“You shall read it.”
He unearthed it with some difficulty and gave it to her. She read it and wept over it.
“Is it a good play?” he asked.
“I don’t know, but it’s a lovely part.”
He went to see Mr. Brown, a flashy little Cockney who peppered him with illustrious literary names and talked about everything but the business in hand. Old Mole asked where Timmis might be, and Mr. Brown said he had heard from him only once, and that from a place called Crown Imperial, in British Columbia.
“A good fellow, Timmis, but cracked. Impatient, you know. I never can make young writers see that they’ve got to wait until the old birds drop off the perch before their masterpieces can come home to roost.”
“Is ‘Lossie Loses’ a masterpiece?” asked Old Mole innocently.
“Between ourselves,” replied the agent, “I don’t think there’s much in it. But Mr. Butcher has been having a lean period lately and wanted something cheap, and thought he’d try a new author.”
He produced the contract. Old Mole read it through in a sort of dream and signed it. He was shown out with a hearty handshake, and that very evening he received from Mr. Brown a check for ninety pounds—a hundred in advance of royalties less 10 per cent. commission. He was disconcerted. There was some uncanny wizardry in it that, by merely walking into an office and signing a paper, one could at the end of the day be the richer by ninety pounds with never a stroke of work done for it. His first impulse was to give the check to Matilda, but, on reflection, he decided to give her forty and to keep the fifty for Timmis if he could be found. He looked up Crown Imperial, British Columbia, on the map and in the gazetteer, but there was no mention of it, and, concluding that it must be a new place, he wrote to Timmis there in the hope of catching him. When he had posted his letter he remembered that Timmis might have dropped his stage name, and wrote another letter to Cuthbert Jones. Then he brushed the play from his mind.
Within a fortnight it was impossible to walk along any of the main thoroughfares of London without seeing the words “Lossie Loses,” with the name of Mr. Henry Butcher in enormous letters, and the name of Carlton Timmis in very small print.