CHAPTER XII
Eldon was unaware that his light was out. He was unaware of almost everything important. He forgot his opening lines and marched across the stage with the granite tread of the statue that visited Don Juan.
Sheila improvised at once a line to supply what Eldon forgot. But she could not improvise a flame on a wick. Indeed, she had not noticed that the flame was missing. Even when Eldon, with the grace of a scarecrow, held out the cold black lantern, she went on studying the map and cheerily recited:
“Oh, that’s better! Now we can see just where we are.”
The earthquake of joy that smote the audience caught her unaware. The instant enormity of the bolt of laughter almost shook her from her feet. They do well to call it “bringing down the house.” There was a sound as of splitting timbers and din upon din as the gallery emptied its howls into the orchestra and the orchestra sent up shrieks of its own. The sound was like the sound that Samson must have heard when he pulled the temple in upon him.
Sheila and Mrs. Vining were struck with the panic that such unexpected laughter brings to the actor. They clutched at their garments to make sure that none of them had slipped their moorings. They looked at each other for news. Then they saw the dreadfully solemn Eldon holding aloft the fireless lantern.
The sense of incongruity that makes people laugh got them, too. They turned their backs to the audience and fought with their uncontrollable features. Few things delight an audience like the view of an actress broken up. It is so successful that in comic operas they counterfeit it.
The audience was now a whirlpool. Eldon might have been one of the cast-iron effigies that hold up lanterns on gate-posts; he could not have been more rigid or more unreal. His own brain was in a whirlpool, too, but not of mirth. Out of the eddies emerged a line. He seized it as a hope of safety and some desperate impulse led him to shout it above the clamor:
“It ain’t a very big lantern, ma’am, but it gives a heap o’ light.”
Sheila’s answer was lost in the renewed hubbub, but it received no further response from Eldon. His memory was quite paralyzed; he couldn’t have told his own name. He heard Sheila murmuring to comfort him: