Chown had a talk, rather than “that” talk, with Mary, omitting, for instance, Rossiter’s recommendation of matrimony as essential to an actress. Experience, with or without marriage lines, might tap an emotional reservoir but, in her case, the experience would certainly go with marriage and Chown had suffered too often by the retirement of his successful clients after marriage to risk advising it. He considered Rossiter incautious. “There’s a part for you in ‘Granada the Gay,’” he told her, “that is going to make you a new reputation. A Lancashire part and London will think you’re acting it. You and I know you are it, but we won’t mention that.”
“This is interesting,” said Mary Ellen with shining eyes. “I’ll work at this. I’ll show them something.”
Chown nodded, satisfied that she would, in fact, “show them” enough to silence Rossiter’s murmurings for the next two years—nobody looked for a shorter run than that from a musical comedy in war time—and Rossiter was indeed ungrudging in his admission that Mary’s demure Lancastrian, with the terrific and accurate accent coming with such rugged veracity from those pretty lips, was the success of “Granada the Gay.” People were going with scant selectiveness to all theaters alike, but there were a few, and the Galaxy among them, which had their special lure.
It was a curiosity of the time, full though the theaters were, that advance bookings were low. No one could see ahead, no one’s time was his own and perhaps that was the reason or perhaps it was only the sentiment which underlay the practice of going impulsively to theaters without the solemnity of premeditation involved in booking seats many days ahead; and the two young officers, sitting down to dinner, were not remarkable in expecting at that late hour to get stalls at any theater they pleased. “Libraries”—that curious misnomer of the ticket agencies—perhaps kept up their sleeves a parcel of certainly saleable tickets for the benefit of abrupt men in khaki, but libraries were crowded places to be avoided by those who had the officering habit of telling some one else to do the tedious little things.
“We might go on to a show after this,” said Derek Carton. “Don’t you think so, Fairy? Waiter, send a page with the theater list. I want tickets for something.”
His companion, only arrived that day from France, let his eyes stray sensuously over the appointments of the restaurant. He was to eat in a room decorated in emulation of a palace at Versailles; the chefs were French; the guests, when they were not American, were of every allied or neutral European nationality; the band played jazz music; and to the marrow of him, as he contemplated the ornate evidences of materialistic civilization, he exulted in his England. The hardship was that he couldn’t spend the whole of this leave in London: he must go, to-morrow, to Staithley. He was, he had been for six months, Sir Rupert Hepplestall, but when his father died the 1918 German push was on and leave impossible. Decidedly he must go North, this time, this once, though—oh, hang the Hepplestalls! Why couldn’t they let him go quietly, to look in decent privacy at his father’s grave? But no: they must make him a director of the firm and they must call a meeting for him to attend. Well-meaning but absurd old men who had not or who would not see that Rupert was free of Hepplestall’s now. Sincerely he mourned his father’s death, and they wouldn’t let him be simple about it, they complicated a fellow’s pilgrimage to Sir Philip’s grave by their obtuse attempt to thrust his feet into Sir Philip’s shoes.
That needn’t matter to-night, though, that sour affront to the idea of leave: it was his complication not Carton’s who, good man, had met him at the station. Like Rupert, Carton had gone from Cambridge to the war, then he had lost a leg and now had a job at the War Office: and the jolly thing was that Carton hadn’t altered, he was as he used to be even to calling Rupert by that old nickname. If you have seventy-three inches you are naturally called Fairy and out there nobody ever thought of calling you anything else except on frigidly official occasions. But you were never quite sure of the home point of view; the thing called war-mind made such amazing rabid asses of the people who were not fighting and you weren’t certain even of Carton and now you were a little ashamed of having been uncertain. Of course, old Carton would not rot him about his title; of course, he would call him Fairy, he wouldn’t allude to that baronetcy of which Rupert was still so shy.
“Stop dreaming, Fairy,” said Derek, and he looked across the table to find a page-boy at Derek’s elbow and a theater-list on the table before him. “What shall it be?”
“Oh, Robey, I suppose.”
“Yes,” Derek agreed. “Usually Robey’s first choice. Just now, it’s Robey or ‘Granada the Gay,’ with a girl called Arden.”