Page:Once a Clown, Always a Clown.djvu/90

ONCE A CLOWN, ALWAYS A CLOWN the necessity of paying him for a summer of leisure. Rather than do that, the colonel did what many another manager has been known to do—he cast the actor in an insignificant role in "Clover" in the hope that Dungan would refuse the part as beneath his dignity and his reputation.

Dungan was such a conscientious actor that I never have been able to decide whether he accepted the part out of a sense of obligation or whether he sensed McCaull's strategy and was determined to confound it, but take it he did. He appeared in one act only and had exactly one line:

yet he made up for it as carefully as if he were playing Hamlet.

The rest of us got a good deal of malicious sport out of the situation and made it as difficult for Dungan as possible. We tried every trick known to actors in an effort to break him up in the delivery of his one line. I used to tap my wooden shoes on the stage at his entrance in imitation of a galloping horse. But when he did trip at last the catastrophe was purely accidental.