Page:The Blind Bow-Boy (IA blindbowboy00vanv).pdf/242

 of Zimbule herself. Her dressing-room was located on the opposite side of the building and was approached by a separate staircase. He had taken it for granted that she would be working in the studio below and that was primarily the reason why he had refrained from wandering about downstairs, although he had been encouraged to do so by various actors, camera-men, and stage-hands, who had lounged into his room out of curiosity, ostensibly to light their cigarettes, or to ask the time. He had not taken advantage of their invitation to roam; instead, he sat alone in his room, waiting. . . for what? he wondered.

Campaspe had oiled the wheels. He had found it incredibly simple to become a cabot of the silver sheets, an epithet for his new profession dropped by one of his visitors, an assistant director named Rex MacGregor, a lad about seventeen years old, whose thin white face was profusely sprinkled with pimples, and who wore ridiculously tight shepherd's plaid trousers over his extremely thin legs, a waistcoat which exposed about as much of his shirt as the similar garment of a Spanish matador, and a coat in which the pockets were cut at angles which would have thrown a cubist painter into a delirium. Harold had called one morning, following instructions, on the casting director, and when he encountered that superb individual, with his shirt-sleeves rolled back to the shoulder, exposing the lumps of muscle which distorted the contour of his hairy