“It was a gag!” one of them shouted. “That’s Walter Herrick, the writer. It’s his picture.”
“My God!”
“He was kidding Max Leam. It was a gag I tell you!”
“Pull him out… Get a doctor… Look out, there!”
Now Helen Earle hurried over; Walter Herrick was dragged out into a cleared space on the floor and there were yells of “Who did it?—Who beaned him?”
Pat let the tray lapse to a chair, its sound unnoticed in the confusion.
He saw Helen Earle working swiftly at the man’s head with a pile of clean napkins.
“Why did they have to do this to him?” someone shouted.
Pat caught Max Leam’s eye but Max happened to look away at the moment and a sense of injustice came over Pat. He alone in this crisis, real or imaginary, had acted. He alone had played the man, while those stuffed shirts let themselves be insulted and abused. And now he would have to take the rap—because Walter Herrick was powerful and popular, a three-thousand-a-week man who wrote hit shows in New York. How could anyone have guessed that it was a gag?
There was a doctor now. Pat saw him say something to the manageress and her shrill voice sent the waitresses scattering like leaves towards the kitchen.
“Boil some water! Lots of it!”
The words fell wild and unreal on Pat’s burdened soul, But even though he now knew at first-hand what came next, he did not think that he could go on from there.
Published in Esquire magazine (March 1940).
