Almost at the same moment the
being in the dress-suit and the eyeglass, becoming aware of phenomena
slightly unusual even in a restaurant, dropped his eyeglass, turned
round to the sideboard and received the other waiter's seven dozen
plates in the face and on the crown of his head.

No such effect had ever been seen in the Five Towns, and the felicity
of the audience exceeded all previous felicities. The audience yelled,
roared, shrieked, gasped, trembled, and punched itself in a furious
passion of pleasure. They make plates in the Five Towns. They live by
making plates. They understand plates. In the Five Towns a man will
carry not seven but twenty-seven dozen plates on a swaying plank for
eight hours a day up steps and down steps, and in doorways and out of
doorways, and not break one plate in seven years! Judge, therefore,
the simple but terrific satisfaction of a Five Towns audience in the
hugeness of the calamity. Moreover, every plate smashed means a demand
for a new plate and increased prosperity for the Five Towns. The
grateful crowd in the auditorium of the Empire would have covered the
stage with wreaths, if it had known that wreaths were used for other
occasions than funerals; which it did not know.

Fresh complications instantly ensued, which cruelly cut short the
agreeable exercise of uncontrolled laughter. It was obvious that one
of the waiters was about to fall. And in the enforced tranquillity
of a new dread every dyspeptic person in the house was deliciously
conscious of a sudden freedom from indigestion due to the agreeable
exercise of uncontrolled laughter, and wished fervently that he could
laugh like that after every meal. The waiter fell; he fell through
the large violet hat and disappeared beneath the surface of a sea of
crockery. The other waiter fell too, but the sea was not deep enough
to drown a couple of them. Then the customers, recovering themselves,
decided that they must not be outclassed in this competition of havoc,
and they overthrew the table and everything on it, and all the other
tables and everything on all the other tables. The audience was now
a field of artillery which nothing could silence. The waiters arose,
and, opening the sideboard, disclosed many hundreds of unsuspected
plates of all kinds, ripe for smashing. Niagaras of plates surged on
to the stage. All four performers revelled and wallowed in smashed
plates. New supplies of plates were constantly being produced from