Clipped Wings. Hughes Rupert
both seen and heard. Fellow Seniors in the box caught at his coat-tails, but he wrenched loose and, putting a foot over the rail, stepped to the apron of the stage. In his struggle he lost his eye-glasses. They fell into the footlight trough, and he was nearly blind.
Sheila, who stood close at hand, recoiled in panic at the sight of this unheard-of intrusion. The rampart of the footlights had always stood as a barrier between Sheila and the audience, an impassable parapet. To-night she saw it overpassed, and she watched the invader with much the same horror that a nun would experience at seeing a soldier enter a convent window.
Winfield advanced with hesitant valor and frowned fiercely at the dazzling glare that beat upward from the footlights.
He was recognized at once as the famous stroke-oar of the crew that had defeated the historic rivals of Grantham University. He was hailed with tempest.
Sheila knew neither his fame nor his mission. She felt that he was about to lay hands on her; all things were possible from such barbarians. Her knees weakened. She turned to retreat and clung to a table for support.
Suddenly she had a defender. From the wings the big actor who had played the taxicab-driver dashed forward with a roar of anger and let drive at Winfield’s face. Winfield heard the onset, turned and saw the fist coming. There was no time to explain his chivalric motive. He ducked and the blow grazed his cheek, but the actor’s impetus caught him off his balance and hustled him on backward till one foot slid down among the footlights. Three electric bulbs were smashed as he went overboard into the orchestra.
He almost broke the backs of two unprepared viola-players, but they eased his fall. He caromed off their shoulder-blades into the multifarious instruments of the “man in the tin-shop.” One foot thumped bass-drum with a mighty plop; the other sent a cymbal clanging. His clutching hands set up a riot of “effects,” and he lay on the floor in a ruin of orchestral noises, and a bedlam of din from the audience.
By the time he had gathered himself together the curtain had been lowered and the whole house was in a typhoon.
A dozen policemen who had been hastily summoned and impatiently awaited by the manager charged down the aisles and seized each a double arm-load of the nearest rioters. The foremost policeman received Winfield as he clambered, shamefaced, over the orchestra rail.
Winfield started to explain: “I went up there to ask the fellows to be quiet.”
The officer, indignant as he was, let out a guffaw of contemptuous laughter: “Lord love you, kid, if that’s the best lie you can tell, what’s the use of education?”
Winfield realized the hopelessness of such self-defense. It was less shameful to confess the misdemeanor than to be ridiculed for so impotent a pretext. He suffered himself to be jostled up the aisle and tossed into the patrol-wagon with the first van-load of prisoners. He counted on a brief stay there, for it was a custom of the college to tip over the patrol-wagon and rescue the victims of the police.
This year’s Freshmen, however, lacked the necessary initiative and leadership, and before the lost opportunity could be regained the wagon had rolled away, leaving the class to eternal ignominy.
CHAPTER VI
Deprived of its ringleaders, the mob fell into such disarray that it was ready to be cowed by the manager of the theater. He had waited for the police to remove the chief pirates, and now he addressed the audience with the one speech that could have had success:
“Ladies and gentlemen, I’ve lowered the curtain and I’m going to keep it lowered till the hoodlums settle down or get thrown out. The majority of people here to-night have paid good money to see this show. It is a good show and played by a company of ladies and gentlemen from one of the best theaters in New York, and I propose to have them treated as such while they are in our city. We are going to begin the play all over again, but if there is any further disturbance I’ll ring down the asbestos and put out the house lights. And no money will be returned at the box-office.”
This last argument converted the mob into a sheriff’s posse. The house-manager received a round of applause and the first Freshman who rose in his place was subdued by his own fellow-classmen.
Bret Winfield spent the night in a cell. He slept little, because the Freshmen hardly ceased to sing the night long; they were solacing themselves with doleful glees. Winfield could not help smiling at his imprisonment. Don Quixote was tasting the reward of misapplied chivalry.
The next morning he made no defense before the glowering judge who had played just such pranks in his college days and felt, therefore, a double duty to repress it in the later generation. He excoriated Bret Winfield especially, and Winfield kept silence, knowing that the truth would gain him no credence and only added contempt. The judge fined the young miscreants five dollars each and left their further punishment to the faculty.
On his way back to his rooms after his release, Winfield met Eugene Vickery, and said, with a wry smile, “Hello, ’Gene! I’ve just escaped from the penitentiary.”
To his astonishment, Vickery snapped back, “I’m sorry to hear it.”
Winfield, seeing that he was in earnest, fumbled for words: “What the—Why the—Well, say!”
The slight and spindling youth confronted the bureau-chested giant and shook his finger in his face: “If you weren’t so much bigger than I am I’d give you worse than that actor gave you. To think that a great big hulk like you should try to attack a little girl like that! Don’t you ever dare speak to me or my sister again.”
Winfield gave an excellent imitation of incipient apoplexy. He seized Vickery by the lapels to demand: “Good Lord, ’Gene, you don’t think I—Say, what do you think I am, anyway? Why—Well, can you beat it? I ask you? Ah, you can all go plumb to—Ah, what’s the good!”
Winfield never was an explainer. He lacked language; he lacked the ambition to be understood. It made him an excellent sportsman. When he lost he wasted no time in explaining why he had not won. To him the martyrdom of being misunderstood was less bitter than the martyrdom of justifying himself. He was so dazed now by the outcome of his knight-errantry that he resolved to leave the college to its own verdict of him. Eugene Vickery’s ruling passion, however, was a frenzy to understand and to be understood. He caught the meaning in Winfield’s incoherence and seized him by the lapel:
“You mean that you didn’t go out on the stage to scare the girl, but to—Well, that’s more like you! I’m a lunkhead not to have known it from the first. Why, a copper collared me, too, and accused me of being one of the Freshmen! I talked him out of it and proved I was a post-graduate, or I’d have spent the night in a dungeon, too. Well, well! and to think I got you so wrong! You write a statement to the papers right away.”
“Ah, what’s the good?”
“Then I will.”
“Just as much obliged, but no, you won’t.”
“You ought to square yourself with the people who—”
“There’s just two people I want to square myself with—that little actress who didn’t realize what I was there for, and that damned actor who knocked me through the bass-drum. Who were they, anyway? I didn’t get a program.”
“I didn’t see the man’s name; but the girl—I used to know her.”
“You did! Say!”
“She was only a kid then, and so was I. She could act then, too—for a kid, but now—You missed the rest of the show, though, didn’t you?”
“Yes. I was called away.”
“After you left, the audience was as good as a congregation. Sheila Kemble—that’s the girl—was wonderful. She didn’t have much to do, but, golly!