“Claim the authorship, and all will be well.”
“I will,” I said.
I packed up the play in its brown paper, and rushed from the house. At the post-office, at the bottom of the King’s Road, I stopped to send a telegram. It consisted of the words, “Accept thankfully.—Cloyster.”
Then I took a cab from the rank at Sloane Square, and told the man to drive to the stage-door of the Briggs Theatre in Shaftesbury Avenue.
The cab-rank in Sloane Square is really a Home for Superannuated Horses. It is a sort of equine Athenaeum. No horse is ever seen there till it has passed well into the sere and yellow. A Sloane Square cab-horse may be distinguished by the dignity of its movements. It is happiest when walking.
The animal which had the privilege of making history by conveying me and The Girl who Waited to the Briggs Theatre was asthmatic, and, I think, sickening for the botts. I had plenty of time to cool my brain and think out a plan of campaign.
Stanley Briggs, whom I proposed to try first, was the one man I should have liked to see in the part of James, the hero of the piece. The part might have been written round him.
There was the objection, of course, that The Girl who Waited was not a musical comedy, but I knew he would consider a straight play, and put it on if it suited him. I was confident that The Girl who Waited would be just what he wanted.
The problem was how to get him to himself for a sufficient space of time. When a man is doing the work of half a dozen he is likely to get on in the world, but he has, as a rule, little leisure for conversation.
My octogenarian came to a standstill at last at the stage-door, and seemed relieved at having won safely through a strenuous bit of work.