The Magic Christian Read Online Free PDF Page B

searching look before continuing:
    “. . . but it didn’t work, sir! It did not work . . . and I’ll tell you why: it was a crackpot scheme. A crackpot scheme, and rocks on the green! It cost Frank his licence, his health, and in this case perhaps his very life.”
    Grand paused for effect and crossed to the desk where he took up a sheaf of onionskin papers and threshed them about before the manager. Each sheet was black with figures.
    “According to my figures,” he said tersely, “this house will fold in nine months’ time unless there is, at minimum, an eight percent climb in ‘p.a.’s’—paid admissions.” Here he frowned darkly, let it pass, forced a smile, and then flapped his arms a time or two, as he resumed speaking, in a much lighter tone now:
    “Of course there are a number of . . . of possibilities for us here . . . I have certain plans . . . oh granted they’re tentative, under wrap, irons in the fire, if you like—but I can tell you this: I am retaining you and your staff. We are not ploughing the green under. Do you follow? Right. Now I have arranged for this increase in your salaries: ten percent. I won’t say it is a substantial increase; I say simply: ten percent . . . which means, of course, that all . . . all these figures”—he waved the sheaf of papers in a gesture of hopelessness and then dropped them into the wastebasket—“will have to be revised! More time lost before we know where we stand! Yet that can’t be helped. It is a move—and I say it is a move . . . in the right direction!”
    He spoke to the manager for an hour, thinking aloud, getting the feel of things, keeping his hand in, and so on. Then he dismissed him for three months’ paid vacation.
    Grand’s theatre was one of the city’s largest and had first-run rights on the most publicized films. In the manager’s absence, things proceeded normally for a while; until one night when the house was packed for the opening of the smart new musical, Main Street, U.S.A.
    First there was an annoying half-hour delay while extra camp-stool seats were sold and set up in the aisles; then, when the house lights finally dimmed into blackness, and the audience settled back to enjoy the musical, Grand gave them something they weren’t expecting: a cheap foreign film.
    The moment the film began, people started leaving. In the darkness, however, with seats two-abreast choking the aisles, most of them were forced back. So the film rolled on; and while the minutes gathered into quarter-hours, and each quarter-hour cut cripplingly deep into the evening, Grand, locked in the projection room high above, stumbled from wall to wall, choking with laughter.
    After forty-five minutes, the film was taken off and it was announced over the public-address system, and at a volume strength never before used anywhere, that a mistake had been made, that this was not the new musical.
    Shouts of “And how!” came from the crowd, and “I’ll say it’s not!” and “You’re telling me! God!”
    Then after another delay for rewinding, the cheap foreign film was put on again, upside down.
    By ten thirty the house was seething towards angry panic, and Grand gave the order to refund the money of everyone who wished to pass by the box office. At eleven o’clock there was a line outside the theatre two blocks long.
    From his office above, Grand kept delaying the cashier’s work by phoning every few minutes to ask: “How’s it going?” or “What’s up?”
    The next day there was a notice on the central bulletin board:
    “Rocks on the green! All hands alert!”
    It also announced another fat pay-hike.
    Into certain films such as Mrs. Miniver, Grand made eccentric inserts.
    In one scene in Mrs. Miniver, Walter Pidgeon was sitting at evening in his fire-lit study and writing in his journal. He had just that afternoon made the acquaintance of Mrs. Miniver and was no doubt thinking about her now as he paused reflectively and looked towards the open