CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
1.
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.
