Chapter VI: Sunday at Chipstone (2)

“So it’s you! I was wondering what wit heaven had dropped with the thunder! Yankee yumour—I ought to ha’ guessed it.” And he nearly spitted Will on his fork in his enthusiastic effort to shake hands. “‘I’ll wait till my beard grows’—ha, ha, ha! That goes in this very night—no, there’s no show to-night, hang it! Don’t go, Polly,” he called, as he pulled Will into the room over a barrier of Bluchers and Wellingtons and even Hessian boots with silken tassels, “we must get that into _Hamlet_. When I say to Ophelia, ‘Get thee to a nunnery; go, farewell’— I’ll wind up ‘Until thy beard grows.’ That’ll be your new cue, Polly.”

“But that’ll spoil the scene,” Miss Flippance protested, poised in a morning wrapper in the open doorway between the two rooms. She was mysteriously mantled in aromatic clouds, like the spirit in _The Mistletoe Bough_, yet her father did not seem to be smoking.

“Not at all, Polly,” he persisted, “it’s just the right grotesque spirit.”

“There’ll be a laugh.”

“The one thing _Hamlet_ needs. Even the ghost don’t carry it off.”

“You’d better give _me_ the line,” persisted Miss Flippance. “It’ll come better in the mad scene.”

“Well, we’ll talk about it—I think you’ve seen our American friend before.”

“Before and behind,” said Miss Flippance viciously, a scowl traversing her pockmarks. “And since he left me in the lurch, I wasn’t sorry to think I’d seen the back of him.”

“But as Miss Quar—as the Carrier hadn’t got your drumstick, there was nothing to return for,” apologized Will.

“Then why _have_ you?” she snapped, and closed the door behind her with a similar snap.

VI

“Polly’s in a pet,” commented her parent. “She don’t like being worried by actors in search of jobs, specially on Sundays. It’s your hairless phiz, you know.”

“But I’m not an actor.”

“Of course not—she ought to have seen you haven’t the face—only the razor: ha, ha, ha!”

Will was vaguely resentful. “But I dare say I could black my face.”

“There’s more to the drama than Othello, and more to Othello than burnt cork.” And Mr. Flippance laughed again as he dropped into his wooden arm-chair and resumed his breakfast at a little table ’twixt the bed-canopy and the window. “Sit down, won’t you? Excuse my back—I can hear all you say behind it. Ha, ha! That’s another good gag, eh?”

Will, glancing round, saw that the chair not occupied by his host was hopelessly littered by his garments, mixed with papers: he therefore dropped on the high four-poster—it was now made—and cleared his throat for action.

“You’ll have a drop of something,” Mr. Flippance threw backwards, mistranslating the sounds.

“No, thank you!” He must not be bribed or drugged, Will felt: he had stern work before him. It was as well, however, to placate the adversary. “Glad to hear the show’s a big draw,” he said.

“And who told you that?”

“Er—the Bradmarsh Carrier!”

“Bless her—she carries all the lies I tell her.”

“Aren’t things rosy then?”

“I never lie on Sundays. Ha, ha, ha! Perhaps it’s just as well Jinny won’t do business with me to-day. No, old man, I ought to be middling mollancholy, as they say here. But I’m as happy as the day is long—and it’s getting longer every day.” He drained his coffee-cup voluptuously. “Never mind my business—what’s yours?”

“Mine? I haven’t come on business.”

“Then you _must_ have a brandy.” He reached out and pulled the green bell-rope.

“No thank you. You see—” Will swung his legs hesitatingly. “Surely you don’t think she ought to carry lies——?”

“Who?”

“The Bradmarsh Carrier.”

“Jinny! She has to carry anything—at the proper tariff.”

“But is it fair to her?”

“If you mean our doing bumper business, she don’t know it’s a lie, and her telling it helps to make it true. Why, you were itching to see the show yourself, as soon as you heard other fools were flocking.” He turned a grinning face. “Come now, confess.”

“I didn’t come to see the show,” Will contradicted, feeling vaguely baffled.

“Of course not, being Sunday. But what _did_ you come for? Cut the cackle and come to the ’osses.”

“I will,” he said eagerly. “I hear you want to buy one.”

Mr. Flippance swung round, chair and all. “Then you _have_ come on business!”

“No, I haven’t.”

“Well, have you got a horse?”

“No, but I could get one.”

“And you don’t call that business!”

“I didn’t mean to—!” Will was getting embarrassed. “It just slipped out. What I want to ask of you is——”

“Where the devil is that waiter?” broke in the Showman, reaching for the cord again.

“What I mean is,” said Will, determined to get it out before the waiter popped up, “that there’s a girl you’re leading into brazen courses!”

“A girl! Me!” Mr. Flippance pulled himself angrily to his feet, and stood glaring at Will, with the snapped bell-cord in his hand like a green serpent. “You son of Ananias, if you’ve listened to any of those scandal-mongering swine you ought to be jolly well ashamed of yourself. There isn’t a cleaner man—for a widower—in all the circuit. Why, I could pile up the dollars—as you call it—if I’d only darken my tent a bit, so that the lovers of the drama could go rubbing their noses and licking one another like the calves in the next field. But there isn’t a brighter show this side of the Atlantic. Besides, my girls are all wood—there’s not a flesh and blood female with me except Polly, and she’s my own daughter, born on the right side of the blanket, too. Which is more than can be said for all of us. What may be _your_ name, now?”

“What has my name to do with it?” He got off the bed.

“What has his name to do with it?” asked Mr. Flippance of the waiter, who now shot in with a well-divined bottle and appurtenances.

“Beg pardon, sir?”

“And so you may, you son of a slug. Here, take this rope and hang yourself with it! So you won’t tell your name, you son of a flea,” he went on, when the waiter had spirited off the breakfast-tray. “Well, here’s my back—bite away.” And with a high tragic gesture he turned to open the brandy-bottle.

“I’m not a backbiter,” said Will angrily. “I’m a front-puncher, and my name is——”

“Never mind your name. I accepted you. You came like the spirit of the May Day—mixed with the _Mayflower_. I opened my heart to you. I gave you three names. I was Duke, I was Anthony Flippance, I was Tony Flip.” He gurgled the brandy into his glass. “I demanded no references. I entrusted you with posters for my daughter.”

“Which I delivered honestly.”

“But anonymously.”

“My name is——”

“Hush! Not for a million pounds would I hear it now. But the girl’s name?” he turned round, glass in hand. “That at least I beg.”

“I’ve mentioned it already. It’s—it’s the Carrier.”

“Jinny!” Tony Flip burst into an explosive laugh of relief. “Fancy calling Jinny a girl!”

“And what else would you call her?”

“What _you_ just called her—the Carrier.”

“Then if she is a carrier, why should you degrade her into a horse-broker?”

“Oh, that’s all you mean, is it?”

“Isn’t that enough?”

“Don’t be an idiot. Here, have a drink.”

Will waved the glass away.

“Would you like to send your daughter bargaining among a lot of rough men?”

Tony grinned. “I don’t think Polly ’ud mind the men. It’s the horse she’d come a cropper over. Jinny’s had a long experiance of horses, and she’s smart enough to buy anything. If I wanted the moon, she’d get it for me—and cheap too!”

“And why can’t you buy your own horses?”

“Why? Because I’m a child of nature—a simple player—who wears his heart on his sleeve for daws to peck at. My last mare crocked up in a week in the flower of her youth—seems to have been bought in a knacker’s yard, shaved and singed and brushed and combed till she was as shiny as a Derby winner. They gingered her ears and jaws and cayenne-peppered her nostrils till she seemed clothed in thunder, like the war-horse in the Bible.”

Will smiled despite himself. “And you expect a girl to see through all that! Look here, I’ll buy your horse.”

Mr. Flippance paused in the act of imbibing. “Oh, _there_ we are,” he said, looking shrewd. “Want to cut out Jinny’s business!”

Will’s cheeks became chromatically indistinguishable from his hair.

“Me! Do you think I want your dirty commission?”

“And do you think I want your stinking horse? Why the devil do you come interfering?”

Will was silent. Tony finished his glass like a victor.

“If it ain’t the commission, what _are_ you after?”

“That’s my business,” said Will sullenly.

“Just what I said!” crowed Tony. “But I’d rather pay Jinny a quid than you a bob. She’s got her old grandfather to keep!”

“Yes, and he’s as selfish and inconsiderate as you. But she _shan’t_ get you a horse, and there’s an end of it.”

“Oho!” Brandy had made him genial again. “Who’s going to prevent it? Now don’t say ‘_I_ will,’ because that’s in our dramas—attitude and all. Though judging by the way you’ve been going on, Mr. Anon, I’m not so sure you _wouldn’t_ make an actor! Perhaps Polly smelt right and you _are_ one after all. But don’t you come disturbing my peace of mind, you son of a star. Wild horses wouldn’t drag me back to the legitimate.”

“We’re talking of caravan horses,” said Will, at once mystified and mollified.

“You seem to know all about it. I guess you ran a show yourself in the States.”

Will smiled darkly. “That’s not your affair.”

“But it might be. I’m not above a partner with capital. Duke’s Marionettes are getting shabby. The ghost is nearly black; Ophelia wants a new coat of paint. Harlequin is out of joint and the Clown’s cheeks are worn white. And we’ve got too few characters and too many plays. The public are on to it when they see Hamlet turning up again in _The Beggar of Bethnal Green_. Some new scenery too would smarten up the show. I shan’t expect you to pull the strings—just put up the chinkers and we’ll divvy up, you and me and Polly. Now don’t say ‘No’ too quick. Drink it over.” And, beaming beneficence, he again tendered Will the other glass.

This time Will took it, hearing himself clink it against Tony’s through a daze, as he asked himself whether, after all, this notion—utterly fantastic and unexpected as it was—mightn’t be as good a way as any other of investing his ninety pounds: he would certainly be in a position then to stop Jinny from buying the horse!

“Well, what do you say?” cried Tony.

“But you don’t know my name?” murmured Will, with the stir of adventure and brandy in his veins.

“Pooh! What’s in a name? A nose by any other name would swell as red.” And, laughing, he clapped Will on the shoulder. “We’ll spruce up the tent too, and slick up the caravan—a dingy old hearse ain’t the best advertisement on a tour. And why shouldn’t you take some of the parts? Pity to waste your twang. We’d get some American figures made—cowboys and slave-dealers and such—and spice our ghosts and goblins with Colonel Bowie knives and Yankee yumour. We might even turn the bridegroom in _The Mistletoe Bough_ into a rich New-Yorker, and make the bride moulder away in an American trunk. There’s a fortune in it. I don’t mean in the trunk—ha, ha, ha!”

With a last instinct of sanity Will observed maliciously that it was Sunday. He merely meant to remind Tony that that was his day for truth. But the Showman’s glass nearly fell from his fingers.

“You too!” he said. “And that Jinny—as lively a girl as ever stepped. And Mother Gander—as buxom a landlady as ever bussed a bagman. What’s come over the East Anglian circuit? And I took you for a man of the world.”

Unwilling to repudiate that status, Will remarked flabbily that precisely as a man of the world he didn’t see any money in marionettes.

“No money!” Mr. Flippance swelled with indignation as he pointed out that Drury Lane and the mines of Golconda were not in it with marionettes, properly equipped and spring-cleaned; the public was simply panting for high-class puppets.

It goaded Will to emphasize his meaning. “Is this your Sunday talk or your week-day talk?” he interrupted dryly. “Didn’t you just tell me that you’re doing badly?”

Mr. Flippance admitted it almost without a wince. And had he not given the reason? To take money out you must put money in. “I tell you there’s a fortune in it,” he repeated.

“Sunk?” asked Will blandly. He added vengefully that he would consider a partnership when the stuffed elephant came home from the Crystal Palace. Tony, in crimson comprehension, rushed at the litter on the spare chair and dragged out a newspaper from under the neckties. “Read that!” he said sublimely, “the _Essex County Chronicle_!” And his semi-gilded forefinger indicated a heavily blued passage. “Our readers will be interested to know,” read Will, “that it is a local showman who supplied the great stuffed elephant that holds Her Majesty’s gorgeous howdah in Mr. Paxton’s marvellous glass——”

He dropped the paper. “I beg your pardon!” he said, too disconcerted to realize that the “local” showman need not necessarily be Tony Flip. “But I really would rather not talk business to-day, and I don’t know anything about yours—that wasn’t my line in the States. I never even saw a puppet-show in my life, outside Punch and Judy. A real live drama now——” he concluded vaguely, meaning that he had at least seen real plays, and utterly unforeseeing the effect the remark would have upon his host.

For Tony Flip bounded like a large mechanical toy, plumped down again in his chair, turned its back and his own to his guest, and stuffing jewelled forefingers into both his ears cried out: “Get thee behind me, Satan! Avaunt! Avaunt!”

VII

“Me, Satan!” said Will, astonished. “Who ever heard of Satan refusing to do business on Sunday?”

If his last innocent remark had produced convulsive effects in a perpendicular direction, this set Tony Flip rolling from side to side in his chair. “Yankee yumour,” he gasped between the spasms. “Lord!” he said at last. “You’ll drive me to set up a minstrel show, only to get that in.”

Will, though puzzled, could hardly help being flattered by these proofs of his facetious talents. It was strange, he thought, how different the conversation went when he was with Jinny. Then the laugh seemed always at his expense.

“I should think a minstrel show would be more fun,” he observed.

Tony veered round with his arm-chair, ceased to laugh, and regarded Will with large, reproachful eyes. “And you cant about Sunday!” he said. “And then to come tempting me back to that Witches’ Sabbath of a profession.”

“Nigger minstrels?” Will murmured, more dazed than ever.

“As if nigger minstrels weren’t half-way to your _Othello_. No, you son of Satan. To hell with your capital! Didn’t you hear me say ditto to the rat-catcher? They _are_ dens of the devil—theatres.”

“Then why do you run one?”

“Me! I don’t class my show as a theatre. Marionettes keep themselves to themselves.”

“But you play Shakespeare.”

Tony held up his fat glittering forefinger. “We pull Shakespeare’s strings—Polly and me. But there’s no actors the public can drag before the curtain.”

Will admitted the difference, but not the moral distinction.

“You ever met any actors and actresses?” said Tony.

Will could not pretend to that privilege—if Mr. Flippance and his daughter refused to be counted—and there was a long silence, in which Tony seemed to the outer eye to keep sips of brandy-and-water lingering on his palate, though he was really—it transpired—chewing the cud of bitter memories. For suddenly he burst out: “I lived all my life with ’em. I’ve managed ’em for years—or, rather, failed to manage ’em. Born in a Green Room, rocked in a Witches’ Cauldron, and baptized in grease-paint. My ma was a leading lady—she played heroines and my father wrote the melodramas. And they know a good melodrama at the ‘Eagle.’”

“Yes—I’ve heard of the ‘Eagle’ in London,” said Will.

“Ah, you know it by the song, perhaps:

_Up and down the City Road,_
_In and out the ‘Eagle.’_
_That’s the way the money goes,_
_Pop goes the weasel!_”

“I never heard a weasel go pop,” Will laughed. “It was the mouse, if anything, though I did once see a stoat crack up before a cat.”

Tony’s mien relaxed in a faint smile.

The weasel was a tailor’s iron, he explained, pawned by the reckless snip to raise money for treating the damsels who danced with him on that open-air platform to which the “Eagle’s” audience streamed out betwixt the drama and the farce. He added simply: “That’s where my Don Juan of a dad first clapped eyes on a girl, pretty, of course, but with no more acting in her than Mother Gander. Yet, would you believe it, he shoved her into the lead instead of ma, and wrote a piece all for her, and what was worse it was a big go. That was the last straw, and clasping me to her wounded bosom, she left him, poor ma.”

“I should have thought she’d ha’ left him sooner,” murmured Will, vaguely uncomfortable under these frank domestic revelations.

“It isn’t so easy to leave a man you’re not married to!” said Tony.

Will gasped.

“Ah, that surprises you?” said the Showman complacently. With a cautious glance at his daughter’s door of communication, he produced two cigars furtively from his washstand drawer—was he forbidden to smoke, Will wondered. “You’ll find that good,” he said, pressing one upon his guest.

“You see,” he explained, as they puffed at these excellent weeds in a new intimacy, “if a woman leaves her husband it makes a scandal he don’t like, whereas a man that’s not tied is only too glad to be rid of her. Oh, I ain’t defending ma, mind you—it only shows she was a born actress. I dare say she’d only sucked up to pa to get parts. But when he unstarred her, fine emotional actress as she was, she could never get her foot in again in London, to play leads I mean, for she was too proud to play anything else. ‘I can play anything except second fiddle,’ she used to say, and rather than cave in, she married a fifth-rate manager, called Jim Flippance, who had only a fit-up theatre (carries its own props, scenery, and proscenium, but not open-air, you know), and made him put up pieces with a kid in ’em to keep me out of mischief, but it wasn’t long before I soared out of the parental nest, and by the time they both joined the majority, poor old birds, I’d been leading man or manager or both in half a dozen theatres, two of ’em London houses.” Will receiving this information with a silent curl of his smoke, as though it were another elephantine claim, Mr. Flippance added vehemently: “Real London theatres, mind you, not those swindling gaffs for paying amateurs described by Boz—that’s Charles Dickens, you know. You’ve read Dickens?”

Will shook his head. “Too heavy and high-class for me. They don’t like him in the States either—I’ve heard he wrote a piece against them——”

“Ah, but you should hear him read his ‘Christmas Carol!’ There’s a wasted actor for you! Lord, if I’d had the running of that chap!”

Will was more interested in the girl who cut out Mr. Flippance’s ma. “I hope your father—your pa—” he substituted politely, “married his new flame,” he said. Even through the glow of the brandy and the blur of the smoke he was dismayed by this dishevelled life.

“How could he? He had a wife in Cork. Yes, I forgot to say pa was Irish. I’ve always gone by my mother’s married name, but you can have my father’s name if you wish!”

“Not for a million pounds,” said Will.

“You Yankee yumorist!” Tony blew a playful puff of smoke at him. “Well, you’ll see it if you come across the old ‘Eagle’ playbills or those of Flippance’s Fit-Up for that matter, for we did all pa’s plays—ma had played them so long she knew all the parts. Pa sent her a lawyer’s letter—for she didn’t even trouble to change the titles or the author’s name—but she defied him to wash his dirty linen in court, knowing how virtuous his ‘Eagle’ public was, and that it might ha’ ruined him and his moral melodramas.”

“They seem a funny lot—stage folk,” Will commented.

“Bless you, there’s no bearing of ’em.”

Will, relieved, said he was glad Mr. Flippance didn’t approve of such morals.

“Morals!” Tony glared at him. “Who’s talking of morals? Men will be men and women women whether they’re pro’s or public. You didn’t find America a Sunday-school, I reckon?”

Will, coughing over his liquor, supposed a man could have his fun anywhere.

“That’s what I say!” said the Showman. “And on the other hand I’ve known actors as respectable as your rat-catcher. I’m one of ’em myself, as I told you just now. I’d seen too many dead flies in the honey—and my Polly’s as pure as her poor dead mother. No, it ain’t their morals that bother me, it’s their ways. Holy Moses! To think of the time I had travelling round managing these sons of dragons and hell-cats! I envied ma and Flippance in the churchyard under their favourable stone notices. The jealousies! The cat-and-dog bickerings! The screams and hysterics! Who should play this or that, who should be largest on the programmes and posters, who should stand in the limelight, who should take the call—they never quarrelled who should take the bird: that’s the hiss in our lingo. They were always hissing at one another, or at the poor manager, that’s me! I’ve seen the leading man and the leading lady take their call hand in hand, and the moment the curtain was down resume spitting fire at each other. It wasn’t that they had any vanity, they said, it was only that their position demanded they should take calls singly or be printed larger than each other. Cocks and catamarans! I tell you if I hadn’t swopped with Duke for his marionettes, I should have had little rose-bushes growing out of me now, and that favourable stone notice over me. Oh, the peace of it—it’s Sunday all the week!”

“I can see marionettes would be easier to manage,” said Will, smiling.

“Ah, but to feel it as I do, you must have lived through it.” Mr. Flippance rose in his emotion and paced animatedly. “You must have had a hornets’ nest for your seat and a brood of vipers in your bosom, and shared diggings with the Furies. Oh, my radiant juvenile, your sun-coloured hair would have been snow if you had gone through what I have! If you’d had Ophelia in hysterics and Hamlet in liquor and even the ghost hardly able to walk, and the call-boy crying the curtain was up, and the audience stamping and whistling, and short-tempered people at the box-office demanding their money back, you’d be able to measure the feeling of thankfulness that comes over the cockles of my heart when I stand in my theatre and see my leading lady sitting so angelic on her wires unable to move hand or foot without me, or when I jerk my leading man out of the centre of the stage all in a heavenly calm; And to see the curtain come up and down with nobody scuffling behind it to bob and smirk—oh, the Jerusalem restfulness! There mayn’t be as much rhino in marionettes as in flesh and blood——”

“You just said there was more,” Will reminded him, unkindly.

“I meant compared with the capital put in,” said Tony, without turning a hair. “You don’t risk much when you don’t have to pay your actors. But Duke wasn’t mercenary, and it was the glory that appealed to him, poor man. He’d inherited the business, like me, but he’d always been ambitious after high art, he told me, and Flippance’s Fit-Up was his boyhood’s dream. We did the swop over mulled claret last Christmas Eve in this very inn. Peace and goodwill, thinks I, as we clinked tumblers on the deal. You’ve got the goodwill, but peace, no, that you’ll never see again.”

Will smiled. “I’ll really have to come and see those blessèd puppets,” he said, as the Showman replenished the glasses.

Tony replied that he should see the whole boiling of them either before or after the show, neatly packed in their big box. “And if there’s any you’d like to kick, you’re welcome,” he said.

“What! Damage your property?”

“It would work off my bitter memories.”

“But they’re not the real live actors.”

“No—there’s the pity!” said Tony. “But they look so real—they’re life-size, you know—that I sometimes yell at ’em and abuse ’em just for the satisfaction of their not answering back. And the leading lady looks as if she had a tongue to her—I promise you. A tongue—but thank the Lord it can only talk Shakespeare or noble sentiments—can’t even nag the management for a new dress. As for the juvenile lead, I can’t help tweaking his nose sometimes for the sake of auld lang syne. Polly can’t understand my spoiling his beauty—I can’t make her see I’m getting a bit of my own back—and when she catches me punching the low comedian’s head with a boxing-glove she saucers her eyes, as though I was going dotty. But she never had to manage ’em. And I had to travel ’em too—don’t forget that. Fancy carting around a menagerie, all in the same cage! But I have my revenge when I travel ’em now—into the box they go—leads below and the heavy man sitting on their heads, ha, ha, ha!—and utilities and supers on top of all! And it don’t raise a whisper. Talk of the lion lying down with the lamb. Believe me, old cock, that there millennium will never come till we’re all on wires.” He drew vigorously at the cigar his eloquence had all but extinguished.

“There’s a lot of the brutes,” he mused between the puffs, “that don’t know Tony Flip’s escaped out of hell, and they write and call for engagements—same as Polly thought you did—and if it isn’t Sunday I take ’em to see my company and rub their noses into ’em, so to speak. Look at ’em, I say, every man and woman knowing their place, and when to speak and when to hold their blooming tongue, every one knowing their parts too, which is more than you ever did, I’ll be bound. No wigs, no make-ups, no dresses, no young bloods or decrepit dandies coming behind, no prompter, nobody missing their cue, or unpunctual or hysterical. No Bardell _versus_ Pickwick. Nobody drunk, married, divorced, deceased, laid up, locked up, or run over, between the dress rehearsal and the first night. No understudies, eating their heads off: in the way when they’re not wanted, and missing their cues when they are. No sore throats, no funerals to go to, no babies to get—if there’s a baby wanted, I order it from the makers. And above all, my boy, say I to ’em, no treasury.”

“What’s that?” inquired Will.

“What’s that? Well I’m blowed. That’s pay-day. And kindly note, I say to ’em, that lead don’t get more than utility, nor responsibles than walking gentlemen. It’s Owenism, you sons of Mammon, I tell ’em, sheer Owenism. Everybody getting the same nothing, and nobody coming carneying for advance half-crowns. As for curtain-calls, the singing chambermaid’s got the same chance as Lady Macbeth. And when it is a leading man that’s come for a berth, I take him to the front of the booth where there’s a retired village idiot I picked up, banging the drum. Look there, says I, he’s not got much brains but he isn’t wood, and that’s the only flesh-and-blood job I’ve got left in this blooming shop. If you like to take it, why, in recognition of your position, I’ll throw in an extra naphtha flare.”

“And what do they say?” laughed Will.

“It can’t be repeated on a Sunday! But you can picture ’em black in the face—all except the nose. That gets redder than ever! Hullo, Charley! Come in! Come in!”

Through the open door he had caught sight of the landlord in the corridor.

“Can’t stop, Tony.” Mr. Mott was, in fact, hurrying to take advantage of his spouse’s return to chapel.

“Gander-pecked again, I suppose,” laughed the Showman. “Ah, Charley, you’d be much happier if you had a wife on wires.”

“There you go again!” And Mr. Mott, eager to join old pals at their fishing, sniggered past, leaving a reek of hair-oil.

“Poor chap!” sighed Tony. “But there’s always hope for a man whose wife won’t call in a doctor.”

Will laughed, and cunningly took advantage of all this expansive geniality to escape from the room and the threatened transaction and to call from the doorstep as he took his farewell, “Then it’s settled—_I_ get the horse.”

“If you bring it into the partnership,” cried Tony after him, “not otherwise.”

Will found himself waylaid by Polly as he passed her doorway. She beckoned him within with a mysterious, masterful forefinger, and he, seeing the moreen curtains of her four-poster discreetly drawn, entered, though not without Puritan misgivings. She drew another curtain over the closed door communicating with her father’s room, and turned the key. “Don’t waste my cigar,” she said as he held it behind him. “I can see pa’s given you one of mine.” And taking up her glowing fag-end from the ash-tray, she resumed her suction of it, sipping in the intervals at a glass of milk. “I suppose you won’t share my drink,” she said simply.

“No, thank you,” he said, hardly believing his eyes, though he now understood whence came the clouds in which he had found her mantled. Perhaps she was really a man in disguise, despite her long ear-rings. But then, would ever a male take milk with his cigar? What with tobacco and horsiness, what was the sex coming to? And yet there seemed something symbolic in this combination of stimulants, this masculinity mitigated by milk! “What do you want to say to me?” he asked, keeping the front door open with his hand.

“What’s this about a partnership?” she said softly. “I couldn’t help hearing.”

“Don’t ask me,” said Will in tones hushed as cautiously. “Mr. Flippance did speak of it, but I’ve never thought of the theatre as a business, only as a spree.”

“Did he want you to take a theatre?” she asked anxiously.

“Good heavens, no! He called it hell!”

Miss Flippance smiled sadly. “That’s his way of consoling himself. He’s dying to get a stock company again. But he _mustn’t_ have even a theatre for amateurs. I’d fight it tooth and nail.”

“It’s bad for him, I know.”

“It’s bad for _me_,” said Miss Flippance. She puffed out a cloud. “You see, there’d be no place for me. I can wipe most actresses off the stage, but I’m not pretty—at least, not since my illness—and the public won’t have me—except at the piano where I turn my back on them. Plain actresses must be heard and not seen.”

“Oh!” Will was taken aback by such candour.

“Besides, one of the women would probably entangle him into marriage. I don’t mind his having a wife on wires!” And a smile came travelling over the pits of her face.

“You don’t mean to say he really wants to go back to hell?” said Will, dazed.

“Don’t the moths after you’ve saved ’em from the lamp? And it was no easy task saving him. Christmas after Christmas I used to jest: ‘Peace and goodwill indeed! You’ll never have peace till you’ve got rid of your goodwill.’”

“But that’s what he says himself,” said Will naïvely. “So he can’t be craving to go back—it’s the marionettes he wanted me to stand in with.”

“That’s all my eye. He don’t know how happy he really is nowadays, playing all the men’s parts. That was always the trouble in a real theatre, especially when he was cock-of-the-walk—he never could make up his mind which part he wanted. First he’d try one, and then think another was better and throw it up in the middle and take away the other man’s part. Nobody likes to give up a half-digested part, and it doesn’t make things easier when, after all, you get it back again. Imagine the ructions he was always making, and I’m not going to have it all over again. He’s got _all_ the parts now, and so it’s going to stay.” With which ultimatum she held out her hand and gripped him with what he felt a manly clasp, and an honest. “Don’t you be his partner,” she counselled. “He’s lost all his own money and it’s not likely he’d multiply yours. He might have been a big London actor or manager, but the Bible sized him up before he was born. ‘Unstable as water, thou shalt not excel.’ If only at least one can _keep_ him to water! No, you stick to your cash. There’s no money in the show for more than him and me—my last jewellery will have to go for the horse—and if you’ve really got the dollars, he’d have a theatre, with you as juvenile lead, before you could say Jack Robinson, and then he’d steal your part and drive you to drink.”

Will replied firmly, still holding her hand, that he was going to put his money into farming, and by the way, would she countermand that order to the Carrier for the horse?

“Oh, but we must have a horse,” said Polly.

“Quite so, but why through Jinny?” He was prepared himself, he explained, to get them the best animal at the lowest price.

“And for what commission?” she queried.

“For love!” said Will.

Polly withdrew her hand. “No, thank you. We’d best let it go through Jinny—like everything else.”