ruffian,
pouring forth great quantities of immediately saleable stuff, but
altogether declining to lay up for yourself treasures in heaven. It
may be that you cannot afford to do otherwise. Therefore I am quite
ready to make a deal with you.

A full length play should contain about 18,000 words (mine
frequently contain two or three times that number). I do not know
what your price per thousand is. I used to be considered grossly
extortionate by Massingham and others for insisting on L3. 18,000
words at L3 per thousand is L54. I need make no extra allowance for
the republication in book form, because even if the play aborted as
far as the theatre is concerned, you could make a book of it all the
same. Let us assume that your work is worth twice as much as mine;
this would make L108. I have had two shockingly bad years of it
pecuniarily speaking, and am therefore in that phase of extravagance
which straitened means have always produced in me. Knock off 8% as a
sort of agent's commission to me for starting you on the job and
finding you a theme. This leaves L100. I will pay you L100 down on
your contracting to supply me within three months with a mechanically
possible, i.e., stageable drama dealing with the experiences of St.
Augustine after re-visiting England. The literary copyright to be
yours, except that you are not to prevent me making as many copies as
I may require for stage use. The stage right to be mine; but you are
to have the right to buy it back from me for L250 whenever you like.*
The play, if performed, to be announced as your work and not as a
collaboration. All rights which I may have in the scenario to go with
the stage right and literary copyright as prescribed as far as you
may make use of it. What do you say? There is a lot of spending in
L100.

[* I could not very well offer him L100 as a present. G.B.S.]

One condition more. If it should prove impossible to achieve a
performance otherwise than through the Stage Society (which does not
pay anything), a resort to that body is not to be deemed a breach of
the spirit of our agreement.

Do you think it would be possible to make Belloc write a comedy? If
he could only be induced to believe in some sort of God instead of in
that wretched little conspiracy against religion which the pious
Romans have locked up in the Vatican, one could get some d