“Christ!” he said; “good luck! And as to the lady—I take it back. I never see ’er. It’s all me eye.”
He was across the hall and gone before Granter could decide what to say; the scurrying shuffle of his footsteps down the stairs died away. ‘And as to the lady—I take it back. I never see ’er. It’s all me eye!’ Good God! The scoundrel, having failed with him, had been trying to blackmail his wife—his wife, who had laughed at his fidelity—his wife, who had looked—frightened! ‘All me eye!’ Her face started up before Granter—scared under its powder, with a mask drawn over it. And he had let that scoundrel go!... But why—scared? Blackmail—of all poisonous human actions!... Why scared?... What now ...!
1921.
THE BROKEN BOOT
The actor, Gilbert Caister, who had been ‘out’ for six months, emerged from his East Coast seaside lodging about noon in the day, after the opening of ‘Shooting the Rapids,’ on tour, in which he was playing Dr. Dominick in the last act. A salary of four pounds a week would not, he was conscious, remake his fortunes, but a certain jauntiness had returned to the gait and manner of one employed again at last.
Fixing his monocle, he stopped before a fishmonger’s and, with a faint smile on his face, regarded a lobster. Ages since he had eaten a lobster! One could long for a lobster without paying, but the pleasure was not solid enough to detain him. He moved upstreet and stopped again, before a tailor’s window. Together with the actual tweeds, in which he could so easily fancy himself refitted, he could see a reflection of himself, in the faded brown suit wangled out of the production of ‘Marmaduke Mandeville’ the year before the war. The sunlight in this damned town was very strong, very hard on seams and buttonholes, on knees and elbows! Yet he received the ghost of æsthetic pleasure from the reflected elegance of a man long fed only twice a day, of an eyeglass well rimmed out from a soft brown eye, of a velour hat salved from the production of ‘Educating Simon’ in 1912; and, in front of the window he removed that hat, for under it was his new phenomenon, not yet quite evaluated, his mêche blanche. Was it an asset, or the beginning of the end? It reclined backwards on the right side, conspicuous in his dark hair, above that shadowy face always interesting to Gilbert Caister. They said it came from atrophy of the—er—something nerve, an effect of the war, or of under-nourished tissue. Rather distinguished, perhaps, but——!
He walked on, and became conscious that he had passed a face he knew. Turning, he saw it also turned on a short and dapper figure—a face rosy, bright, round, with an air of cherubic knowledge, as of a getter-up of amateur theatricals.
Bryce-Green, by George!