It happened to be an amateur performance, and we had just seated ourselves in the second row of a buccra box, near the stage.
I was admiring the neatness of the house, which was great for a provincial theatre any where, and the comical appearance the division of castes produced, as thus:—The pit seemed to be almost exclusively filled with the children of Israel, as peculiar in their national features here as everywhere else; the dress boxes contained the other white inhabitants and their families; the second tier the brown ladies, who seemed more intent on catching the eyes of the young buccras below, than attending to the civil things the males of their own shade were pouring into their ears above; the gallery was tenanted by Bungo himself, in all his glory of black face, blubber lips, white eyes, and ivory teeth. This black parterre being powdered here and there with a sprinkling of white sailors, like snowdrops in a bed of purple anemones; Jack being, as usual on such occasions, pretty well drunk.
A very nice-looking fresh complexioned little man was sitting on the same bench along with us on the right hand—that is, next the stage—and a young stray Hebrew, having eschewed the pit, sat on our left—we were thus between them—a post of no small danger, as it turned out. There had been some wrangling between these parties before we entered, for no sooner had Flamingo and I taken our seats, than Moses said across us, but, as it afterwards appeared, intending to address the gentleman already mentioned, "If you say that again, sir, I will pull your nose."
Thereupon, up rose the short ruddy man, and up rose the long Don Felix, each appropriating the insult to himself; but Flam, who never dreamed that any nose could be spoken of when his own kidney potato was in company, was first, and levelled little Moses in an instant. This was the signal for the sea of Jews in the pit to toss its billows; and, like a great cauldron, to popple and hiss, until it boiled over into the boxes, in a roaring torrent, that speedily overthrew both Don Felix, the little ruddy man, and I Benjie, who had neither part nor portion in the quarrel, into the bargain; and such a pommelling I never got before or since.
Whatever Moses's creed might have been, he spared not my bacon that blessed night, as my poor ribs witnessed for many a long day.
In the midst of the uproar, a magistrate—a most excellent and sedate personage—planted his back against the pillar, immediately behind me, where a cohort of parrot bills had already turned the flank of the brave little red man, and were threatening my own rear, left uncovered by the destruction of both of my coat skirts. Here he shouted at the top of his pipe to "keep the peace;" but one of the assailants, a powerful bluebeard, speedily gagged him, by passing his arm round his neck, and pinning him to the post, as if he had been a culprit undergoing the Spanish punishment of the garrote.
At length the row became so serious and national, that the whole house was likely to side with one or other of the parties; the manager, therefore, fearing for the safety of his theatre, sent for the chief magistrate in town (not the mayor, who was absent), and he fortunately made his appearance very promptly, with a party of police; the row on this was fast subsiding, until a very ludicrous incident made it breeze up again with twofold violence, like flax steeped in turpentine cast on a smouldering fire. For the last ten minutes Don Felix had disappeared, having been literally trodden down, after a fall on missing his blow at the Goliah who led the assault; and when the storm abated, and he could screw himself from under the benches where he had been forced, the first thing he did, in his haste and confusion, was to throttle the very man of authority himself; taking him for one of the enemy. The tumult again increased on this, and we now ran some chance of being extinguished altogether; for a gigantic black-whiskered Israelite had upheaved a stick, which threatened to prove the thickness of my skull, had there been any doubt about it, when I was saved by the timely succour afforded by a powerful sailor-looking chap, who had fought his way towards us, clearing a path right and left amongst our enemies, like a walking windmill.
"Foul, foul—stick against fist—fair play is a jewel," sung out the windmill, whom, it flashed on me at the moment, I had seen before, and suiting the action to the word, he seized him of the black whisker and parrot nose, neck and croup, and pitched him down bodily into the thickest of the troubled waters of the pit, as if he had been a juvenile branch of the grunter family—not pig upon pork, however, but Jew upon Jew, where he floundered on the sea of heads for a minute, like a harpooned whale come to the surface to breathe, and then sank, to have his ribs very sufficiently kneaded by the knees and feet of his rebellious compatriots.
Having accomplished this feat, the sailor, as if desirous of escaping observation, slid out of the mêlée, and I lost sight of him.
The fight continued, but the police were by this time masters; and fortunately we were taken into custody, and bailed by our friends. Next day we escaped with a fine.