The Old Die Rich pptx

The Old Die Rich

Gold, Horace Leonard

Published: 1953

Categorie(s): Fiction, Science Fiction, Short Stories

Source: http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/31892

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Also available on Feedbooks for Gold:

• No Charge for Alterations (1953)

• The Enormous Room (1953)

• At the Post (1953)

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Transcriber's Note:

This etext was produced from the March 1953 issue of Galaxy. Extens￾ive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this

publication was renewed.

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"You again, Weldon," the Medical Examiner said wearily.

I nodded pleasantly and looked around the shabby room with

a feeling of hopeful eagerness. Maybe this time, I thought, I'd get the an￾swer. I had the same sensation I always had in these places—the quavery

senile despair at being closed in a room with the single shaky chair, tot￾tering bureau, dim bulb hanging from the ceiling, the flaking metal bed.

There was a woman on the bed, an old woman with white hair thin

enough to show the tight-drawn scalp, her face and body so emaciated

that the flesh between the bones formed parchment pockets. The M.E.

was going over her as if she were a side of beef that he had to put a fed￾eral grade stamp on, grumbling meanwhile about me and Sergeant Lou

Pape, who had brought me here.

"When are you going to stop taking Weldon around to these cases, Ser￾geant?" the M.E. demanded in annoyance. "Damned actor and his mor￾bid curiosity!"

For the first time, Lou was stung into defending me. "Mr. Weldon is a

friend of mine—I used to be an actor, too, before I joined the force—and

he's a follower of Stanislavsky."

The beat cop who'd reported the D.O.A. whipped around at the door.

"A Red?"

I

let Lou Pape explain what the Stanislavsky method of acting was,

while I sat down on the one chair and tried to apply it. Stanislavsky

was the great pre-Revolution Russian stage director whose idea was that

actors had to think and feel like the characters they portrayed so they

could be them. A Stanislavskian works out everything about a character

right up to the point where a play starts—where he was born, when, his

relationship with his parents, education, childhood, adolescence, matur￾ity, attitudes toward men, women, sex, money, success, including incid￾ents. The play itself is just an extension of the life history created by the

actor.

How does that tie in with the old woman who had died? Well, I'd had

the cockeyed kind of luck to go bald at 25 and I'd been playing old men

ever since. I had them down pretty well—it's not just a matter of shuff￾ling around all hunched over and talking in a high cracked voice, which

is cornball acting, but learning what old people are like inside—and

these cases I talked Lou Pape into taking me on were studies in senility. I

wanted to understand them, know what made them do what they

did, feel the compulsion that drove them to it.

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