Conceive, if you can, my consternation when I discovered my dilemma. Having no further need for my excessive flesh, I sought to reduce my weight only to find that I could not lose it! Six years of playing Falstaff had made me Falstaff for good or ill. No fighter of the prize-ring, no beauty of the court, ever labored as I labored to struggle back to slimness. No Hamlet ever cried more earnestly than I,
“Oh, that this too, too solid flesh would melt!”
Like Sisyphus, I toiled for months with my burden, rolling off flesh only to have it roll on again, until at last I gave up in despair.
No manager would employ me to play for him—I was too fat. Too fat to act, too fat to play at any part but one. Once only since that time have I tried to obtain an engagement and that was when I saw an advertisement of a revival of my own great play, Henry the Fourth. But would you believe it, Sir, the manager had the impudence to laugh in my face, to deny the truth of my story and scoff at my insistence upon my identity. He called me, Sir, a fat slob! In desperation I tried a Dime Museum, only to be told that no “fat freaks” were employed who weighed less than three hundred and fifty pounds. At last I fell into my present disgraceful situation; I was employed by a restaurant-keeper as a decoy. In the window of one of the cheapest and vilest cafés in this city I sit for eight hours daily drawing a crowd about the place while I toy with a knife and fork and pretend to eat of a meal that I would not feed my most bitter enemy. I do not eat it. I can not eat it. And so, Sir, here I sit each day, a mere husk of my former self, a hulk, a wrecked Leviathan! A fraud and a freak; a delusion and a snare. This have I suffered in consequence of my devotion to an ideal—I who was for six years the greatest Falstaff the world has ever known!
T. P.
THE REWARD OF MERIT
To the Editor of The Idler.
Dear Sir: I am an ashman, or, as they call me nowadays, a scavenger. It may appear to you, Sir, a queer thing that a man in my station in life should address a letter to an editor and upon such a subject, but when I have made you acquainted with the facts of my case, I think it will not seem so strange.
It is true that I am now employed as a scavenger, but I was formerly the occupant of a very different station in life; I was formerly a physician. I wish to lay before you what I consider the causes of my descent in the social scale. When a man who has once been a member of an honored profession is reduced to manual labor of a peculiarly disagreeable sort, the common opinion is like to be that he is in some way responsible for his own downfall; that he has fallen a victim to drink or drugs, to a passion for gambling, or to some other injurious habit. In my own case, I will not deny that the change in my circumstances is probably due to my own conduct, though I do assure you that it was not caused by my indulgence in the habits which I have mentioned above. To be brief, Sir, I am of the opinion that my present poverty and obscurity is nothing more nor less than the reward of merit.