Part 14

“You see, Dad has told me all,” explained Polly, turning beaming, childlike eyes of happiness upon the embarrassed pair. “Though Cis knew before I did, and I hardly call that quite fair. But as he is to be your son, dear Mrs. Osborne—as I am to be your daughter——Why, there is the crackle arranged upon your cabinets already! How nice it looks! But it will all be yours, presently, won’t it, Mamma?” Polly gave Mrs. Osborne another kiss, and then fluttered over to Sir Giles, who sat petrified upon the footstool, and gave him a couple. “You mustn’t be jealous,” she said, “you foolish old Dad! And now, Mamma darling, won’t you give me some tea?”

“Dear Mary, with pleasure!” assented Mrs. Osborne, who knew that her hand had been forced, and yet could not help admiring the audacity of the _coup_. As her graceful form undulated to the tea-table, she cast a glance at Sir Giles, raising her beautifully tinted eyebrows almost to her golden-brown curls. She gave him credit for being a party to the plot, while he, poor astonished gentleman, was as innocent as a new-born babe. In the passing out of a cup of tea she realized that a double game was no longer possible, and that Polly Overshott had the stronger hand. “Your father,” she said, as she gave Polly her tea, “has enlisted a powerful advocate. All was not so settled as you seem to think, dear Mary, but——” And she sighed, and extended her white hand to Sir Giles, and helped him up from the footstool; and he was in the act of gracefully kissing that fair hand as Cis, in riding-dress, pale, agitated, and breathless from the gallop over, was ushered in.

“Cis!” cried Polly, realizing that the supreme moment of the Tug of War was now or never. Her eyes were blue fires, her cheeks red ones, as she moved swiftly and gracefully to her lover and led him forward. “Kiss Mamma and shake hands with Dad,” she said, and added with a coquetry of which Cis had never thought her capable: “and then, perhaps, you may kiss me.” Bewildered, choking with the reproaches, the recriminations with which he was bursting, and which it need hardly be explained were intended for Mrs. Osborne’s private ear, the young man obeyed.

“I—I congratulate you both,” he said thickly. Mrs. Osborne had never felt so little the niceties of a situation in her life. Nonplused, angry, and perturbed, she looked every hour of her age, despite pink curtains; and the powder only served to accentuate the suddenly revealed hollows in her face. Polly, as I have explained, had never worn such an air of coquetry, of brilliancy, of dare-devil, defiant mastery as she now displayed. But her final blow was to be dealt—and she dealt it.

“Mamma darling,” she cooed, taking the vacated stool at Mrs. Osborne’s feet—the stool contested for by both the discomfited wooers—“how cosy we are here—all together! Won’t you please Dad—and me—and Cis—by bringing out the pearls!”

“The—pearls!” Mrs. Osborne said. An electric shock went through her; she turned stabbing eyes upon the speechless Cis. And Sir Giles, studying her face, made up his mind that he would never marry that woman—not if Polly did her level best to bring the match about.

While Polly prattled on.

“The pearls, of course. I told Cis I thought it sweet of him to bring them to show you—as though I were really your daughter, don’t you know. And if you will fasten them round my neck yourself, I shall think it sweet of you. Where have you hidden them? Why, I believe you are wearing them now—to keep them warm for me—under your lace cravat, you dear, darling thing!”

The affectionate daughter-elect raised a guileless hand and twitched the jewels into sight.

Mrs. Osborne, ashy pale, and with Medea-like eyes, unfastened the jewels from her throat.

“Here they are, dear Mary. Take them—and may they bring you all the happiness I wish you!” said Mrs. Osborne in cooing accents.

Polly could not restrain a little shudder, but she was grave.

“Now Cis and I will go,” she said, when the pearls were fastened round her neck over the neat white collar. “I am sure you and Dad want to be alone. Come, Cis dear.”

And she kissed Mrs. Osborne again, and bore Cis—not unwilling, strangely fascinated by the new Polly so suddenly made manifest—away. They were riding slowly home to dinner at Overshott Foxbrush, when the sound of wheels rattling behind them, and Fanchon’s well-known trot, brought a covert smile to Polly’s lips.

Mrs. Osborne had a headache, Sir Giles explained, and so he had decided not to remain to dinner.

But father, daughter, and betrothed dined pleasantly at Overshott Foxbrush. And when the dazzled Cis said good-night to the triumphant Polly, the valediction was uttered unwillingly with as many repetitions as there were pearls in the string Miss Overshott wore round her firm white throat.

There was no gas laid on at Overshott. Bedroom candlesticks were an unabolished institution. As Sir Giles gave his daughter hers, he spoke.

“You were a little premature in your conclusions, my girl, at The Sabines to-day. I won’t ask why you played that little comedy, because I know.... But you played it well ... and I don’t think Cis will kick over the traces in that direction again. Nor do I think”—the Colonel cleared his throat rather awkwardly—“that you are going to have Mrs. Osborne for your second mother. She is too clever—and so are you! Good-night, my dear!”

GAS!

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 is 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 highly 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.

“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.

“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 tweed, “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 level 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 for a liddle plow,” admitted Gormleigh. “Dere is a cheab night drain to Stinkton-on-Sea, sdarding from de Creat Northern at dwelve dirty. I shall sleep in de gorridor gombardmend, oond breakfast at a goffee and vinkle stall on de peach to-morrow morgen. By vich I haf poot von night to pay for at de hotel.” His bearded lips parted in a childlike smile of delight. “My vife goes not vid me,” he said, and smiled again.

“Then take this!” said Mrs. Gudrun, turning Slump’s farce over. “Report on it after the show on Monday.” And she rustled from the office on billows of silk, attended by clouds of perfume, the despised Billy, and the assiduous Candelish. The stage-manager swore. De Hanna, concealing the solution in the continuity of his tweeds with a bicycle trouser-clip, grinned.

“A little solid reading will steady you down, Gummy, and if my experience of Slump goes for anything—you’ve got it there. But you’ll report on Monday, as Her Nibs ordered. If you’ve not read it, look out for squalls on Monday night!”

* * * * *

“Potstausend! Hof I read dot farce!” gasped Gormleigh on the night of Monday. “Schwerlich! I hof read him tvice. Once from de beginning to de end, oond akain from de end to de beginning.” His face assumed an expression of anguish, and the veins on his bald forehead stood out as the thick drops gathered there. “I cannot make heads or dails of him.... He is gram-jam with chokes, poot I cannot lof at dem; his situations are sgreaming, poot I cannot sgream. De tears day komm instead.... Dat vork is vonderful ... it should one day be broduced, poot in de kreat National School Theatre for authors oond actors dot de gountry hos not yet founded, to brove to bubils vot is not a farce——”

“Yet I shouldn’t be surprised if we did the piece here,” said Teddy Candelish. “Slump, the author, has been talking over Her Nibs, and as he would let _Maggs at Margate_ go for nothing down, find three hundred pounds toward the production, and merely take a nominal sixty per cent., the chances are that you’ll be rehearsing before Tuesday. Hullo!” for the stage-manager had reeled heavily against him.

“Ich bin unwohl.... It is dose undichested chokes of Slumps I haf hodd on my gonstitution since I read dot farce. Oond now you komm mit anodder,” Gormleigh groaned.

“Here’s Her Nibs with Slump,” said Candelish, with a grin; and Mrs. Gudrun, in the Renaissance robes of Juliet, swept into the green room with a little grinning, long-haired man in an imitation astrachan-collared overcoat over crumpled evening dress—a little man who gave a large hand, with mourning nails, familiarly to Candelish, and nodded cavalierly when Gormleigh was introduced. Slump was to read his play to the manageress and her staff after the performance that night.

Read his play Slump did, and Cimmerian gloom gathered upon the countenances of his listeners as the first act dragged to a close. Slump put the typescript down on the supper-table and looked round; Gormleigh’s head had sunk upon his folded arms. Heavy snores testified to the depth and genuineness of his slumbers. The countenances of De Hanna and Candelish expressed the most profound dejection, while the intellectual half of Mrs. Gudrun’s celebrated countenance had temporarily vanished behind her upper lip.

“What do you say to that?” Slump asked, quite undismayed by these signs of weariness on the part of his listeners. Mrs. Gudrun came back to answer him.

“I say that it’s the longest funeral I’ve ever been at. Open another bottle of the Boy, Teddy, and wake up, Gormleigh.”

“I hof not been asleep,” explained Gormleigh.

“I wish I had,” sighed De Hanna. “The fact is,” he continued, prompted by a glance from Mrs. Gudrun, “that your play don’t do.”

Slump maintained, in the face of this discouragement, a smiling front.

“Won’t do, eh?”

“Won’t do for nuts,” said De Hanna firmly. “Nobody could possibly laugh at it,” he continued.

“It is too tam tismal,” put in Gormleigh.

“But if I prove to you that people can laugh at it, what then?” queried the undismayed Slump. He took from a fob pocket-book a newspaper cutting and handed it across the supper-table to De Hanna. The cutting was headed

“OZONE AT THE BALL,”

and ran thus:

“‘Will you take a little refreshment?’

“‘Thank you, I have just had a sniff of ozone.’

“Question and answer at the ball given last night in aid of the —— Hospital, —— Square, at the Royal Rooms, Kensington. For, besides champagne, ozone was laid on. After every dance Dr. Blank, head of the Hospital, wheeled about the hall an appliance in which, by electrical

## action, pure oxygen was converted into the invigorating element of

mountain or seaside air, greatly to the purifying and enlivening of the atmosphere of the ballroom.”

“My firm supplies the gas used in the treatment of the patients at that hospital,” said Slump. “It’s a turnover of ten thousand per annum. We’re ready to lay it on at the theater, and give the playgoers genuine ozone with their evening’s entertainment. As for the farce, I don’t count it A1 quality, but I’ve made up my mind to be acted and laughed at, and I’m going to bring chemistry in to help me. Think what an advertisement for the hoardings: ‘Real Ozone Wafted Over the Footlights,’ ‘Sea Air in the Stalls and Gallery!’”

“By thunder! it’s a whacking notion!” cried Candelish.

“Colossal!” exclaimed De Hanna, taking fire at last.

“Poot vill de beoble loff?” asked Gormleigh.

“Ah, yes! Will they stand your farce even with an ozone accompaniment?” doubted Mrs. Gudrun.

“I’ve a machine downstairs in the stage-door office,” said Slump calmly. “Will you try the first act over again—with gas?”

Gormleigh groaned, but the other three nodded acquiescence; and the men in charge of the electrical oxygen-generator received instructions to bring the machine upstairs.

* * * * *

“Ha, ha, ha!”

“Haw, haw, haw!”

“Ach, it is too funny for anydings!” This from Gormleigh, rocking in his chair, and mopping his streaming eyes with a red silk handkerchief. “Ach, ha, ha, ha!”

Mrs. Gudrun held up her jeweled hands for mercy. The laughing man who worked the machine stopped pumping, the laughing author ceased to read, Billy the bulldog, who had been grinning from ear to ear, wiped a wet nose on his mistress’s gown and sat down panting.

“How the deuce,” gasped De Hanna, “can oxygen make a stupid farce a funny one? I can’t understand it, for the life of me.”

“Because,” replied Slump, with brevity and clearness, “that’s my trade secret, and I don’t mean to give it away. Well, does _Maggs_ go on, or do I take it to another management?”

The general assent was flattering in its unanimity. _Maggs at Margate_ went into rehearsal at the “Sceptre” next day, and in a week was presented to the public. We refer you to the critiques published in the _Daily Tomahawk_, the _Yelper_, and other morning prints:

“It seems as though the good old days were come again.... Peals of irresistible laughter rang through the crowded theater as the side-splitting story of _Maggs_ was unfolded. The audience laughed, the orchestra laughed, the actors themselves were infected by the general merriment.”

“Mr. Slump is a public benefactor. When ‘down,’ a dose of him will be found to act like magic. The management’s happy notion of supplying the theater with real ozone adds not a little to the pleasure of the entertainment.”