Yorick got from the stage manager permission to change his dressing-room.
Thereafter he and Bridges maintained a mutual coolness, until one day the
leading juvenile, warmed by cocktails, melted, and addressed the old man
familiarly by his nickname.
"Old fellow," said Bridges, over a cafe table, "when I come to play Hamlet,
I'll send for you to act Poor Yorick. You'd do it well. You're always best,
you know, in parts that don't require you to come on the stage at all."
The old man smiled grimly and then shrugged his shoulders at this
pleasantry. When he died the other day, he left a curious will, in which,
after naming several insignificant legacies, he bequeathed his skull "to a
so-called actor, one Charles Bridges, to be used by him in the graveyard
scene when he shall have become able to play Hamlet,--if the skull be not
disintegrated by that time."
XXIII
COINCIDENCE
Max took us down into a German place into the bowels of the earth. It was a
bit of Berlin transplanted to Philadelphia and thriving beneath a Teutonic
eating-house. Imagine a great cellar, with stone floor, ornamented ceiling,
massive rectangular pillars of brown wood, substantial tables, heavy
mediaeval chairs, crossbeams bearing pictures of peasant girls and lettered
with sentiments of good cheer in German, and walls covered with beer-mugs
of every size and device.
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