and eyes
that saw everything. I knew at one he was the one who had seemed
familiar to me in the knot of City fellows.

He looked at me and I looked from him to the picture sitting on the
reserve makeup box by Siddy's mirror. And I began to tremble.

He looked at it too, of course, as fast as I did. And then he began to
tremble too, though it was a finer-grained tremor than mine.

The sword-fight had ended seconds back and now I heard the witches
faintly wailing, "Fair is foul, and foul is fair--" Sid has them echo
that line offstage at the end to give a feeling of prophecy fulfilled.

Then Sid came pounding up. He's the first finished, since the fight
ends offstage so Macduff can carry back a red-necked papier-mache head
of him and show it to the audience. Sid stopped dead in the door.

Then the stranger turned around. His shoulders jerked as he saw Sid.
He moved toward him just two or three steps at a time, speaking at the
same time in breathy little rushes.

* * * * *

Sid stood there and watched him. When the other actors came boiling up
behind him, he put his hands on the doorframe to either side so none
of them could get past. Their faces peered around him.

And all this while the stranger was saying, "What may this mean? Can
such things be? Are all the seeds of time ... wetted by some
hell-trickle ... sprouted at once in their granary? Speak ... speak!
You played me a play ... that I am writing in my secretest heart. Have
you disjointed the frame of things ... to steal my unborn thoughts?
Fair is foul indeed. Is all the world a stage? Speak, I say! Are you
not my friend Sidney James Lessingham of King's Lynn ... singed by
time's fiery wand ... sifted over with the ashes of thirty years?
Speak, are you not he? Oh, there are more things in heaven and earth
... aye, and perchance hell too ... Speak, I charge you!"

And with that he put his hands on Sid's shoulders, half to shake him,
I think, but half to keep from falling over. And for the one time I
ever saw it, glib old Siddy had nothing to say.

He worked his lips. He opened his mouth twice and twice shut it. Then,
with a kind of desperation in his face, he motioned the actors out of
the way behind him with one big arm and swung the other around the
stranger's narrow shoulders and swept him out of the dressing room,
himself following.

The actors came pouring in then, Bruce tossing Macbeth's head to
Martin like a footbal