rest of the company.
From that moment, Jimmy’s troubles began. Charteris was a young man
in whom a passion for the stage was ineradicably implanted. It
mattered nothing to him during these days that the sun shone, that
it was pleasant on the lake, and that Jimmy would have given five
pounds a minute to be allowed to get Molly to himself for half-an-
hour every afternoon. All he knew or cared about was that the local
nobility and gentry were due to arrive at the castle within a week,
and that, as yet, very few of the company even knew their lines.
Having hustled Jimmy into the part of CAPTAIN BROWNE, he gave his
energy free play. He conducted rehearsals with a vigor that
occasionally almost welded the rabble he was coaching into something
approaching coherency. He painted scenery, and left it about–wet,
and people sat on it. He nailed up horseshoes for luck, and they
fell on people. But nothing daunted him. He never rested.
“Mr. Charteris,” said Lady Julia, rather frigidly, after one
energetic rehearsal, “is indefatigable. He whirled me about!”
It was perhaps his greatest triumph, properly considered, that he
had induced Lady Julia to take a part in his piece; but to the born
organizer of amateur theatricals no miracle of this kind is
impossible, and Charteris was one of the most inveterate organizers
in the country. There had been some talk–late at night, in the
billiard room–of his being about to write in a comic footman role
for Sir Thomas; but it had fallen through, not, it was felt, because
Charteris could not have hypnotized his host into undertaking the
part, but rather because Sir Thomas was histrionically unfit.
Mainly as a result of the producer’s energy, Jimmy found himself one
of a crowd, and disliked the sensation. He had not experienced much
difficulty in mastering the scenes in which lie appeared; but
unfortunately those who appeared with him had. It occurred to Jimmy
daily, after he had finished “running through the lines” with a
series of agitated amateurs, male and female, that for all practical
purposes he might just as well have gone to Japan. In this confused
welter of rehearsers, his opportunities of talking with Molly were
infinitesimal. And, worse, she did not appear to mind. She was
cheerful and apparently quite content to be engulfed in a crowd.
Probably, he thought with some melancholy, if she met his eye and
noted in it a distracted gleam, she put it down to the cause that
made other eyes in the company gleam distractedly during this week.
Jimmy began to take a thoroughly jaundiced view of amateur
theatricals, and of these amateur theatricals in particular. He felt
that in the electric flame department of the infernal regions there
should be a special gridiron, reserved exclusively for the man who
invented these performances, so diametrically opposed to the true
spirit of civilization. At the close of each day, he cursed
Charteris with unfailing regularity.
There was another thing that disturbed him. That he should be unable
to talk with Molly was an evil, but a negative evil. It was
supplemented by one that was positive. Even in the midst of the
chaos of rehearsals, he could not help noticing that Molly and Lord
Dreever were very much together. Also–and this was even more
sinister–he observed that both Sir Thomas Blunt and Mr. McEachern
were making determined efforts to foster the state of affairs.
Of this, he had sufficient proof one evening when, after scheming
and plotting in a way that had made the great efforts of Machiavelli
and Eichlieu seem like the work of raw novices, he had cut Molly out
from the throng, and carried her off for the alleged purpose of
helping him feed the chickens. There were, as he had suspected,
chickens attached to the castle. They lived in a little world of
noise and smells at the back of the stables. Bearing an iron pot
full of a poisonous-looking mash, and accompanied by Molly, he had
felt for perhaps a minute and a half like a successful general. It
is difficult to be romantic when you are laden with chicken-feed in