The Little Warrior by P. G. Wodehouse (top 50 books to read txt) 📗

Otis Pilkington had left Atlantic City two hours after the conference which had followed the dress rehearsal, firmly resolved never to go near “The Rose of America” again. He had been wounded in his finest feelings. There had been a moment, when Mr Goble had given him the choice between having the piece rewritten and cancelling the production altogether, when he had inclined to the heroic course. But for one thing, Mr Pilkington would have defied the manager, refused to allow his script to be touched, and removed the play from his hands. That one thing was the fact that, up to the day of the dress rehearsal, the expenses of the production had amounted to the appalling sum of thirty-two thousand eight hundred and fifty-nine dollars, sixty-eight cents, all of which had to come out of Mr Pilkington’s pocket. The figures, presented to him in a neatly typewritten column stretching over two long sheets of paper, had stunned him. He had had no notion that musical plays cost so much. The costumes alone had come to ten thousand six hundred and sixty-three dollars and fifty cents, and somehow that odd fifty cents annoyed Otis Pilkington as much as anything on the list. A dark suspicion that Mr Goble, who had seen to all the executive end of the business, had a secret arrangement with the costumer whereby he received a private rebate, deepened his gloom. Why, for ten thousand six hundred and sixty-three dollars and fifty cents you could dress the whole female population of New York State and have a bit left over for Connecticut. So thought Mr Pilkington, as he read the bad news in the train. He only ceased to brood upon the high cost of costuming when in the next line but one there smote his eye an item of four hundred and ninety-eight dollars for “Clothing.” Clothing! Weren’t costumes clothing? Why should he have to pay twice over for the same thing? Mr Pilkington was just raging over this, when something lower down in the column caught his eye. It was the words:—

Clothing … 187.45

At this Otis Pilkington uttered a stifled cry, so sharp and so anguished that an old lady in the next seat, who was drinking a glass of milk, dropped it and had to refund the railway company thirty-five cents for breakages. For the remainder of the journey she sat with one eye warily on Mr Pilkington, waiting for his next move.

This misadventure quieted Otis Pilkington down, if it did not soothe him. He returned blushingly to a perusal of his bill of costs, nearly every line of which contained some item that infuriated and dismayed him. “Shoes” ($213.50) he could understand, but what on earth was “Academy. Rehl. $105.50”? What was “Cuts … $15”? And what in the name of everything infernal was this item for “Frames,” in which mysterious luxury he had apparently indulged to the extent of ninety-four dollars and fifty cents? “Props” occurred on the list no fewer than seventeen times. Whatever his future, at whatever poor-house he might spend his declining years, he was supplied with enough props to last his lifetime.

Otis Pilkington stared blankly at the scenery that fitted past the train winds. (Scenery! There had been two charges for scenery! “Friedmann, Samuel … Scenery … $3711” and “Unitt and Wickes … Scenery … $2120”). He was suffering the torments of the ruined gamester at the roulette-table. Thirty-two thousand eight hundred and fifty-nine dollars, sixty-eight cents! And he was out of pocket ten thousand in addition from the check he had handed over two days ago to Uncle Chris as his share of the investment of starting Jill in the motion-pictures. It was terrible! It deprived one of the power of thought.

The power of thought, however, returned to Mr Pilkington almost immediately: for, remembering suddenly that Roland Trevis had assured him that no musical production, except one of those elaborate girl-shows with a chorus of ninety, could possibly cost more than fifteen thousand dollars at an outside figure, he began to think about Roland Trevis, and continued to think about him until the train pulled into the Pennsylvania Station.

For a week or more the stricken financier confined himself mostly to his rooms, where he sat smoking cigarettes, gazing at Japanese prints, and trying not to think about “props” and “rehl.” Then, gradually, the almost maternal yearning to see his brain-child once more, which can never be wholly crushed out of a young dramatist, returned to him—faintly at first, then getting stronger by degrees till it could no longer be resisted. True, he knew that when he beheld it, the offspring of his brain would have been mangled almost out of recognition, but that did not deter him. The mother loves her crippled child, and the author of a musical fantasy loves his musical fantasy, even if rough hands have changed it into a musical comedy and all that remains of his work is the opening chorus and a scene which the assassins have overlooked at the beginning of act two. Otis Pilkington, having instructed his Japanese valet to pack a few simple necessaries in a suitcase, took a cab to the Grand Central Station and caught an afternoon train for Rochester, where his recollection of the route planned for the tour told him “The Rose of America” would now be playing.

Looking into his club on the way, to cash a check, the first person he encountered was Freddie Rooke.

“Good gracious!” said Otis Pilkington. “What are you doing here?”

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.”

“A pickle manufacturer!”

“Yes. They said it ought to be a comedy part.”

If agony had not caused Mr Pilkington to clutch for support at the back of a chair, he would undoubtedly have wrung his hands.

“But it was a comedy part!” he wailed. “It was full of the subtlest, most delicate satire on Society. They were delighted with it at Newport! Oh, this is too much! I shall make a strong protest! I shall insist on these parts being kept as I wrote them! I shall … I must be going at once, or I shall miss my train.” He paused at the door. “How was business in Baltimore?”

“Rotten!” said Freddie, and returned to his National Geographic Magazine.

Otis Pilkington tottered into his cab. He was shattered by what he had heard. They had massacred his beautiful play, and, doing so, had not even made a success of it by their own sordid commercial lights. Business at Baltimore had been rotten! That meant more expense, further columns of figures with “frames” and “rehl” in front of them! He staggered into the station.

“Hey!” cried the taxi-driver.

Otis Pilkington turned.

“Sixty-five cents, mister, if you please! Forgetting I’m not your private shovoor, wasn’t you?”

Mr Pilkington gave him a dollar. Money—money! Life was just one long round of paying out and paying out.

The day which Mr Pilkington had selected for his visit to the provinces was a Tuesday. “The Rose of America” had opened at Rochester on the previous night, after a week at Atlantic City in its original form and a week at Baltimore in what might be called its second incarnation. Business had been bad in Atlantic City and no better in Baltimore, and a meager first-night house at Rochester had given the piece a cold reception, which had put the finishing touches to the depression of the company in spite of the fact that the Rochester critics, like those of Baltimore, had written kindly of the play. One of the maxims of the theatre is that “out-of-town notices don’t count,” and the company had refused to be cheered by them.

It is to be doubted, however, if even crowded houses would have aroused much response from the principals and chorus of “The Rose of America.” For two weeks without a break they had been working under forced draught, and they