Ghastly things happened, of course. A tricky similarity of cues
would betray somebody into a speech three scenes ahead; a cut would have
the unforeseen effect of leaving somebody stranded, half-changed, in his
dressing-room when his entrance cue came round; an actor would dry up,
utterly forget his lines in the middle of a scene he could have repeated
in his sleep--and the amazing way in which these disasters were
retrieved, the way these people who hadn't, so far, impressed Rose very
strongly with their collective intelligence, extemporized, righted the
capsizing boat, kept the scene going--somehow--no matter what happened,
gave her a new respect for their claims to a real profession.
This was the great thing they had, she concluded; the quality of coming
up to the scratch, of giving whatever it took out of themselves to meet
the need of the moment. They weren't--her use of this phrase harked back
to the days of the half-back--yellow. If you'd walked through the train
that took them back to Chicago Sunday morning, had seen them, glum,
dispirited, utterly fagged out, unsustained by a single gleam of hope,
you'd have said it was impossible that they should give any sort of
performance that night--let alone a good one.
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