Mrs. Gudrun’s season at the Sceptre Theatre was drawing to a finish, and the funds of the Syndicate were in the same condition. Teddy Candelish—Teddy of the cherubic smile and the golden mustache, constantly described by the Theatrical Piffer as the most ubiquitous of acting-managers—sat in his sanctum before an American roll-top desk, checking off applications for free seats and filing unpaid bills. Gormleigh, the stage-director, balanced himself on the end of a saddle-bag sofa, chewing an unlighted cigar; De Hanna, the representative of the Syndicate, was going over the books at a leather-covered table, his eyeglasses growing dim in the attempt to read anything beyond deficit in those neatly kept columns. Mrs. Gudrun occupied the easiest chair. Her feet, beautifully silk-stockinged and wonderfully shod, occupied the next comfortable; her silken draperies were everywhere, and a cigarette was between her finely cut lips. Her feather boa hung from an electric-globe branch, and her flowery diaphanous hat, bristling with diamond-headed pins, crowned the domelike brow of a plaster bust of the Bard of Avon. “Well,” said the manageress, making smoke-rings and looking at De Hanna, “there’s no putting the bare fact to bed! We’ve not pulled off things as we had a right to expect.... We’ve lost our little pot, and come to the end of our resources, eh?”
“In plain terms,” said De Hanna, speaking through his nose, as he always did when upon the subject of money, “the Syndicate has run you for all the Syndicate 181is worth, and when we pay salaries on Saturday we shall have”—he did some figuring with a lead pencil on the back of a millionaire’s request for gratuitous stalls, and whistled sadly—“something like four hundred and fifty left to carry us through until the seventeenth.”
“We began with as nice a little nest-egg as any management could wish for,” said Candelish, dropping a smoking vesta into the waste-paper basket with fatalistic unconcern. “We thought The Stone Age would pay. I’d my doubts of a prehistoric drama in five acts and fourteen scenes that couldn’t be produced under an outlay of four thousand pounds, but we were overruled.” He veered the tail of his eye round at Mrs. Gudrun. “You and the Duke were mad about that piece.”
“De Petoburgh saw great possibilities for me in it,” said Mrs. Gudrun, throwing another cigarette-end at the fireplace and missing it. “That scene where Kaja comes in dressed in woad for battle, and brains What’s-his-name with her prehistoric stone ax because he doesn’t want to fight her, always thrilled him. He said I would be greater than Siddons in it, and, well—you remember the notices I got in the Morning Whooper. Cluffer did me justice then, if he did turn nasty afterward—the beast!”
“When I met Cluffer in the vestibule on the first night after the third act,” said Teddy Candelish, “he said he was going home because the tension of your acting was positively too great to bear. He preferred me to describe the rest of the play to him, and jotted the chief points on his cuff before he went. And I grant you the notice was a ripper, but it didn’t seem to bring people in; and after playing to paper for three weeks, we had to put up the fortnight’s notice and jam The Kiss of Clytie into rehearsal.”
“Dad vos a lofely—ach!—a lofely blay!” moaned Oscar Gormleigh, casting up his little pig’s eyes to the 182highly ornamental ceiling of the managerial sanctum. “Brigged from de Chairman in de pekinning, as I told you, as all de goot blays are.”
“I wish the Germans had stuck to it, I’m sure,” said De Hanna. “It always appeared to me too much over the heads of ordinary intelligent playgoers to pay worth a little damn.”
“De dranscendental element——” Gormleigh was beginning, when Mrs. Gudrun cut him short.
“I never cared for it very much myself; but Bob Bolsover was dead set upon my giving the public my reading of Clytie—and, well, you must recollect the effect I created in that studio scene. Mullekens came round afterward, and brought his critic with him, and said that the best French school of acting must now look to its laurels, and a lot more. Mullekens is the proprietor of the Daily Tomahawk, and so, of course, I thought we were in for a good thing. How could I imagine that the creature of a critic would go home and make game of the whole show? Doesn’t Mullekens pay him?”
“Ah, ja! Poot dat gritic’s vife is de sister of de Chairman agtress dat blayed Glytie in de orichinal Chairman broduction,” put in Gormleigh, whose real surname was Gameltzch, as everybody does not know. “Did I not varn you? It vas a gase of veels vidin veels.”
“Wheels or no wheels, Clytie kissed us out of three thou. odd,” said De Hanna, wearily scratching his ear with his “Geyser” pen, “and then we cut our throats with——”
“With him,” put in Candelish, jerking a contemptuous thumb at the hat-crowned effigy of the Bard of Avon.
“You were keen on my giving the great mass of playgoers a chance of seeing my Juliet,” remarked Mrs. Gudrun casting a Parthian glance at the worm that had turned.
183“But they didn’t take the chance,” put in De Hanna, “and consequently—we fizzle out.”
“Like a burst bladder ...” moaned Candelish, who saw before him a weary waste of months unenlivened by paid occupation.
“Or a damp sguib,” put in Gormleigh.
“Let’s have a sputter before we expire,” said De Hanna, with a momentary revival of energy. “Lots of manuscripts have been sent in.... Isn’t there a little domestic drama of the purely popular sort, or a farce imbecile enough to pay for production, to be found among ’em?”
“Dunno,” yawled Candelish, tilting his chair.
“Who is supposed to read the plays that are sent in?” asked De Hanna, turning his large Oriental eyes toward. Mrs. Gudrun.
“I read some,” said the lady languidly, “and the dogs get the rest.”
She stretched, and an overpowering combination of fashionable perfumes, shaken from her draperies, filled the apartment. The three men sneezed simultaneously. Mrs. Gudrun rose with majesty, and going to the mantel-glass, patted her transformation fringe into form, and smiled at the perennially beautiful image that smiled and patted back. Suddenly there was a whining and scratching outside the door.
“It’s Billy. Let him in, one of you,” ordered the manageress.
All three men obeyed, clashing their heads together smartly at the portal. De Hanna, with watering eyes, opened the door, and a brindled bull of surpassing ugliness trotted into the office, carrying a chewed brown paper parcel decorated with futile red seals and trailing loops of string. Lying down in the center of the carpet and carefully arranging the parcel between his forepaws, Billy proceeded to worry it.
184“Vot has de beast kott dere?” asked Gormleigh.
“Take it from him and see!” said Mrs. Gudrun carelessly. Gormleigh’s violet nose became pale lavender as Billy, looking up from the work of destruction, emitted a loud growl.
“He understonds everyding vot you say!” spluttered the stage-manager.
“Try him with German,” advised De Hanna.
“Or mit Yiddish,” retorted Gormleigh spitefully.
As De Hanna winced under the retort, Candelish, who had rummaged unnoticed in a drawer for some moments, produced a biscuit. Billy, watching out of the corner of his eye, pricked a ragged ear and whacked the carpet with his muscular tail.
“Hee, boy, hee, Billy!” Candelish said seductively. Billy rose upon his powerful bow-legs and hung out his tongue expectantly.
“Koot old Pillee!” uttered Gormleigh encouragingly. “Gleffer old poy!”
Billy vouchsafed the stage-manager not a glance; his bloodshot eyes were glued upon the biscuit as he stood over the brown paper parcel. Then, as Candelish, throwing an expression of eager voracity into his countenance, made believe to eat the coveted delicacy himself, Billy made a step forwards.... The end of the parcel projected from between his hind-legs.... De Hanna softly stepped to the fireplace and seized the tongs....
“Poo’ boy—poo’ ol’ Billy, then!” coaxed the acting-manager. He broke the biscuit with one inviting snap, Billy forgot the parcel, and De Hanna grabbed and got it. The next moment the bull, realizing his loss, pinned the representative of the Syndicate by the leg.
“Dash—dash—dash! Take the dash brute off, somebody!” shrieked De Hanna.
There was a brief scene of confusion. Then, as Billy retired under a corner table with a mouthful of ravished 185tweed, “He’s torn a piece out of your trow-trows, old man,” Candelish remarked sympathetically.
“He might have torn all the veins out of my leg!” De Hanna gasped.
“Den,” said Gormleigh, chuckling, “you would haf been Kosher.”
But Mrs. Gudrun was deeply disappointed in Billy. “Letting you off for a bit of cloth!” she said. “Why, the breed are famous for their bite. He ought to have taken a piece of flesh clean out—I shall never believe in that dog again!” She swept over to Gormleigh, who was busy disentangling the lengths of chewed string and removing the tatters of brown paper from Billy’s treasure-trove. It proved to be a green-covered, rather bulky volume of typescript. A red-bordered label gummed on the cover announced its title:
“MAGGS AT MARGATE
A Seaside Farce,
In Three Whiffs of Ozone.”
“What funny fool has written this?” snorted the manageress.
“De name of de author.... Ach so! De name of de author is Slump—Ferdinand Slump.”
“I know the chap, or of him. He’s a business man who owns a half share in some chemical gasworks at Hackney, and does comic literature in off hours. He writes the weekly theatrical page of Tickles,” said De Hanna, “and——”
“Dickles is a stupid halfpenny brint,” said Gormleigh, “dat sdeals all its chokes from de Chairman babers.”
“Really? It struck me that there must be some existing reason,” said Candelish, “for the wonderfully 186level flow of dullness the publication manages to maintain——”
“Well, I suppose somebody is going to read this farce, since that is what he calls it, by this Slump, since that is what he calls himself,” said Mrs. Gudrun, removing her hat from Shakespeare and pinning it on.
“Certainly. De Hanna, as the Representative of the Syndicate——” began Candelish eagerly.
“Pardon me. As acting-manager,” objected De Hanna, “you, Candelish, have the prior claim.”
“Didn’t you say you were going out of town to-night, Gormleigh?” interrupted Mrs. Gudrun, who had stuck in all her hatpins, and was now putting on her gloves.
“Choost............