Death and the Dancing Footman Read Online Free PDF

beautifully made-up, her mouth was large and scarlet, and her skin flawless. She was rather tall, and moved in a leisurely fashion, looking gravely about her. She was followed by William Compline.
    In William, Mandrake saw what he had hoped to see — the commonplace faintly touched by a hint of something that was disturbing. He was in uniform and looked perfectly tidy but not quite smart. He was fair and should have been good-looking, but the lines of his features were blunted and missed distinction, He was like an unsuccessful drawing of a fine subject. There was an air of uneasiness about him and he had not been long in the room before Mandrake saw that whenever he turned to look at his fiancée, which was very often, he first darted a glance at his mother, who never returned it. Mrs. Compline talked easily and with the air of an old friend to Jonathan, who continually drew the others into their conversation. Jonathan was in grand form. “A nice start,” thought Mandrake, “with plenty in reserve.” And he turned to Miss Wynne with the uneasy feeling that she had said something directly to him.
    “… I didn’t in the least understand it, of course,” Miss Wynne was saying, “but it completely unnerved me and that’s always rather fun.”
    “Ah,” thought Mandrake, “one of my plays.”
    “Of course,” Miss Wynne continued, “I don’t know if you were thinking, when you wrote it, what I was thinking when I saw it; but if you were, I’m surprised you got past the Lord Chamberlain.”
    “The Lord Chamberlain,” said Mandrake, “is afraid of me and for a similar reason. He doesn’t know whether it’s my dirty mind or his, so he says nothing.”
    “Ah,” cried Jonathan, “is Miss Wynne a devotee, Aubrey?”
    “A devotee of what?” asked Mrs. Compline in her exhausted voice.
    “Of Aubrey’s plays. The Unicorn is to reopen with Aubrey’s new play in March, Sandra, if all goes well. You must come to the first night. It’s called ‘Bad Black-out’ and is enormously exciting.”
    “A war play?” asked Mrs. Compline. It was a question that for some reason infuriated Mandrake, but he answered with alarming politeness that it was not a war play but an experiment in two-dimensional formulism. Mrs. Compline looked at him blankly and turned to Jonathan.
    “What does that mean?” asked William. He stared at Mandrake with an expression of offended incredulity. “Two-dimensional? That means flat, doesn’t it?”
    Mandrake heard Miss Wynne give an impatient sigh and guessed at a certain persistency in William.
    “Does it mean that the characters will be sort of unphotographic?” she asked.
    “Exactly.”
    “Yes,” said William heavily, “but
two-dimensional
. I don’t quite see—”
    Mandrake felt a terrible apprehension of boredom but Jonathan cut in neatly with an amusing account of his own apprenticeship as an audience to modern drama, and William listened with his mouth not quite closed and an anxious expression in his eyes. When the others laughed at Jonathan’s facetiæ, William looked baffled. Mandrake could see him forming with his lips the offending syllables “two-dimensional.”
    “I suppose,” he said suddenly, “it’s not what you say but the way you say it that you think matters. Do your plays have plots?”
    “They have themes.”
    “What’s the difference?”
    “My darling old Bill,” said Miss Wynne, “you mustn’t browbeat famous authors.”
    William turned to her and his smile made him almost handsome. “Mustn’t you?” he said. “But if you do a thing, you like talking about it. I like talking about the things I do. I mean the things I did before there was a war.”
    It suddenly occurred to Mandrake that he did not know what William’s occupation was. “What do you do?” he asked.
    “Well,” said William, astonishingly, “I paint pictures.”
    Mrs. Compline marched firmly into the conversation. “William,” she said, “has Penfelton to look after in