The next night, just before the curtain went up, he stood on the stage of the Regent Theatre, and it is a fact that he was trembling--not with fear but with simple excitement.

Through what a day he had pa.s.sed! There had been the rehearsal in the morning; it had gone off very well, save that Rose Euclid had behaved impossibly, and that the Cunningham girl, the hit of the piece but ousted from her part, had filled the place with just lamentations and recriminations.

And then had followed the appalling scene with Rose Euclid. Rose, leaving the theatre for lunch, had beheld the workmen removing her name from the electric sign and subst.i.tuting that of Isabel Joy. She was a woman and an artist, and it would have been the same had she been a man and an artist. She would not submit to this inconceivable affront. She had resigned her role. She had ripped her contract to bits and flung the bits to the breeze. Upon the whole Edward Henry had been glad. He had sent for Miss Cunningham, who was Rose's understudy, had given her instructions, called another rehearsal for the afternoon and effected a saving of nearly half Isabel Joy's fantastic salary. Then he entered into financial negotiations with four evening papers and managed to buy, at a price, their contents-bills for the day. So that all the West End was filled with men and boys wearing like ap.r.o.ns posters which bore the words: "Isabel Joy to appear at the Regent to-night." A great and original stroke!

And now he gazed through the peep-hole of the curtain upon a crammed and half-delirious auditorium. The a.s.sistant stage manager ordered him off.

The curtain went up on the drama in hexameters. He waited in the wings, and spoke soothingly to Isabel Joy who, looking juvenile in the airy costume of the Messenger, stood flutteringly agog for her cue.... He heard the thunderous crashing roar that met her entrance. He did not hear her line.

He walked forth to the glazed balcony at the front of the house, where in the entr'actes dandies smoked cigarettes baptised with girlish names.

He could see Piccadilly Circus, and he saw Piccadilly Circus thronged with a mult.i.tude of loafers, who were happy in the mere spectacle of Isabel Joy's name glowing on an electric sign. He went back at last to the managerial room. Marrier was there, hero-worshipping.

"Got the figures yet?" he asked.

Marrier beamed.

"Two hundred and sixty pounds. As long as it keeps up it means a profit of getting on for two hundred a naight!"

"But, dash it, man,--the house only holds two hundred and thirty!"

"But my good sir," said Marrier, "they're paying ten shillings a-piece to stand up in the dress-circle."

Edward Henry dropped into a chair at the desk. A telegram was lying there, addressed to himself.

"What's this?" he demanded.

"Just cam."

He opened it, and read: "I absolutely forbid this monstrous outrage on a work of art. Trent."

"Bit late in the day, isn't he?" said Edward Henry, showing the telegram to Marrier.

"Besides," Marrier observed, "he'll come round when he knows what his royalties are."

"Well," said Edward Henry, "I'm going to bed." And he gave a devastating yawn.

VIII.

One afternoon Edward Henry sat in the king of all the easy chairs in the drawing-room of his house in Trafalgar Road, Bursley. Although the month was September, and the weather warm even for September, a swansdown quilt lay spread upon his knees. His face was pale, his hands were paler; but his eye was clear and his visage enlightened. His beard had grown to nearly its original dimensions. On a chair by his side were a number of letters to which he had just dictated answers. At a neighbouring table a young clerk was using a typewriter. Stretched at full length on the sofa was Robert Machin, engaged in the perusal of the second edition of that day's _Signal_. Of late Robert, having exhausted nearly all available books, had been cultivating during his holidays an interest in journalism, and he would give great accounts, in the nursery, of events happening in each day's instalment of the _Signal's_ sensational serial. His heels kicked idly one against the other.

A powerful voice resounded in the lobby, and Doctor Stirling entered the room with Nellie.

"Well, Doc!" Edward Henry greeted him.

"So you're in full blast again!" observed the doctor, using a metaphor invented by the population of a district where the roar of furnaces wakens the night.

"No!" Edward Henry protested, as an invalid always will. "I'm only just keeping an eye on one or two pressing things."

"Of course he's in full blast!" said Nellie with calm conviction.

"What's this I hear about ye ganging away to the seaside, Sat.u.r.day?"

asked the doctor.

"Well, can't I?" said Edward Henry.

"Ye can," said the doctor. "Let's have a look at ye, man."

"What was it you said I've had?" Edward Henry questioned.

"Colonitis."

"Yes, that's the word. I thought I couldn't have got it wrong. Well, you should have seen my mother's face when I told her what you called it. She said, 'He may call it that if he's a mind to, but we had another name for it in my time.' You should have heard her sniff! ... Look here, Doc, do you know you've had me down now for pretty near three months?"

"Nay," said Stirling. "It's yer own obstinacy that's had ye down, man.

If ye'd listened to yer London doctor at first, mayhap ye wouldn't have had to travel from Euston in an invalid's carriage. If ye hadn't had the misfortune to be born an obstinate simpleton ye'd ha' been up and about six weeks back. But there's no doing anything with you geniuses.

It's all nerves with you and your like."

"Nerves!" exclaimed Edward Henry, pretending to scorn. But he was delighted at the diagnosis.

"Nerves," repeated the doctor firmly. "Ye go gadding off to America.

Ye get yeself mixed up in theatres.... How's the theatre? I see yer famous play's coming to end next week."

"And what if it is?" said Edward Henry, jealous for reputations, including his own. "It will have run for a hundred and one nights. And right through August, too! No modern poetry play ever did run as long in London, and no other ever will. I've given the intellectual theatre the biggest ad. it ever had. And I've made money on it. I should have made more if I'd ended the run a fortnight ago, but I was determined to pa.s.s the hundredth night. And I shall do!"

"And what are ye for giving next?"

"I'm not for giving anything next, Doc. I've let the Regent for five years at seven thousand five hundred pounds a year to a musical comedy syndicate, since you're so curious. And when I've paid the ground rent and taxes and repairs and something toward a sinking-fund, and six per cent. on my capital I shall have not far off two thousand pounds a year clear annual profit. You may say what you like, but that's what I call business!"

It was a remarkable fact that, while giving undemanded information to Doctor Stirling, Edward Henry was in reality defending himself against the accusations of his wife--accusations which, by the way, she had never uttered, but which he thought he read sometimes in her face. He might of course have told his wife these agreeable details directly, and in private. But he was a husband, and, like many husbands, apt to be indirect.

Nellie said not a word.

"Then you're giving up London?" The doctor rose to depart.

"I am," said Edward Henry, almost blushing.

"Why?"

"Well," the genius answered. "Those theatrical things are altogether too exciting and risky! And they're such queer people--Great Scott! I've come out on the right side, as it happens, but--well, I'm not as young as I was. I've done with London. The Five Towns are good enough for me."

Nellie, unable to restrain a note of triumph, indiscreetly remarked with just the air of superior sagacity that in a wife drives husbands to fury and to foolishness:

"I should think so, indeed!"

Edward Henry leaped from his chair, and the swansdown quilt swathed his slippered feet.