The room-clerk, always of a chatty disposition, was saying something to him, but Archie did not listen. He nodded mechanically. It was something about his room. He caught the word “satisfactory.”
“Oh, rather, quite!” said Archie.
A fussy devil, the room-clerk! He knew perfectly well that Archie found his room satisfactory. These chappies gassed on like this so as to try to make you feel that the management took a personal interest in you. It was part of their job. Archie beamed absently and went in to lunch. Lucille’s empty seat stared at him mournfully, increasing his sense of desolation.
He was half-way through his lunch, when the chair opposite ceased to be vacant. Archie, transferring his gaze from the scenery outside the window, perceived that his friend, George Benham, the playwright, had materialised from nowhere and was now in his midst.
“Hallo!” he said.
George Benham was a grave young man whose spectacles gave him the look of a mournful owl. He seemed to have something on his mind besides the artistically straggling mop of black hair which swept down over his brow. He sighed wearily, and ordered fish-pie.
“I thought I saw you come through the lobby just now,” he said.
“Oh, was that you on the settee, talking to Miss Silverton?”
“She was talking to ME,” said the playwright, moodily.
“What are you doing here?” asked Archie. He could have wished Mr. Benham elsewhere, for he intruded on his gloom, but, the chappie being amongst those present, it was only civil to talk to him. “I thought you were in New York, watching the rehearsals of your jolly old drama.”
“The rehearsals are hung up. And it looks as though there wasn’t going to be any drama. Good Lord!” cried George Benham, with honest warmth, “with opportunities opening out before one on every side– with life extending prizes to one with both hands–when you see coal-heavers making fifty dollars a week and the fellows who clean out the sewers going happy and singing about their work–why does a man deliberately choose a job like writing plays? Job was the only man that ever lived who was really qualified to write a play, and he would have found it pretty tough going if his leading woman had been anyone like Vera Silverton!”
Archie–and it was this fact, no doubt, which accounted for his possession of such a large and varied circle of friends–was always able to shelve his own troubles in order to listen to other people’s hard-luck stories.
“Tell me all, laddie,” he said. “Release the film! Has she walked out on you?”
“Left us flat! How did you hear about it? Oh, she told you, of course?”
Archie hastened to try to dispel the idea that he was on any such terms of intimacy with Miss Silverton.
“No, no! My wife said she thought it must be something of that nature or order when we saw her come in to breakfast. I mean to say,” said Archie, reasoning closely, “woman can’t come into breakfast here and be rehearsing in New York at the same time. Why did she administer the raspberry, old friend?”
Mr. Benham helped himself to fish-pie, and spoke dully through the steam.
“Well, what happened was this. Knowing her as intimately as you do– ”
“I DON’T know her!”
“Well, anyway, it was like this. As you know, she has a dog–”
“I didn’t know she had a dog,” protested Archie. It seemed to him that the world was in conspiracy to link him with this woman.
“Well, she has a dog. A beastly great whacking brute of a bulldog. And she brings it to rehearsal.” Mr. Benham’s eyes filled with tears, as in his emotion he swallowed a mouthful of fish-pie some eighty-three degrees Fahrenheit hotter than it looked. In the intermission caused by this disaster his agile mind skipped a few chapters of the story, and, when he was able to speak again, he said, “So then there was a lot of trouble. Everything broke loose!”
“Why?” Archie was puzzled. “Did the management object to her bringing the dog to rehearsal?”
“A lot of good that would have done! She does what she likes in the theatre.”