rushed him off to the stairs and shoved him down with a force that would have thrown him headlong if he had not saved himself by catching the handrail. The manager followed him with Cousin, who was bleeding at the nose and mouth. "You're both discharged. Don't either of you come back to that stage. Get your things off now, and get out."
Don hung up his hat and coat. "I'll have to wait," he said. "I look after the costumes for Mr. Kidder."
The stage manager, with an angry oath by way of dismissal, turned and went back to his work. It was the sight of "Delicate Pete" bleeding into the wash-bowl that brought Don to a sense of what had happened.
He had been as if poised above his own actions, watching himself, in a sort of double-consciousness that always came on him in such moments of excitement; and every aspect of the swift instants through which he had moved had imprinted itself on his visual memory as clearly as if he had seen it with the cool attention of an unmoved spectator. Now, all these sensations—Cousin's impudent smile, the sight of Margaret drawn up to meet another attack, the shameful suffering of her face—the eyes of the supers as they fell back in front of him, the crackle of Cousin's starched collar in the grasp of his hand, the blind movement of the super's arms guarding his eyes while he choked with open mouth, squirming to avoid the blows that struck brutally on his bleeding lips—the sudden roughness that had seized Don himself from behind and whirled him away dizzily and thrown him at the stairs down
