Sensitive to such effects, he sat, musing and contemplative, when suddenly his spirit was imperiously aroused by the orchestra.  The ’celli had opened the Andante from the C Minor Symphony.  For ten minutes, the music held his every sense....  It unfolded as of old, but not its full message.  There was a meaning in it for him!  He heard the three voices—­man, woman and angel.  It was the woman’s tragedy.  The lustrous Third Presence was for her.  The man’s figure was obscure, disintegrate....  Bedient was so filled with the mystery, that the play had but little surface of his consciousness during the first act.  He enjoyed it, but could not give all he had.  Finally, as Hedda was ordering the young writer to drink wine to get “vine-leaves in his hair,” there was an explosion back of the scenes.  Bedient, as did many others, thought at first it belonged to the piece.  The faces of the players fell away in thick gloom, the voices sank into crazy echoes, and the curtain went down.  Bedient’s last look at the stage brought him the impression of squirming chaos.  Fire touched the curtain behind, disfiguring and darkening the pictured ruin.  Then a woman near him screamed.  The back of a chair snapped, and now scores took up the woman’s cry.

The crowd caught a succession of hideous ideas:  of being trapped and burned, of inadequate exits, murderous gases, bodies piled at the doors—­all the detailed news-horror of former theatre disasters.  And the crowd did all it could to repeat the worst of these.  Bedient encountered an altogether new strength, the strength of a frenzied mass, and to his nostrils came a sick odor from the fear-mad.  The lights had not been turned on with the fall of the curtain.  Untrained to cities, Bedient was astonished at the fright of the people, the fright of the men!...  The lines of Hedda recurred to him, and he called out laughingly: 

“Now’s the time for ‘vine-leaves in your hair,’ men!”

He moved among the seats free from the aisle.  A body lay at his feet.  Groping forward, his hand touched a woman’s hair.  He smiled at the thought that here was one for him to help, and lifted her, turning to look at the glare through the writhing curtain.  There were voices behind in that garish furnace; and now the lights filled the theatre again.  Bedient quickly made his way with others to a side exit, the red light of which had not attracted the crowd.

The woman was light in his arms.  She wore a white net waist, and her brown hair was unfastened.  She had crushed a large bunch of English violets to her mouth and nostrils, to keep out the smoke and gas.  A peculiar thing about it was, Bedient did not see her face.  In the alley, he handed his burden to a man and woman, standing together at the door of a car, and went back.  One of the actors had stepped in front of the stage, and was calling out that the fire was under control, that there was no danger whatever.  The roar from the gallery passages subsided.  Only a few were hurt, since the theatre was modern and the main exit ample....  Bedient returned to the side-door but the woman he had carried forth was gone, probably with the pair in the car.  He decided to see the end of Hedda Gabler another time.  The Andante, the Grecian ruin and vine-leaves were curiously blended in his mind....