Certainly it was. I had never been in such a tightly packed crowd and, as bad luck would have it, I was beginning to feel very uncomfortable. I was, in plain words, starving. Like a fool I had spared no time for tea, but rushed off at the earliest possible moment, and now I began to feel emptier than I had ever felt in my life before.
The girl, to whom I mentioned this, said that I had gone white as chalk, but that I should be able to buy something to eat and drink inside. She had some chocolate in her pocket, fortunately, and with great generosity insisted upon sharing it with me; but it amounted really to nothing in my ravenous state. It was like giving a hungry tiger a shrimp.
And then a most extraordinary thing happened—a thing that I should not have believed possible. I began to feel funnier and funnier, and to gasp in a very fishlike way, and to feel a cold and horrid sweat bursting out upon my forehead. I had not felt like this for many, many years—in fact, only once before: on the day that I and Jackson Minor found a cigar at Merivale and tossed for it and I won and smoked the cigar secretly to the stump. And I remembered now, with tragical horror, what happened afterwards; and the hideous thought came to me that I was going to be ill in that seething crowd of hardy old “first-nighters”! Think of the disgrace and shame of it; and it wasn’t only that, because, of course, the “first-nighters” would never forget a horrible adventure of that kind, and no doubt the next time I presented myself among them, to wait five or six hours before the doors opened upon some great triumph of Thespian art, they would recognise me and band together against me and order me away, as a man unfit to take his place among seasoned critics of the drama.
All this and much more flashed through my head and then, just before the climax, there came the comforting thought that I couldn’t be ill in that way, having had nothing since my bun and glass of milk eight hours before. I am sorry to keep on mentioning this bun and glass of milk because it sounds greedy, but for once in a way I was glad that I was empty—for the sake of all those artistic and courageous “first-nighters,” not to mention the brave, grey-eyed girl.
Then I felt my knees give and the gaslight overhead whirled about like a comet with twenty tails; I saw the heads of the people round me fade off their shoulders; the gaslight went out; I heard a tremendous humming and roaring in my ears, like a train in a tunnel, and all was over. My last thought was that this was death, and I wondered if Miss Ellen Terry would read about it in the paper next day and be sorry. But, even at that ghastly moment, I knew she wouldn’t, because of course she would want to hear what the critics thought of her “Portia”; and that would naturally be the principal thing in the newspaper for her.
Of course I wasn’t dying really; but I fainted and must have put a great many people to fearful inconvenience. It shows, however, what jolly good hearts “first-nighters” have got, in my opinion, that they didn’t merely let me sink to the earth, and ignore me, and walk over me when the doors opened. But far from that, despite the length of my legs, they lugged me out somehow and forced open the side door of a public-house that was close at hand, and thrust me in.
When I came to, my first instinct was one of pure self-preservation and I asked for food. Outside, the people were crushing into the pit of the theatre, and by the time I had eaten about a loaf and half a Dutch cheese, and drunk some weak brandy-and-water, which the landlord of the public-house very kindly and humanely insisted upon my doing, the pit was full—not even standing room remained. It was rather sad in a way; but I felt less for the frightful disappointment, after waiting all those hours, than for the debt I owed the merciful men who had rescued me. Of course I didn’t know who they might be and, in any case, it was impossible to wait there till midnight, on the off-chance of seeing them after the play was over and thanking them gratefully.
I could have kicked myself over it, because for a chap nearly six feet high, about to join the London Athletic Club and going to be an actor some day and so on—for such a chap, with his way to make in the world, to go into a crowd and faint, like a footling schoolgirl who cuts her finger—it was right bang off, as they say. I felt fearfully downcast about it, because it looked to me as if my career might just as well be closed there and then: but the kind landlord rather cheered me up. He said:
“You needn’t take on like that. No doubt you’ve outgrown your strength. It’s nothing at all. The air out there in these crushes would choke a crow. It’s the commonest thing in the world for people to be dragged out and shot in that door.”
“Women, I dare say—not men.”