A PLEA FOR THE OLD PLAYGOER

He’s a nuisance, of course.  But to see only that side of him is to think, as the shepherd boy piped, ‘as though’ you will ‘never grow old.’  Does he never appeal to you with any more human significance, a significance tearful and uncomfortably symbolic?  Or are you so entirely that tailor’s fraction of manhood, the fin de siecle type, that your ninth part does not include a heart and the lachrymal gland?

You suspect him at once as you squeeze past his legs to your stall, for he cannot quite conceal the hissing twinge of gout; and you are hardly seated ere you are quite sure that a long night of living for others is before you.

‘You hardly would think it, perhaps,’ he begins, ’but I saw Charles Young play the part—­yes, in 1824.’

If you are young and innocent, you think—­’What an interesting old gentleman!’ and you have vague ideas of pumping him for reminiscences to turn into copy.  Poor boy, you soon find that there is no need of pumping on your part.  He is entirely self-acting, and the wells of his autobiography are as deep as the foundations of the world.

If you are more experienced, you make a quick frantic effort to escape; you try to nip the bud of his talk with a frosty ‘Indeed!’ and edge away, calling upon your programme to cover you.  You never so much as turn the sixteenth part of an eye in his direction, for even as the oyster-man, should the poor mollusc heave the faintest sigh, is inside with his knife in the twinkling of a star; even as a beetle has but to think of moving its tiniest leg for the bird to swoop upon him,—­even so will the least muscular interest in your neighbour give you bound hand and foot into his power.

But really and truly escape is hopeless.  You are beyond the reach of any salvage agency whatsoever.  Better make up your mind to be absolutely rude or absolutely kind:  and the man who can find in his heart to be the former must have meeting eyebrows, and will sooner or later be found canonised in wax at Madame Tussaud’s.  To be the latter, however, is by no means easy.  It is one of the most poignant forms of self-sacrifice attained by the race.  In that, at least, you have some wintry consolation; and the imaginative vignette of yourself wearing the martyr’s crown is a pretty piece of sacred art.

If you wished to make a bag of old playgoers, or meditated a sort of Bartholomew’s Eve, a revival of Hamlet would, of course, be the occasion you would select for your purpose:  for the old playgoer, so to speak, collects Hamlets.  At a first night of Hamlet every sixth stall-holder is a Dr. Doran up to date, his mind a portfolio of old prints.

That is why a perambulation of the stalls is as perilous as to pick one’s way through hot ploughshares.  You can hardly hope always to pass through unscathed.  You are as sure some night to find yourself seated beside him, as you will some day be called to serve on the jury.  And then—­