A young man visits an old, dusty theater shop. Its owner, an old man, reminisces on the glory of the theater stage. The young man brings one of the books he found in the shop and the old man says that “acting is a lost art,” and modern actors simply talk on stage. He describes a play called “The Bells,” which the young man had not known about. The old man says that it is an example of authentic theater, and invites the young man for tea upstairs in the shop to talk about it. In the old man’s room, there was a full-length portrait of Hamlet, played by an actor named Henry Irving. The old man tells the young man about "The Bells" and said it was produced by Irving in 1871. He describes the first act that takes place in an inn during a heavy winter. He says it enthralls the audience perfectly, and how Mathias, the innkeeper, is a complex character. Mathias had to kill a Polish Jew who traveled in a sleigh to get his money because he was extremely poor.  The young man sees a dagger hanging on the bedroom wall that looked just like the one held by Henry Irving in the Hamlet portrait. The old man continues the story and says that Mathias kept being haunted by the sleigh bell sounds from the Polish Jew fifteen years later. The young man sees a long sword on the wall labeled “Royal Lyceum Theatre” and silverware engraved with Henry Irving’s initials. The old man reveals he was a member of Irving’s theater company for twenty-two years. He says Irving gave him everything except what he most desired. The old man finishes the story of "The Bells," where Mathias is sentenced to death by hanging. The melodrama element of it, the old man excitingly asserts, is that when Mathias wakes up, he struggles to breathe and dies. He experiences “an imaginary rope but a real death.” Irving played this role for over 30 years, but the old man himself never acted in the play. He worked as Irving’s understudy constantly and worked to remember all the lines, movements, and details of every play. He even put off his marriage until he could get a shot in his career but to no avail. In his explanation, the old man would recite Mathias’s quotes from the play in conjunction with his own words and then stop abruptly. He says he waited twenty-two years to act on stage, then he became an old man before he knew it. The old man looks at Hamlet’s dagger on the wall and says that it caused much chaos and deaths, and its little blade still “cries for more" hundreds of years later. The young man sees the old man begin a monologue-like speech addressing the dagger and he sees everything on his face, including the dream and the twenty-two years he spent with Irving.