Winfield determined to make himself 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.”