“But you’ll come round an’ wait after the show?” Mark wailed.
“We’ll have to catch the cars, Bud. Well, goo’ bye.”
Mark stood clutching the sponge and sighed a monstrous, woeful exhalation after Eddie Bernamer. His grey eyes filled. He was hideously homesick, certain that Fayettesville was a better place than this cellar that stunk of sweated cloth and greasy paint. And Cora hadn’t been strikingly pleased by the news of him in this morning’s papers. She was odd. He wiped his nose on a wrist and looked hopelessly at Carlson.
“Rather be back on the farm, wouldn’t you?” the gaunt man asked.
Mark sat down on the floor and thought. His thoughts went slowly across the track of six weeks. He plodded. For all its demerits this red and gold theatre was thrilling. People were jolly, kind enough. The lewd stagehands had let him help set a scene tonight. The man who handled the lights had shown him how they were turned on and off to make stormy waverings. Cora was exciting. Winter at home was plagued by Aunt Edith who came out from Trenton to spend the cold months at the farm and who lectured Mark’s father on Methodism. And here was this easy, good job. If he worked hard it might be that Mr. Carlson—who wasn’t now the screaming beast of rehearsals—would let him run the lights instead of acting. Mark said, “Well, no. Just as soon stay here, I guess.”
“How old are you, sonny?”
“Goin’ on seventeen, sir.”
“I’ll give you forty a week to stay here,” said Carlson, “Fitch tells me you think acting’s pretty easy.”
“I don’t see any trick to acting,” Mark mused, absorbing the offer of forty dollars a week, “There ain’t nothin’ to it but speakin’ out loud.... Yes, I’d like to stay here.” He wanted to show himself useful and got up, pointing to the bulbs clustered on the ceiling in a bed of tin, “I should think you’d ought to save money if you had them down here by the lookin’ glasses instead of this gas, y’see? The fellers don’t get any good of the electric light while they’re puttin’ paint on, and—”
“Rehearsal at ten in the morning,” said Carlson, “Good-night.”