He drove fast. Whoever the girl was, whatever she was, he knew that he had enjoyed meeting her far more than he could ever have enjoyed meeting the real Judith Northwade, whose unfortunate motor accident had been featured, with portrait, on the front page of the New York Daily Gazette, alongside his own two columns. She could never have looked anything but a hag. Whereas he still thought that her impostor was very beautiful. He hated to think what she would say when she delved deeper into the duplicate envelope and dummy roll of plans which he had so rapidly prepared for her in Burt Northwade’s library. But he still drove fast, because those sad things were a part of the game and it was a longish way to Willow Run.
Iris
Of Simon Templar it could truly be said that to him all the world was a stage, and all the men and women merely players in an endless comedy drama designed for his especial entertainment and incidentally his cut at the box office.
To Mr Stratford Keane, all the world was also a stage, with the difference that he was the principal player and all the other men and women merely audience. This attitude persisted in spite of the fact that it was many years since the public had last shown any great desire to see him behind the footlights, and his thespian activities had been largely restricted to giving readings from Shakespeare to women’s clubs and conducting classes in The Drama in the more obscure summer-theater colonies. In spite of these slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, however, he still maintained the fur-collared overcoats, the flowing ties, the long white locks, and the sweeping gestures of his departed day, and wherever he might be, the fruity resonance of his voice was still pitched to the second balcony in rounded periods from which every traditional caricature of a Shakespearean ham might have been taken.
Simon saw him advancing through the Pump Room, not in a perfectly straight line, for one of the causes of Mr Keane’s eclipse was a weakness for the stuff that maketh glad the heart of man, but nevertheless with an unmistakable destination, and the attractions of Chicago fell under a slight cloud.
“Don’t look now,” he said to Patricia Holm, “but we are on the brink of another recital.”
The main attraction of Chicago at the moment glanced up.
“Poor old Stratford,” she said. “He’s a good-hearted old bore. And not such a fool as you think, or why do you think he got the job of directing this new production of Macbeth?”
“Probably it was the only way they could get rid of him,” Simon suggested. “So long as he’s locked up in a theater in rehearsal he can’t be out boring people anywhere else.”
“You and your big heart,” Patricia said. “It’s a wonderful break for him, and he must have needed it badly.”