“Oh, yes, I think I could manage that much,” I said. “Though I’m not a drinking man, Marky, and never have been.”
“But I do not ask. Because, you see, Flint, you are brave, but you are not artist. Now me, I am both the two. I can act—name of a little good man, but I can act! You have seen me, in the dance—if I had not been noble, I had been the most celebrated actor in Europe.”
“That’s right; I’ll allow you can act,” I said.
“And see, if you were to do this thing, you would not do it as an artist; you would quite simply get drunk, and perhaps, in the strong man’s rage, you should kill some one, but you should not keep the head cool to destroy this evidence here. So I am drunk. In two minutes, I sacrifice my character. You shall see.”
I did see.
I do not think, while I still hold on to life, I shall ever forget the scene that took place in the bar of the Kilori goldfield, there, in the early sunrise, with the Papuan carriers coming in singing to their morning’s work, and the giant Gaura pigeons, in the bush outside, beginning to toll their golden bells. It was a quiet spot enough at six o’clock; at five minutes past it was pandemonium. The Marquis went outside to find a miner’s pick; came back with it, looked about him, spat deliberately on his hands, “to envulgarize himself,” as he explained, seized the pick, uttered a madman’s yell and went Berserk on the spot.
It was exactly like poking a stick into an ants’ nest. You find a quiet little hill of clay, with nothing stirring round about; you smash into it with your boot-heel or a bit of wattle, and instantly the earth is covered in every direction with a scrambling, scurrying—doubtless, if one could hear them, a screaming—crowd, all bent on knowing what has caused the disturbance.
That was what occurred at the Kilori goldfield store on that peaceful, beautiful southeast season morning, with the birds singing and the river gently flowing just outside and the sun coming up above the trees to look down on another day. The storekeeper jumped out of his bed and ran into the bar, pajama-clad; the cooky-boys scuttled in from the kitchen and peered round the corner of the doorway, wonder-eyed; the miners and the new-chums and the hangers-on of the camp all came running as fast as they could, some with blankets still hanging round their necks, to see what was going on. They were used to rows in the neighborhood of the store, but not to the sort of row that the Marquis kicked up—doing it, as he afterwards explained to me, “in artist.”
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