressed air on a blast furnace. The girl was
too cool, she showed no nervousness. “Darley will teach you to feel,
my girl,” he thought: “I’m making your path short, but I don’t want it
smooth. Soft places don’t make actresses. I’m cruel to be kind.” And
being kind he advanced her two pounds on account of commission, told her
the station for Torquay was Paddington and left her on Rossiter’s steps.
He had exposed himself unavoidably to the lifted brows which could not
help saluting the glossy Lexley Chown in the company of these obsolete
clothes, but the necessity was past now and he lost no time in
indicating to her that, for better or for worse, her future was in her
own hands. He had other business to attend to.
Mary Ellen, who had surrendered herself confidingly to his large
protectiveness, was braced by his departure. Their journey together,
the wonder of lunching at a table in a train, the oppressiveness of
offices--these were behind her now and she stood on Rossiter’s busy
steps breathing hard like a swimmer who comes to surface after a long
dive. She breathed the air of London and looked from that office down
a street across Piccadilly Circus, nameless to her. The whirl of it
assaulted her; the swimmer was in the breakers now.
Mr. Rossiter’s commissionaire, not unaccustomed to the sight of young
women pausing distressfully on those steps where they had left their
hopes behind them, addressed her with kindly intent. “Shall I get you a
taxi, miss?”
“No, thanks,” said Mary Ellen, who had noted the immense sums Mr. Chown
had paid to the drivers of those vehicles. “I’ll walk,” and “others
walk” she thought. “I can do what they can,” and hardily set foot upon
the London streets. Let that commissionaire perceive that Mary Ellen was
afraid? Not she, and presently she was so little afraid that she asked
the way to Euston of a policeman. Her suit-case--in strict fact, Mr.
Pate’s suitcase--was at Euston.
The man in the left luggage office at Euston was good enough to tell her
the way to Paddington, but “You can’t carry that,” he said. “Why not?”
said Mary Ellen, and carried it. The case was heavy and grew heavier:
but there were stretches of her route, the part, for instance, between
Tottenham Court Road and Portland Road, which revived her spirit. That
might have been a bit of Staithley. London was flat; she had seen no
reason in the slight rise of Shaftesbury Avenue to justify Mr. Chown’s
qualifying “Not absolutely”; but there were sights and smells along the
road to Paddington which she accepted gratefully as evidence of some
affinity with Staithley. Piccadilly Circus was not the whole of
London; one could breathe here and there, Praed Street way, in cheering
shabbiness. She saw a barefoot girl, and a ragged boy offered to carry
her bag. There was still a confused echo of the surging West End in her
ears and she hadn’t conquered London, but she had received comforting
assurance that, in spots, London was habitable.
She fortified herself with tea at Paddington, remembered the night
journey and bought buns at the counter, remembered the night journey
again and slept in a waiting-room, cushioned on her bag, till it was
nearly midnight. There was nothing in this precautionary garnering
of sleep to prevent her from sleeping in the train, and her through
carriage to Torquay was being shunted at Newton Abbot when she awoke and
hungrily ate buns. Near Dawlish, she had the first sight in her life
of the sea, and all the emotions proper to the child of an island race
ought to have besieged her in the gray dawn. “It’s big,” she thought,
grudging the sea the character of space, then turned her eyes inland
to the cliffs. “They’re small, but they’re better than the sea.” Not
Staithley Edge, but elevation of a sort.
Mr. Hugh Darley, arriving at the theater at eleven o’clock, was told by
the doorkeeper that a young lady was waiting for him.
“Been here long?” he asked, looking through Mary Ellen who stood in the
passage.
“I came on duty when the night-watchman went off at nine. She was here
then.”
“More fool she,” he said. “Got my letters there?” The doorkeeper had his
letters, including one from Mr. Drayton.
Darley was a small man, with a shock of red hair and intensely blue eyes
which gleamed sometimes with the light of an almost maniacal fury. It
was this uncontrolled temper which kept him out of London: at his job,
the job of infusing energy and “go” into bored chorus girls and
of supplying spontaneity and drollery to comedians who had neither
spontaneity nor drollery of their own, he was masterly when he kept his
temper. A stage manager needn’t suffer fools gladly, but he must suffer
them suavely, he must hide his sufferings and must cajole when his every
instinct is to curse, and Darley was a touring stage manager instead of
a London “producer” because he simply could not roar them as ’twere
any nightingale and London players were too well established not to be
able effectually to resent his Eccles’ vein: the strollers were not.
He read Drayton’s letter through. “Where is she?” he asked.
“Why, here,” said the doorkeeper.
“But,” said Mr. Darley and then “Christ!” he cried, and bit through
his pipe. That often happened: he carried sealing was in his pocket
for plugging the hole. “Comes to a theater at eight in the morning and
dresses like a scullery maid’s night out. What’ll they send me next? I
suppose you _are_ what they’ve sent me? What’s your name?”
“Mary Arden.”
He consulted the advice note of these extraordinary goods. “That’s
right,” he admitted. “Arden! Whom did you see as Rosalind?”
Mary Ellen blushed: he seemed to her to read her secrets. “And me a man
that respects Shakespeare,” he said. “There’s one line of the Banished
Duke you may remember. ‘Sweet are the uses of adversity.’ If you don’t
remember the line, you’re going to, Miss Mary Arden. You chose the name.
I don’t know that I don’t choose to make you worthy of it.”
“Oh, will you?” she cried.
“You’ve got no sense of humor,” he said. “Come on the stage and we’ll
see what you have got. It’ll be like going water-finding in the Sahara.
Can you read music?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Then be looking at those songs. There’s a piano in the orchestra. I’m
going down to it.”
She was staring in amazement at the sheeted auditorium into which the
unexpected rake of the stage seemed threatening to precipitate her.
Vague masses hung over her head in the half-light seeming about to fall
and crush her in the grisly loneliness to which she was abandoned as
Mr. Darley went round to the orchestra. The diminished echoes of his
footfalls were a wan assurance that this place, shunned by daylight as
if it were a tomb, had contacts with humanity. But he had said it was
the stage and however disconcerting she might find its obscure menace,
the stage was where she wished to be and she was not to be put down
either by it or by a little man who was rude about her best clothes,
while he had not shaved that morning and his knickerbockers showed a
rent verging on the scandalous. She had to sing to him and she expelled
her terrors of her strange, her so alarmingly dreary surroundings, and
strained her eyes to read the music he had put into her hands.
He seemed to bob up below her like a jack-in-the-box, and struck some
chords on the piano. “Have you got that one?” he asked.
“Yes.” she said, fighting her impulse to scream at the phenomenon of his
sudden reappearance.
“Then let her go.”
She sang the opening chorus of “The Little Viennese.”
“You’ve sung that before,” he said, accusingly.
“Oh, no.”
“Don’t try to kid me. It won’t pay. Read through the one you’ve got
there marked 3.” No. 3 was a new interpolation; she might know the
rest, but she couldn’t know No. 3. “Ready? Go on,” and, in a minute,
surprised, satisfied but by no means inclined to show his satisfaction
other than by cutting the trial short, “That’ll do, that’ll do,” he said
resentfully. “This isn’t the Albert Hall. What about your dancing?”
“I’m afraid I haven’t danced yet,” said Mary.
“You will,” he said savagely, “and to my piping. I knew there was a
catch in it somewhere,” he thought, “but it comes to me that I’ve found
a hobby for the rest of this tour. They don’t often send me stuff that’s
worth working on.--I suppose you took the name of Arden because you’ve
got a wooden leg,” he jeered aloud.
Mary Ellen’s face clouded, then an accomplishment of her street days
came back to her. They were not, after all, so long ago. She pitched her
hat into the wings and, reckless of the rake of the stage, turned rapid
cartwheels.
“It’s that sort of wood,” she said, breathless but defiant.
“Thanks for the assurance,” he said, “only this isn’t a circus and your
legs are wooden. They’re wooden because you’ve no brains in them and
till you have brains in your toes you’re no use to me. You’ve got an
accent that’s as thick as pea-soup and till you’ve cleared it, it’ll
stay hidden in the chorus. If you’ll work, I’ll teach you to act but,
by the Lord, you’ve work ahead of you. If I take trouble and you don’t
work, I’ll flay you alive. Is that understood? Very well. There’s a
matinee to-day. You come in and see the show this afternoon and you see
it again to-night. You’ll be sitting where I can see you and if I catch
you laughing, I’ll eat you. Leave laughing to the audience; it’s their
job. You’re there to learn. Watch what the other girls do and when they
do it. They’ll love you because I’m calling a chorus rehearsal for you
to-morrow. Make mistakes then if you dare. You’ll play to-morrow night.
See the wardrobe mistress between the shows to-day about your clothes.
I’m paid to make you a chorus girl; you’ll be in the chorus tomorrow
night. Then I begin to have my fun with you. I begin to make your name
something else than an impertinence. I get busy on you, my girl. You’re
clay and I’m the potter. Meantime, we’ll go to the door and I’ll tell
the first girl who comes for her letters to show you where you’re likely
to find rooms and you can ask her why Hugh Darley proposes to spend four
hours a day breaking in a chorus girl.”
Mary asked the other girl, who looked curiously at her. “I never knew
Darley to make love before,” she said.
“Love!” said Mary, blinking startled eyes as if a flashlight had blazed
at her out of darkness.
“Well,” said her cynical friend, “when you’ve been more than five
minutes on the stage, you’ll know that the way to success lies through
the manager’s bedroom. Don’t look at me like that. Down your nose.
I’m not a success, I’m in the chorus running straight on thirty-five
shillings a week, and there are more of us keep straight than don’t.”
Mary was not conscious that she had looked, fastidiously or otherwise,
at her companion. She had a feeling of vertigo; she was thinking of
herself, not of the other girl, and of this shameful threat before which
she seemed to stand naked in her bones.
“We don’t look after other people’s morals,” Dolly Chandler assured her,
“but you may care to know Darley’s married.”
“You think he meant--this?”
Dolly shrugged her shoulders. “He’s a man.”
“And he meant you to tell me what you are telling me?”
“You’re pretty green, you know. I expect he thought I’d put you wise.
Though I tell you again it’s not like what I’ve seen of Darley to do the
sultan stunt.”
And in ordinary clothes she had turned cartwheels before this man! Mary
Ellen blushed scarlet consternation.
Mr. Chown’s thought, “Darley will teach you to feel,” was taking rapid
substance, but she must drive it from her, she must go to the theater
and sit through two performances and memorize, memorize.
“That will do,” said Darley after the rehearsal next day. “Miss Arden
will stay behind. You can go on to-night,” he told her as the rest went
up the stairs. “You’ve got the tunes if you haven’t got the words
and they’re damn fool enough not to matter though you’ll know them by
Saturday. You’ve got a clumsy notion of the movements, but you don’t
know how to move. Your idea of walking is to put one foot in front
of the other. You’re as God made you, but he’s sent you to a good
contractor for the alterations. He’s sent you to me. Did you get Dolly
Chandler to answer that question?”
She failed to meet his eye. Telling herself she was a coward, she tried
and failed.
“I see,” he said. “She answered it the way they’ll all answer it. I’m
going to put in four hours a day with you and Dolly’s told you what
they’ll think of you. Thought’s free and it’s mostly dregs and I don’t
mind. What about you, Rosalind?”
“You mean it won’t be true?” There was a hope and she clutched at it
with words that came unbidden to her lips.
“True?” he roared. “You--papoose, you whippet! Don’t cry, you whelp. I
asked you a question. I asked you if you mind their thoughts?”
“No,” she said.
“Then we start fair,” he said. “I’m having you on the stage and I’m
coming to see you at your rooms, and if you’d like to know your name in
this company, it’s Dar-ley’s Darling. Only you and I’ll know we meet
for work, not play. I’m stage manager of a rotten musical comedy on
a scrubby tour, but I’m a servant of the theater and I’ll prove it on
you.”
He was, disinterestedly, the theater’s servant, and service purged of
self-interest is rare though there is plenty of voluntary work done in
the theater. An actor rehearses for weeks and performs without fee in a
special production: he may have an enthusiasm for the play he is to
act, he may feel that such a play must, at all costs, come to birth,
but somewhere self-interest lurks. The play may succeed at its special
performance; it may be taken for a run, and, if not, the actor still has
the hope that his acting will focus on him the attention of critics and
managers. And if the part he plays is so inconsiderable that he cannot
hope to attract notice to himself, his hope is that the organizers of
special productions will note him as a willing volunteer to be rewarded,
next time, with a distinctive part.
For Darley, proposing to spend laborious hours in molding Mary Ellen,
there was nothing concrete to be gained; no credit from the Rossiter
headquarters and the positive loss of a reputation for asceticism which
had been a shield against the advances of aspirants who believed that
success in the theater was reached by the road Dolly had indicated to
Mary. He did not flatter his company by supposing that his reputation
for austerity would survive association with Mary. But, intimately,
he would have his incomparable gain, the matchless joy of the creative
artist working on apt material.
“You can take the rest of this week in getting used to jigging about
in the chorus,” he said. “Then we’ll begin to work. Only you needn’t
despise musical comedy. There are as many great actresses who came out
of a musical comedy training as out of Shakespeare. Perhaps for the same
reason that white sheep eat more than black ones.”
He drilled her on a dozen stages as the tour went on, in a dozen walks
from the Parisian’s to the peasant’s (“You’ve never heard of pedestrian
art,” he said, “but this is it”), and for dancing, “You’re too old, but
we’ll get a colorable imitation,” and in her rooms they went through
Rosalind and Juliet till she spoke the lines in English and made every
intonation to his satisfaction. “Feel it, you parrot, feel it,” was his
cry, and he stopped his mockery of calling her Rosalind. He called her
“Iceberg.”
He had taken her far, very far, along the technical way, and he had come
to a barrier. Where there was question of the grand emotions, her voice
was stupid. She seemed intelligently enough to understand with her
brain, but there was a lapse between understanding and expression. “I’ve
done all I’m going to,” thought Harley. “She’s not an actress yet, she’s
only ready to be one when somebody breaks the eggs to make the omelette.
I’m not the somebody.”
Except that she did not shirk work, she gave no sign of gratitude.
Harley was another Pate, another man who was, to please himself,
experimenting on her with a system. She was not afraid of him now; men
in her experience were usable stepping-stones and when their use to her
was gone, she stepped from one to another. In the present case she saw
clearly what he was aiming at and the necessity of this training in
technique. It had visible results, it wasn’t, like Pate’s, a journey to
a peak mistily beyond a far horizon and it would, in any case, last
only for the three months she was to spend in the chorus of “The Little
Viennese.” He could take pains with her and she would generously
be there to be taken pains with; it was a sort of exercise which
he preferred to playing golf with the men or the other girls of the
company, and she permitted his enjoyment of the preference because it
was of use to her.
“What did you want to go on the stage for, anyhow?” he asked her once.
“To hold them,” she said, “there!” And made a gesture, imperious,
queenly, that almost wrung applause from him. “To have them in my grip
like that. To know I’ve got them in my power.”
“I think you’ll do it, Mary, when you have learned to feel,” he told her
soberly.
She looked at him with glittering eyes. “Gee, does it get you like
that?” he said, amazed. Here, to be welcomed with both hands, was
feeling at last.
“Yes,” said Mary, dashing him to earth, “there’s money in it.”
“You miserable slut!” he said, and flung out of her room.
Money! Yet hadn’t she excuse? She feared poverty, having known it.
Poverty, for her, was not a question of what would happen to an income
of a thousand a year if the income tax went up; it was Jackman’s
Buildings and the Staithley streets. If she could help it, she was not
going back to poverty. To Staithley perhaps she would go back: she was
indeed fixed in her idea to go back, to buy, with her stage-made wealth,
a house in Staithley like Walter Pate’s and to be rich in Staithley. So
far, in her journeyings, she had seen no place like Staithley: either
there was flatness which depressed her, or hills which were too urbane,
or too low, too much like mounds in a park to be worthy of the name of
hills. The stage was a means to an end, and the end was Staithley,
a house of her own, an independence--and her present salary was
thirty-five shillings a week, less ten per cent to Chown! She was, at
any rate, thrifty with it, seeing no need, on tour, with her contract in
her pocket, to revise her wardrobe in the direction of effectiveness and
keeping her nose too closely to the grindstone Darley held to have time
for money-spending in other ways. She watched with satisfaction her Post
Office Savings Bank account increase by a weekly ten shillings.
Darley relented and came back next day with the Maisie part in “The
Girl from Honolulu” in his pocket. “Damn her,” he thought, “she’s honest
about it and there have been avaricious artists. Avarice and Art aren’t
contradictory.” He expected no more at their parting than the cool
“Good-by” she gave him.
“Full of possibilities,” he reported her to Drayton, and when Drayton
asked him to be more definite, “I can’t,” he wrote, “be more definite
than this. You know those Chinese toys consisting of a box within a box
of beautiful wood, wonderfully made? You marvel at the workmanship and
you open box after box. You get tired and you go on opening because each
box is beautiful and because of a faint hope you have that there’ll
be something in the last box. I don’t know what’s in hers. That’s her
secret and her mystery, and, by the way, you can discount what Pettigrew
is going to tell you of her Maisie. It isn’t her Maisie. It’s mine. I’ve
rehearsed her in it.”
“Darley’s mad about her,” Drayton interpreted this to Rossiter.
Darley was, anyhow, sufficiently interested to travel across half
England to see her play Maisie on her first Saturday night, in
Liverpool. He stood at the side of the circle where he could watch both
her and the house, and he waited, especially for a scene which was one
of the weaknesses of the piece, when Maisie, by sheer blague, has to
subdue a rascally beachcomber who intends robbery. He wasn’t afraid of
her song, but this scene called for acting; it wasn’t plausible, even
for musical comedy, unless Maisie carried it off _con brio_.
And he had, that night, his reward for the labor of these months. It
was Saturday night, and the audience stopped eating chocolates. Darley
wasn’t looking at the stage, he was looking at the audience and he knew
triumph when he saw it. They stopped eating. Darley looked upon his work
and knew that it was good.
“_Ich dieu_” he muttered. “By God, I do. Where’s the bar?”