With a roar he leapt upon Old Bill, kicked the startled animal in the belly, and headed for the stage. Bill, who had never been used so in his life, bolted, and as he ran two of his leather shoes dropped off, so that he was steel-shod. As he burst through the bushes, bearing Geordie on his back, the effect was all a humorist could desire. Women shrieked; men roared; Professor Vambrace and Pearl, who were in the middle of the stage, took to their heels. It was Geordie’s instant of utter triumph, the apotheosis of a practical joker. Then, bewilderingly, Old Bill gave a frightful scream, reared upon his hind legs, and dropped upon the ground. There he lay, screaming piteously for perhaps ten seconds; then he was still, his teeth bared, his eyes bulging.
Tom arrived on the run. “Dead as a nit,” said he.
The cause of death was established by Larry Pye. “He’s gouged up the ground with his hooves, you see,” he explained. “Here’s the main cable not three inches down, in this steel conduit; Tom just put the sod over that this morning. Here’s a poor join in the conduit, and he’s hit the cable with his shoe. That’s what did for him. Wouldn’t happen once in a million years. But it happened this time. Thanks to you, you god-damned stupid bastard,” he said, regarding Geordie with an officer’s eye. Geordie walked away and was noisily and copiously sick under a bush, but nobody pitied him.
Old Bill, venerable and loveable in life, was a disagreeable sight in death. His belly swelled shockingly, within a few minutes, which caused him to move a little from time to time, and to creak as though in an uneasy slumber. The actors did not want to look at him, but they could not take their eyes off him. At last Mr Leakey, moved by who can say what motives of delicacy, fetched a tweed jacket (it happened to be Larry Pye’s) and draped it over Old Bill’s face.
“We shan’t rehearse any more this afternoon,” said Valentine. “But I should like to see the committee for a few moments.”
It is enough to say that Mr Webster refused to allow the Little Theatre to replace Old Bill, saying without much real conviction that he supposed accidents would happen. Valentine had a frank talk with Geordie, in which she permitted herself to forget that Salterton was not New York; she was seconded by Major Larry Pye, who spoke with great restraint, all things considered. Geordie wrote a letter to Mr Webster in which the shrieking figure of Apology was hounded through a labyrinth of agonized syntax. Old Bill was hauled away to the knacker’s, sincerely mourned by Tom and Freddy.
In the production of every play there comes a low point of rehearsal, after which the piece climbs to whatever climax it is destined to reach. There could be no doubt about it, the day Geordie killed the horse marked that point for The Tempest, as produced by the Salterton Little Theatre.
Leonardo Da Vinci asserted that the human eye not only received, but gave forth rays of light; Hector’s eye, at any time before he fell in love with Griselda, might have served as a proof of this theory. But now it was dulled. In the late springtime, when he should have been deep in that exhaustive revision of the year’s work which was so much a feature of his teaching, he would spend as long as five minutes at a time staring out of the window, twiddling the cord of the blind, while his pupils wondered what had come over him. His particular brand of classroom humour no longer held any charm for him. There had been a time when, during such a spring revision, he had sent two or three of the more backward pupils to the blackboard every day, to work out problems under his direct gaze; as they blundered, he had goaded them, not angrily, with a mingling of humour, pity and a little contempt. If it is true, as is so often asserted, that the greatest humour is near to pathos, Hector qualified on these occasions as a great humorist: although few of the stupid ones learned much about mathematics during these ordeals, some of them learned lessons of fortitude which were invaluable to them in later life. But this spring all the ardour of the born teacher was gone from him. He was like a sick man, but his pupils did not guess the cause of his sickness.
Spring had been his chief season for detentions. Every afternoon he had collected a group of boys and girls in his classroom after school was over, in order to make sure that they finished the work which they had not done during the lesson period. But this spring he was noticeably ill at ease for the last hour of the school day, and left as soon as the last bell had rung. He made his way at once to St Agnes’ and if no rehearsal was called he would do little jobs for Larry Pye, or measure the area which had been set aside for seats, or do something to make it decent for him to linger there. Rehearsals usually began at five o’clock and ended at eight, when the light began to fail; Hector was the first to come and the last to go.
He had, in the course of a few weeks, learned much about himself. He had learned that he had no talent as a joker. But then, he was comforted to notice, Griselda did not seem to care for jokes, and never smiled at Shortreed’s finest strokes, though she often laughed at young Bridgetower’s nonsense, which meant nothing to Hector. He learned that his youth was gone, and that his attempts to dress youthfully made him ridiculous. Larry Pye, who was over fifty, could wear anything he liked, including very old Army shorts, and no one laughed; but when Hector wore a sports shirt he felt naked and looked foolish. He had learned that it was possible for him to throw himself in Griselda’s way constantly, without her taking any notice of him. She, who had smiled so meaningly at him, did not even heed his presence now. And yet when it was necessary to the action of the play that she, as Ariel, should sing softly into his ear as he pretended to be asleep, he knew that his face reddened, that his breathing was hard and that the blood beat in his ears and eyes; he thought “I love you, I love you,” as she knelt by him, and was hurt and dismayed that in some way the message was not plain to her. Wild schemes, as they appeared to him, kept coming into his mind by which he would make his love known. He would write a letter—but he knew his limitations as a writer. He would ask to see her privately some evening, ask for an hour uninterrupted; but would he be able to speak? No, he could not face such an ordeal; the old gods of planning and common sense had deserted him. He would wait until some lucky chance brought them together, and then, on the spur of the moment, he would speak. But chance never did bring them together. He did not know what to do.
His love for Griselda had undergone a change which frightened him. When he had awakened that morning, sure that he loved her, he had enjoyed the happiness of the sensation. For perhaps a week he had thought of his attachment chiefly as an appurtenance to himself. In his little mental drama he was the principal figure, and Griselda was a supporting player. But as time wore on the emphasis shifted, and Griselda became the chief person of the drama, and he was a minor character, a mere bit player, aching for a scene with her. For the first time in his life Hector discovered that it was possible for someone to be more important to him than himself.
He had no need now to look ruefully at the item in his Plan of Conduct which urged him to give up pie. His appetite waned, and his accustomed waitress at the Snak Shak commented on it. He did not lose any of his bulk, but he looked puffy and distressed. One day he tore the Plan of Conduct out of his book and burned it; it seemed to him to be stupid and worthless, an insult to what he felt. Indeed his whole concept of life as something which could be governed by schemes in pocketbooks appeared to him suddenly to be trivial and contemptible.