Vergers, too, observe towards you the courtesy extended to strangers within the gate. There is a subtle difference in their manner. In their "Yes, sirs," and "No, sirs," and in their pointing and smiling you can feel the affection which churches have always, and quite rightly, extended to pilgrims. One man obviously considered me a distinguished visitor from foreign parts. He went out of his way to instruct me in history that I know quite well, and I wondered whether the only straight and honourable thing to do was to make a clean breast of it and stop him with:
"Look here, I live in Knightsbridge and work in Fleet Street, and I'm frightfully sorry about it, and all that. I know it's most unusual and you won't believe me, but there it is."
I had not the courage. I gazed insincerely into his enthusiastic eyes and said "Really!" and "By Jove!" and "How interesting," at appropriate pauses, so that when eventually I left him I went surrounded, for him, with all the beauty of a bird of passage.
Heartbreak House
In the old comic papers you will find a stock character whose nose is red, whose coat collar is Astrakhan, whose hand is always drawn in the act of conveying drink to a clean-shaven, mobile mouth—a mouth always uttering the words: "When I played Hamlet, laddie, in '84..."
He is, or rather was, the out-of-work actor. No actor has of course ever been out of work: he "rests" sometimes for so long a period that idleness becomes a habit. Lack of employment seems to cover the actor with disgrace. In most other professions men make no secret of being out of a job, but the actor acts both on and off the stage.
The out-of-work actor to-day (you find him in Leicester Square and the Charing Cross Road), has changed since the comic papers pictured a tragedian whose ambitious argosies had evidently foundered in, as Homer would put it, a wine-dark sea. To-day you find him in a bar, merely because there he will meet other actors and agents and pick up news of his heartless and overrated profession; but in his hand is a glass of ginger beer. His clothes are well-cut and he wears a public school tie. His spats draw attention to his worn boots, always the sign of a man's condition, and as he drawls lazily in his Oxford voice, real or assumed, he tries hard to give the impression that, resting as he is on the enormous profits of his genius, he must keep an important appointment in Mayfair at one-thirty or the duchess will be absolutely furious!
Poor brave people! No matter how overdue the rent may be they never lose their panache. To-day the fight to walk on in a musical comedy and say heartily: "Girls, let's go to Paris!" and the feminine fight to answer coyly in good Kensingtonian: "Oh, what a quate topping ideah!" is fiercer than ever. Added to the usual legitimate "resters" are thousands of film actors, both male and female, thrown on the streets because the British film trade is in the doldrums.
If you could only know the bitterness of the fight for the job that does not exist, the daily march round the agents' offices, the young man who puts his head round a door, smiles, says "Nothing doing"—the humiliation of not having a shilling!