This was too much for poor Crumb. He went about town renewing former acquaintances with the fervor of a far voyager who has come home to stay. When he appeared at the second performance his speech was glucose and his gait rippling. In his one scene it was his duty to bring in a lantern and hold it over an automobile map on which Sheila and Mrs. Vining were trying to trace a lost road. It was a passage of some dramatic moment, but Crumb in his cups made unexpected farce of it by swinging the lantern like a switchman.
No comic genius from Aristophanes via Molière to Hoyt has ever yet devised a scene that will convulse an audience like the mistake or mishap of an actor. Poor, befuddled Crumb’s wabbly lantern was the laughing hit of the piece. He was too thick to be rebuked that night. Friends took him to his hotel and left him to sleep it off.
When the next morning he realized what he had done, what sacrilege he had committed, he sought relief from insanity in a hair of the dog that bit him. He was soon mellow enough to fall a victim to an hallucination that Tuesday was a matinée day. He appeared at the theater at half-past one, and made up to go on. He fell asleep waiting for his cue, and was discovered when his dressing-room mate arrived at seven o’clock. Then he insisted on descending to report for duty. He was still so befogged that Batterson did not dare let him ruin another performance. He addressed to Crumb that simple phrase which is the theatrical death-warrant:
“Hand me back your part.”
With the automatic heroism of a soldier sentenced to execution, Crumb staggered to his room and, fetching the brochure from his trunk, surrendered it to the higher power, revealing a somewhat shaky majesty of despair.
Eldon was standing in the wings, and Batterson thrust the document at him and growled: “You say you’re a great actor. I’m from Missouri. Get up in that and show me, to-night.”
If he had placed a spluttering bomb in Eldon’s hands, and told him to blow up a Czar with it, Eldon could hardly have felt more terrified.
CHAPTER XI
Eldon climbed the three flights of iron stairway to his cubby-hole more drunkenly than Crumb. The opportunity he had counted on was his and he was afraid of it. This was the sort of chance that had given great geniuses their start, according to countless legends. And he had been waiting for it, making ready for it.
Weeks before during the rehearsals and during the first performances he had hung about in the offing, memorizing every part, till he had found himself able to reel off whole scenes with a perfection and a vigor that thrilled him—when he was alone. Crumb’s rôle had been one of the first that he had memorized. But now, when he propped the little blue book against his make-up box and tried to read the dancing lines, they seemed to have no connection whatsoever with the play. He would have sworn he had never heard them. He had been told that the best method for quickly memorizing a part was to photograph each page or “side.” But the lines danced before him at an intoxicated speed that would have defied a moving-picture camera.