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 [216] 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.