‘You remember the great Kean?’ said Maurice.
‘Yes, sir,’ answered Mr. Clipcome, with pride. ‘I remember Edmund Kean, and I remember Charles Young, and Miss O’Neil, and Miss Foote, and Mrs. Nesbitt, and Mr. Macready, and a good deal more talent such as you’re not likely to see in these days. Seacomb Theatre was worth going to in my boyhood.’
‘And you were an enthusiastic patron of the drama, I imagine?’
‘If spending every sixpence of my pocket-money upon admission to the pit is a proof of enthusiasm, I was an enthusiast, sir,’ replied Mr. Clipcome. ‘The sixpences which boys—well, I will venture to say boys of an inferior mind—would have laid out upon cakes and apples, peg-tops, and such like, I spent upon the drama. There’s hardly a line of Shakespeare you could quote that I couldn’t cap with another line. I used to go to the pit of that theatre twice a week while I was a youngster, and three or four times a week after my father’s death, when I was in business for myself and my own master, and used to get a weekly order for exhibiting the bills. And though there were a good many opposed to the closing of the theatre for ever, I don’t believe there was any one in all Seacomb took it to heart as keenly as I did. “Othello’s occupation was gone.”’
‘Why did they do away with your theatre at last?’ asked Maurice.
‘Well, you see, sir, the town had grown serious-minded, and for some years before they turned it into a chapel the theatre had been going down. The great actors and actresses were dead and gone, and the stars that were left didn’t care about coming to Seacomb. Managers had been doing worse and worse year after year, business dwindling down to next to nothing, half salaries, or no salaries towards the end of every season, and it became a recognised fact in the theatrical profession that Seacomb was no go. The actors and actresses that came here were sticks, or if not, they made up in rant what they wanted in talent. The county families left off coming to the place—there were no Bespeaks, and the poor old theatre got to have a dilapidated woe-begone look, so that it gave one the horrors to sit out a play. The actors looked hungry and out at elbows. It made one uncomfortable to see them. Many a time I asked one of them in to share my one o’clock dinner, if it was but a potato pasty, or a squab pie made with scrag of mutton. The stage door used to be just opposite my shop. It’s walled up now, but you may see the outline of it in the brickwork. The actors used to be always lounging about that doorway of a morning, on and off, and whilst the rehearsal was going on inside. And they were very fond of coming into my shop for a gossip, or a peep at a newspaper. Papers were dear in those days. No Standard or Telegraph with all the news of the world for a penny. And the poor chaps couldn’t afford to lay out fivepence.’
‘You must have been on friendly terms with a good many of them,’ said Maurice, feeling that from this loquacious barber, if from any one in Seacomb, he was likely to obtain the information he sought. ‘Do you happen to remember a man called Elgood?’
‘Elgood! Mat Elgood,’ cried the operator, dropping his scissors in the vehemence of his exclamation, ‘I should think I did indeed! He was one who hung on to our Theatre Royal to the very last,—stuck to it like a barnacle, poor fellow,—when there was not enough sustenance to be got out of it to keep body and soul together. He lodged in this very court, the last house on the other side, next door but one to the Theatre—a tailor’s it was then—and a good little man the tailor was, and a kind friend to Mat Elgood—as long as he had a crust to share with him, or a garret to shelter him. But one day, about a month after the theatre had shut up shop altogether, the manager having bolted—the brokers walked into poor Jones’s little place and took possession of everything, and Jones went to prison, so Mat Elgood and his wife, a poor weak thing that had lost her first baby only a few weeks before that time, were cast loose upon the world, and what became of them from that hour to this I never heard. If I’d had an empty room in my house I’d have given it them, but I hadn’t, and my wife is a prudent woman, who never forgot to remind me that my first duty was to her and my children, or, in other words, that charity begins at home.’
‘Do you remember the date of this occurrence—the year and month in which Matthew Elgood left Seacomb? I may as well tell you that I do not ask these questions out of idle curiosity. I am personally interested in knowing all about this Mr. Elgood.’
‘My dear sir,’ exclaimed the barber, swelling with importance at the idea of giving valuable information, ‘you could not have come to a better source. If I fail to remember the dates you require, I can produce documentary evidence which will place the fact beyond all doubt. For a period of ten years or upwards I made it a rule to keep a copy of every playbill issued in our town. They were delivered at my door gratis for exhibition in my window, and instead of throwing them aside as waste paper, I filed them as interesting records for re-perusal in the leisure of my later life. I am rather proud of that collection. It contains the name of many a brilliant light in the dramatic hemisphere, and, indeed, I look upon it as a history of dramatic art in little. My impression is that Elgood and his wife left Seacomb nineteen years ago last winter, but the bills will make matters certain. Matthew Elgood was among that diminished band which trod the boards of our poor little theatre on that final night when the green curtain descended on the Seacomb stage, never to rise again. The theatre remained in abeyance for some two or three years after that last performance, dismantled, shut up, a refuge for rats and mice, and such small deer.’