“I said ‘Bite my head off!’ I didn’t say ‘Freeze me!’ I take the license of an old friend who in his time has put worms down your back, and I repeat—I don’t like your being on the stage.”
“I shouldn’t have thought you would have been so”—Jill sought for a devastating adjective—“so mid-Victorian!”
“As far as you are concerned, I’m the middest Victorian in existence. Mid is my middle name.” Wally met her indignant gaze squarely. “I-do-not-like-your-being-on-the-stage! Especially in any company which Ike Goble is running.”
“Why Mr Goble particularly?”
“Because he is not the sort of man you ought to be coming in contact with.”
“What nonsense!”
“It isn’t nonsense at all. I suppose you’ve read a lot about the morals of theatrical managers …”
“Yes. And it seemed to be exaggerated and silly.”
“So it is. There’s nothing wrong with most of them. As a general thing, they are very decent fellows,—extraordinarily decent if you think of the position they are in. I don’t say that in a business way there’s much they won’t try to put over on you. In the theatre, when it comes to business, everything goes except biting and gouging. ‘There’s never a law of God or man runs north of fifty-three.’ If you alter that to ‘north of Forty-first Street,’ it doesn’t scan as well, but it’s just as true. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the Golden Rule is suspended there. You get used to it after you have been in the theatre for awhile, and, except for leaving your watch and pocketbook at home when you have to pay a call on a manager and keeping your face to him so that he can’t get away with your back collar-stud, you don’t take any notice of it. It’s all a game. If a manager swindles you, he wins the hole and takes the honor. If you foil him, you are one up. In either case, it makes no difference to the pleasantness of your relations. You go on calling him by his first name, and he gives you a couple of cigars out of his waistcoat pocket and says you’re a good kid. There is nothing personal in it. He has probably done his best friend out of a few thousand dollars the same morning, and you see them lunching together after the ceremony as happily as possible. You’ve got to make allowances for managers. They are the victims of heredity. When a burglar marries a hat-check girl, their offspring goes into the theatrical business automatically, and he can’t shake off the early teaching which he imbibed at his father’s knee. But morals …”
Wally broke off to allow the waiter to place a fried sole before him. Waiters always select the moment when we are talking our best to intrude themselves.