Mr. Campion's Lucky Day & Other Stories (4 page)

But in ten minutes or so his indomitable faith in himself had returned. He had been forced into a delicate situation, compelled to take an unconventional line. A regrettable but minor mishap had deprived him of his bag, but he was still the captain of his press, still the keeper of the personality.

He looked about him. No provincial town is at its best at four o’clock on an autumn morning. Tadema did not know the place and did not particularly want to. His best plan, he decided, was to leave Yarborough. He consulted a weary porter.

“First train, sir? Where for, sir?”

“Anywhere,” said Tadema recklessly. “The first train to leave this station.”

The man looked at him curiously and replied that there was a slow branch line train leaving in an hour.

“Take you to Ebury, Lessing and Saffronden,” he concluded.

Saffronden. The name struck a familiar note in Tadema’s memory. There was a theatre in Saffronden, or rather there had once been a theatre there; the Theatre Royal, a little dark house with a smell. Through the years that smell crept back and assailed again the nostrils of Tadema, a camphory, dampish odour with a bite in it, unique and unforgettable.

The old “Hearts Afire” company under Benny Fancy had played there for a week way back in 19… Tadema forgot the year.

Another memory returned to him. It was very vague but it conjured up a sensation of warmth and stuffiness and amusement. It was a joke, he fancied, and something to do with cocoa of all things; something excruciatingly funny. He brightened up.

“I’ll go on to Saffronden,” he said, adding abruptly as he returned to the temporarily forgotten porter, “There’s a bookstall there, isn’t there? What time do the morning papers arrive?”

Both bewildered replies having proved satisfactory, Tadema, the fugitive, entered the Saffronden train.

He was waiting on Saffronden station when the papers arrived and he pounced upon a copy of the
Trumpeter
and turned the pages over feverishly. At first he thought he was not mentioned at all and a feeling of bewilderment passed over him. It was not until the third time that he searched the paper that he found the small paragraph tucked away at the bottom of a page:

“Sir Geoffrey Tadema, the well-known actor manager, was forced by indisposition to retire from the cast of ‘Lovers’ Meeting”, now enjoying a successful run at the Gresham. Sir Geoffrey’s part in the third act was played by his understudy, Paul Ritchie. Sir Geoffrey is confidently expected to return to his role at this evening’s performance.”

Tadema swore softly under his breath. What an idiot Wentworth was! As a business manager he was intelligent and economical, but in an emergency he always did the wrong thing. If only the fool knew it he was wasting precious time. Oh, well, he’d have to rely on the evening papers. The lunatic would be sure to do something by that time. Doubtless he had the wind up properly. Tadema could not repress a chuckle at the spectacle. “Dashing about like a demented hen,” he said to himself as he walked down the winding hill from the station into the main road of the town, which had miraculously become much smaller and sleepier than he remembered it.

By the time he was breakfasting in the commercial room of the Red Lion his trepidation had returned. Time was so very short. By this time tomorrow Chloe would be well on her way to Athens and a short time later the wires would be buzzing.

He was beside himself with impatience and a growing sense of impotence in the matter. There was nothing he could possibly-do to speed things up. A wire to Wentworth saying “I’ve disappeared you fool” would be ludicrous and quite horribly disastrous if it fell into the wrong hands.

Moreover, this temporary setback was taking his attention from the plan he had to evolve. He had relied upon the morning newspapers to give him a lead. Whatever he did, it had got to be good. Tadema did not shut his eyes to the danger of the whole thing fizzling out into an incident that had to be explained away: “Temporary amnesia”, “actor finds strain too great”, “betrothed’s flight breaks up elderly fiance”. That was the sort of thing which had to be avoided at all costs.

By the end of breakfast he had decided to wait. Nothing could be done at the moment, so much was painfully obvious.

By paying in advance and sending out for some pyjamas Tadema dispelled any doubts which the clerk at the Red Lion might have entertained concerning him and, having bathed and shaved, he retired to bed, leaving instructions that he was to be called with a cup of tea and an evening paper as soon as that sheet should have arrived.

He lay awake for some time, fuming at Wentworth and worrying over his predicament, but his night’s journey had been long and uncomfortable and he dropped off into a fitful and uneasy sleep.

However, he was awake and pacing up and down the room in pyjamas and a bed quilt when the chambermaid arrived. The girl set down the tea, and would have spoken, but Tadema had pounced upon the folded paper and she went out again huffily.

For a moment Tadema’s eyes refused to focus, and he was conscious of a thrill of pure apprehension as he shook out the paper. The next moment, however, he was staring, his pale eyes starting out of his head.

Right across the front page and surmounting a large photograph of himself were the words:

“TRAGIC DEATH OF FAMOUS ACTOR. Dies in Stage Clothes. Early this morning a man was knocked down and terribly mutilated in the Gray’s Inn Road. From papers in his pocket the police discovered him to be the famous stage actor Sir Geoffrey Tadema. The actor manager had not been seen by any of his associates since the interval after the second act of ‘Lovers’ Meeting” at the Gresham Theatre last night.

“When Sir Geoffrey’s body was found it was clad in the clothes which he wore in the play. His friends can give no explanation for the tragedy.

“Mr. Henry Sharper, Sir Geoffrey’s valet, broke down at the mortuary when he identified the body, and has been taken home to relatives, suffering from shock.”

Tadema let the paper drop from his hand. His eyes were glazed and the expression upon his face was mainly pathetic.

“Well—I’m damned,” he said aloud, and added as a gleam ol intelligence returned to his blue eyes, “I am, too.”

“Tragic death”. Tadema sat on the edge of his bed in his new pyjamas and re-read the words until they became meaningless and afterwards horribly clear again. He was, of course, completely unaware of the existence, or rather the pre-existence, of Duds Wallace, that luckless seeker after sartorial correctness, who, clad in his new glory, had blundered blindly into a car when on his way to air his plumage.

But it was obvious that some such disaster must have occurred. Tadema read every word the paper had printed about himself and then, with disaster weighing numbingly upon him, he dressed carefully and went downstairs.

He collected the other papers and carried them off to his room. They had the same story, of course, but with a few added details.

There was only one mention of Chloe.
The Trumpeter
observed that Sir Geoffrey’s fiancee, Lady Chloe Staratt, was out of London.

“Thinking of some way of cashing in on the story,” thought Tadema grimly. “Or, more likely, trying to prevent the young lout from blethering his side of the affair.”

For the first time a faint smile passed over the actor’s lips. Chloe was frustrated all right: temporarily rendered speechless, it seemed. His enjoyment in this aspect of the affair was short-lived as his own position became painfully apparent. As far as publicity was concerned, he had certainly scored heavily. His name and prowess filled all three papers, but what of the future? There was an ancient jest concerning the young man who, on being promised a legacy if he got his name in the news, cut his throat to achieve it. The similarity of his own story made Tadema squirm. What could he do? What on earth could he do? How could he return without providing the greatest anticlimax of all time?

He toyed with the idea of simply walking back into his part and meeting the subsequent inquiry with a more or less plausible story. That would be a sensational course in all conscience and would serve his purpose very well unless Chloe eloped. And she would; he knew it instinctively. Chloe would elope and people would draw the inevitable and unfortunately true conclusions.

The only way to prevent her going off and marrying someone else immediately was for him to remain dead. If he remained dead, how could he ever resurrect himself? How could he ever explain why he had allowed some unknown man to be buried in his stead?

Thinking of burial, Tadema returned to the newspapers. “The funeral arrangements will be published later.” This was a dreadful side of the farce. In his mind’s eye he saw old Wentworth flying about in a panic, poor Sharper prostrate in the house of inquisitive relations, the company, the wretched author, the flowers, the solemn ceremony and the grief of the few people who were fond of him; Ma Biggs, his housekeeper and old Wally Bell, the comedian.

No, it was horrible. It was dreadful. It had got to stop. But what could he do?

He wandered out into the town. Some of the passers-by glanced at the stranger in their midst with the mild interest of country folk and Tadema might have been alarmed for the safety of his incognito had he cared about it.

Fortunately, or unfortunately, he was perfectly safe. The carefully taken studio portraits reproduced in the newspapers showed a man twenty years younger, with darker eyes and deeper and more interesting shadows than this pale, worried-looking, middle-aged man who hurried along so fast and yet, had they known it, so aimlessly. As far as the man in the street was concerned Sir Geoffrey Tadema was dead.

The queue outside the pit impeded his progress and finally pulled him up. He stood staring at the shabby old theatre for a moment with the first interest he had shown in externals since the advent of the evening papers.

The Theatre Royal was on its last legs, or at least its plaster pillars were crumbling. Tadema was shocked. A genteel shabbi-ness it had always possessed, besides its characteristic smell, but in the old days it had never looked like this. The meanest cinema in the meanest street had not this dreadful decayed poverty. To Tadema the Theatre Royal Saffronden looked like some depraved and leering old harridan clad in filthy finery, all the more depressing because he had known her in her better days.

The Chasberg Stock Company was playing there, he gathered from the bills. The piece that week was “Beggar’s Choice”. Tadema took a box.

He remembered the play as soon as the curtain rose. It was an ancient melodrama about a racehorse, an impoverished lord and the inevitable Lady Mary. He had played in it himself many times in his old rep days.

He almost enjoyed it. The contemplation of the past at least took his mind off the horror of the present. Seated well back among the crimson curtains, the pungent camphory smell tingling in his nostrils, he looked down at the old stage and remembered with a hint of sadness something he had long forgotten, the excitement of those early days.

His job had kept him busy then. Plays had followed so fast upon one another in those days that no one was ever word perfect. The underpaid stage managers were always unreliable. No one knew if the props would turn up in their right places, or even if the curtain would descend at the end of the act. It would be nerve-racking and terrible now, but in those days it had been rather fun.

Tadema, already extremely sorry for himself, nearly wept when he remembered how long ago it all was.

He had been watching the Lady Mary for some minutes before he recognised her. It was a trick of her voice which finally caught his attention, and made him lean forward in the box and peer more closely at her face. She was older, of course—far too old for the part. Tadema could not remember her name but her voice was familiar and she had a way of smiling that came back to him.

He could not see his programme and relied upon his memory. What was the woman’s name? Chrissie something, he was inclined to think, and they had travelled together. It must have been in the old rep days.

She had improved, he thought suddenly. That was it; in the old days she had been appalling. Appalling and rather sweet. His mind, anxious to escape from the world of reality outside the theatre, seized avidly on the problem within. Tadema closed his eyes and delved back into the past. The voices on the stage helped him considerably. He remembered whole sequences and there was one scene on the steps of a hotel just off the racecourse which returned so vividly to his mind that he sat up abruptly. That was it! Her name was Chrissie and they must have played this part together.

It wasn’t such a coincidence, if one thought of it. He had played in the provinces for fifteen years and there must have been a great many actresses who claimed to have played with Tadema. Some of them Sir Geoffrey could remember much more clearly.

This woman was only a vague memory. But he knew her. Her name was Chrissie something and she had been rather sweet. It had been very long ago, he decided; in his early days. He didn’t think there had been a ghost of an affair. If there had he would have remembered. He turned his attention to the stage. Whole scenes, he realised, were modern interpolations. Much of the bravura had been dropped. It was all very interesting.

When the lights of the first interval went up he looked at the programme. “Lady Mary… Miss Chrissie Dilling.” Chrissie Dilling; that was the name. How could a woman have gone through a lifetime of leading ladyship with a name like that?

He was debating whether to send his card round and had indeed half decided to when he remembered his predicament with a start and the whole dreadful business poured back into his mind. He did not go out of the theatre, however, but sat there till the curtain rose again. At least he was hidden and inspiration must surely come in time.

Fortunately for him the second act opened with a scene in an attic room which he remembered. It was a tragic parting in which the impoverished lord refused for his honour’s sake to accept the overtures of the infatuated Lady Mary. The words came back to him so clearly that he was irritated by the rather hopeless boy playing the part when his inflections and interpretations were unfamiliar.