Page:Stringer - Wine of Life.djvu/173



URING the week that ensued the new inter- preter of the North-land found time a-plenty to give to his work. Torrie was surprisingly little at home. Her day, and sometimes half her night, seemed filled with rehearsals and fittings and photogra- phers and ever-revised preparations for a two-week try- one of The Seventh Wave " on the road." Yet even the preoccupied Storrow was able to garner a hint or two that things were not going as smoothly with the new produc- tion as they should.

Nor did he find the approach to his own new venture altogether plain sailing. He was doubly anxious to es- cape failure, not only because it was the first step in a new field, but also because it seemed success alone that could now justify existence for him. He was not sorry, accordingly, when at the tail end of a day of hard work Chester Hardy dropped in to see how he was getting along.

" That's the only answer to your question," retorted Storrow, pointing none too hopefully at the pile of manu- script that lay before him, confronted by that bareness of the horizon which comes after supreme endeavour.

Hardy, at a nod from the other, took up the scattered sheets and tamped their edges methodically together.

" In the first place," he said, " get a typewriter. Script is too hard to read and too slow to write, for these busy times." Then he sat silent, with his keen and slightly faded eye rowelling over line after line. Storrow sat watching him, more anxious than he would have been 163