Chapter VII

He went down to the theatre on the evening of the first performance in a state of calm and quietness which greatly astonished him. He had expected to tremble and quake with nervousness and to be reluctant to go near the theatre. He remembered to have read somewhere an account of the way in which some melodramatist of repute behaved on a first night. He walked up and down the Embankment while his play was being performed, mopping his fevered brow and groaning in agony. Someone had found the melodramatist on one occasion, sitting at the foot of Cleopatra's Needle, howling into his handkerchief.... John, however, had no terrors whatever when he entered the theatre, and he told himself that the melodramatist was either an extremely emotional man or a very considerable liar. There was a moderate number of people in the auditorium, enough to preserve the theatre from seeming sparsely-occupied, but not enough to justify anyone in saying that the house was full. The atmosphere resembled that of a church. People spoke, when they spoke at all, in whispers, and John was so infected by the air of solemnity that when a small boy in the gallery began to call out "Acid drops or cigarettes!" he felt that a sidesman must appear from a pew and take the lad to the police-station for brawling in a sacred edifice. He waited for the orchestra to appear, but the play began without any preliminary music. The lights were lowered, and soon afterwards someone beat the floor of the stage with a wooden mallet ... sending forth three sepulchral sounds that seemed to hammer out of the audience any tendency it might have had to enjoy itself. Then the curtain ascended, and the play began.