Mr. Campion's Lucky Day & Other Stories (5 page)

Chrissie had improved. She was almost good in an old-fashioned way. Not West End standard, of course, but first class for the provinces. She held the audience, too. They loved her.

Something else returned to Tadema’s memory. He seemed to hear Chrissie complaining that someone always struck a match in her big scenes and it put her off. Always at the most dramatic part that little pin point of light out in the dark audience would catch her eye, telling her that there was someone whose attention she was not holding.

Softly and feeling indescribably guilty, Tadema drew a box from his pocket. He waited for the right moment and struck the match. He was leaning forward and the flickering light caught his face, accentuating the hollows and darkening eyes.

Miss Dilling wavered, her glance rested on the box, and then, with a little shrill cry, she clasped her hand over her heart.

Tadema started back in his box. He did not see her gallant recovery, did not see her struggling on with the scene. The only thought in his mind was one of intense excitement, and, curiously enough, of relief. He was alive. The secret was out; whatever disaster might accompany the revelation he was alive again. Somebody knew it. He slipped out of the box and hurried round to the stage door.

He was sitting in the dressing room when she came in from the stage, still a little pale under her make-up. Tadema rose and gallantly held out his hands.

“Why, Chrissie!” he said.

The woman stared at him and for an uncomfortable moment he thought that she was going to faint. Stock company actresses are more or less inured to shock, however, and Miss Dilling revived. She came into the room, shutting the door carefully behind her.

“Well, Geoff,” she said, and added awkwardly after a pause, “I was only thinking of you this evening.”

As soon as the words left her mouth she bit her lower lip sharply and regarded him apologetically with round eyes. Tadema remembered the trick. He remembered the eyes, too, and it must have been some sort of little romance here; nothing serious; just a boy and girl flirtation perhaps. She was several years younger than himself; ten, perhaps; he was not sure.

Miss Dilling continued to stare.

“Well, I don’t know what to say, I’m sure,” she said at last. “The papers are wrong, of course.”

The morning papers published a fresh Tadema sensation. Lady Chloe Staratt had been led by an apparently friendly
Trumpeter
reporter into an admission that her engagement to Sir Geoffrey had been broken off on the morning of his disappearance. Whereas the weeping, broken-hearted Chloe might have made a pretty enough picture to grace any suburban breakfast table, it was considerably marred by an independent statement by Mr. Gyp Rains in the same paper to the effect that his own marriage to Lady Chloe had been fixed for the morrow, this announcement being backed up by the evidence of a special licence.

The Trumpeter,
never famed for its delicacy, published the two stories one after the other and the report of the inquest in the next column. Since the coroner’s jury brought in a verdict of “death by misadventure” and vetoed absolutely any question of deliberation, the combined effect of the three stories was unfortunate as far as Chloe was concerned. Tadema, reading the paper over his breakfast in the hotel lounge, was almost sorry for her.

Most of his sympathy, however, he reserved for himself. The morning’s news had brought him no respite. He was still a dead man and to revive with honour looked like proving an impossibility.

He was still faced with the problem of finding the means of returning to life without appearing either a petulant and jilted lover or the victim of a sudden fit of mental aberration, or, of course, both. For a time he let his mind dwell sadly on what might have been, but sighed and put the vain imaginings from him. It had happened. He was in the devil of a mess.

He had just decided to lie low for another forty-eight hours at least until opportunity, if not sheer necessity, drove him to action, when Miss Dilling arrived. Tadema was pleased to see her, but only mildly so. By morning light she looked most of her age and her clothes were painfully provincial. However, her smile was friendly and admiring.

She came out with her request immediately, her eyes meeting his anxiously. She hardly dared to suggest it, but Derek Fayre, her leading man, was really too ill to play and Mr. Lewis was so worried. The incognito would be preserved, of course. No one knew. She had simply spoken of him as an actor friend and that had given Mr. Lewis the idea. After all, they had done the show so many times in the past. It would be like old times. Would he? Would he? Dare she ask?

The idea appealed to Tadema from the moment it was presented to him. It is possible, of course, that he might have smelt a rat if anyone but Chrissie Dilling had put the thing up to him. But she was so patently without second motive, so obviously anxious only to play at old times again. All women were sentimental, Tadema thought privately; all except that hussy Chloe.

Over supper the previous evening he had asked Chrissie why she had never married. Her reply had been heart-breaking.

“Oh, you know how it is,” she had said, wrinkling her nose at him. “First it’s a career. Afterwards there’s no one around the theatre quite good enough. And then—you just don’t.”

Poor old Chrissie, her old-fashioned sophistication that was sophistication no more. She just hadn’t.

Tadema smiled at her. She had a gift for making people feel pleasantly condescending.

“My dear girl, I’m too old,” he said.

“Geoff, don’t be ridiculous.” Her sincerity did him good.

He went to rehearsal with her like a lamb. He had a glorious time. Every nervous criticism put in by the breathless Mr. Katz for verisimilitude’s sweet sake amused and delighted him. Things which would have rendered him speechless in his own theatre here struck him as being funny, and the old play came back easily. Right words, wrong words, delicious gags, they slipped to his tongue and he let himself go.

The irony of the situation as he knew it he found exquisite and all the more so since he had an appreciative audience in Miss Dilling. He made covert references to the truth, fooled about and behaved generally like an irresponsible child, while Chrissie Dilling played up to him, and the sparkle returned to her eyes.

Neither of them so much as thought of Mr. Lewis, which was perhaps fortunate. Breathless, laughing, and twenty years younger, Sir Geoffrey knocked off for lunch. He and Miss Dilling ate sausages and drank beer at the Red Lion and reminisced. Tadema put the world of reality into the back of his mind. He felt reckless and somehow slightly truculent. If the world combined to mock and frustrate him, at least he was a fine old trouper still. Yes, by God he was! And secretly he longed for the show.

There was an electric atmosphere in the Theatre Royal that night. The whole company was in a state of whispering hysteria. The only two innocent participants in the comedy were frankly and engagingly happy. The first act went with a bang. Tadema was aware of a large and appreciative audience and gave his best. The personality revived in all its early splendour. Miss Dilling was carried away.

No curtain calls till the end of the show; that was the rule of the house and it was observed.

Tadema climbed happily out of mess jacket into hunting pink and from hunting pink to naval uniform without a dresser or a qualm. He romped and gagged and threw his weight about atrociously, while the provincial audience rejoiced with him. It was a glorious night.

When the final moment came on the steps of the castle and the lovers were reunited with the immortal line, “Marry me, Mary. I’m a man again”, Sir Geoffrey swung Miss Dilling into his arms and kissed her in the style of his predecessors with a sound that was heard at the back of the gallery.

The gallery rose and the grand, glorious sound of applause poured sweetly on his head. Tadema, gallantly leading Miss Dilling, took the curtain. Not once or twice, but again and again they came forward. At last Miss Dilling fled and Tadema took the final call alone.

As he stood before the curtain the light shot up in the theatre and he looked around. The crowd was still applauding and Tadema bowed. He was superbly happy.

As he raised his head again, however, he stiffened. Directly in front of him, in the middle of the first row, was a boiled shirt, and above that shirt sat the smug face of Evans of
The Trumpeter.

Tadema, grown old again, glanced sharply down the line, his blood chilled. There they were, all of them: Richardson, Playfair, Jones—the whole gang.

He walked back through the curtains, his head held stiffly but his eyes unfocused, strode through the sniggering throng behind the scenes and entered the dressing room at the end of the corridor.

Miss Dilling paled before his expression. He told her what he thought coldly and all the more bitterly because of his great humiliation. Miss Dilling wept.

“I didn’t—oh, Geoff, I didn’t.”

“Nobody else knew,” said Tadema. “Do you realise,” he went on with sudden heat, “that to get a little publicity for your paltry little company you’ve sacrificed and made a fool of me? Publicity!”

He laughed rather theatrically and would have made his exit on that word but they were upon him like a pack of dogs. They all swarmed in through the door, jostling, laughing, eager and content that the chase was yielding a kill.

They were all there, the half-dozen that he had seen in the stalls and more that he had missed. Even Evans in his affected boiled shirt was condescending to hurry like a mere reporter, since duty and the story demanded it.

Tadema, obscuring the tragic Miss Dilling, faced them.

“Let’s have the story, Sir Geoffrey—the whole story. It’ll take a bit of explaining, you know.”

That was Richardson, grinning away like a Barbary ape.

“A remarkable performance, Tadema. I didn’t think you had it in you.”

Sir Geoffrey had often wanted to kick Evans but never more than now.

“Come, Tadema, was it because of Lady Chloe? You’ve seen the papers, of course. What poor devil did you lend your clothes to?”

They were jostling him; hectoring him. His mind shuttered.

“We’ll let you down lightly. It was the engagement, of course?”

“Gentlemen?” Tadema raised a protesting hand, “—just a moment. Just a moment, please.”

The sound of his own voice gave him confidence. It always did; it was so absolutely right.

“Since you’ve hunted me out—I almost said hounded me down—” the easy, rounded phrases slipped out softly, “—I suppose I must tell you the truth.”

“I should say so. I’m holding a line,” muttered someone and was instantly suppressed.

Tadema went smoothly on.

“Lady Chloe Staratt has said that our engagement was broken off the day before yesterday. Lady Chloe is a very sweet and charming girl but she is not quite accurate. Our engagement was broken off last Sunday—”

“Why? The whole story. We must have the whole story.”

Tadema shrugged his shoulders and threw out his hands. A faint smile which was not wholly assumed played round his lips.

“Even an actor has private affairs, gentlemen,” he murmured. “And yet—well—since you’ve come for the truth—”

Turning swiftly like a conjurer he took Miss Dilling’s quivering hand.

“This is Miss Chrissie Dilling,” he said simply. “My first love and my last. This evening she has honoured me by accepting the proposal I made her when I first arrived in this town yesterday morning.”

He paused for the announcement to sink in and then, when he was sure he had all their attention, added superbly and with great dignity: “Even at my age, gentlemen, romance is not wholly dead. There is always one woman—somewhere.”

He watched them scribbling and his smile widened. Inspiration had arrived.

Chrissie Dilling, that rare woman, did not speak.

Some days later Sir Geoffrey Tadema turned away from the contemplation of his wedding presents to glance at the proofs of an interview which his fiancée had granted to a woman’s magazine. Chrissie had brought it to him and now stood at his side while he ran a pencil along the lines.

“Christiana Dilling glanced at me and I thought I saw something very charming in her wistful blue eyes. ‘Of course, I always hoped he’d come back,” she confessed.” Tadema lifted the pencil.

“We’ll take out that ‘hoped”, my dear,” he said, “and put ‘knew”. It’s better publicity.”

Knowles was the perfect butler, and, since the word knows no qualification, he was only that; yet there were some who would have stretched the point and claimed that he was more than perfect, inasmuch as the very art of buttling achieved under his hand a flowering, a golden renascence it never before had known.

At the moment he was in his pantry at the back of a great Georgian house in Berkeley Square, considering the polish on the Georgian spoons. His son, young Harold, was attending to the spoons, his face pink and absorbed as he rubbed away with the leather.

Young Harold was his father’s only anxiety. The boy came from an unbroken line of butlers as ancient as the family which they served.

When the present Knowles looked at young Harold and realised everything the lad had to live up to he trembled. The past can be a cruel master, especially when legend has strengthened its hand, and Knowles feared for Harold. Could Harold make the grade? There were times when his father lay awake wondering.

When they were alone, as now, in that blessed interval when tea is a thing of the past and dinner only a partly realised dream in the chef’s mind, Knowles would talk to young Harold and impart the deeper secrets of his calling.

Since young Harold was only fifteen and still human, and Knowles was fifty-five and superhuman, the conversation was liable to have a one-sided quality, but there were rare occasions when the imperfectly subdued nature of the boy got out of hand. This was one of them.

“I saw Lady Susan this afternoon. She had been crying,” he observed, rashly.

Knowles set down a mellow spoon with great deliberation and, taking a pair of small pince-nez from his waistcoat pocket, placed them carefully on the bridge of his nose.