Chapter II (3)

“They’ll laugh all right without that,” he said, looking nasty. “You’d make a cow laugh in those things.” I had on an old fancy-dress ball costume representing something out of Shakespeare; and I know I looked jolly well, because Warne said so himself, but this vulgarity of Greensmith’s set me thinking. I am the most soft-hearted brute really, and somehow the spectacle of Greensmith in evening dress, with the prompt-copy of his drivel in his hand, with a red silk handkerchief sticking out of his shirt-front, green clocks to his little socks, a bunch of violets in his buttonhole, and diamonds stuck on him wherever the same could be placed without absolute absurdity, made my heart bleed. I wept inwardly--not for him, but for the sweet, innocent woman he was slowly luring into his toils. Pity is akin to love, and now I actually found myself head over ears again! Millicent happened to be a very pretty girl, beautifully English, with sweet eyes and a very poetical way of walking. Besides, there was the background of romance. At any rate I must propose once more, though somehow I felt it was too late. Then that blighted Greensmith gave me the very idea I required. He said:

“Well, thank goodness, the best thing in your part is the letter you’re supposed to send proposing marriage. You can’t ruin that because it’s all typewritten. Remember you gave it to the girl in the first scene. Don’t go on, for mercy’s sake, and then find you’ve forgotten the thing.”

“It’s here,” I said, showing him the letter tied up with a bit of red silk. Then an inspiration of the sort that only comes once in a lifetime and sometimes never at all, rolled into my mind. I cleared off into the library, which was approached from the stage in the hall. I then opened the letter, put P.T.O. at the bottom of Greensmith’s idiotic stuff, and wrote on the blank sheet which followed it. What I said is no business of yours or any other man’s. Suffice it that I touched lightly on the past, hinted that, in my opinion, Millicent was running frightful risks, explained that I loved her too well to see her throw herself away on a foreign body whose name would readily occur to her, and finally explained that my views on matrimony were changed, and that if she thought it was good enough--well, you know the sort of letter. If you haven’t written one, you’ve said the same thing by word of mouth; or you will; or you ought to. The reason for my haste was that I had already seen a proposal on Greensmith’s lips every time he caught sight of Miss Warne. I also knew that he would have opportunities, denied to me that night, of seeing her at the wings and elsewhere. I hoped to get one word after the first scene was over, however.

Millicent looked grand. Every man in the room was in love with her. Greensmith ate her with his eyes, and forgot all about prompting until I stuck almost immediately after my first appearance. Then he allowed himself to swear at me in a voice which could be heard to the back of the hall; and I told him out loud that it would be all the same a hundred years hence; which got the best laugh in the piece.

I gave the letter to Millicent and went off, while she read it in face of the audience. Then she turned over and read my own little piece to herself.

“There is a postscript,” she remarked, but did not turn a hair or show anything excepting the deep sorrow she was supposed to feel at having to reject me. Millicent did this part so jolly well that I felt uncomfortable. She avoided me like poison after the first scene, but kept it up hot with Greensmith; and once I half thought she might have told him the truth. That decided me to destroy Greensmith if my own affair fell through, and I went on in the next scene feeling about as little like acting as you can possibly imagine. It was the aching heart and the green-eyed monster, and all that, hidden beneath the jester’s motley. Then I remembered that in the course of this scene she had to send me a letter, and for the first time in my life I felt what it is to have nerves. Could she? Would she? Was there any chance? I felt that there was not. Why, the brilliant and exquisite Millicent might have captivated the noblest in the land that night.

I did not act well. I know it, and admit it frankly. Everything was in a haze until I sat alone on the stage. Millicent had taken the letter from her pocket, regarded me with a look of divine pity, dropped the communication at my elbow, and departed. I just saw Greensmith through a sort of mist. He was looking venomous, I thought. One eye dashed malignant hatred, the other scintillated triumph.

I heard him say, “Read it, you fool!” Then I opened the letter and I shook. It wasn’t acting, though it must have looked jolly real and pathetic, don’t you know, from the front.

Well, I have said a thousand times since that I was very sorry. I have apologised to everybody concerned, even Greensmith. These things will happen. I forgot all about his precious charade in the excitement of opening the letter; and when I saw at the bottom of a lot of typewritten rot the three letters P.T.O., just as I had set them down myself, I forgot everything in the world excepting Millicent. I am a man who can usually keep his nerves in a crisis; but I didn’t then. I just sat down in a chair and read to myself:

“_Yes! I think it is quite good enough._

“_Your loving Milly._”

And then I laughed out loud, and banged my feet on the ground, and thumped the table, and cheered, and said “Holy Mouse! She thinks it’s good enough! God bless her!” Mind you, I should have done just the same if the King and all the Royal Family had been in the audience. I forgot there was an audience. I forgot my part, my costume, my name--everything. As for Greensmith, he might never have lived. The audience applauded like anything, _because they’d seen Millicent write the charade letter and knew she’d chucked me_. They thought it was so jolly natural for a girl to change her mind like that and send another letter. But Greensmith here made it clear that he lived.

He was boiling all the starch out of his linen with rage, and trying to destroy me with his beady eye.

“Read the letter, you miserable, long-legged fool!” he hissed under his breath.

“I have,” I answered, and the audience roared.

“You have not!” he said, coming round the wing in his excitement. “She’s refused you! Now you’ve ruined everything, you stupid ass!”

This before everybody; and still I couldn’t grasp the situation, and turned on Greensmith. “Run away, run away, my little man,” I said, with calm superiority. “Refuses me! It’s here in black and white. She’s _accepted_ me, and I’m the happiest Johnny alive.”

He flung down the book, gnashed his teeth, and forgot himself so far as to try and strike me in the face. I was too happy to hurt him. I just took him by the back of his neck somewhere, and called him a silly little cuckoo, and slapped him and let him go. Of course the charade ended there. It couldn’t proceed because Millicent had utterly dislocated the plot by accepting me. A thing like that in the middle of a drama can’t be repaired. So they dropped the curtain--and only missed Greensmith himself by a hair. And the best judges always say it was the finest amateur performance that they ever saw in their lives. General Warne sat in the billiard-room and cried with laughter all the next day; and I went about saying I was awfully sorry half the night. Everybody in the house frankly forgave me, too, excepting only Greensmith.

He left the next morning and sent me a serious challenge to fight a duel soon afterwards; which I’ve got framed in oak and gold to this day.

THE MATE OF THE “BUNCH O’ KEYS”

In fifteen hundred and eighty-eight--
Name a braver year if you can--
’Twas a caravel, as the legends tell,
That passed from the sight of man.

Southward away, like an ocean bird,
On the breath of a northern blast,
Sailed the _Bunch o’ Keys_; and following seas
Laughed loud as they thundered past.

She struggled from moon to moon again,
While a hurricane round her leapt;
Till her master and crew aweary grew,
And murmured their Maker slept.

Then many an angry and fearful eye
Bent aglow on the vessel’s mate,
Where he moved in dread, with a hanging head
And a mien disconsolate.

This pitiful, haunted, haggard wretch
Was as friendless as man may be;
And upon his face lay the ugly trace
Of a secret agony.

When day departed they heard his cry
To the God of all power and might,
And his hollow groan, as he moved alone,
At the darkest hour of night.

He told his crime to the Evening Star
And a wandering wild sea-bird,
“They will bear my tale on the angry gale,”
He whispered when no man heard.

“They will cry my deed to the icy wind,
And the wind to the white-capped wave;
They will tell the sun the thing I have done
Far under his western grave.

“I slew a friend in his hour secure,
While a woman pointed the way;
And I saw the flood of his good heart’s blood
Leap red as the Judgment Day!”

That terrible deed they knew alone--
God and the Devil and the Dead--
Then a morning came, upon wings of flame,
And deluged the world with red.

“O, who shall tell?” cried the sailor-men,
“What this vision of woe can mean,
Filling sea and air with a gory glare
And the lurid clouds between?

“Red, as at rising or going down,
Reels the sun at the hour of noon,
And the stars by night are like sparks of light
From the bale-fire of the moon.

“Red are the hungry and steel-eyed sharks,
Where they swim in these crimson seas,
And horribly red, to her top-mast head,
Is the luckless _Bunch o’ Keys_.

“Now mad we grow, as a beast grows mad
When his eyes the red shambles see,
And it is not well that we suffer hell
For another’s villainy.”

Thus did they threaten, those sailor-men;
But the master cried, “God of grace!”
And pointed away to the dying day,
Where the sun sank down apace.

And there, from out circles of liquid flame,
Spread abroad on the ocean’s breast,
Ascended a Hand, like the sight of land,
From under the shining west.

Crooked, gigantic, and lean and gaunt,
And ebon, and naked and vast,
It hid the skies from the terrified eyes
Of those who beheld aghast.

Sombre and grim as a blind man’s night,
It arose like a mountain peak;
Each finger-bone was a pillar of stone,
Each claw was a dragon’s beak.

All the black malice of deepest hell
Did the palm of the monster show,
With passions sore, full many more
Than human natures know.

Its pulsing wrist made the waters leap,
Where it moved through that blood-red sea;
While the caravel, like a rocking shell,
Awaited her destiny.

As a herd of frightened flying sheep
Ran the sailors, with cry and groan;
But their cursed mate met the fall of Fate
Where he stood, on the poop alone.

From the inky mass of that awful Hand
Did the thumb and finger bend,
And, as crawling ant from the leaf of plant,
They plucked him unto his end.

They plucked him aloft and they held him high,
Then, under the sea of gore,
To his torment dire of eternal fire
He vanished for evermore.

* * * * *

A northern wind, like the breath of God,
Leapt forth from the sky to the sea;
And the hideous stain off the rolling main
Was lifted right speedily.

A clear sweet night of diamond stars,
And a crew on their bended knees,
For the precious boon of a silver moon
That shone upon silver seas.

THE TRANSMIGRATIONS OF TARVER