e dank darkness was full of the noise of wheels and the
flashing of lamps on the way to accord another season's welcome to
Jimmy Finnigan. "I might've learned this town well enough by now," he
reflected, "to know that a bally minstrel show's about the size of it."
Mr. Stanhope had not Mr. Finnigan's art of the large red lips and
the twanging banjo; his thought was scornful rather than envious. He
aspired, moreover, to be known as the pilot of stars, at least in the
incipience of their courses, to be taken seriously by association, since
nature had arranged that he never could be on his intrinsic merits. His
upper lip was too short for that, his yellow moustache too curly, while
the perpetual bullying he underwent at the hands of leading ladies gave
him an air of deference to everybody else which was sometimes painfully
misunderstood. The stars, it must be said regretfully, in connection
with so laudable an ambition, nearly always betrayed him, coming down
with an unmistakably meteoric descent, stony-broke in the uttermost
ends of the earth, with a strong inclination to bring the cause of that
misfortune before the Consular Courts. They seldom succeeded in this
design, since Llewellyn was usually able to prove to them in advance
that it would be fruitless and expensive, but the paths of Eastern
capitals were strewn with his compromises, in Japanese yen, Chinese
dollars, Indian rupees, for salaries which no amount of advertising
could wheedle into the box-office. When the climax came, Llewellyn
usually went to hospital and received the reporters of local papers in
pathetic audience there, which counteracted the effect of the astounding
statements the stars made in letters to the editor, and yet gave the
public clearly to understand that owing to its coldness and neglect a
number of ladies and gentlemen of very superior talents were subsisting
in their midst mainly upon brinjals and soda-water. "I'm in hospital,"
Mr. Stanhope would say to the reporters, "and I'm d---- glad of it,"--he
always insisted on the oath going in, it appealed so sympathetically to
the domiciled Englishman grown cold to superiority,--"for, upon my soul,
I don't know where I'd turn for a crust if I weren't." In the end the
talented ladies and gentlemen usually went home by an inexpensive
line as the voluntary arrangement of a public to whom plain soda was a
ludicrous hardship, and native vegetables an abomination at any price.
Then Llewellyn and Rosa N