Part 32 (2/2)

It amuses me now to think that it was a good half-hour before I took the trouble to cut the string. Fortune and happiness were waiting for me in that parcel, and I would not bother to open it. I sat in my chair, smoking and thinking, and occasionally cast a gloomy eye at the parcel. But I did not open it. Then my pipe went out, and I found that I had no matches in my pocket. There were some at the farther end of the mantelpiece. I had to get up to reach them, and, once up, I found myself filled with a sufficient amount of energy to take a knife from the table and cut the string.

Languidly I undid the brown paper. The contents were a pile of typewritten pages and a letter.

It was the letter over which my gla.s.sy eyes travelled first.

”My own dear, brave, old darling James,” it began, and its purport was that she had written a play, and wished me to put my name to it and hawk it round: to pa.s.s off as my work her own amateurish effort at playwriting. Ludicrous. And so immoral, too. I had always imagined that Margaret had a perfectly flawless sense of honesty. Yet here she was asking me deliberately to impose on the credulity of some poor, trusting theatrical manager. The dreadful disillusionment of it shocked me.

Most men would have salved their wounded susceptibilities by putting a match to the ma.n.u.script without further thought or investigation.

But I have ever been haunted by a somewhat over-strict conscience, and I sat down there and then to read the stupid stuff.

At seven o'clock I was still reading.

My dinner was brought in. I bolted it with Margaret's play propped up against the potato dish.

I read on and on. I could not leave it. Incredible as it would appear from anyone but me, I solemnly a.s.sure you that the typewritten nonsense I read that evening was nothing else than _The Girl who Waited_.

CHAPTER 25

BRIGGS TO THE RESCUE _(James Orlebar Cloyster's narrative continued)_

I finished the last page, and I laid down the typescript reverently.

The thing amazed me. Unable as I was to turn out a good acting play of my own, I was, nevertheless, sufficiently gifted with an appreciation of the dramatic to be able to recognise such a play when I saw it.

There were situations in Margaret's comedy which would grip a London audience, and force laughter and tears from it.... Well, the public side of that idiotic play is history. Everyone knows how many nights it ran, and the Press from time to time tells its readers what were the profits from it that accrued to the author.

I turned to Margaret's letter and re-read the last page. She put the thing very well, very sensibly. As I read, my scruples began to vanish.

After all, was it so very immoral, this little deception that she proposed?

”I have written down the words,” she said; ”but the conception is yours. The play was inspired by you. But for you I should never have begun it.” Well, if she put it like that----

”You alone are able to manage the business side of the production. You know the right men to go to. To approach them on behalf of a stranger's work is far less likely to lead to success.”

(True, true.)

”I have a.s.sumed, you will see, that the play is certain to be produced.

But that will only be so if you adopt it as your own,”

(There was sense in this.)

”Claim the authors.h.i.+p, and all will be well.”

”I will,” I said.

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