“She went to the pictures with that Simpson guy,” Harry told him when he called to see her the next night.

He sat down to wait for her. The old man was very ill and lay on the bed with extreme care as though it were a narrow shelf from which he might fall if he moved.

“What are they making on your lot?” he asked slowly, rolling his eyes toward Tod without budging his head.

“‘Manifest Destiny,’ ‘Sweet and Low Down,’ ‘Waterloo,’ The Great Divide,’ Begging Your . . . ”

“‘The Great Divide’—” Harry said, interrupting eagerly. “I remember that vehicle.”

Tod realized he shouldn’t have got him started, but there was nothing he could do about it now. He had to let him run down like a clock.

“When it opened I was playing the Irving in a little number called ‘Enter Two Gents,’ a trifle, but entertainment, real entertainment. I played a Jew comic, a Ben Welch effect, derby and big pants —‘Pat, dey hollered me a chob in de Heagle Laundreh’ . . . ‘Faith now, Ikey, and did you take it?’ . . . ‘No, who vants to vash heagles?’ Joe Parvos played straight for me in a cop’s suit. Well, the night ‘The Great Divide’ opened, Joe was laying up with a whisker in the old Fifth Avenue when the stove exploded. It was the broad’s husband who blew the whistle. He was . . . ”

He hadn’t run down. He had stopped and was squeezing his left side with both hands.

Tod leaned over anxiously.

“Some water?”

Harry framed the word “no” with his lips, then groaned skillfully. It was a second-act curtain groan, so phony that Tod had to hide a smile. And yet, the old man’s pallor hadn’t come from a box.

Harry groaned again, modulating from pain to exhaustion, then closed his eyes. Tod saw how skillfully he got the maximum effect out of his agonized profile by using the pillow to set it off. He also noticed that Harry, like many actors, had very little back or top to his head. It was almost all face, like a mask, with deep furrows between the eyes, across the forehead and on either side of the nose and mouth, plowed there by years of broad grinning and heavy frowning. Because of them, he could never express anything either subtly or exactly. They wouldn’t permit degrees of feeling, only the furthest degree.

Tod began to wonder if it might not be true that actors suffer less than other people. He thought about this for a while, then decided that he was wrong. Feeling is of the heart and nerves and the crudeness of its expression has nothing to do with its intensity. Harry suffered as keenly as anyone, despite the theatricality of his groans and grimaces.

He seemed to enjoy suffering. But not all kinds, certainly not sickness. Like many people, he only enjoyed the sort that was self-inflicted. His favorite method was to bare his soul to strangers in barrooms. He would make believ............