“And they did all that to me, too,” said Rosalind Hale wryly. “I was practically Sarah Bernhardt when they’d finished…But I told you just how they did it. Why do you have to let yourself in for the same mess that I got into?”
“The easiest way to rob a bank is from the inside,” said the Saint cryptically. “I suppose you noticed that they really have got a play?”
“Yes. I read part of it—the same as you did.”
“Did you like it?”
She made a little grimace.
“You’ve got a right to laugh at me. I suppose that ought to have been warning enough, but Urlaub was so keen about it, and Quarterstone had already made me think he was a great producer, so I couldn’t say that I thought it was awful. And then I wondered if it was just because I didn’t know enough about plays.”
“I don’t know much about plays myself,” said the Saint. “But the fact remains that Comrade Urlaub has got a complete play, with three acts and everything, God-awful though it is. I took it away with me to read it over and the more I look at it the more I’m thinking that something might be done with it.”
Rosalind was aghast.
“You don’t mean to say you’d really put your money into producing it?”
“Stranger things have happened,” said the Saint thoughtfully. “How bad can a play be before it becomes good? And how much sense of humour is there in the movie business? Haven’t you seen those reprints of old two-reelers that they show sometimes for a joke, and haven’t you heard the audience laughing itself sick…? Listen. I only wish I knew who wrote Love—the Redeemer. I’ve got an idea…”
Mr Homer Quarterstone could have answered his question for him, for the truth was that the author of Love—the Redeemer resided under the artistic black homburg of Mr Homer Quarterstone. It was a matter of considerable grief to Mr Quarterstone that no genuine producer had ever been induced to see eye to eye with him on the subject of the superlative merits of that amorous masterpiece, so that after he had grown weary of collecting rejections, Mr Quarterstone had been reduced to the practical expedient of using his magnum opus as one of the props in the more profitable but by no means less artistic drama from which he and Mr Urlaub derived their precarious incomes, but his loyalty to the child of his brain had never been shaken.
It was therefore with a strange squirmy sensation in the pit of his stomach that Mr Quarterstone sat in his office a few mornings later and gazed at a card in the bottom left-hand corner of which were the magic words, “Paragon Pictures, Inc., Hollywood, Calif.” A feeling of fate was about him, as if he had been unexpectedly reminded of a still-cherished childhood dream.
“Show her in,” he said with husky magnificence.
The order was hardly necessary, for she came in at once, shepherded by a beaming Waldemar Urlaub.
“Just thought I’d give you a surprise. Homer,” he explained boisterously. “Did your heart jump when you saw that card? Well, so did mine. Still, it’s real. I fixed it all up. Sold her the play. ‘You can’t go wrong,’ I said, ‘with one of the greatest dramas ever written.’”
Mrs Wohlbreit turned her back on him coldly and inspected Mr Quarterstone. She looked nothing like the average man’s conception of a female from Hollywood, being gaunt and masculine with a sallow lined face and gold-rimmed glasses and mousey hair plastered back above her ears, but Mr Quarterstone had at least enough experience to know that women were used in Hollywood in executive positions which did not call for the decorative qualities of more publicised employees.
She said in her cold masculine voice, “Is this your agent?”
Mr Quarterstone swallowed.
“Ah—”
“Part owner,” said Mr Urlaub eagerly. “That’s right, isn’t it, Homer? You know our agreement—fifty-fifty in everything. Eh? Well, I’ve been working on this deal—”
“I asked you,” said Mrs Wohlbreit penetratingly, “because I understand that you’re the owner of this play we’re interested in. There are so many chisellers in this business that we make it our policy to approach the author first direct—if he wants to take in any ten-percenters afterwards, that’s his affair. A Mr Tombs brought me the play first, and told me he had an interest in it. I found out that he got it from Mr Urlaub, so I went to him. Mr Urlaub told me that you were the original author. Now, who am I to talk business with?”
Mr Quarterstone saw his partner’s mouth opening for another contribution.
“With…with us,” he said weakly.
It was not what he might have said if he had had time to think, but he was too excited to be particular.
“Very well,” said Mrs Wohlbreit. “We’ve read this play, Love—the Redeemer, and we think it would make a grand picture. If you haven’t done anything yet about the movie rights…”
Mr Quarterstone drew himself up. He felt as if he was in a daze from which he might be rudely awakened at any moment, but it was a beautiful daze. His heart was thumping, but his brain was calm and clear. It was, after all, only the moment with which he had always known that his genius must ultimately be rewarded.
“Ah…yes,” he said with resonant calm. “The movie rights are, for the moment, open to…ah…negotiation. Naturally, with a drama of such quality, dealing as it does with a problem so close to the lives of every member of the thinking public, and appealing to the deepest emotions and beliefs of every intelligent man and woman—”
“We thought it would make an excellent farce,” said Mrs Wohlbreit blandly. “It’s just the thing we’ve been looking for, for a long time.” But before the stricken Mr Quarterstone could protest, she had added consolingly, “We could afford to give you six thousand pounds for the rights.”
“Ah…quite,” said Mr Quarterstone bravely.
By the time that Mrs Wohlbreit had departed, after making an appointment for the contract to be signed and the check paid over at the Paragon offices the following afternoon, his wound had healed sufficiently to let him take Mr Urlaub in his arms, as soon as the door closed, and embrace him fondly in an impromptu rumba.
“Didn’t I always tell you that play was a knockout?” he crowed. “It’s taken ’em years to see it, but they had to wake up in the end. Six thousand pounds! Why, with that money I can—” He sensed a certain stiffness in his dancing partner and hastily corrected himself: “I mean, we…we can…”
“Nuts,” said Mr Urlaub coarsely. He disengaged himself and straightened the creases out of his natty suit. “What you’ve got to do now is sit down and figure out a way to crowbar that guy Tombs out of this.”
Mr Quarterstone stopped dancing suddenly and his jaw dropped.
“Tombs?”
“Yeah! He wasn’t so dumb. He had the sense to see that that play of yours was the funniest thing ever written. When we were talking about it in here he must have thought we thought it was funny, too.”
Mr Quarterstone was appalled as the idea of duplicity struck him.
“Waldemar—d’you think he was trying to—”
“No. I pumped the old battle-axe on the way here. He told her he only had a part interest, but he wanted to do something for the firm and give us a surprise—he thought he could play the lead in the picture, too.”
“Has she told him—”
“Not yet. You heard what she said. She gets in touch with the author first. But we got to get him before he gets in touch with her. Don’t you remember those contracts we signed yesterday? Fifty per cent of the movie rights for him!”
Mr Quarterstone sank feebly on to the desk.
“Three thousand pounds!” he groaned. Then he brightened tentatively. “But it’s all right, Waldemar. He agreed to put three thousand pounds into producing the play, so we just call it quits and we don’t have to give him anything.”
“You great fat lame-brained slob,” yelped Mr Urlaub affectionately. “Quits! Like hell it’s quits! D’you think I’m not going to put that play on, after this? It took that old battle-axe to see it, but she’s right. They’l
l be rolling in the aisles!”
He struck a Quarterstoneish attitude.
“‘I brought you a rose,’” he uttered tremulously, “‘but you turned it into a nest of vipers in my bosom. They have stabbed my heart!’ My God! It’s a natural! I’m going to put it on in the West End whatever we have to do to raise the dough—but we aren’t going to cut that mug Tombs in on it.”
Mr Quarterstone winced.
“It’s all signed up legal,” he said dolefully. “We’ll have to spend our own dough and buy him out.”
“Get your hat,” said Mr Urlaub shortly. “We’ll cook up a story on the way.”
When Rosalind Hale walked into the Saint’s apartment at the Cornwall House that afternoon, Simon Templar was counting crisp new twenty-pound notes into neat piles.
“What have you been doing?” she said. “Burgling a bank?”
The Saint grinned.
“The geetus came out of a bank, anyway,” he murmured. “But Comrades Quarterstone and Urlaub provided the cheques. I just went out and cashed them.”
“You mean they bought you out?”
“After a certain amount of haggling and squealing—yes. Apparently Aaron Niementhal changed his mind about backing the show, and Urlaub didn’t want to offend him on account of Aaron offered to cut him in on another and bigger and better proposition at the same time, so they gave me two thousand quid to tear up the contracts, and the idea is that I ought to play the lead in Niementhal’s bigger and better show.”
She pulled off her hat and collapsed into a chair. She was no longer gaunt and masculine and forbidding, for she had changed out of a badly fitting tweed suit and removed her sallow make-up and thrown away the gold-rimmed glasses and fluffed out her hair again so that it curled in its usual soft brown waves around her face, so that her last resemblance to anyone by the name of Wohlbreit was gone.
“Two thousand pounds,” she said limply. “It doesn’t seem possible. But it’s real. I can see it.”
“You can touch it, if you like,” said the Saint. “Here.” He pushed one of the stacks over the table towards her. “Three hundred that you paid Quarterstone for tuition.” He pushed another. “Eight hundred that you put into the play.” He drew a small sheaf towards himself. “Two hundred that I paid for my lessons. Leaving seven hundred drops of gravy to be split two ways.”
He straightened the remaining pile, cut it in two, and slid half of it on to join the share that was accumulating in front of her.
She stared at the money helplessly for a second or two, reached out, and touched it with the tips of her fingers, and then suddenly she came round the table and flung herself into his arms. Her cheek was wet where it touched his face.
“I don’t know how to say it,” she said shakily. “But you know what I mean.”
“There’s only one thing bothering me,” said the Saint some time later, “and that’s whether you’re really entitled to take back those tuition fees. After all, Homer made you a good enough actress to fool himself. Maybe he was entitled to a percentage, in spite of everything.”
His doubts, however, were set at rest several months afterwards, when he had travelled a long way from London and many other things had happened, when one day an advertisement in a London paper caught his eye:
14th Week!
Sold out 3 months ahead!
The Farce Hit of the Season:
LOVE—THE REDEEMER
by Homer Quarterstone
IMPERIAL THEATRE
A Waldemar Urlaub Production
Simon Templar was not often at a loss for words, but on this occasion he was tongue-tied for a long time. And then, at last, he lay back and laughed helplessly.
“Oh, well,” he said. “I guess they earned it.”
THE CHARITABLE COUNTESS
Simon Templar’s mail, like that of any other celebrity, was a thing of infinite variety. Perhaps it was even more so than that of most celebrities, for actors and authors and the other usual recipients of fan mail are of necessity a slightly smaller target for the busy letter-writer than a man who has been publicised at frequent intervals as a twentieth-century Robin Hood, to the despair and fury of the police officials at whose expense the publicity has been achieved. Of those correspondents who approached him under his better-known nom de guerre of “The Saint,” about half were made up of people who thought that the nickname should be taken literally, and half of people who suspected that it stood for the exact opposite.
There were, of course, the collectors of autographs and signed photos. There were the hero-worshipping schoolboys whose ideas of a future profession would have shocked their fathers, and the romantic schoolgirls whose ideals of a future husband would have made their mothers swoon. There were also romantic maidens who were not so young, who supplied personal data of sometimes startling candour, and whose propositions were correspondingly more concrete. And then there were the optimists who thought that the Saint would like to finance a South American revolution, a hunt for buried treasure on the Spanish Main, a new night club, or an invention for an auxiliary automatic lighter to light automatic lighters with. There were the plodding sportsmen who could find a job in some remote town, thereby saving their wives and children from imminent starvation, if only the Saint would lend them the fare. There were the old ladies who thought that the Saint might be able to trace their missing Pomeranians, and the old gentlemen who thought that he might be able to exterminate the damned Socialists. There were crooks and cranks, fatheads and fanatics, beggars, liars, romancers, idiots, thieves, rich men, poor men, the earnest, the flippant, the gay, the lonely, the time-wasters, and the genuine tragedies, all that strange and variegated section of humanity that writes letters to total strangers, and then sometimes the letters were not from one stranger to another, but were no less significant, like a letter that came one morning from a man named Marty O’Connor.
I should have written you before but I didn’t want you to think I was asking for a handout. I stuck at that stable in Ireland—we were doing fine. I thought we were all set but the guy was betting on the horses. I didn’t know he was such a mug, so the next thing is he’s bust, the stable is sold up, and I’m out of a job. I could not get nothing else there, but I hear the heat is off in London now so me and Cora come back, I got a job as chaufer and hold that three weeks till the dame hears I got a police record, she won’t believe I’m going strait now. I got thrown out and haven’t found nothing since, but Cora does odd jobs and I may get a job any day. When I do you got to come see us again, we never forgot what you done for us and would do the same for you anytime if we swing for it…
That was a reminder of two people whom he had helped because he liked them and because he thought they were worth helping, in one of those adventures that made all his lawlessness seem worthwhile to him, whatever the moralists might say. Marty O’Connor, who put off writing to his friend for fear of being suspected of begging, was a very different character from many others who wrote with no such scruples and with less excuse—such as the Countess Jannowicz, whose letter came in the same mail.
The smile which Simon had had for Marty’s letter turned cynical as he read it. On the face of it, it was a very genteel and dignified epistle, tastefully engraved under an embossed coronet, and printed on expensive handmade paper. The Countess Jannowicz, it said, requested the pleasure of Mr Simon Templar’s company at a dinner and dance to be held at the Dorchester on the twentieth of that month, in aid of the National League for the Care of Incurables, RSVP.
That in itself would have been harmless enough, but the catch came in very small copperplate at the foot of the invitation, in the shape of the words “Tickets Five Guineas”—and in the accompanying printed pamphlet describing the virtues of the League and its urgent need of funds.
Simon had heard from her before, as had many other people in London, for she was a busy woman. Born as Maggie Oaks in Bermondsey, resplendent later as Margaretta Olivera in a place of honour in the nuder tableaux
of the Follies, she had furred her nest with a notable collection of skins, both human and animal, up to the time when she met and married Count Jannowicz, a Polish boulevardier of great age and reputedly fabulous riches. Disdaining such small stuff as alimony, she had lived with him faithfully and patiently until the day of his death, which in defiance of all expectations he had postponed for an unconscionable time through more and more astounding stages of senility, only to discover after the funeral that he had been living for all that time on an annuity which automatically ceased its payments forthwith, so that after nineteen years of awful fidelity his widowed Countess found herself the proud inheritor of a few more furs, a certain amount of jewellery, a derelict castle already mortgaged for more than its value, and some seventeen kopeks in hard cash.
Since she was then forty-four, and her outlines had lost the voluptuousness which had once made them such an asset to the more artistic moments of the Follies, many another woman night have retired to the companionable obscurity of her fellow unfortunates in some small Riviera pension. Not so Maggie Oaks, who had the stern marrow of Bermondsey in her bones. At least she had the additional intangible asset of a genuine title, and during her spouse’s doggedly declining years she had whiled away the time consolidating the social position which her marriage had given her so that after some sober consideration which it would have educated a bishop to hear, she was able to work out a fairly satisfactory solution to her financial problems.
Unlike Mr Elliot Vascoe, of whom we have heard before, who used charity to promote his social ambitions, she used her social position to promote charities. What the charities were did not trouble her much, as long as they paid her the twenty-five per cent, of the proceeds which was her standard fee: she had been known to sponsor, in the same day, a luncheon in aid of the Women’s Society for the Prosecution of Immorality, and a ball in aid of the Free Hospital for Unmarried Mothers. As a means of livelihood, it had been a triumphant inspiration. Social climbers fought to serve, expensively, on her committees; lesser snobs scrambled to attend her functions to get their names in the papers in such distinguished company-charitable enterprises, struggling against depressions, were only too glad to pass over some of the labour of extracting contributions from the public to such a successful organiser, and the Countess Jannowicz, nee Maggie Oaks, lived in great comfort on Park Lane and maintained a chauffeur-driven Daimler out of her twenty-five per cents, eked out by other percentages which various restaurants and hotels were only too glad to pay her for bringing them the business.
The Happy Highwayman (The Saint Series) Page 14