He caught the eye of a barmaid, and she seemed to be saying to him sternly: 'If you think you can occupy this place all night on a ninepenny drink, you are mistaken. Either you ought to order another or hook it.' He braved it for several more ages, then paid, and went; and still it was only ten minutes to nine. All mundane phenomena were inexplicably contorted that night. As he was passing the end of the short street which contains the stage-door of Prince's Theatre, a man, standing at the door on the lookout, hailed him loudly. He hesitated, and the man--it was the doorkeeper--flew forward and seized him and dragged him in.
'Drink this, Mr. Knight,' commanded the doorkeeper.
'I'm all right,' said Henry. 'What's up?'
'Yes, I know you're all right. Drink it.'
'Come upstairs,' said the doorkeeper. 'You'll be wanted, Mr. Knight.'
As he approached the wings of the stage, under the traction of the breathless doorkeeper, he was conscious of the falling of the curtain, and of the noisiest noise beyond the curtain that he had ever heard.
'Here, Mr. Knight, drink this,' said someone in his ear. 'Keep steady. It's nothing.'
His overcoat was jerked off by a mysterious agency.
The noise continued to be terrible: it rose and fell like the sea.
Then he was aware of Jane Map rushing towards him and of Jane Map kissing him rapturously on the mouth. 'Come _on_,' cried Jane Map, and pulled him by the hand, helter-skelter, until they came in front of a blaze of light and the noise crashed at his ears.
'I've been through this before somewhere,' he thought, while Jane Map wrung his hand. 'Was it in a previous existence? No. The Alhambra!' What made him remember the Alhambra was the figure of little Doxey sheepishly joining himself and Jane. Doxey, with a disastrous lack of foresight, had been in the opposite wing, and had had to run round the stage in order to come before the curtain. Doxey's share in the triumph was decidedly less than half....
'No,' Henry said later, with splendid calm, when Geraldine, Jane, Doxey, and himself were drinking champagne in Jane's Empire dressing-room, 'it wasn't nervousness. I don't quite know what it was.'
He gathered that the success had been indescribable.
'I tell you what, old man,' said Doxey: 'we must adapt _The Plague-Spot_, eh?'