The Theatre Queue
Golding, Louis
THE THEATRE QUEUE By LOUIS GOLDING WHENEVER I visit the theatre in any other city than London, I am aware of something lacking throughout the whole prosecution of the performance, however...
...But you will find not only the sad mind which'methodically pursues its path from column to column of the evening paper, finding of equal importance the stablishment of empires, the erection of a new pump, the virtues of Dr...
...Baker's chances of adding a millimetre to his high jump...
...For minutes he stood before the waiting crowd, lifting an arm, making passes with his stick, interjecting from time to time an unintelligible word...
...Blind Tim is approaching with dull disks for eyes, and his wife, a shawl over her head, a solemn wise child staring across her shoulder, leads him by the hand...
...With what agility do the woman's compensating eyes scamper among our faces like ferrets in and out among rat-holes...
...Once, by some accident, he lifted his face and caught the compassionate stare of some honest citizen...
...The cause of my unease eludes me from act to act...
...They lead me to a box...
...Dusk gloomed across my eyes...
...Then of a sudden I found my eyes enchained by his...
...Or he would circle heavily on one foot, then strike again at an imaginary enemy...
...Consider the sallow typists from the southeastern suburbs musing outside the Pavilion doors how Delysia is overrated, of the abandoned ecstasy with which they will flood her stage when, from the blear unknown, suddenly a hawk-beaked manager raises them to that, ah, sweet eminence...
...The boy it was who came round with the cap...
...but for my part I prefer the dizzy chances of the queue to all the stalls' flamboyant monotony...
...The infinite variety of type and achievement that they present...
...There was such power in his face that his presence seemed to fill the air enormously...
...I was examining him with some interest, assuring myself that here was a worthy addition to my store of queue memories...
...No one could have had a more exiguous equipment than he...
...In London, I stand in a queue...
...In rivalry with him a lady has appeared who is uttering a long and irrelevant oration that involves the title of every play the town has known for years...
...They have not been elected to their dignity because their teeth will advertise so well the All-in Tooth-Paste or because they were fives champions at Marlborough or because their brotherin-law is in the trade...
...The man might long ago have been a poet, a scholar, anything...
...but his lips bore at once the indefinable shadow of some evil which had gripped him, and the forlorn traces of a battle in which he had been overcome...
...It is upon these that the eyes of that wise solemn child seem to settle for one moment of melancholy surprise...
...Neither a flute nor burnt cork was his endowment, nor a sword to swallow—nothing but a walking-stick...
...to outstare with no visible discomfort the policeman's hauteur...
...you will find also a meritorious youth at Gibbon's seventh volume...
...Let the least sign of compassion relax your lips, and the teeth, as it were, of her necessity, have nipped your throat...
...until at the very moment of climax, just when we learn that the gold-haired maiden did not, in point of fact, poison the vicar or that the vampire is to abandon all claims to the heart of the handsome young baritone—in that moment of climax, I say, I realize what is missing...
...THE THEATRE QUEUE By LOUIS GOLDING WHENEVER I visit the theatre in any other city than London, I am aware of something lacking throughout the whole prosecution of the performance, however opulent, however brilliant...
...The man swung a concertina, the boy played, with indignation and grief, the violin...
...But, let me confess, it is not my actual companions in the queue that absorb me so much as that strange fellowship of entertainers that float from theatre to theatre to hasten our slow-footed hours...
...Not one muscle but controls some terrifying instrument...
...But I am remembering now a man who, for a short period only, took round the theatres a boy of about fifteen, his son perhaps...
...For when I go to the theatre in London, I stand in a queue for variable times before the performance starts, finding that the stalls and dress circle are not for such feckless wanderers as I. In New York, in Paris, in Cairo, I do not stand in a queue...
...to hazard the London weathers...
...But now it was that the crowd began to press forward, to filter through the doors...
...Could you read, at a length of many columns, a learned disquisition upon Mr...
...But when the rattle of his bone-blocks is no more heard, how cracked are those voices singing the deathless loyalty of (or is it towards...
...They were both wearing what had once been expensive and well-cut clothes, but the father's betrayed every mark of carelessness, the boy's were pitifully well pressed and brushed...
...He looked beyond us and beyond the theatre walls, beyond the foolish preparations for the puppet-show we were waiting to witness...
...He was the spectator, that terrible and aloof old man...
...To them entertainment is an austere vocation, not an amiable pastime...
...The boy blushed, dropped his eyes, completed his task and disappeared like a stricken beast...
...Who, saving the poor exiles to stalls and dress circle, does not hail with delight the Negro minstrel descending like the god in the machine, from the impassive clouds, to demand "Ev'rybody 'appy...
...Cymbals, bassoons, drums, triangles, bagpipes—every music saving a cathedral organ's is within the compass of his mobile ringers, his ankles, shoulders, his very eyebrows...
...I make the further confession that on many occasions the al fresco performers without the theatre doors have intrigued me far more than the conventional entertainers within...
...Pinkerton's Purple Pills...
...Consider the contrast between the befeathered, the pearl-breastpinned queues at our Lyceum Theatre and the owl-eyed gentlemen that study the score of "Parsifal" until such time as Covent Garden shall throw open its doors...
...You do not assume a black tie and a stiff shirt for the queue, which garments are all very well in their way...
...I looked round for that old man with his walking-stick, but he was there no more...
...Now a sword-swallower approaches ; now a strange musical pantechnicon...
...Sweet Genevieve...
...It is a decrepit, futile old man, as he seemed, who is more abiding in my memory...
...I heard a tramping and a tumult, and I could not know whether they came from the hollows of my own heart or from afar off, from the edges of space...
...In the first place, of course, they take their labors far more seriously, they are not mere amateurs...
...By what right could he expect, for such small service rendered, our attentions and our coins...
...and throughout the process he held his eyes shamefast on the ground, shuffling like a dotard on his young feet...
...the first vowel a prolonged scream...
...With what studies in the mental pabula of the English race do the theatre queues provide us...
...Some there are in the queue who stiffen every sinew upon an iron preoccupation with their reading as soon as the clanking of her tin approaches...
...He held me with a grave scrutiny, heavy with wisdom...
...Could you flush with passion over the Poulterers' Standard-bearer...
...For a while we were faintly amused, then bored, then at last faintly indignant...
...the people round me, I amongst them, shrank into trivial manikins, posturing, gesticulating...
...we were the entertainers, performing our little tricks before this unimpassioned audience...
...he looked beyond the innumerable littlenesses of the metropolis, over the slope of the world into the heavens...
...How else could they be induced to venture, blackened, and in motley, through the scoffing streets...
Vol. 12 • July 1930 • No. 11
