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The draughts, the dust, the wide, icy space of the stage, the droning voices, the crisp interruptions, the stupid "business," endlessly repeated, all seemed equally disenchanting. The stagehands had set the stage for the next day's opening curtain, and had long ago departed. Duncan was cold, tired, headachy.
The wild beast smell of the lion, although his cage had been hurriedly wheeled out through the scenery door, still persisted and caught the throat, and in the dim white-washed bareness, a few figures, stagehands in shirt-sleeves, and vague pale men in hard felt hats tiptoed about like perspiring ghosts. One of the latter approached Andrew. Monsieur Patou need have no fear, he whispered.
I have seldom missed a first night. No sooner has one periodical got rid of me than another has had the misfortune to engage me, with the result that I am now the foremost critic of the day, read assiduously by millions, fawned upon by managers, courted by stagehands. My lightest word can make or mar a new production. If I say a piece is bad, it dies. It may not die instantly.
"I met her socially several times, and she certainly was perfectly lovely to me. But when she got back on the stage, why, she even had the stagehands stepping sideways, and you know them. And the manager couldn't call his soul his own until he had loaded her into a cab and on her way.
But the noise grew greater while Linda Beach tried gamely to cover it up. It was not easy. In fact, it was impossible. One of the Toppers found himself cornered by two stagehands and dashed triumphantly across that sacrosanct space, the area in a camera's field of vision. He raced behind Linda Beach, then smiling pleasantly and talking at the top of her voice to cover the noise behind her.
It was a totally chaotic rushing-about of people who'd been half hysterical to start with, who had been crushed in a senselessly swaying mob, had been pushed bodily into a building-lobby jammed past endurance, and escaped into a maze from which they'd blundered into a studio with a broadcast going on. Stagehands and necktie-less persons rushed to throw them out.
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