Mr Goble faced him, registering the utmost astonishment and horror.
"One and a half per cent for fixing a show like this? Why, darn it, there's hardly anything to do to it! It's—it's—in!"
"You called it junk just now."
"Well, all I meant was that it wasn't the sort of thing I cared for myself. The public will eat it! Take it from me, the time is just about ripe for a revival of comic opera."
"This one will want all the reviving you can give it. Better use a pulmotor."
"But that long boob, that Pilkington … he would never stand for my handing you one and a half per cent."
"I thought you were the little guy who arranged things round here."
"But he's got money in the show."
"Well, if he wants to get any out, he'd better call in somebody to rewrite it. You don't have to engage me if you don't want to. But I know I could make a good job of it. There's just one little twist the thing needs and you would have quite a different piece."
"What's that?" enquired Mr Goble casually.
"Oh, just a little … what shall I say?… a little touch of what-d'you-call-it and a bit of thingummy. You know the sort of thing! That's all it wants."
Mr Goble gnawed his cigar, baffled.
"You think so, eh?" he said at length.
"And perhaps a suspicion of je-ne-sais-quoi," added Wally.
Mr Goble worried his cigar, and essayed a new form of attack.
"You've done a lot of work for me," he said. "Good work!"
"Glad you liked it," said Wally.
"You're a good kid! I like having you around. I was half thinking of giving you a show to do this Fall. Corking book. French farce. Ran two years in Paris. But what's the good, if you want the earth?"
"Always useful, the earth. Good thing to have."
"See here, if you'll fix up this show for half of one per cent, I'll give you the other to do."
"You shouldn't slur your words so. For a moment I thought you said 'half of one per cent.' One and a half of course you really said."
"If you won't take half, you don't get the other."
"All right," said Wally. "There are lots of other managers in New York. Haven't you seen them popping about? Rich, enterprising men, and all of them love me like a son."
"Make it one per cent," said Mr Goble, "and I'll see if I can fix it with Pilkington."
"One and a half."
"Oh, damn it, one and a half, then," said Mr Goble morosely. "What's the good of splitting straws?"
"Forgotten Sports of the Past—Splitting the Straw. All right. If you drop me a line to that effect, legibly signed with your name, I'll wear it next my heart. I shall have to go now. I have a date. Good-bye. Glad everything's settled and everybody's happy."
For some moments after Wally had left, Mr Goble sat hunched up in his orchestra-chair, smoking sullenly, his mood less sunny than ever. Living in a little world of sycophants, he was galled by the off-hand way in which Wally always treated him. There was something in the latter's manner which seemed to him sometimes almost contemptuous. He regretted the necessity of having to employ him. There was, of course, no real necessity why he should have employed Wally. New York was full of librettists who would have done the work equally well for half the money, but, like most managers, Mr Goble had the mental processes of a sheep. "Follow the Girl" was the last outstanding musical success in New York theatrical history: Wally had written it: therefore nobody but Wally was capable of rewriting "The Rose of America." The thing had for Mr Goble the inevitability of Fate. Except for deciding mentally that Wally had swelled head, there was nothing to be done.
Having decided that Wally had swelled head and not feeling much better, Mr Goble concentrated his attention on the stage. A good deal of action had taken place there during recently concluded business talk, and the unfortunate Finchley was back again, playing another of his scenes. Mr Goble glared at Lord Finchley. He did not like him, and he did not like the way he was speaking his lines.
The part of Lord Finchley was a non-singing role. It was a type part. Otis Pilkington had gone to the straight stage to find an artist, and had secured the not uncelebrated Wentworth Hill, who had come over from London to play in an English comedy which had just closed. The newspapers had called the play thin, but had thought that Wentworth Hill was an excellent comedian. Mr Hill thought so too, and it was consequently a shock to his already disordered nerves when a bellow from the auditorium stopped him in the middle of one of his speeches and a rasping voice informed him that he was doing it all wrong.
"I beg your pardon?" said Mr. Hill, quietly but dangerously, stepping to the footlights.
"All wrong!" repeated Mr Goble.
"Really?" Wentworth Hill, who a few years earlier had spent several terms at Oxford University before being sent down for aggravated disorderliness, had brought little away with him from that seat of learning except the Oxford manner. This he now employed upon Mr Goble with an icy severity which put the last touch to the manager's fermenting state of mind. "Perhaps you would be kind enough to tell me just how you think that part should be played?"
Mr Goble marched down the aisle.
"Speak out to the audience," he said, stationing himself by the orchestra pit. "You're turning your head away all the darned time."
"I may be wrong," said Mr Hill, "but I have played a certain amount, don't you know, in pretty good companies, and I was always under the impression that one should address one's remarks to the person one was speaking to, not deliver a recitation to the gallery. I was taught that that was the legitimate method."
The word touched off all the dynamite in Mr Goble. Of all things in the theatre he detested most the "legitimate method." His idea of producing was to instruct the cast to come down to the footlights and hand it to 'em. These people who looked up stage and talked to the audience through the backs of their necks revolted him.
"Legitimate! That's a hell of a thing to be! Where do you get that legitimate stuff? You aren't playing Ibsen!"
"Nor am I playing a knockabout vaudeville sketch."
"Don't talk back at me!"
"Kindly don't shout at me! Your voice is unpleasant enough without your raising it."
Open defiance was a thing which Mr Goble had never encountered before, and for a moment it deprived him of breath. He recovered it, however, almost immediately.
"You're fired!"
"On the contrary," said Mr Hill, "I'm resigning." He drew a green-covered script from his pocket and handed it with an air to the pallid assistant stage-director. Then, more gracefully than ever Freddie Rooke had managed to move downstage under the tuition of Johnson Miller, he moved upstage to the exit. "I trust that you will be able to find someone who will play the part according to your ideas!"
"I'll find," bellowed Mr Goble at his vanishing back, "a chorus-man who'll play it a damned sight better than you!" He waved to the assistant stage-director. "Send the chorus-men on the stage!"
"All the gentlemen of the chorus on the stage, please!" shrilled the assistant stage-director, bounding into the wings like a retriever.
"Mr Goble wants all the chorus-gentlemen on the stage!"
There was a moment, when the seven male members of "The Rose of America" ensemble lined up self-consciously before his gleaming eyes, when Mr Goble repented of his brave words. An uncomfortable feeling passed across his mind that Fate had called his bluff and that he would not be able to make good. All chorus-men are exactly alike, and they are like nothing else on earth. Even Mr Goble, anxious as he was to overlook their deficiencies, could not persuade himself that in their ranks stood even an adequate Lord Finchley. And then, just as a cold reaction from his fervid mood was about to set in, he perceived that Providence had been good to him. There, at the extreme end of the line, stood a young man who, as far as appearance went, was the ideal Lord Finchley,—as far as appearance went, a far better Lord Finchley than the late Mr Hill. He beckoned imperiously.