Wait a minute: give me a chance! I'll tell it exactly as it came to me, in snips and shreds. At first I didn't pay much attention. I had problems of my own that summer. You know what a fourth-floor hall bedroom is in hot weather. I had given up my newspaper job, and was trying to finish a novel. I couldn't work late at night, when it was cool, because if I kept my typewriter going after nine-thirty the old maid in the next room used to pound on the partition. I didn't get on very well with the work, and the money was running low. Every now and then I would meet Edwards in the hall. He looked ill and worried, and I used to think there was a touching pathos in his careful neatness. My own habits run the other way—my Palm Beach suit was a wreck, I remember—but Edwards was always immaculate. I could see—having made it my business to observe details—how cunningly he had mended his cuffs and soft collars. Poor devil! I used to see him going out about noon, with his cane and Panama hat. I dare say he scrubbed his hat with his toothbrush. Summer is a hard time for an actor who hasn't had a job all spring. Of course there are the pictures, and summer stock, but I gathered that he had been ill, and then had turned down several offers of that sort on account of something coming along that he had great hopes for. I remembered his really outstanding work in “After Dinner”, that satiric comedy that fell dead the winter before. Most of the critics gave it a good roasting, but knowing what I do now I expect the real trouble was poor direction. Fagan was the director, and what did he know of sophisticated comedy? As I say, I had reviewed the piece for the Observer, and had been greatly struck by Edwards's playing. Not a leading part, but exquisitely done.
But just at that time I was absorbed in my own not-too-successful affairs. For several years I had been saying to myself that I would do great stuff if I could only get away from the newspaper grind for a few months. And then, when I had saved up five hundred dollars, and buried myself there on Seventy-third Street to write, I couldn't seem to make any headway. I got half through the novel, and then saw that it was paltry stuff. It was flashy, spurious, and raw. One warm evening I was sitting at my window, smoking mournfully and watching some girls who were laughing and talking in a big apartment house that loomed over our lodgings like an ocean liner beside a tugboat. There was a tap at the door. Edwards asked if he could come in. I was surprised, and pleased. He kept very much to himself.
“Glad to see you,” I said. “Sit down and have a pipe.”
“I didn't want to intrude,” he said. “I just wanted to ask you something. You're a literary man. Do you know anything about Arthur Sampson?”
I had to confess that I had never heard the name. No one had, at that time, you remember.
“He's written a play,” Edwards said. “A perfectly lovely piece of work. I've got a part in it. By heaven, it seems too good to be true—after a summer like this: illness, the actors' strike, and all that—to get into something so fine. I've just read the whole script. I'm so keen about it, I'm eager to know who the author is. I thought perhaps you might know something about him.”
“I guess he's a new man,” I said. “What's the play called?”
“'Obedience.' You know, I've never had such a stroke of luck—it's as if the part had been written for me.”
“Splendid,” I said, and I was honestly pleased to hear of his good fortune. “Is it the lead?”
“Oh, no. Of course they want a big name for that. Brooks is the man. My part is only the foil—provides the contrast, you know—on the payroll as well as on the stage.” He laughed, a little cynically.