Read Mr. Campion's Lucky Day & Other Stories for Free Online

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