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Updated: May 23, 2025
"Never knew him to be late before never!" exclaimed the business manager, impatiently pulling out his watch for the twentieth time. "Not in all my ten years' experience of him not once." "I suppose you've seen him this morning, Mr. Stafford?" inquired Jerramy. "He's in the town, of course?" "I suppose he's in the town," answered Mr. Stafford.
Jerramy, thirty years' stage-door keeper at the Theatre Royal, Norcaster, had come to regard each successive Monday morning as a time for the renewal of old acquaintance. For at any rate forty-six weeks of the fifty-two, theatrical companies came and went at Norcaster with unfailing regularity.
At a quarter past one of a certain Monday afternoon in the course of a sunny October, Jerramy leaned over the half-door of his sanctum in conversation with an anxious-eyed man who for the past ten minutes had hung about in the restless fashion peculiar to those who are waiting for somebody.
"We'll telephone to the theatre there, and ask them to step across and make inquiries. Come on! let's do it at once." He hurried inside again, and Stafford turned to Copplestone. "Better send your cab away and come inside until we get some news," he said. "Let Jerramy take your things into his sanctum he'll keep an eye on them till you want them I suppose you'll stop at the 'Angel' with Oliver.
From noon onwards of Mondays, when the newcomers began to arrive at the theatre for the customary one o'clock call for rehearsal, Jerramy was invariably employed in hearing that he didn't look a day older, and was as blooming as ever, and sure to last another thirty years, and his reception always culminated in a hearty handshake and genial greeting from the great man of the company, who, of course, after the fashion of magnates, always turned up at the end of the irregular procession, and was not seldom late for the fixture which he himself had made.
"I suppose he's at his old quarters the 'Angel. But I haven't seen him; neither had Rothwell we've both been too busy to call there. I expect he came on to the 'Angel' from Northborough yesterday." Jerramy opened the half-door, and going out to the end of the passage, looked up and down the street. "There's a taxi-cab coming round the corner now," he announced presently.
The company which presented itself for patronage in the first week of April in one year was almost certain to present itself again in the corresponding week of the next year. Sometimes new faces came with it, but as a rule the same old favourites showed themselves for a good many years in succession. And every actor and actress who came to Norcaster knew Jerramy.
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