MY FRIEND PIERROT.

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume XXXIII, Issue 10659, 12 May 1906, Page 5 (Supplement)

MY FRIEND PIERROT.

(By C. Bryson Tay-Vw.) '"My .dance, I think, Mils Irving!" said Billy, coming up. His'vollar was a wilted wreck; his face was unbecomingly flushed with his exertions; his red hair plastered damply on his forehead—the outward and visible signs, these, that he was having a " simply ripping time." He stood planted squarely before Miss Irving, his blue eyes challenging her to deny him his rights, his broad shoulders blocking the entrance of the palmscreened bower wherein Miss Irving and her attendant cavalier had esconced themselves. In his evening clothes he looked about as much out of place as a bull m a gingham apron. They fitted him, but he did not fit them. In his appearance waß something of the grotesque, for which it was hard to condemn any one feature. His hair was of a, painful red, but it was soft and well kempt; his face was blunt and homely, but there was no coarseness m it; his eyes were small and palely blue, but they were steady and kind. His hands ware preternaturally big, but they were the hands of a gentleman; and his figure, boasting no elegance of outline, was deep-chested and rough-hewn, and built for rugged strength . " Oh, you, Billy Buttinsky !" jibbed Frailey with good-humored, easy patronage. He was Miss Irving's attendant cavalier, a dapper elegant whom Billy could have punished with one hand tied behind him. Every one jibed Billy —just why, no one stopped to think. "It's the fashion— he doesn't mind. He .never knows we're guying him, he's such a clown— always playing monkey for the crowd," Frailey would have said. Miss Irving looked up at Billy, towering above her, thick-set, rumpled, awkward with his untutored strength. She was a slim slip of a girl, cool-eyed, flo-wer-faced, dark-haired; and Billy's eyes on her were hungry. "Really?" she said demurely. "Then I suppose I'll have to give it to you, won't I?"' She had acquired to perfection the latest fashionable lisp; the fascination of it m her red mouth had long since been Billy's undoing. She rose, with a little move over her shoulder at Frailey, to intimate that as she had promised so she must perform, however hard the duty. It was meant for Frailey alone, but Billy caught it, and misunderstood it, and his heavy face flushed. Such sensitiveness on his part, he knew, was foolish; let "the crowd" once suspect that their > pin-pricks went home, and his life would not be worth living. "It would be ice-cream and cake for them if they knew the truth," he thought rather hopelessly, as he followed his captive into the dancing room. Here were lights, many voices,- the perfume of flowers and women's laces; over all. the strains of the "Valse Bleu." On the polished floor half a hundred couples slid and glided and galloped; white shoulders gleamed against black coats; -gauzy skirts swirled and slippers twinkled. Billy shouldered a way through the group of men at the doorway, and turned to receive his partner. In the full glare of the lights he looked redder and hotter than ever. Miss Irving gathered her skirts daintily m one hand, held out the other to him, and suffered his embrace. At the touch of her his head whirled; so it was always when he danced with her; exquisite bliss to hold her actually m his arms ; exquisite pain to know that it was probably the only way he could ever get her there. He took delight m intricate turns and slidings through the crowd, for the mere pleasure of feeling her yielding to him, guided by his' strength. Billy himself hated dancing viciously, for he was not a good dancer— -but it had its compensations, and if he could hold his heart's delight by no other means, he would cheerfully have danced all night. He bumped her into the band stand, and into as many couples as he could find ; he caromed against a thin man and a fat woman; he was punched m the back and prodded m the ribs and his toes were stepped on, but he was m the heights of idiotic bliss until Miss Irving, nearly torn from his arms by the onslaught of a furiously whirling couple, gasped and said m exasperation : "Oh, Billy, why are you so big?" So it was all spoiled; he was a great, clumsy clown, fit only to be laughed at, and she was having an awful time. The light went out of his hot and eager face; he stopped so suddenly that Miss Irving nearly tell. "I'm sorry!" he stammered m anxious contrition. "I'm nothing but a clumsy lummox, anyhow. Lets go into the conservatory and cool off." He had his way, for Miss Irving was left with no breath for objections. The conservatory was dark and quiet and delightfully cool. Billy mopped his heated brow with a silk handkerchief a half size or so smaller than a tablecloth, found a seat for Miss Irving, and set himself to the task of entertaining her. Hiß chance had come-f-the first tinio he had been alone with her for a week. What he wished to say he had prepared m a neat speech, carefully rehearsed. He knew what he would say and do; he had figured out carefully what she would do and say. : She ' might weep ; ho had an uneasy notion that girls wept when they were proposed to, but he must be prepared for that. She would be shy, of course, 'and very likely hold him off ; he must be gentle with her and not frighten her with his pleadings. Here he realized with a shock that the speech was gone from him utterly. Not a stammer of it was left.

Under the stress- of his emotion, his face, already flushed, became empurpled. , He wondered how she could bo so cool, so demure, so sweetly serene; it seemed impossible that something of hiseradtion should not communicate itself to her. Ho fanned her violently, meditating m a crimson anguish .of doubt how he would best begin. When cold shivers began crawling down his spinal column at the pall of silence which threatened to settle on them, through sheer nervousness he plunged headlong into speech. " I hope you are having a pleasant time," he said loudly, m a perfectly expressionless voice only a trifle huskier than its wont. '

It was Billy who; playing the monkey, for the crowd, invariably, with the best intentions m the world, somehow played the clown instead, by word or deed, and got himself laughed at for his pains. So here again; trying his best to please, he had started wrong, and she would laugh at him. He began to feel that if any one laughed at him again he could cheerfully commit murder. iwiss Irving looked him over calmly, with no idea that the worm was threatening to turn. .

"BiUy, you're a. goose," she said lightty- . Billy'B big hand closed on the fan he was desperately wielding, and a stick snapped. He turned on her, his perspiring face frightened and eager,' his olue eyes very bright. "I've got something to tell you," he stammered. His voice gathered headway; he heard it speaking almost without his own volition. Miss Irving began to look at him m astonishment minfled with some alarm. She knew that c adored her; had seen that he followed her with worshipful eyes ;' had been teased about him until it had become an old story; but for these violent symptoms, apropos of nothing whatever, she was unprepared. "I'm m love with you !" he announced loudly. "I— Fuf-Floronce, I love you! inu you marry me?" He did it very badly, but it was obviously bis first attempt. Thon he sat back, gripping tho fan m both hands, and looked at her. It was done ; he had brought all he was or hoped to. be, his boy's pure passion, garbed as it might bo m its husk of awkward crudity, and laid it at her feet. Yet because he was Billy, the poor Pierrot, unwilling victim of his clown's mask, he must needs do it m hiß own way, tho clown's way, tho way of Pierrot. But it was done, and bis world hung silent, until sho should speak. '

Misß Irving struggled a moment. But the combined etiects of himself and his speech were too much for her; she gave it up, and laughed — laughed as every one laughed at Billy— poor Billy "playing monkey for the crowd." "Billy, you're such a goose !" she said sweetly. It never occurred to her to take him seriously. No one ever took Billy seriously — and who could help laughing? He was so adorably funny when he got excited. But Billy was looking at her as though she had struck him m the face. It had never occurred to him that m this, the supreme moment of his life, he would not be taken seriously. "I'm glad it amuses you!" he said m an altered voice. "I know you think I'm a clown— everybody call me one, and I guess I look like one, and maybe I act like one. You all have laughed at me and quizzed mo, and I'm not complaining of that." He fought desperately against the overwhelming shyness that gripped him, the deep-rooted, dumb shyness of a boy, which is far harder to combat than a girl's. Never bad he dreamed of talking so to any living soul, of himself and his inmost sacred feelings; he was appalled at his own outbreak. He spoke fast, m a strained and husky voice. "I never seem to do the right thing, nor say the right thing, no matter what I do. I've made a thundering ass of myself sometimes — but there are mighty few who don't do that once m a while. I never say anything about it, of course —being ridiculed, I mean, and having people always laugh at you instead of with you— but sometimes it's hard not to show that it cuts when they go a bit further than they realize. I like to see things going' with a snap; and somehow m a crowd there's always one person who's got to make them go. In our crowd that one always seemed to be me, and I guess people forgot after a while that, l was anything else but & clown. And tiow-^r:"

His hurrying voice stopped as though he realized all at once what he was saying. Another stick of the luckless fan snapped. "Oh, Billy !" said Miss Irving m confusion. "I'm so sorry! I didn t know! I — never dreamed you felt like that about it !' Billy smiled at hor steadily. "Of course you didn't! Clowns have no business to have feelings, have they? I mean — well, I guess it's all right." He rose, giving her no time for what she might havo said. The situation was his, undoubtedly, but she met it with a nervous attempt at lightness. "Billy, do you know you've proposed to me, and never waited to hear my answer?" , He looked down at her, and a shadow came into his hurt blue eyes. "I think I've got about all the answer I need," he said soberly. "When a girl — when a man — " Again he left his sentence unfinished, and the third stick I of the fan snapped. Miss Irving roso precipitately. She was very young, and suddenly she found the situation too much for her. Frailey's slim and elegant shoulders were visible m the crowd outside the conservatory. She fled to him cravenly, with a hasty murmur of "this dance engaged," and danced away with him into the lights and brightness, leaving Pierrot alone amid the greenery, with tlie broken fan clutched tightly m his hand. Out m the lights and brightness, Pierrette whirled through her pretty part, flying feet keeping time to the music, busy thoughts keeping time to another tune. "Poor Billy! If he only were not so queer ! Why can't he do things as Mr Frailey does? But Pierrot had to do things and say things m his own blundering way, as Pierrot always does and suffers for it, because he was born Pierrot and could not help himself. Pierrot's part is sometimes no easy one to play, for all its merriment anjl its grinning mask. It might have been for several centuries that Billy lurked m the conservatory, clinging to the broken fan. He was m no humor to emerge and face the more or less innocent inquisition of his friends, to hear their jokes, and be forced into joking on his own account— or else confess why the jokes were not forthcoming. Couples went down to supper and returned; dances tripped on to their blithe end ; ■ men and maidens flirted, and the world was very well. From the sight of various promenading couples Billy sought shelter between two tall rubber trees and a flowering acacia while he donned his mask to face the world again. He sat very quiet m his nook, opening and closing the broken fan. The world had never seen Pierrot with his mask off; he was learning that when he tried to lift it, the world believed merely that some new buffoon trick was ready for its applause. Abruptly he was aware that a couple had established themselves beyond the rubber trees and the flowering acacia; and, perforce, he realized that they were Miss Irving and Frailey, he meditated instant flight. But the only way to escape was to pass them, and m his new mood of bitter shyness this was what he would not do.

"What'd you do with Billy?" Frailey's voice asked. > "I — think he must have gone home," Miss Irving answered. "Silly ass," said Fairley cheerfully. In his corner Billy grinned ruefully — it was so very true. « "You shouldn't say such things about Billy," said Miss Irving with indignation. "He's an — awfully dear fellow, and we've treated him very badly. I — somehow one can't help feeling sorry for him — " She broke off -with an exclamation. "What is it?'.' Frailey demanded. Miss Irving gave a nervous laugh. "I think it was a bug," she answered. "Yes, a big red bug/ Her tone was odd, but bugs might be provocative of anything from hysterics to swear-words. This it was evident that Frailey knew ; he said promptly: "Give me that cushion quick and I'll kill it." "Funny thing to kill a bug with," Billy commented inwardly, and wished that he could get a view of the proceedings. But' it at once became evident, even without seeing that Frailey knew what he was about. He shouted "Philopena!" so loudly that Billy jumped. "You've lost!" he exulted. "You made the conditions yourself — give-and-take, and the winner to name the penalty. That's the penalty I'll take— a kiss and nothing else." ' "I won't do it !" said Miss Irving. "That's vulgar— and' we're not children." Her voice suddenly became angry. "Mr Frailey let me go at once!" Billy clenched his fists, his eyes hot. He heard a little cry from Miss Irving; even as he pushed back his chair and rose, her voice reached him, imperious, but with a queer little catch m it which went directly to his head. "Billy, come out of there at once! If you let this man kiss me, I will never speak to you again as long as I live !" Billy had no time for surprise at this. He lunged between the rubber trees and the acacia, leaving a trail of broken branches to mark, his course, into the open space where Miss Irving was standing, flushed and tearful and defiant, and actually m Frailey' s arms. Billy bore down upon them, great, hulking, awkward, his blue eyes aflame. "Here, you! Drop that!" he said furiously. Poor Pierrot! — even with the situation m his hands he must mull it somehow. Miss Irving gave a half-hysteri-cal giggle. . Frailey laughed. Billy caught him by the collar, and as he released Miss Irving to defend himself, shook' him until he choked and spluttered. In Billy's big hands he was a reed, a helpless infant. Miss Irving stood by, her hands raised to her scarlet cheeks.

"Now you go !" said Billy, husky with wrath, and propelled his victim violently doorward. Thereafter, he promptly forgot him, for Miss Irving held out both hands to him, saying — still with the queer little catch m her voice : "Thank you, Billy! If that little, beast had kissed me I should ' have died." Billy took the hands and flushed to his hair. "How did you know I was there?" he asked eagerly. Miss Irving drew her hands away and seated herself on the bench, holding her skirts aside to make room. He had sense enough to accept the hint,, and sat beside her, leaning forward with an elbow on his knee that he might look into her face. ' "Why, I knew you were there nearly all the time," she confessed. "I saw you through the — the leaves. It made me jump, and Mr Frailey asked- why— " "And you called me a red bug," said Billy. , Miss Irving blushed. "I couldn't think of anything else to say," she murmured uncomfortably. "I'm sorry." "Oh, don't mention it," said Billy politely, and made a motion to rise. He had just remembered that his feelings had been badly hurt and that he was still sore. Miss Irving looked at him under her lashes; a curious glance, half ! anxious, half humorous, entirely allur-i ing.

"Are — you — m such a hurry?" she said faintly. " Why, no," he answered without guile.

j "iou— you managed Mr Frailey beauj tifully," said Miss Irving, feeling neiv ; nously for speech. Billy turned slow eyes of scorn upon her. "Huh — that shrimp!" ho said contemptuously. Miss Irving tried again. "Are you sure you don't want to go ' and dance? I wouldn't keep you for the world " "j.Mo, thanks, said Billy shortly. He looked at her m surprise at her incomprehensibility, and found her looking at • him. To his amazement she flushed, as he had never seen a girl flush before; a slow and heavy crimson that drowned the rose of hor cheeks and crept to her i white forehead.

I "Whats the matter?" hq gasped m a panic. "Billy," said Miss Irving m a voice that fluttered m spite of her, "if I were , very, very nice, and— and awfully. j s-sorry would you propose to me again?'' Billy almost turned his back on her. ! Couldn't she let up on him even yet? "And — get lughed at again?" he said sullenly. ".No, thanks, 1 think not!" Quite suddenly ho lost his head and his reason; the last straw was too much.

"My God, girl how much more of a fool do you want to make me? Can't you see it's gone far enough? It's no joke to me, whatever it may be to you !" Then he got himself m hand again, and stopped short, crimson with anger and embarrassment. "I beg your pardon!" ho said miserably. ' A heavy silence fell. Out of it Miss Irving said sweetly and unexpectedly: "Billy, how old aro you?" Billy started. "Xwenty-eight. Why?" he answered brieuy.

"lou might just as weU be eight,", said Miss Irving unkindly. "I'm twentytwo, but I never was as young as you are at this instant minute."

Billy answered nothing. He was unhappy, and wanted nothing so much as to get away. She seemed to delight m his embarrassment, to take pleasure m prolonging it. He glanced at her. Her eyes were downcast, her fingers very busy with the chain which had held her fan. She began to speak, without raising her lashes.

"Then, if you won't propose to me, I---I suppose I'll have to propose to you. Oh, Billy, dear, don't you see what I'm trying to say, you stupid goose? We've treated you shamefully, and poked fun at you, and you've been so good — and I've been sorry for you aU the time. You were funny, but— l like you all the better for it— l truthfully do! If I hadn't run away when I did I should have cried. I didn't mean to hurt your feelings — "

She stopped to catch breath. Billy got

himself to his feet and started down at her. Ho ran a finger around inside his wilted collar, opened his mouth and shut it again, and said thickly : "You moan " "Yes, oh, yes!" said Miss Irving fervently. She caught herself up. "No — oh, no ! I don't mean anything at all ! I mean — if this is tho way you re going to act, I'm sorry I spoke!" She rose with a wild glance doorwardBilly stepped between her and escape. "Will you please tell me what's the matter with you?" he said steadly. "We can't both go crazy at once, you know ! It rather seems to be your turn now." Miss Irving laughed, but the laugh broke m a sob. "I'm afraid of you !" she faltered. "If you wouldn't look so graye — the matter is that I — well, I will marry you whether you ask me again or not. Now do you understand ?' ' Billy's face broke into light. He took a stride toward her, stopped short and folded his arms across his chest— simply to keep them from going around her — and said m a curiously level voice : " I'm nothing but a silly ass, you know, and an everlasting chump, and a clown that's always playing monkey for the crowd " " Billy— don't !" sobbed Miss Irving with another sob. "You're good and kind— or you'd have hated us for the way we, treated you— and I don't care what you are !" He came toward her, and she stood still bravely, flushing rosy red. He took her m his arms and she raised bar, hands to his shoulders, leaning against him ever so lightly, yielding to his embrace. So then he knew that even Pierrot could find his happiness as other men. "It's better than dancing!" cried Billy m a burst of. exultation. — Everybody's Magazine.