Page:The Strand Magazine (Volume 5).djvu/244

 he knew that I knew, for we had understood one another in the old days.

I took it to him last of all,' he went on, wiping his damp lips with his hand. 'When I began hawking it about he was an unknown man; when his turn came he was here. He let me read it to him. Then he asked me to leave it with him for a week; and when I went back to him, he said what they had all said—that it would never act! But Morton Morrison said it nicely. And when he saw how it cut me up, into little bits, he got me to tell him all about everything; and then he persuaded me to burn the play, instead of ruining my life for it; and I burnt it in his dressing-room fire, but the ruin was too far gone to mend. I wrote that thing with my heart's blood—old man, you know I did! And none of them would think of it! My God! But Morrison was good about it—he's a good soul—and that's why you'll see me at every first night of his until the drink finishes its work.'

"I had not followed him quite to the end. One thing had amazed me too much.

You burnt your play,' I could only murmur, 'when it would have turned into such a novel! Surely you have some draft of it still?'

I burnt the lot when I got home,' Pharazyn replied; and by-and-by I shall join 'em and burn too!'

"I had nothing to answer to that, and was, besides, tenacious of my point. 'I don't think much of the kindness that makes one man persuade another to burn his work and throw up the sponge,' said I, with a good deal of indignation, for I did feel wroth with that fellow Morrison—a bread-and-butter drawing-room actor, whose very vogue used to irritate me.

Then what do you think of this?' asked Pharazyn, as he dipped a hand within his shabby coat, and cautiously unclenched it under my nose.

Why, it's a five-pound note!'

I know; but wasn't that kind, then?'

So Morrison gave you this!' I exclaimed. "Two or three persons had stopped to join us at the pit door, and Pharazyn hastily put the note back in his pocket. As he did so, his dreadfully shabby condition gave my heart a fresh cut.

Are you never going to spend that?' I asked in a whisper; and in a whisper he answered:—

Never! It is all my play has brought me—all. It was given me as a charity, but I took it as my earnings—my earnings for all the work and waiting, and blood and tears, that one thing cost me. Spend it? Not I! It will bury me as decently as I deserve."

"We could converse no more. And the presence of other people prevented me from giving him my overcoat, though I spoke of it into his ear, begging and imploring him to come away and take it while there was still time for him to slip back and get a seat in the front row. But he would not hear of it, and the way he refused reminded me of his old stubborn independence; all I got was a promise that he would have a bite with me after the performance. And so I left him in the frosty dusk, ill-clad and unkempt, with the new-lit lamp over the pit door shining down upon the haggard mask that had once been the eager, memorable face of my cleverest friend.

"I saw him next the moment I entered the theatre that evening, and I nodded my head to him, which he rebuked with the