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:
 
“Can’t you light the lantern again? Don’t be afraid. Just light it. Haven’t you a match? Don’t be afraid!”
 
If Eldon had carried the stolen fire of Prometheus in his hand he could not have kindled tinder with it. He heard Mrs. Vining growling:
 
“Get off, you damned fool, get off!”
 
But the line between his brain and his legs had also blown out a fuse.
 
The audience was almost seasick with laughter. Ribs were aching and cheeks were dripping with tears. People were suffering with their mirth and the reinfection of laughter that a large audience sets up in itself. Eldon’s glazed eyes and stunned ears somehow realized the activity of Batterson, who was epileptic in the wings and howling in a strangled voice:
 
“Come off, you—! Come off, or—I’ll come and kick you off!”
 
And now Eldon was more afraid of leaving than of staying.
 
In desperation Sheila took him by the elbow and started him on his way. Just as the hydrophobic Batterson was about to shout, “Ring!” Eldon slipped slowly from the stage.
 
Little Batterson met the blinded Cyclops and was only restrained from knocking him down by a fear that he might knock him back into the scene. As he brandished his arms about the giant he resembled an infuriated spider attacking a helpless caterpillar.
 
Batterson’s oration was plentifully interlarded with simple old Anglo-Saxon terms that can only be answered with a blow. But Eldon was incapable of resentment. He understood little of what was said except the reiterated line, “If you ever ask me again to let you play a part I’ll—”
 
Whatever he threatened left Eldon languid; the furthest thing from his thoughts was a continuance upon the abominable career he had insanely attempted.
 
He stalked with iron feet up the iron stairs to his dressing-room, put on his street clothes, and went to his hotel. He had forgotten to remove his greast-paint, the black on his eyebrows and under his eyes, or the rouge upon his mouth. A number of passers-by gave him the entire sidewalk and stared after him, wondering whether he were on his way to the madhouse or the hospital.
 
The immensity of the disaster to the play was its salvation. The audience had laughed itself to a state of exhaustion. The yelps of hilarity ended in sobs of fatigue. The well-bred were ashamed of their misbehavior and the intelligent were disgusted to realize that they had abused the glorious privilege of laughter and debauched themselves with mirth over an unimportant mishap to an unfortunate actor who had done nothing intrinsically humorous.
 
Sheila and Mrs. Vining went on with the scene, making up what was necessary and receiving the abjectly submissive audience’s complete sympathy for their plight and extra approval for their ingenuity in extricating themselves from it. When the curtain fell upon the act there was unusual applause.
 
To an actor the agony of “going up” in the lines, or “fading,” is not much funnier after the first surprise than the death or wounding of a soldier is to his comrade. The warrior in the excitement of battle may laugh hysterically when a friend or enemy is ludicrously maimed, when he crumples up and grimaces sardonically, or is sent heels over head by the impact of a shell. But there is little comfort in the laughter since the same fate may come to himself.
 
The actor has this grinning form of death always at his elbow. He may forget his lines because they are unfamiliar or because they are old, because another actor gives a slightly different cue, some one person laughs too loudly in the audience, or coughs, or a baby cries, or for any one of a hundred reasons. That fear is never absent from the stage. It makes every performance a fresh ordeal. And the actor who has falte............