Hanging over the front of the gallery, I asked myself: “Who are these hundreds of well-dressed people who fill this great playhouse? To all appearance they are intelligent beings, yet I cannot imagine intelligent beings taking this kind of thing seriously. As burlesque it’s funny, and the more thrilling it gets the funnier it is. Yet, except myself, no one seems to laugh. How the author must have chuckled over his fabrication! However, let me credit him with one haunting line, one memorable sentiment, delivered by the heroine to a roar of applause:
“A woman’s most precious jewel is her good name,
And her brightest crown the love of her husband!”
Then suddenly a light flashed on me. It was these people who bought my books; it was this sort of thing I had been peddling to them so long. And they liked it. How they howled for more! “O ye gods of High Endeavour!” I groaned, “heap not my sins of melodrama on my head.”
Conscience-stricken I did not wait for the climax where two airships grapple in the sky, under the guns of a “Dreadnought,” while at a crossing an auto dashes into a night express. I sneaked out between the acts, and sought the solitude of the Thames Embankment.
The fog had cleared now, and the clock of St. Stephen’s pealed till I counted the stroke of midnight. The wall of the Embankment was a barrier of grime, the river a thing of mystery and mud. It was a gruesome night. Even the huge electrically-limned Highlandman on the opposite shore, who drinks whiskey with such enviable capacity, had ceased for the nonce his luminous libations.
A few human waifs shuffled past me, middle-aged men with faces pale as dough, and discouraged moustaches drooping over negligible chins. Their clothes, green with age and corroded with mud, seemed to flap emptily on their meagre frames. A woman separated herself from a mass of shadow, a miry-skirted scarecrow crowned with a broken bonnet. With one red claw she clutched a precious box of matches.
“For Gord’s syke buy it orf me, mister. I ain’t myde tupp’nce oipney orl dye.”
I left her staring at a silver coin and testing it with her teeth.
Yes, it was a bad night to be out in, a bad night to cower on these bitter benches waiting for the dawn. Yet I myself was conscious of the chauffage central of peripatetic philanthropy. Greedily I panted for other opportunities to enjoy the glow of giving. Then, as I was passing Cleopatra’s Needle, I heard the sound of a woman’s sob.