putterings 139 < 140 > 141 index
the gray stage, the gray
People said something must be going to happen to Grady. And it did happen. His union called a strike.
It was on the morning of the first night in New York. Everything was just as usual; the gray stage, the gray auditorium with the cleaners puttering about among the holland swathings, the men and women on the stage standing in the disaffected attitudes and speaking in the curiously detached voices of people who were saving themselves for the night, and then suddenly the opening of the stage door, the entrance of the walking-delegate and the reversal of the world.
—
“Nobility Obliges,” in Virginia Tracy, Merely Players : Stories of Stage Life (1909) : 193-220 (195)
same (NYPL copy, via hathitrust)
Virginia Tracy (1874-1946)
an utterly unsatisfactory wikipedia entry, for this interesting actress, novelist, screenwriter)
three titles listed at hathitrust, the above and —
“Persons Unknown”, illustrations by Henry Raleigh (1914) here
and
The Moment After (Doubleday Crime Club, 1934)
beautiful dustjacket design by D. V. Barry, see this bookseller’s description