"We must 'ave him, Bill; if I take him myself we must 'ave him!" cried Ben Jope, dancing with admiration. '"Tis no more than a mercy, neither, after the trouble he's been and laid up for hisself."
Into what precise degree of mental confusion Mr. Jope had worked himself the Major could never afterwards determine; though he soon had every opportunity to think it out at leisure.
For the moment, as a boatswain's whistle shrilled close behind his ear, he was merely bewildered. He did not even know that the mouth sounding it was Mr. Jope's. It ought to have sounded on board H.M.S. Poseidon.
As the crowd to right and left of him surged to its feet, he saw at intervals along the gallery, sailor after sailor leap up with drawn cutlass. He saw some forcing their way to the exits; and as the packed throng, swaying backwards, bore him to the giddy edge of the gallery rails, he saw the whole audience rise from their seats with white upturned faces.
"The Press!" called someone. Half a dozen, then twenty, then a hundred voices took up the cry:
"The Press! The Press!"
He turned. What had become of Mr. Jope?
What, indeed? Cutlass between teeth, Mr. Jope had heaved himself over the gallery rail, caught a pillar between his dangling feet, and slid down it to the Upper Circle; from the Upper Circle to the Dress Circle; from the Dress Circle to the Pit. A dozen seamen hurrahed and followed him. To the audience screaming, scattering before them, they paid no heed at all. Their eyes were on their leader, and in silence, breathing hard, each man's teeth clenched upon his cutlass, they hounded after him and across the Pit at his heels.
It may be that this vivid reproduction of his alleged exploit off Pernambuco for the moment held Mr. Orlando B. Sturge paralysed. At any rate, he stood by the footlights staring, with a face on which resentment faded into amaze, amaze into stupefaction.
It is improbable that he dreamed of any personal danger until the moment when Mr. Jope, leaping the orchestra and crashing, on his way, through an abandoned violoncello, landed across the footlights and clapped him on the shoulder.