Freddie looked up dully from his reading. The abrupt stoppage of his professional career—his life-work, one might almost say—had left Freddie at a very loose end: and so hollow did the world seem to him at the moment, so uniformly futile all its so-called allurements, that, to pass the time, he had just been trying to read the National Geographic Magazine.
“Hullo!” he said. “Well, might as well be here as anywhere, what?” he replied to the other’s question.
“But why aren’t you playing?”
“They sacked me!” Freddie lit a cigarette in the sort of way in which the strong, silent, middle-aged man on the stage lights his at the end of act two when he has relinquished the heroine to his youthful rival. “They’ve changed my part to a bally Scotchman! Well, I mean to say, I couldn’t play a bally Scotchman!”
Mr Pilkington groaned in spirit. Of all the characters in his musical fantasy on which he prided himself, that of Lord Finchley was his pet. And he had been burked, murdered, blotted out, in order to make room for a bally Scotchman!
“The character’s called ‘The McWhustle of McWhustle’ now!” said Freddie sombrely.
The McWhustle of McWhustle! Mr Pilkington almost abandoned his trip to Rochester on receiving this devastating piece of information.
“He comes on in act one in kilts!”
“In kilts! At Mrs Stuyvesant van Dyke’s lawn-party! On Long Island!”
“It isn’t Mrs Stuyvesant van Dyke any longer, either,” said Freddie. “She’s been changed to the wife of a pickle manufacturer.”