I remember the stage manager shouting to me from the wings "Keep singing, keep singing." It was not easy, I can assure you, to keep on with a humorous number in circumstances like those, and with sparks dropping over one's head, but I did keep on with the song until they decided to ring down the curtain. Then I was told to run upstairs to warn the girls, whose dressing-rooms were near the flies. Now, as a young man I had made a reputation for myself as a practical joker, and one of my favourite antics was to tell this person or that, quite untruly, "You're wanted on the stage." Thus, when I rushed up to sound the real alarm, it was treated as a cry of "wolf." I banged the doors and entreated them to come out, but it was not until the smoke began to creep into the rooms that the girls knew positively that there was a fire, and promptly scurried for safety. Fortunately the outbreak was speedily subdued and the performance proceeded.
A minor incident of this kind may be worth mentioning. We were in "Erminie" at the Comedy, and at the close of one of the acts the chorus, the ladies dressed as fisher girls and holding lighted candles, were singing a concerted "Good Night." Suddenly I noticed that one of the girls who was not paying much attention to her work had let the candle ignite the mob cap she was wearing. If the flame had reached her wig--and wigs in those days were cleaned with spirit--she must have been seriously burnt. So I ran up and tore off her cap, only to be rewarded with a haughty, "How dare you!" Later, when she realised what her danger had been, her apology and thanks were profuse.
It may not, I think, be amiss if to these combustible reminiscences is added just one more story, though in a much lighter vein. It occurred in "The Sorcerer." _John Wellington Wells_, the "dealer in magic and spells," disappears at last into the nether regions, as it were, through the trap-door in the stage. One night the trap, having dropped a foot or so, refused to move any further, and there was I, enveloped in smoke and brimstone, poised between earth and elsewhere. So all I could do was to jump back on to the boards, make a grimace at the refractory trap-door, and go off by the ordinary exit. "Hell's full!" shouted an irreverent voice from the "gods." The joke, I know, was not a new one, for legend has it that a similar incident occurred during a performance of "Faust." Whether it did or not I do know that it occurred in that performance of "The Sorcerer."