'Sure!' said Kloot cheerfully. 'They all die at the end. Our audiences would go away miserable if they didn't. You wait till they're dead, then you shall take your call.'
'Take my call, for your play!'
'There's quite a lot of your lines left, if you listen carefully. Only you don't understand stage technique. Oh, I'm not grumbling; we're quite satisfied. The idea of adapting "Hamlet" for the Yiddish stage is yours, and it's worth every cent we paid.'
A storm of applause gave point to the speaker's words, and removed the last partition between the poet's great mind and momentary madness. What! here was that ape of a Goldwater positively wallowing in admiration, while he, the mighty poet, had been cast into outer darkness and his work mocked and crucified! He put forth all his might, like Samson amid the Philistines, and leaving his coat-collar in Kloot's hand, he plunged into the circle of light. Goldwater's amazed face turned to meet him.
'Cutter of lines!' The poet's cane slashed across Hamlet's right cheek near the right eye. 'Perverter of poesy!' It slashed across the left cheek near the left eye.
The Prince of Palestine received each swish with a yell of pain and fear, and the ever-ready Kloot dropped the curtain on the tragic scene.
Such hubbub and hullabaloo as rose on both sides of the curtain! Yet in the end the poet escaped scot-free. Goldwater was a coward, Kloot a sage. The same prudence that had led Kloot to exclude authors, saved him from magnifying their importance by police squabbles. Besides, a clever lawyer might prove the exclusion illegal. What was done was done. The dignity of the hero of a hundred dramas was best served by private beefsteaks and a rumoured version, irrefutable save in a court of law. It was bad enough that the Heathen Journalist should supply so graphic a picture of the midnight melodrama, coloured even more highly than Goldwater's eyes. Kloot had been glad that the Journalist had left before the episode; but when he saw the account he wished the scribe had stayed.
'He won't play Hamlet with that pair of shiners,' Pinchas prophesied early the next morning to the supping café.
Radsikoff beamed and refilled Pinchas's glass with champagne. He had carried out his promise of assisting at the première, and was now paying for the poet's supper.
'You're the first playwright Goldwater hasn't managed to dodge,' he chuckled.