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At this point his voice was lost in a destroying uproar. Perceiving that the rehearsal was well under way, and that the star had made his entrance, two of the stage-hands attached to the theatre ascended to the flies and set up a great bellowing on high. “Lower that strip!” “You don’t want that strip lowered, I tell you!” “Oh, my Lord! Can’t you lower that strip!” Another workman at the rear of the stage began to saw a plank, and somebody else, concealed behind a bit of scenery, hammered terrifically upon metal. Altogether it was a successful outbreak.

Potter threw his manuscript upon the table, a gesture that caused the shoulders of Packer to move in a visible shudder, and the company, all eyes fixed upon the face of the star, suddenly wore the look of people watching a mysterious sealed packet from which a muffled ticking is heard. The bellowing and the sawing and the hammering increased in fury.

In the orchestra a rusty gleam of something like mummified pleasure passed unseen behind the spectacles of old Carson Tinker. “Stage-hands are the devil,” he explained to the stupefied Canby. “Rehearsals bore them and they love to hear what an actor says when his nerves go to pieces. If Potter blows up they’ll quiet down to enjoy it and then do it again pretty soon. If he doesn’t blow up he’ll take it out on somebody else later.”

Potter stood silent in the centre of the stage, expressionless, which seemed to terrify the stage-manager. “Just one second, Mr. Potter!” he screamed, his brow pearly with the anguish of apprehension. “Just one second, sir!”

He went hotfoot among the disturbers, protesting, commanding, imploring, and plausibly answering severe questions. “Well, when do you expect us to git this work done?” “We got our work to do, ain’t we?” until finally the tumult ceased, the saw slowing down last of all, tapering off reluctantly into a silence of plaintive disappointment; whereupon Packer resumed his place, under a light at the side of the stage, turning the pages of his manuscript with fluttering fingers and keeping his eyes fixed guiltily upon it. The company of actors also carefully removed their gaze from the star and looked guilty.

Potter allowed the fatal hush to continue, while the culpability of Packer and the company seemed mysteriously to increase until they all reeked with it. The stage-hands had withdrawn in a grieved manner somewhere into the huge rearward spaces of the old building. They belonged to the theatre, not to Potter, and, besides, they had a union. But the actors were dependent upon Potter for the coming winter’s work and wages; they were his employees.

At last he spoke: “We will go on with the rehearsal,” he said quietly.

“Ah!” murmured old Tinker. “He’ll take it out on somebody else.” And with every precaution not to jar down a seat in passing, he edged his way to the aisle and went softly thereby to the extreme rear of the house. He was an employee, too.

III

It was a luckless lady who helped to fulfil the prediction. Technically she was the “ingenue”; publicly she was “Miss Carol Lyston”; legally she was a Mrs. Surbilt, being wife to the established leading man of that ilk, Vorly Surbilt. Miss Lyston had come to the rehearsal in a condition of exhausted nerves, owing to her husband’s having just accepted, over her protest, a “road” engagement with a lady-star of such susceptible gallantry she had never yet been known to resist falling in love with her leading-man before she quarrelled with him. Miss Lyston’s protest having lasted the whole of the preceeding night, and not at all concluding with Mr. Surbilt’s departure, about breakfast-time, avowedly to seek total anaesthesia by means of a long list of liquors, which he named, she had spent the hours before rehearsal interviewing female acquaintances who had been members of the susceptible lady’s company–a proceeding which indicates that she deliberately courted hysteria.