GAS!
Mrs. Gudrun’s season at the Sceptre Theatre was drawing to a finish, and the funds of the Syndicate were in the same condition. Teddy Candelish—Teddy of the cherubic smile and the golden mustache, constantly described by the Theatrical Piffer as the most ubiquitous of acting-managers—sat in his sanctum before an American roll-top desk, checking off applications for free seats and filing unpaid bills. Gormleigh, the stage-director, balanced himself on the end of a saddle-bag sofa, chewing an unlighted cigar; De Hanna, the representative of the Syndicate, was going over the books at a leather-covered table, his eyeglasses growing dim in the attempt to read anything beyond deficit in those neatly kept columns. Mrs. Gudrun occupied the easiest chair. Her feet, beautifully silk-stockinged and wonderfully shod, occupied the next comfortable; her silken draperies were everywhere, and a cigarette was between her finely cut lips. Her feather boa hung from an electric-globe branch, and her flowery diaphanous hat, bristling with diamond-headed pins, crowned the domelike brow of a plaster bust of the Bard of Avon.
“Well,” said the manageress, making smoke-rings and looking at De Hanna, “there’s no putting the bare fact to bed! We’ve not pulled off things as we had a right to expect.... We’ve lost our little pot, and come to the end of our resources, eh?”
“In plain terms,” said De Hanna, speaking through his nose, as he always did when upon the subject of money, “the Syndicate has run you for all the Syndicate is worth, and when we pay salaries on Saturday we shall have”—he did some figuring with a lead pencil on the back of a millionaire’s request for gratuitous stalls, and whistled sadly—“something like four hundred and fifty left to carry us through until the seventeenth.”
“We began with as nice a little nest-egg as any management could wish for,” said Candelish, dropping a smoking vesta into the waste-paper basket with fatalistic unconcern. “We thought The Stone Age would pay. I’d my doubts of a prehistoric drama in five acts and fourteen scenes that couldn’t be produced under an outlay of four thousand pounds, but we were overruled.” He veered the tail of his eye round at Mrs. Gudrun. “You and the Duke were mad about that piece.”
“De Petoburgh saw great possibilities for me in it,” said Mrs. Gudrun, throwing another cigarette-end at the fireplace and missing it. “That scene where Kaja comes in dressed in woad for battle, and brains What’s-his-name with her prehistoric stone ax because he doesn’t want to fight her, always thrilled him. He said I would be greater than Siddons in it, and, well—you remember the notices I got in the Morning Whooper. Cluffer did me justice then, if he did turn nasty afterward—the beast!”
“When I met Cluffer in the vestibule on the first night after the third act,” said Teddy Candelish, “he said he was going home because the tension of your acting was positively too great to bear. He preferred me to describe the rest of the play to him, and jotted the chief points on his cuff before he went. And I grant you the notice was a ripper, but it didn’t seem to bring people in; and after playing to paper for three weeks, we had to put up the fortnight’s notice and jam The Kiss of Clytie into rehearsal.”
“Dad vos a lofely—ach!—a lofely blay!” moaned Oscar Gormleigh, casting up his little pig’s eyes to the highly ornamental ceiling of the managerial sanctum. “Brigged from de Chairman in de pekinning, as I told you, as all de goot blays are.”
“I wish the Germans had stuck to it, I’m sure,” said De Hanna. “It always appeared to me too much over the heads of ordinary intelligent playgoers to pay worth a little damn.”
“De dranscendental element——” Gormleigh was beginning, when Mrs. Gudrun cut him short.