The Lottery Rose: Chapters 12–14

Everything about the stage directions fascinated him—how a change of tone or a facial expression was worth any number of words, how every aside, supposedly muttered, must, all the same, be enunciated so that no one in the audience missed it.

He listened to the lines of each skit and learned them, certain in some cases that his own delivery of them in the seclusion of his room was better than that of the struggling actors trying to follow Mrs. Harper’s directions.

“Well, I like ’em,” Timothy answered and continued complacently. “I not only like ’em, but I’m pretty good in ’em too. Mrs. Harper says my White Rabbit—the one that’s late for his appointment with the Duchess—is real good. I saw her grin and wink at Sister Dolores once when I was goin’ strong.”

I wouldn’t be in one of her plays if she coaxed me for a year—she couldn’t make me be in one of them—

Once when Mr. Collier paid Georgie and Robin an unexpected call at the playhouse, he found Georgie delivering the lines of one skit after another, working with pretended props, changing from a scowling pirate to a scheming Tom Sawyer with apparent ease.

Georgie flushed as he saw Mr. Collier watching him try to find an answer.

Timothy shrugged in callous disregard for Richie’s trouble.

During the following days there was considerable grousing among the boys over the cancellation of the Mad Tea Party.

We’ll have to wait until some gentlemen around here learn that girls’ roles are just as good as theirs—sometimes considerably better—

There was the case too of Ross Davis who couldn’t project his voice or enunciate his lines distinctly.

The sunlight sifted into the loft and fell on Georgie’s face.

There was persistent hammering in the auditorium and a shouting of commands among the workers.

But as the Hatter, the March Hare, and the Dormouse looked out toward the right wing and began to clamor that there was no room for an approaching girl at the tea table, Molly Harper stepped out of the wing, and the room erupted with a delighted roar.

She was wearing a short dress with a crepe-paper pinafore that Rosita had pinned together less than an hour before.

He forgot a boy named Georgie completely once the play opened and became a ridiculously pompous old Hatter who teased Alice and irritated her with his sly mockery.

The saucy lines which a Georgie Burgess behind the Hatter’s big spectacles dared to say openly to the Molly Harper behind Alice’s pinafore tickled the audience immensely.

“You mean you can’t take less,” he said smugly. “It’s very easy to take more than nothing.”

And when he waved his arms in an extravagant gesture as he recited, “Twinkle, twinkle, little bat, how I wonder where you’re at,” Alice looked at him in what was surely puzzled disbelief, and the audience howled at a Georgie Burgess they had never known before.

It was fun, heady exciting fun.

She laughed at that almost as gaily as Sister Mary Angela sometimes laughed.

I said the lines and never stumbled. Sister Dolores was in the wing waitin’ to give me a cue if I needed it, but I didn’t—not once.

Amanda found it very difficult to rouse herself before eight o’clock; and to be up and around before seven seemed senseless and highly disagreeable.

He called a few times, a garbled attempt to say Georgie, but when there was neither an answer nor an appearance of Georgie, he sighed and resigned himself to further waiting.

He called a few times, a garbled attempt to say Georgie, but when there was neither an answer nor an appearance of Georgie, he sighed and resigned himself to further waiting.

From a distance the quail called out to him in loud, clear notes that Georgie knew how to imitate, but Robin couldn’t.

He laughed and chortled.

He waved his arms and tried to make them go away, but they wouldn’t. They pushed against him relentlessly, and when he tried to run from them he fell face downward in the water—

Outdoor games had been abolished for the three days preceding the rites for Robin.

They practiced for over an hour that morning, singing without accompaniment as they would have to sing at the cemetery.

The graveside rites were very simple. The choirboys sang, their voices sweet and full of tenderness for the child who had died and for his mother who watched them as they sang, unmoving and erect as she stood beside her father among their friends.

Georgie sang with the others, his face so haggard that Molly Harper scarcely recognized him at first.

He held the car door open and Georgie reluctantly got in.

Gradually they drifted away, some of them going into the house for the night, others taking their cars and driving to motels outside the nearest town.

The task before him was awkward for the bush had grown heavier, nourished as it had been by Old Eddie’s careful feeding, but the sandy soil around it crumbled easily into Georgie’s spade.

When he spoke at last his words were barely audible.