Page:Christopher Morley--Tales from a rolltop desk.djvu/253

I saw it did him good to pour out his perplexity.

"You don't know," he said, "how the actor is at the mercy of the director. The director is appointed by the manager and is responsible only to him. If the director takes a dislike to one of the cast, he can tell the manager he 'can't work with him', and get him fired that way; or he can make the man's position impossible by ridicule and perpetual criticism at rehearsals. He remarked to-day that I was miscast. The fool! I've never had such a part."

Well, we talked until after midnight, and only stopped then because I was afraid that the spinster might begin to hammer again. In the end I got him fairly well pacified. He was delighted when I told him that I was going to be press agent, and I pleased him by making some memoranda of his previous career, which I thought I could work up into a Sunday story. To tell the truth, I did not, then, take all his distress at its face value. I knew he had had a difficult summer, and was in a nervous, high-strung state. I thought that his trouble was partly what we call "actors' disease," or (to put it more humanely) oversensitized self-consciousness. I promised to get round to the rehearsal the next day.