I have an easy, gliding stage gait that is something between a "pace" and a "rack." It is full of the very poetry of motion.
I "racked" up to the heroine at the proper time and told her how I loved her and how it was tearing me all to pieces, and so forth. Just as I was coming to the grand flourish, however, I forgot a word, and while I was thinking that up, the remainder of the speech slowly drifted away to where I couldn't get at it.
To add to the general hilarity of the occasion the stage manager, who was furnishing at that moment some pale blue lightning and distant thunder, and who happened to be drunk, threw in a heavy snow storm that should have gone into another piece.
I stood there waiting and trying to think of my part about thirty years, I should think. Any way, the snow got knee deep and the heroine excused herself and went away to warm her feet. She told me to call her up by telephone when I could think of my piece.
I thought the audience would be mad and mob me, but it didn't. There seemed to be general good feeling and harmony all the way through. I told them that I could not call to mind the exact words of my part, but if those present would like to hear a little poem that had gone the rounds of the press a good deal and which I composed myself, entitled "The Burial of Sir John Moore," I would render it in my own choice and happy style.
It is not a humorous poem, but the audience seemed to think it was, for all the way through from the time the procession started out with Sir John till he was planted, everybody was tickled nearly to death.
Now I do not take the part of the leading lover any more. The awkward young man who carries dead bodies off the stage is good enough for me.