I was too much hurt about the insult offered Mr. Wilson Barrett and myself to go and see him act again for a long time; but other theatres demanded my attention because I was now a regular student of the drama and didn’t like to miss anything. Sometimes I went alone and sometimes I got a clerk from the Apollo to go with me. But none of them much cared about legitimate drama.

I was already deeply in love, in a far-distant and hopeless sort of way, with Miss Ellen Terry, and when there came a first night at the Lyceum Theatre, I resolved to be present in the pit. I told Aunt Augusta not to expect me at dinner-time, but she was well used to this and said she wouldn’t. So the moment that I was free from my appointed task I flew off to the Lyceum pit door and took my place. I was, however, by no means the first to arrive. A crowd had already collected and I found myself among that hardy and famous race of men and women known as “first-nighters.” There were even youngish girls in the crowd, for one stood near me reading the Merchant of Venice, which was the play we had all come to see. Luckily for the girl a gas-lamp hung over her head and she was thus enabled to read the play and pass the time. Like a fool I had brought nothing, yet it was enough amusement and instruction for me to be among so many regular professional “first-nighters”; and I listened with great interest to their deep knowledge of the subject. Five or six men of all ages evidently knew one another, and they were talking about a little book that had just been written on Mr. Henry Irving by Mr. William Archer. It was a very startling book—the very one, in fact, that I was going to buy at the bookstall when the shady customer pretended he was Mr. Martin Tupper. It was a small book with rather a grim picture of Mr. Henry Irving on the outside, and I found that these old hands of the stage did not altogether approve of the book and thought parts of it rather strong coming from Mr. Archer to Mr. Irving.

“He says that Irving is half a woman,” said a grey man. “Now that’s going too far, in my opinion.”

“I know what he’s driving at,” answered a young man with a very intellectual face. “You see, every artist has got to be man, woman, and child rolled into one. Every great artist has to have the imagination and power of feeling and fellow-feeling to identify himself with every other sort of possible person. If you can’t do that, you can’t be a first-class actor. That’s where Irving beats Barrett into a cocked hat—temperament and power of imagination. Irving could act anything—from Richard the Third to an infant in arms; Barrett could not.”

“Barrett very nearly made Hamlet an infant in arms, all the same,” said the grey man, and at this excellent and subtle joke they all laughed. I wanted to laugh in an admiring sort of way, but doubted whether it would not be rather interfering. So I contented myself with smiling heartily; because I didn’t want them to think so fine a joke had been lost upon me.

They were very deeply read in everything to do with the theatre, and I found that they knew most of the actresses by their married names, which, of course, I did not. Thus, greatly to my surprise, I found out that nearly all the most fascinating and famous actresses were married. Many even had families.

Splendid stories were told by the grey man. He related a great jest about Mr. William Terriss when he was acting with Mr. Irving. It was irreverent in a way to such a famous actor as Mr. Terriss; but, of course, for mere intellectual power Mr. Terriss was not in it with Mr. Irving—any more than any other actor was, though he might, none the less, be very great in himself. And once, when Mr. Terriss was rehearsing with Mr. Irving, the latter, failing to make the former do what he wanted, said before the actors, actresses, and supernumeraries at that time assembled on the spacious boards of the Lyceum Theatre—he said, “My dear Terriss, do try and use the little brains that God has given you!”

The hours rolled by and one or two of the young men spoke kindly to me. Then the girl, who had grey eyes and a mass of yellow hair under a deer-stalker hat, and was dressed in cloth of the same kind, also spoke to me and asked me to take my elbow out of her shoulder-blade. I apologised instantly and altered my position. The crush was now increasing and the air was exceedingly stuffy; but there still remained an hour before the doors opened.

Having broken the ice, the girl, who I think was tired of keeping quiet for such a long time, began to talk. We discussed the drama and “first nights” in general. From one thing we went to another and I found, much to my interest, that the girl intended to become an actress. She was an independent and courageous sort of girl. Her parents had a shop in the Edgware Road and were very much against her going on the stage; but she was determined to defy them. There was to be a dramatic school opened shortly, and she was going to join it. Then I naturally told her that I was going to join that school too, and she was quite pleased.

“Perhaps we shall play parts in the same play some day,” she said; and I said I hoped we might.

“Phew!” she exclaimed presently. “This is getting a bit thick, isn’t it?”

Certainly it was. I had never been in such a tightly packed crowd and, as bad luck would have it, I was beginning to feel very uncomfortable. I was, in plain words, starving. Like a fool I had spared no time for tea, but rushed off at the earliest possible moment, and now I began to feel emptier than I had ever felt in my life before.

The girl, to whom I mentioned this, said that I had gone white as chalk, but that I should be able to buy something to eat and drink inside. She had some chocolate in her pocket, fortunately, and with great generosity insisted upon sharing it with me; but it amounted really to nothing in my ravenous state. It was like giving a hungry tiger a shrimp.

And then a most extraordinary thing happened—a thing that I should not have believed possible. I began to feel funnier and funnier, and to gasp in a very fishlike way, and to feel a cold and horrid sweat bursting out upon my forehead. I had not felt like this for many, many years—in fact, only once before: on the day that I and Jackson Minor found a cigar at Merivale and tossed for it and I won and smoked the cigar secretly to the stump. And I remembered now, with tragical horror, what happened afterwards; and the hideous thought came to me that I was going to be ill in that seething crowd of hardy old “first-nighters”! Think of the disgrace and shame of it; and it wasn’t only that, because, of course, the “first-nighters” would never forget a horrible adventure of that kind, and no doubt the next time I presented myself among them, to wait five or six hours before the doors opened upon some great triumph of Thespian art, they would recognise me and band together against me and order me away, as a man unfit to take his place among seasoned critics of the drama.

All this and much more flashed through my head and then, just before the climax, there came the comforting thought that I couldn’t be ill in that way, having had nothing since my bun and glass of milk eight hours before. I am sorry to keep on mentioning this bun and glass of milk because it sounds greedy, but for once in a way I was glad that I was empty—for the sake of all those artistic and courageous “first-nighters,” not to mention the brave, grey-eyed girl.

Then I felt my knees give and the gaslight overhead whirled about like a comet with twenty tails; I saw the heads of the people round me fade off their shoulders; the gaslight went out; I heard a tremendous humming and roaring in my ears, like a train in a tunnel, and all was over. My last thought was that this was death, and I wondered if Miss Ellen Terry would read about it in the paper next day and be sorry. But, even at that ghastly moment, I knew she wouldn’t, because of course she would want to hear what the critics thought of her “Portia”; and that would naturally be the principal thing in the newspaper for her.

Of course I wasn’t dying really; but I fainted and must have put a great many people to fearful inconvenience. It shows, however, what jolly good hearts “first-nighters” have got, in my opinion, that they didn’t merely let me sink to the earth, and ignore me, and walk over me when the doors opened. But far from that, despite the length of my legs, they lugged me out somehow and forced open the side door of a public-house that was close at hand, and thrust me in.

When I came to, my first instinct was one of pure self-preservation and I asked for food. Outside, the people were crushing into the pit of the theatre, and by the time I had eaten about a loaf and half a Dutch cheese, and drunk some weak brandy-and-water, which the landlord of the public-house very kindly and humanely insisted upon my doing, the pit was full—not even standing room remained. It was rather sad in a way; but I felt less for the frightful disappointment, after waiting all those hours, than for the debt I owed the merciful men who had rescued me. Of course I didn’t know who they might be and, in any case, it was impossible to wait there till midnight, on the off-chance of seeing them after the play was over and thanking them gratefully.

I could have kicked myself over it, because for a chap nearly six feet high, about to join the London Athletic Club and going to be an actor some day and so on—for such a chap, with his way to make in the world, to go into a crowd and faint, like a footling schoolgirl who cuts her finger—it was right bang off, as they say. I felt fearfully downcast about it, because it looked to me as if my career might just as well be closed there and then: but the kind landlord rather cheered me up. He said:

“You needn’t take on like that. No doubt you’ve outgrown your strength. It’s nothing at all. The air out there in these crushes would choke a crow. It’s the commonest thing in the world for people to be dragged out and shot in that door.”

“Women, I dare say—not men.”

“Women—and boys,” he answered. “And what d’you call yourself?”

“Well, I’m a man, I suppose,” I replied. “I’m earning my own living, anyway.”

“So did I—afore I was ten years old, my bold hero!” said the landlord.

He talked to me, while I ate my bread and cheese, and presently advised me to take a cab and drive home; but this I scorned to do, being perfectly fit again. I said I hoped to see him once more some day and he only took sixpence for all my refreshment. He was a good man and I felt jolly obliged to him—especially when he told me that my faint was not a disgrace in itself, but more in the nature of a misfortune.

I walked home and said nothing about this unfortunate event; but merely told Aunt Augusta that I had not been able to get into the Lyceum, which was the strict truth and no more. For if I had revealed to her about fainting she would have fussed me to death and very likely made me go to Harley Street in grim earnest and not merely as a spectator of that famous spot.

Two nights later I went to the Lyceum again and waited three hours, and being laden in every pocket with sausage rolls, mince pies, and fat, sustaining pieces of chocolate, simply laughed at the waiting. However, it was a lesson in its way; and the lesson was never to be hungry in London. It is the worst place in the world to be hungry in—owing to the great strain on the nerves, no doubt. And hunger weakens the strength in a very marked way and makes you liable to be run over, or anything. Besides that, to be hungry is not only very uncomfortable in itself; but it makes you a great nuisance to other people; and the hungry person ought not to go into crowds for fear of the consequences. A time was coming when I was going to see hundreds of hungry persons all assembled in one place together; but that remarkable and fearful sight did not happen until many months later.

The immediate result of the fainting was a change of diet, and you will be glad to know I shall never mention the bun and the glass of milk again; because it went out of my career from that day forward.

I had no secrets from Mr. Blades, who was now my greatest and most trusted friend in London. Therefore I told him about the catastrophe, making him first swear silence; and he explained it all and let me go out to lunch with him that very day, to show me what a good and nourishing lunch ought to be.

“It is silly to say you can’t pay for it,” declared Mr. Blades, “because you must. And it is far better to pay for a chop or steak or even a sausage and mashed and half of bitter ale, than to find yourself in the doctor’s hands.”

He was full of these wise and shrewd sayings; so I went to an eating-house with him and never laughed so much before, owing to the screamingly funny way in which a waiter shouted things down a tube. It was not so much the things in themselves as the way he shortened the names of them, to save his precious time. Men came in and gave their orders, and then this ridiculous but exceedingly clever waiter shouted his version of the orders down a pipe which led to the kitchen of the restaurant, where the dishes were being prepared.

It was like this: the waiter cruised round among the customers and collected orders for soup. Two men ordered ox-tail soup, three had mock-turtle soup, Mr. Blades decided for vegetable soup and I had pea-soup. Well, of course, that was far too much to shout down the tube, so the genius of a waiter said, “Two ox, three mocks, a veg, and a pea!” And there you were! In less than no time the various soups appeared, and the funniest thing of all to me was, that nobody saw anything funny about it. But I roared—I couldn’t help it, and much to my regret annoyed Mr. Blades, who told me not to play the fool where he was known. After a time I steadied down and made an ample meal; and afterwards it transpired that it was generally the custom of Mr. Blades to play a couple of games of dominoes with some of his friends, who lunched at the same place. But, though he promised to teach me, it was impossible that day owing to my being quite unsteadied and helpless and imbecile with laughing just at the end of the lunch.

It was, I need hardly say, the amazing waiter. He saw that he had frightfully amused me and perhaps thought he would get an extra tip for being so wonderful. Which he did do, for I gave him sixpence and made Mr. Blades angry again.

But the waiter deserved a pound, for when two men ordered Gorgonzola cheese and another man ordered a currant dumpling and three others wanted kidneys on toast, he excelled himself by screaming down to the kitchen these memorable words:

“Two Gorgons, a dump, and three kids!” Then he winked at me and I simply rolled about helplessly and wept with laughing. This must have been one of that glorious waiter’s greatest efforts, I think, because several other quite elderly men laughed too.

He was called “William,” and I knew him well in a week. He had a rich fund of humour, but was very honest and hard-working and a Londoner to the backbone. He hated foreign waiters and said that the glitter of his shiny hair was produced by a little fat from the grill well rubbed in every morning. No barber’s stuff could touch it, he said, and if it made him smell like a mutton chop, who thought the worse of him for that? He expected twopence after each luncheon, and if any stranger gave him less, he made screamingly funny remarks. In his evenings he waited at the banquets of the City Companies, which are the most stupendous feeds the world has ever known since Nero’s times; and at these dinners he often heard State and other secrets, which he said would have been worth a Jew’s eye to him if he had not been an honest man. He didn’t, of course, say these things as if they were meant to be true. Simple people no doubt would have believed them, but I soon got to notice that he accompanied many of his most remarkable statements with a wink, which disarmed criticism, as the saying is. He was a good man at heart and had a wife at home and also a lame daughter who would never walk; so, though one would not have thought it, he had his trials. In fact nearly everybody I met, when I got to know them, told me about distressing things which they hid from the world. Even Mr. Blades, who seemed to preserve the even tenor of his way with great skill, confessed to me that he had a brother very different from himself and evidently very inferior in every way. In fact it looked to me, though of course I never hinted at such a thing, that the brother of Mr. Blades must have been rapidly sinking into a shady customer of the deadliest sort.

Really for the moment, after I took to proper lunches, it seemed as if I was the only man in the office with no private worries.