“From what I’ve been told, Joe, this new show should get some nice notices. Some very nice notices.” Youthful and light of step the veteran walked out of the office.
Joe Carlin’s lips were parted in breathless exultation. Kicked out of one show and stepping right into another. Oh, but this was grand! This was one of those moments that paid for the heartache of the bread-and-butter hunt. Without warning the strain of the day took its toll and his nerves were limp and ragged. He went to the cooler, but water was flat. What he needed was a quick pick-up, coffee hot and strong. He went along the corridor through which Tony and Pop had preceded him and paused at the reception-desk. “I’ll be back in five min—” His voice went dead.
Pop Bartell stood near the elevators staring into vacancy.
The mouth of the girl at the desk opened to ask a question and Joe touched her arm for silence.
Abruptly Pop roused from his abstraction and stepped toward the elevators. There was no change in his jaunty, youthful stride. He touched a button. A down light flashed and he moved over toward the indicated door. And then, in the interval of waiting, a quick, sick change took place in him. Suddenly he seemed to shrink and to sag. His coat wrinkled like an old coat across the shoulders, and his head drooped as though there was no longer strength to hold it upright. An elevator stopped, and he entered it with a faltering, uncertain step. All in an instant he was a beaten, broken, hopeless old man.
“What did you say, Mr. Carlin?” the girl asked.
“Nothing,” Joe said hoarsely.
He went back to Tony’s office. So it had been front, the pathetically brave front of show business. Poor old Pop! A languidly contemptuous climber had thrust him aside as a relic, and this is what he came to after forty years of gallant trouping. This was show business. And making the rounds was show business, and washing out your only shirt and hanging it to dry overnight was show business, and Lucille Borden eating out her heart behind a Munson counter was show business. Radio small-time! Hunger and uncertainty!
He sat at Tony’s desk and thought of the day Vic Wylie had told him he’d see things that would make him want to cry. The telephone rang fitfully and he made note of the calls on Tony’s desk pad. A clock whirred the five o’clock signal and Tony had not returned.
Slowly, his lips stiff, Joe took a pen from his pocket, wrote a note, and left it on the desk: