I chucked up my part four times during the first rehearsal; I chucked it up thirteen times in all before the night. Greensmith was entirely responsible for the chucking; Millicent’s marvellous tact so worked upon me that, against my better judgment, I resumed the character. He said once:
“If you’ll only be natural, old man, you’re all right. The part fits you like a glove. It was written for you.”
Now, seeing that the character I impersonated was a silly fool who didn’t know his own mind, and fancied he was not in love when he was all the time, this seemed hard enough to bear without being called ‘old man’ by a person like Greensmith. So I threw up the part again. That was the tenth time, or it may have been the eleventh. Anyway, Millicent so far prevailed with me that I found myself acting on the night. The first week in January it was; and the concern being in mediæval times, we were all got up in costume. Greensmith wanted to have everything archæologically correct, but they weren’t by long chalks, because everybody would wear what he liked, and the girls too. We had a stage and scenery out from Birmingham, and a man to paint our faces, and another to do limelight effects on us. I remember just at the last minute Greensmith asking me if I thought the big audience which crammed General Warne’s hall would call for the author. I said:
“If they do, you can get away through the hall window and hide in the park.” This stung him into retort.
He said:
“There’ll only be one target for brickbats, my boy, while you’re on the stage. Your solitary chance is to speak my words. I don’t believe you know your part a little bit.”
“I’m going to put some fun of my own into it,” I said, just to get his wool off.
“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.