Cobb Irvin Shrewsbury
Local Color

“I still insist, Verba,” put in Offutt, “that you overestimate the importance of the grandfather – he’s only a character bit.”

“Son,” said Verba, “you talk like an author! Maybe you thought he was a bit when you wrote him in; but he’s not. He’s going to carry this play. He’s the axle that the whole action turns on and if he’s wrong the whole thing’s wrong. If he falls down your play falls down.”

“Well, suppose he is,” said Offutt plaintively. The bruised worm was beginning to turn. “Am I to blame because I write a part so human and so lifelike that nobody’s competent to do it?”

Verba gave him a sidelong glance and grinned sardonically. “Don’t ask me whose fault it is,” he said. “I know this: In the old days actors were actors.” Verba, who was perhaps forty-four, spoke with the air of having known Edmund Kean intimately. “They bred real artists then – people who had versatility and a range. You got hold of a play and you went out and hired a bunch of troupers, and they played it for you. Now we don’t have actors any more – we only have types.

“Everybody’s a type. A man or a woman starts out being one kind of type, and sticks right there. Dramatists write parts for types, and managers go out and hire types for the parts. Sometimes they can’t find the right type and then there’s another expensive production taking a trip to its eternal rest in the storehouse. I don’t know whose fault it is – I only know it’s not mine. It’s hell – that’s what it is – simply hell!”

Gloom choked Verba. He stared moodily ahead of him, where the broad of a wide, blue-ginghamed back showed above the draped tops of the next row of seats but one. Suddenly he smote his hands together.

“Bateman!” he exclaimed. “Old Bird Bateman!”

Up from behind the next row of seats but one rose a chorelady with her nose in the air and her clenched fists on the places where her hips should have been – if she had any hips.

“I beg your par-r-don?” she inquired, quivering with a grand, indignant politeness; “was you referrin’ to me as an ould boid?”

“Madam,” said Verba, “resume your pleasures. I wasn’t thinking of you.”

“Thin why was you lookin’ at me whin you said it? You may be the owner of this bum dump, f’r all I care, but job or no job, let me tell you this, young man – there’s no black Prowtestant Jew alive kin call me out of me own name an’ – ”

“Oh, shut up,” said Verba, without heat. He got on his feet. “Come on, Offutt, the lady thinks I’m trying to flirt with her and between the three of us, we’re breaking up rehearsals. Let’s get out – I’ve got an idea.” In the half light his eyes shone like a cat’s.

Outside, on the hot pavement, he took Offutt by the lapels of his coat. “Boy,” he said, “did you ever hear of Burton Bateman – better known as Old Bird Bateman?”

Offutt shook his head.

“Never did,” he confessed.

“You’re too young at this game to remember, I guess,” said Verba. “Well, then, did you ever hear of the Scudder Stock Company?”

“Of course I’ve heard of that,” said Offutt. “It was long before my time though.”

“It was long before everybody’s time,” assented Verba. “Ten years is the same as a century on this street. But twenty-five years ago Burt Bateman played leads with the Scudder Stock Company – yes; and played juveniles and walking gentlemen and friends of the family and long-lost heirs and Dutchmen and Irishmen and niggers – played high-comedy parts and low-comedy parts – played anything there was to play.

“He wasn’t one of your single-barrelled modern types and none of your old-time ranting scenery-biters either; he was an actor. If he’d come along a little later they’d have made a star out of him and probably ruined him. You’d have remembered him then. But he never was a star. He never was featured even. He just kept right on being an actor. And gee, how he could eat up an old man’s part!”

“You speak of him as though he were dead,” said Offutt.

“He might as well be – he’s forgotten,” said Verba, unconsciously coining all Broadway’s epitaph for all Broadway’s tribe. “I haven’t seen him for fifteen years, but I understand he’s still alive – that is, he hasn’t quit breathing. Somebody was telling me not long ago they’d crossed his trail ’way downtown.

“You see, Burt Bateman was a character in his way, just as old Nate Scudder was one in his way. I guess that’s why they hung together so long. When the theatrical district started to move uptown Nate wouldn’t move with it. It moved from Fourteenth Street to Twenty-third, and from there to Thirty-fourth, and from there to Forty-second – and it’s still headed north. But Scudder stayed where he was. And it broke him – broke his heart, too, I guess. Anyhow, he died and his organisation scattered – all but Bateman. He wouldn’t scatter. The heirs fell out and the estate – what was left of it – got tied up in litigation; and it’s been tied up ever since.”

He turned and waved a long arm at a passing taxi. The driver curved his machine up to the curb.

“Come on!” said Verba, making to cross the sidewalk.

“Come on where?” asked Offutt.

“We’re going to University Place – you and me,” said Verba, quickened and alive all over with his inspiration. “We’re going down to Scudder’s Theatre. Didn’t know there was such a theatre as Scudder’s, did you? Well, there is – what’s left of it. We’re going down there to find Old Bird Bateman. That’s where he was, last accounts. And if the booze hasn’t got him he’s going to play that damn grandfather in this show of yours.”

“Can he do it?”

Verba halted with one foot in the taxi.

“Can he do it? Watch him, boy – that’s all! Just watch him. Say, it’s a notion – digging that old boy out of the graveyard.

“You never heard of him and I’d forgotten him; but you take a lot of these old-timers who don’t think there’ve been any actors since Fanny Davenport and Billy Florence – they’ll remember him. And you bet they’ll come to see him. We’ll give this town a sensation – and that’s what it loves, this town – sensations.”

Once upon a time – that was when he was a green reporter newly come to town – Offutt had known, more or less minutely, almost every prowlable inch of the tip of the long seamy tongue of rock that is called Manhattan Island. Now, as a story-writer and a play-writer, he only went down there when he sought for local colour in Greenwich Village, or around Washington Square or on the lower East Side. As for Verba, he found his local colour, ready-mixed, in scene-painters’ pots and make-up boxes. Being a typical New Yorker – if there is such a thing – he was as insular, as provincial, as closely bound to his own briefened ranging ground as none but a typical New Yorker can be. To him this wasn’t a metropolis of five boroughs, many bridges and five-and-a-half millions. To him this was a strip of street, something less than two miles long, with shorter stretches of street meeting it at right angles, east and west, as ribs meet a spine. His map of New York would have resembled a codfish’s skeleton, its head aiming toward far-away Harlem, the fork in its tail pointing to the distant Battery. To him therefore Twenty-third Street was Farthest South. What might lie below was in the Antarctic Circle of community life.

They crossed Twenty-third Street and invaded a district grown strange to his eyes – a district where tall loft buildings, the successors to the sweatshops of an earlier, but not very much earlier, day, mounted, floor by floor, above the humbler roofs of older houses. They crossed Fourteenth, the taxi weaving a way through dense masses of men who gabbled in strange tongues among themselves, for lunch-time had come and the garment workers, the feather-workers and the fur-workers, deserting their work benches for an hour, had flocked into the open, packing the sidewalks and overflowing upon the asphalt, to chaffer and gossip and take the air. Just below Fourteenth Street they swung eastward and turned into University Place, which is a street of past memories and present acute activities, and, in a minute, obeying Verba’s instructions, their driver brought them to a standstill before a certain number.

“Give it the once-over,” advised Verba as he climbed out and felt in his pocket for the fare. “You can figure for yourself how far out of the world it is – nobody’s had the nerve to try to open it up as a moving-picture palace. And that’s the tip-off on any shack in this burg that’ll hold a crowd, a screen and a projecting machine all at the same time.”

Offutt looked, and marvelled that he had never noticed this place before since surely, covering assignments or on exploration jaunts, he must have passed it by a score of times. It stood midway of the block. On one side of it was a little pawnshop, its single grimy window filled with the strange objects which persons acquire, seemingly, for pawning purposes exclusively – sword-canes and mandolins with mother-of-pearl insets in them, and moss-agate cuff buttons. On the other side was a trunk store with half of its wares cluttering the narrow-door passage and signs everywhere displayed to inform the public that the proprietor was going out of business and must sell his stock at an enormous sacrifice, wherefore until further notice, perfectly ruinous prices would prevail. It appears to be a characteristic of all trunk-stores that their proprietors are constantly going out of business and that their contents, invariably, are to be had below cost.

Between these two establishments gaped a recessed and cavernous entryway flanked by two big stone pillars of a dropsical contour and spanned over at the top by a top-heavy cornice ponderously and painfully Corinthian in aspect. The outjutting eaves rested flat on the coping stones and from there the roof gabled up sharply. Old gates, heavily chained and slanting inward, warded the opening between the pair of pillars, so that the mouth of the place was muzzled with iron, like an Elizabethan shrew’s.

Above, the building was beetle-browed; below, it was dish-faced. A student of architectural criminology would pause before this facade and take notes.

The space inclosed within the skewed and bent gate pickets was a snug harbour for the dust of many a gritty day. There were little grey drifts of it at the foot of each of the five steps that led up to the flagged floor level; secretions of grime covered the barred double doors on beyond the steps, until the original colour was only to be guessed at; scraps of dodgers, pieces of newspaper and tattered handbills adhered to every carved projection at the feet of the columns, like dead leaves about tree boles in the woods.

On the frieze overhead might be made out, in lettering that once had been gold-leafed, the line: Scudder’s Family Theatre. The words were scarcely decipherable now. Bill-posters had coated every available inch of space with snipes and sheets.

Verba shook the gates until the hasps gritted and the chains clanged.

“Nobody at home,” he said. “I guess the sheriff locked her up when the lawsuits started and then threw away the key. Well, let’s scout round. Somebody’s sure to know our man; they told me Bateman was a neighbourhood character down here. A cop ought to be able to help us – only I don’t see one. Maybe they don’t have cops in this street.”

Speculatively his eyes ranged the vista up and down the block and opposite. He pointed to a saloon diagonally across the way, next door to the first corner south.

“When in doubt,” he said, “ask everybody’s friend. Come on; we’ll go over and brace the barkeep.”

A young man, with a humorous slant to his eyebrows and dark hair combed back from the forehead in neatly ornate scallops, pulled down the front of a reasonably clean white jacket and spread both hands on the bar, awaiting their pleasure.

“Mister Wine Clerk,” said Verba, using the ceremonial title of his Tenderloin range, “we’re trying to find an old boy named Bateman – Burton Bateman, retired actor by profession. Ever hear of him?”

“Sure!” assented the barkeeper. “He’s part of the fixtures – Old Bird is; but he ain’t about now. To ketch him, you’ve come an hour late.”

“Lives round here somewhere, doesn’t he?”

“Search me,” said the young man succinctly. “I guess he don’t exactly live anywhere – not in a regular lodging house or anything like that. See? I never asked him – him being sort of touchy about his private affairs – but I guess he sleeps in some hole somewhere. He mostly does his scoffin’ here though – as a guest of the house.”

“Does his what here?” asked Verba.

“His scoffin’ – his feedin’. See?” The young man flirted a thumb in the direction of the free-lunch counter.

“Oh! He eats here?”

“You said it! The boss – man that owns this liquor store – is a kind of an old-timer round here himself. I’ve heard him say he knowed The Bird away back yonder when the old theatre ’crost the street was runnin’ and things was breakin’ better for the old boy than what they do now. So he stakes him to a drink every now and then – Old Bird won’t take a piece of change, but he will take a drink – and he lets him browse off the free lunch all he’s a mind to.

“He comes driftin’ in here twicet a day regular and fills up on chow for nothin’! But he’s been here already and left to-day – ’bout an hour ago. I figure he won’t be back now till ’long about four or five o’clock.”

Verba became cognisant of a tugging at his coat. An incredibly small, incredibly ragged boy, with some draggled first editions under his arm, had wormed silently in between his legs and was looking up at him with one eye. The boy had only one eye to look with. The other eye was a flattened slit over a sunken socket.

“Mister! Say, Mister!” beseeched the gamin earnestly. “Gimme fi’ cent and I’ll – ”

“Hey, you, Blinky!” interposed the barkeeper, bending over the bar to see the small intruder. “Beat it!”

There was a scurrying thud of bare feet on the tiled floor and the wizened intruder magically had vanished between the swinging doors.

“You gents can sit down and wait if you want to,” said the barkeeper. “It’s liable to be a long time though. Or I can tell Old Bird, when he comes in, somebody’s askin’ for him and try to hold him for you. I could phone you even, if it’s important – if you’ll gimme your number.”

“It is important – in a way,” said Verba. “Suppose we do that, Offutt – give the wine clerk our telephone number.”

He laid a coin and a card on the bar. The young man regarded the name and the address on the card briefly.

“All right!” he said, depositing the coin in his pocket and the card against the mirror at his back. “I won’t forget. The old boy don’t have many people lookin’ for him. Fact is, I don’t remember he ever had anybody lookin’ for him before. Are you gents friends of his? … No? Well, anyhow, I’ll fix it.”

“Funny old sneezer!” he continued. “Dippy a little up here, I guess.”

He tapped himself on the forehead.

“If he had a habit I’d say sometimes he was hopped. F’r instance, he’ll come in here and spiel off something to me ’bout havin’ been in his Louie Kahn’s drawin’-room – anyhow, that’s what it sounds like. The only Louie Kahn round here that I know of runs a junk shop over in Ninth Street. And it’s a cinch that Louie Kahn ain’t got no drawin’-room. Or he’ll tell me he’s been spendin’ the day on the seabeach. Only yes’day he was handin’ me that junk.”

“Mightn’t he have taken a little run down to Coney?” suggested Verba hopefully.

“Go to Coney – him!” scoffed the barkeeper. “Where’d he raise the coin for carfare down to Coney? You can take it from me, gents, Old Bird forgot what the sad sea waves sound like, long time ago. I’ll lay you a little eight-to-five he ain’t been a quarter of a mile away from this liquor store in ten years. … Well, good day, gents.”

“It strikes me, Verba,” began Offutt as they passed out, “that possibly we’re only wasting our time. If what that gabby young drink wrestler just said is right we’re – ”

Something wriggled at his knees and caromed off against Verba. A single bright, greedy eye appraised them with an upward flash.

“Mister! Mister, listen!” pleaded a voice, the owner of which managed somehow to be in the path of both of them at once. “I heard yous spielin’ in there. I know where Old Boid is. I kin show yous where he is.”

“Where is he?” demanded Verba.

“Gimme fi’ cent – gimme ten cent – first. It’s a secrut. It’s worth ten cent.”

“It is,” agreed Verba gravely. “It’s worth all of ten cents now and it’ll be worth a quarter more to you, sonny, if you deliver the goods.”

He tendered the advance instalment of the fee and a hand, all claws like a bird’s foot, snatched it away from him.

Blinky carefully pouched the dime in some unfathomable inner recess of his rags. Having provided against any attempt to separate him from the retainer in the event of the negotiations falling through, his code of honour asserted itself.

“It’s a secrut. See? They ain’t nobody but me and two-t’ree udder kids wise to it. Yous gotta swear yous won’t tell ’im nor nobody ’twas me tipped yous off. If yous did it’d spoil me graft – he’d be sore. See? Cold nights he lets us kids bunk in there wit’ ’im. And daytimes we plays audiunce for ’im. See?”

“You play what for him?” asked Offutt.

“C’m on, an’ I’ll show yous,” bade Blinky. “Only yous is gotta lay dead w’ile it’s comin’ off. See?”

“We’ll lay dead,” pledged Verba.

Satisfied, Blinky led the way. Mystified, they followed. He led them back across University Place again; and on past Scudder’s Family Theatre, with the lowering stone frontal bone above and, below, the wide maw, bitted and gagged by its scold’s bridle of snaffled iron; and on round the corner below into a fouled, dingy cross street.

Beyond the canvas marquee of a small walled-in beer garden the child went nimbly through a broken panel in a short stretch of aged and tottery wooden fencing. Wriggling through the gap behind him they found themselves in a small inclosure paved with cracked flagging. Confronting them was a short flight of iron steps, leading up to a wide, venerable-appearing doorway, which once, as the visible proof showed, had been sealed up with plank shorings, nailed on in vertical strips.

“One of the old side entrances to Scudder’s,” said Verba. “Where the carriages used to wait, I guess. The plot thickens – eh, Offutt?”

Offutt nodded, his eyes being on their small guide. A little sense of adventure possessed them both. They had the feeling of being co-conspirators in a little intrigue.

“Wotcher waitin’ fur?” demanded Blinky. “Stick wit’ me and don’t make no noise.” He climbed the iron steps and shoved the nail-pocked door ajar. “Watch yer step!” he counselled as he vanished within. “It’s kind o’ dark in yere.”

Kind o’ dark was right. Straining their eyes they stumbled along a black passage, with Blinky going on ahead silently. They turned once to the left and once to the right and emerged, where the light was somewhat clearer, into the shelter of a recess just behind the lower boxes of the abandoned playhouse.

“Wow!” said Verba in a sort of reverential undertone, as though he stood in the presence of death. “I haven’t been here in twenty-odd years. Why, the last time I was here I was a kid!”

Veritably he did stand in the presence of death. The place looked dead and smelled dead and was dead. The air was heavy-laden with bone-yard scents – rot and corrosion and rust and dust. With the taints of moulded leather and gangrened metal, of worm-gnawed woodwork and moth-eaten fabrics, arose also from beneath their feet that other stench which inevitably is begotten of neglect and lonesomeness within any spot inclosed by walls and a roof, provided sun and wind and human usage are excluded from it long enough. Offutt sniffed and, over Verba’s shoulder, looked about him.

He could make out his immediate surroundings fairly well, for the curtains that had guarded the windows in the hip roof and round one upper side of the building were turned by decay into squares of lace-work, patterned with rents and with cracks; and in some instances they had fetched away from their fastenings altogether.

Through the glass panes, and through the grime that bleared the glass, a measure of daylight filtered, slanting in pale bluish streaks, like spilt skim milk; on vistas of the faded red-plush chairs; on the scrolled and burdened decorations of the proscenium arch; on the seamy, stained curtain; on the torn and musty hangings of the boxes; on an enormous gas chandelier which, swinging low over the pit from the domed ceiling above, was so clumped with swathings of cobweb that it had become a great, dangling grey cocoon.

Curving in wide swings from above their heads to the opposite side ran three balconies, rising one above the other, and each supported by many fat pillars. The spaces beneath these galleries were shadowy and dark, seeming to stretch away endlessly. So, too, was the perspective of the lower floor, at the back, elaborated by the gloom into a vast, yawning mouth which fairly ached with its own emptiness. But at the front the screened angles of sunlight, stippled as they were with billions of dancing motes, brought out clearly enough the stage of the old theatre and, down under the lip of the stage, the railed inclosure of the orchestra and, at either side, the scarred bulkheads and fouled drapings of the stage boxes, upper tier and lower tier.

Close at hand Offutt was aware of crawling things which might be spiders, and a long grey rat which scuffled across the floor almost beneath his feet, dragging its scaled tail over the boards with a nasty rasping sound. He heard other rats squealing and gnawing in the wainscoting behind him. He was aware, also, of the dirt, which scabbed and crusted everything. And he felt as though he had invaded the vault of an ancient tomb. Sure enough, in a manner of speaking, he had done just that.

“Some place – huh, mister?” said the small gutter-sparrow proudly, and, though he spoke in a whisper, Offutt jumped. “Stick yere, yous two,” ordered the child. “Somethin’ll be comin’ off in a minute.”

Seemingly he had caught a signal or a warning not visible to the older intruders. Leaving them, he ran briskly down a side aisle, and apparently did not care now how much noise he might make, for he whooped as he ran. He flung his papers aside and perched himself in a chair at the very front of the pit. He briskly rattled the loose back of the chair in front of him, and, inserting two dirty fingers at the corners of his mouth, emitted the shrill whistle by which a gallery god, since first gallery gods were created into an echoing world, has testified to his impatient longings that amusement be vouchsafed him.

As though the whistle had been a command, the daubed old curtain shivered and swayed. A dead thing was coming to life. Creaking dolefully, it rolled up and up until it had rolled up entirely out of sight.

A back drop, lowered at a point well down front, made the stage shallow. Once upon a time this back drop had been intended to represent a stretch of beach with blue rollers breaking on beyond. Faded as it was, and stained and cracked and scaly as it was now, the design of the artist who painted it was yet discernible; for he plainly had been one who held by the pigmented principle that all sea sands be very yellow and all sea waves be very blue.

Out of the far wings came a figure of a man, crossing the narrowed space to halt midway of the stage, close up to the tin gutter where the tipless prongs of many gas-jet footlights stood up like the tines in a garden rake. Verba’s hand tightened on Offutt’s arm, dragging him farther back into the shadows, and Verba’s voice spoke, with a soft, tense caution, in Offutt’s ear: “Lord! Lord!” Verba almost breathed the words out. “‘Backward, turn backward, O Time, in your – ’ Look yonder, Offutt! It’s him!”

He might have spared the urging. Offutt was looking and, without being told, knew the man at whom he looked was the man the two of them had come here to find. The lone gamin in the pit clapped his talons of hands together, making a feeble, thin sound. To this applause, as to a rousing greeting, the figure behind the footlights bowed low, then straightened. And Offutt could see, by one of the slanting bars of tarnished daylight, which stabbed downward through the dusk of the place, that the man up there on the stage was a very old man, with a heavy, leonine face and heavy brows and deep-set, big grey eyes, and a splendid massive head mopped with long, coarse white hair; and he was dressed as a fop of sixty years ago and he carried himself so.

The slash of indifferent sunshine, slicing into the gloom like a dulled sword blade, rested its lowermost tip full upon him. It brought out the bleached pallor of his skin, for his face was free from any suggestion of make-up, and it showed the tears and frays in his costume, and the misshapen shoes that were on his feet, and the high-shouldered, long-tailed coat and the soiled, collarless shirt which he wore beneath the once gorgeous velvet waistcoat.

In one hand he held, by a dainty grip on the brim, a flat-crowned derby hat, and between the fingers of the other hand twirled a slender black walking stick, with the shreds of a silken tassel adhering to it. And everything about him, barring only the shoes and the shirt, which plainly belonged to his everyday apparel, seemed fit to fall apart with age and with shabbiness.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said – and his voice filled all the empty house by reason of its strength and its toned richness – “with your kind indulgence I shall begin this entertainment with an attempt at an imitation of the elder Sothern in his famous rôle of Lord Dundreary, depicting him as he appeared in one of the scenes from that sterling and popular comedy, Our American Cousin, by Tom Taylor, Esquire.”

With that, instantly stepping into character, he took a mincing, jaunty pace or two sideways. Half turning toward an imaginary confrère and addressing that mythical listener, he began a speech which, being pieced together with other speeches, at once lengthened into a kind of monologue. But he knew the lines – that was plain; and he knew the part, too, and for the moment lived and breathed it, and in all regards veritably was it. That, likewise, the watching pair of eavesdroppers could realise, though neither of them was of sufficient age to remember, even had he seen, the great craftsman whose work old Bateman now was counterfeiting.

The interlopers looked on and, under the spell of a wizardry, forgot indeed they were interlopers. For before their eyes they saw, wonderfully re-created, a most notable conception, and afterward would have sworn, both of them, that all of it – the drawl and the lisp, the exaggerated walk, the gestures, the play of leg and arm, the swing of body, the skew of head, the lift of eyebrow even – was as true and as faithful to the original as any mirrored image might be to the image itself.

How long they stood and watched neither Verba nor Offutt was subsequently able to say with any reasonable exactitude. It might have been four minutes; it might have been six, or even eight. When later, taking counsel together, they sought to reckon up the time, the estimates varied so widely they gave up trying to reconcile them.

This much, though, they were sure of – that, in his mumming, old Bateman rose magically triumphant above the abundant handicaps of his own years and his own physique, his garb and his environment. Doing the undoable, he for the moment threw aside his years as one might throw aside the weight of a worn-out garment, and for that moment, to suit his own designs of mimicry, made floods of strength and youthfulness course through those withered arteries.

The old man finished with a whimsical turn of his voice and a flirt of his cane to match it. He bowed himself off with the hand which held the hat at his breast, and promptly on the second he disappeared the ancient curtain began to descend, Blinky meanwhile clapping with all his puny might.

Offutt turned to his companion. Behind the shelter of the box Verba’s lean, dark face was twitching.

“Is he there? Can he act? Was I right?” Verba asked himself each question, and himself answered each with a little earnest nod. “Gee, what a find!”

“Not a find, Verba,” whispered Offutt – “a resurrection – maybe. We’ve seen a genius in his grave.”

“And we’re going to dig him up.” In his intentness Verba almost panted it. “Wait! Wait!” he added warningly then, though Offutt had not offered to stir. “This is going to be a Protean stunt, I take it. Let’s let him show some more of his goods; for, by everything that’s holy, he’s got ’em!”

Up once more the curtain lifted, seemingly by its own motive power; and now the seaside drop was raised, and they beheld that, behind it, the stage had been dressed for another scene – a room in a French house. A secrétaire, sadly battered and marred, stood at one side; a bookcase with broken doors and gaping, empty shelves stood at the other, balancing it off. Down stage was an armchair. Its tapestry upholstering was rotted through and a freed spiral of springs upcoiled like a slender snake from its cushioned seat. All three pieces were of a pattern – “Louie-the-Something stuff,” Verba would have called them.

A table, placed fronting the chair but much nearer the right lower entrance than the chair was, and covered with a faded cloth that depended almost to the floor, belonged evidently to the same set. The scenery at the back showed a balcony, with a wide French window, open, in the middle. Beyond the window dangled a drop, dingy and discoloured as all the rest was, but displaying dimly a jumble of painted housetops and, far away in the simulated distance, the Arc de Triomphe. The colours were almost obliterated, but the suggestion of perspective remained, testifying still to the skill of the creator.

From the wings where they had seen him vanish Bateman reappeared. The trousers and the shoes were those he had worn before; but now, thrown on over his shirt, was the melancholy wreck of what once had been a blue uniform coat, with huge epaulets upon the shoulders and gold braid upon the collar and the cuffs, and brass buttons to fasten it in double-breasted fashion down the front. Now, though, it hung open. Some of the buttons were missing, and the gold lacings were mere blackened wisps of rags.