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!”