Our author's hero is an excellent provincial tailor, who is also keen Captain Smith in the Sheffingham Terriers. As tailor his chief customer, as soldier his contemptuous scandalised critic, is Sir Dennys Broughton, whose wayward flapper daughter Betty is in the early fierce stages of revolt against the stuffiness of life at Grange Court, meets Smith over some boys' club work, and, finding brains and dreams in him (a formidable contrast to her loafing brother), falls into passionate first-love. Smith is just as badly if more soberly hit, and recognising the impossibility of the situation (quite apart from demonstrations by the alarmed Broughtons) decides to take his tape and shears to his London house of business. The date of all this being about the time of the misguided Panther's fateful leap on Agadir.
Act II. brings us to the second year of the War. Young Broughton, puppy no longer, is gloriously in it, and has just been gazetted to a Territorial regiment whose Colonel bears the not uncommon name of Smith. Our tailor, of course, and a rattling fine soldier too. Having discovered this latter fact and also formed a remarkably cordial relationship apparently in a single day, the enthusiastic cub subaltern (distemper and snobbishness over and done with) motors up his C.O., who is visiting his brother and partner, and brings him in to Grange Court on the way. Sir Dennys, now a brassarded private and otherwise a converted man, is still confoundedly embarrassed, and stands anything but easy in the presence of his youngster's Colonel. Lady Broughton, least malleable of the group, is frankly appalled by this new mésalliance. Perhaps Mr. TERRY'S version of blue-blooded insolence and fatuity is for his stage purpose rather crudely coloured, but who shall say that the doctrine that a man in khaki who has been an elementary schoolmaster or a tailor is a man for a' that, is quite universally accepted in the best circles even in this year of grace? Betty, now a grown girl in the cynical stage, revenges herself with feline savagery on the knight of the shears for the imagined slight of his defection.
Act III. is dated 19? just after peace is declared. The tailor is not (as I half expected) back in his shop, but a Brigadier-General Smith, V.C., is being invested with the freedom of Sheffingham and is making a spirited attack on the defences of Betty. She puts up enough of a fight to ensure a good Third Act, and capitulates charmingly to the delight, now, of all the Broughton household—butler included. I hope Mr. TERRY is right and that the places taken in this great war game of General Post and the values registered will have permanence.
I won't deny that the excellent moral of the play goes far to disarm one's critical faculty. Why not confess that one lost one's heart to the nicest tailor since Evan Harrington? Indeed, Mr. TULLY (always, I find, quite admirable in characterisation, and that no mere matter of outward trick, but duly charged with feeling) made just such a decent, lovable, sideless officer as it has been the pride of the nation of shopkeepers to produce in the day of challenge. Whoever was it dared cast Mr. MCKINNEL for the part of a weak kindly old ass of a baronet, without any ruggedness or violence in his composition? Congratulations to the unknown perspicacious hero and to Mr. MCKINNEL! Miss MADGE TITHERADGE flapped prettily as a flapper; bit cleanly and cruelly in her biting mood; surrendered most engagingly. This is less than justice. She used her queer caressing voice and her reserves of emotional power to fine effect. Miss LILIAN BRAITHWAITE made her Lady Broughton nearly credible and less "unsympathetic" than was just. Mr. DANIELL is new to me. He played one of those difficult foil parts with a really nice discretion.
The audience was genuinely pleased. It dragged from the author a becomingly modest acknowledgment. He did owe a great deal to his players, but a writer of stage plays need not be ashamed of that. T.
Ethel (playing at grown-ups). "IS YOUR HUSBAND IN THE WAR, MRS. BROWN?" Mabel. "OH YES, OF COURSE, MRS. SMITH."
Ethel. "IS HE IN FRANCE?" Mabel. "NO, HE'S IN THE WAR LOAN."