Joking apart

Surely there is something in Shakespeare about somebody who “munched and munched and munched.” If so, it is there because Shakespeare had to do with theatres and evidently knew. When you look at all the pansy-faces together, munching, munching, munching, you begin to wonder why it is that persons who normally go for at least two hours at a time without food require so much extra nourishment all of a sudden. Sarah Jane, we know, gets through a morning’s hard work with no other encouragement than a cup of inky tea at eleven. Miss Simmons, the typist, does not, surely, tick away at all that important stuff with her cheeks bulging like a monkey’s over a hidden store of refreshment. In the showroom you never hear such an apology as, “Sorry, Moddum, the young lady’s sweetmeat is unusually sticky for the time of year; she will answer your question in one moment.” Therefore it cannot be that they eat because listening to the play is hard work and they need support. Can it be to cause anæmia of the brain by directing the flow of blood to—etc.? But then why desire to cause anæmia? They do not look as if their brains were in a fatally active condition; in fact, no one in the audience ever looks quite right in the head. But, indeed, I have a theory that people are no longer themselves when they enter a theatre. Otherwise how is it possible to account for the fact that all our friends go constantly to the play and we go there ourselves, and yet we never, never meet one another; at least hardly ever? Isn’t it a bewildering surprise to recognize a friend between the acts? It seems to take at least five minutes peering and goggling before it is possible to believe the glad thing. And then what a waving and commotion! “The Prenderbursts! Just fancy! In the third row but two—yes, quite sure—that’s Effie! just turning round now—behind the lady with the orange scarf.” Personally I go in just any old thing, because I never expect to be recognized; and I hate leaving my seat, because I generally have on an evening top and thick boots, and it looks so bad if you go out and the lights are up.

Being, like all idle people, an intolerable wonderer, I have wondered for years “who the people are who go to the theatre.” One thing is quite certain, and that is that the people who go are not the same as the people who have been. Every day one knocks against the people who have been, but the people who go one has never seen before—except at the theatre—and will never see again until the next time we go. Where they live between the performances is a mystery. My own belief is that they disappear into their holes in the town, and there sleep until the next performance; they eat at the theatre, as we have seen. As soon as you get a hypothesis started the whole thing begins to work out together, and all sorts of details arrange themselves. The only doubtful point now is how far the theatre managers are in the secret as regards the origin of their audiences, or whether they suppose them to be ordinary persons.

According to my hypothesis the munchers are a race of people apart, like the troglodytes, with physiological and social laws of their own, of which we know nothing. They are unknown to the police because they look more or less like human beings and behave quietly. They come to the box-office and book seats like you and I do, and the man in the box is in a hurry and doesn’t notice any difference. But it is owing to their numbers that you and I can never get just the seats we want.

The most curious thing about the whole business is the munchers’ power of turning human beings into fairy changelings. It is owing to this power that we hardly ever meet our friends at the theatre. An instance that absolutely proves this theory occurred the other day, and it at once threw light on what has been an irritating mystery to me for years. The Blots were dining with us, and some one mentioned a play then running at our principal theatre.

“Oh, were you there?” said Amy Blot, “so were we. Where were you sitting? We never saw you.”

“Second row of the dress circle,” I answered, “fourth from the end.”

“But so were we,” protested Amy, “at least we were sixth from the end—on the right facing the stage.” That had certainly been our side. “Oh, well, it’s too queer,” Amy decided. She is a very striking-looking woman; you couldn’t mistake her; and her husband is really remarkably fat; you would pick him out at once. I thought it over for a few minutes, and then said quite definitely, “My dear Amy, you must be wrong, because I remember exactly who were in those seats. There was a girl with her hair parted on one side; it looked very well in front, but it was scrabbly at the back, as if it had been eaten by rats. She had on a pink silk blouse of the new shape, but beyond that I couldn’t see. There was an old lady with her, who had loose cheeks and a small cap with a butterfly in it—your husband wasn’t dressed up in any way, was he?”

“How absurd,” said Amy, “of course not. But those were our seats, and we never saw you either. There were two minxes and two pasty-faced young men where you say you were.”

I remember that I wrote to Sir Oliver Lodge about it that evening, but tore up the letter on my husband’s advice, as he thought the matter might get taken up, and we should have men calling with notebooks. It wouldn’t have done. But, all the same, this is probably what poor Shakespeare meant when he wrote about the lady who munched and munched and munched.

Looked at from the point of view of psychical research, munchers are extremely interesting. Any natives with horrible ways are all right if viewed scientifically. Munchers have many offensive habits which one might be inclined to resent were it not that it is nice to know how different we are. For instance, this sort of thing. You may be sitting enraptured, the tears streaming down your face, and the hobgoblin behind you starts her reminiscences:

“Something the same sort of story as Hindle Wakes, isn’t it, Lizzie?”

“Yes, did you see that?”

“My word, yes! A funny sort of story, wasn’t it, didn’t you think?”

“Yes, do you remember where she comes on in the first act? Something the same sort of thing, wasn’t it?”

“Were you ever at Blackpool?”

“Oh yes—hush; look at him—there now—pity he don’t move up a bit sharper—we were at Blackpool a week, and mother, she——” etc.

The munchers have almost nerveless fingers, and drop their possessions a good deal. “I wonder if you’d mind, one moment——?” is the sort of thing they ask just when some climax or other is being reached. “I’ve dropped my hat under your seat.” When the wretch by your side has dropped an umbrella, and the two at the back have dropped a purse and a spectacle case, and have put a muff down your neck, and got some beads entangled in your hair; when eighteen of them have squeezed over you during each interval in order to reach seats that are next the gangway on the other side; when the one who looks like a debilitated porpoise has clapped his hands down your ear for ten minutes, and succeeded in recalling the singer whom you were so glad to get rid of; and when laughter, which is about as harmless and irritating as eggs shot from a cannon, has at last died away into mere sniggering at some homely detail in a tragedy: then, if you still feel cross, you must try to divert yourself with the mystery of the munchers, and remember that one of your dearest friends may be sitting next to you, disguised by the spell. The debilitated porpoise may be your friend De Vere, whose manners are so perfect, whose social sense is so developed that we none of us know what clods we are when we go to tea with him. It is only afterwards that we realize our deficiencies: when the Prenderbursts come to tea and we want to make our party feel like De Vere’s. And he may think he was sitting next to a lemon-coloured lady with an angry face and a box of chocolates.

Now and again, of course, one sees an acquaintance or two, but they are nearly always rather dry and emphatic people, who have evidently escaped the power of the spell. You see them standing up, peering through glasses, and saying how odd it is that there seems to be no one here. When they read this they will say that they have not the least idea what it is all about.

Music seems to have some power of disenchantment, because at a concert, though the munchers fill a good part of the building, there are always dozens and dozens of people whom one knows. It may be that the awful weariness paralyses the hypnotic power of the munchers. They are there just the same, with their vacant faces, and their queer screws of hair, and their unsuitable clothes, but they are almost too weak to chew from their packets of refreshment. In fact, no one chews at a concert, except surreptitiously in a box.

There is a special subdivision of munchers who frequent the boxes both in theatres and at concerts. They are like the queen bees in the hive of theatre-goers. They are monstrously fat, female, and innocently foolish. Instead of having a pinched and wispy appearance, they are like the plump, precocious, affected, happy-looking children who perform on the music-hall stage. It is possible that the inferior munchers rear and keep these immense females to decorate the boxes, feeding them luxuriously at all hours, while they themselves subsist on their timid feasts of chocolate that tastes of hair oil.

The right attitude for the box can, surely, only be acquired by special culture and constant practice. To begin with there must always be a huge white arm with a podgy little hand on the end of it draped along the edge of the box. The gigantic body, squeezed like blancmange into whatever mould the latest fashion dictates, is turned towards the stage. The round, good-natured face, with its natural vulgarity breaking through the assumed air of the Princess of Many Sorrows (imagine a jolly country butcher’s wife in a tableau as “Our Lady of Pain”), is directed down and towards the auditorium at the angle of a turnip about to fall from a shelf. Bless the dears! It is a treat to see anyone so happy. But that is what the munchers are, depend upon it.