Page:Once a Clown, Always a Clown.djvu/65

Rh service for both floors of the dressing rooms that had been built back of the stage. Incidentally, the window was deeply inset, leaving a sort of shaft between the first and second floor dressing rooms. Grahame and I had the room directly over one occupied by Mrs. Davenport, Mrs. Rush and Miss Gilman.

When Harry had made up, he called upon his mother, as was his unvarying custom before each performance.

We heard him enter and greet his mother, and a moment later our ears were startled by his voice asking, "Do you ladies object if I smoke?"

The ladies, in their hapless innocence, did not object. The cigar was lit, Grahame and I held our breaths. Suddenly a chair was overturned below us, three women screamed, and the skirmish line of the world's most stupendous stench came up through the shaft. The concentrated essence of all the reeks in the aggregate that ever assailed my olfactory sense did not even suggest the plague that rolled up that shaft. It drove myself and all of us out of the dressing rooms and out of the theater, and it was fifteen minutes before we dared to return. The curtain was that much late.