The Playmaker (9 page)

“I must say that never in my life have I seen a man better built. How firm and strong he treads! He steps like a castle! But I scorn to wheedle any man. Come, honest lad, will you take share of a pot!”

Curtis, fearing now perhaps that the newly arrived women would mock him for his halting reading, began to mumble.

“Louder, if you please, Curtis Brand,” called Ralph, like an authority. He went over then and spoke privately to Curtis. “It is early days, and we must all make fools of ourselves many times over if we are to cause the crowd to laugh when the time comes.”

He nodded to Arscott to carry on.

“Give me your hand then,” boomed clever Arscott. “And now, gentlemen, I have no more to say but this—here's a purse of gold, and there is a tub of humming ale at my quarters! It's the King's money and the King's dish.”

“Now, John Hudson,” said Ralph, “you have to call, ‘No, no, no!'”

“No,” said John Hudson obediently but dully. “No, no, no!”

“You must do better with your ‘no's,' Johnny,” Ralph observed.

But Arscott took up the slack.

“Huzza! Huzza to the Queen, and the honour of Shropshire!”

“‘
King
,' John Arscott,” said Ralph. “‘
King
'! Now you, Curtis, and you, John Hudson, you yell, ‘Huzza!'”

“Huzza!” yelled the two lags, so wanly it made the women laugh for the wrong reason.

“And now you enter please, Mr. Kable, from the right of the stage.”

Henry Kable entered trembling. Once in Norwich Castle, when a housebreaker of seventeen, he had been reprieved at the base of the gallows and then—within a minute or so—witnessed the hanging of his own father and his father's accomplice. It struck Ralph for the first day that some of the terror of
that
public performance had now transferred itself to this one. In Kable's mouth Plume's gallantry withered. He muttered that he, Plume, had left London at ten yesterday morning and ridden a hundred twenty miles in thirty hours. “Pretty smart riding, but nothing to the fatigue of recruiting.”

Kite, according to the play, implies that Plume has begotten a child on an old friend of his, Molly, at the Castle Inn and tells Plume she has just been brought to bed. “Kite, you must father the child,” muttered Plume with an uncertainty of delivery which made the women hoot. Kable looked up, glowering. “Take no notice, Henry,” advised Ralph.

Arscott, who was now the darling of the women in the shade, took the attention away from Plume by reciting the women he was already married to—an Irish potato saleswoman, a Whitehall brandy seller, a carrier's daughter at Hull, “Mademoiselle Van Bottom-flat at the Buss, then Jenny Oakum, the ship's carpenter's widow at Portsmouth. But I don't reckon upon her, for she was married at the same time to two lieutenants of Marines, and a man of war's boatswain.” It was a famous speech and Kite delivered it famously, far more vividly than the delivery of his fellow players.

“A full company!” said Plume flatly, under cover of the women's frank amusement. “You have named five—come, make 'em half a dozen, Kite. Is the child a boy or a girl?”

“A robust boy.”

“Then set the mother down in your list and the boy in mine. Enter him a Marine by the name of Francis Kite, absent upon furlough. I'll allow you a man's pay for his subsistence. And now go comfort the wench in the straw.”

Then, according to Farquhar's invention, Kite goes to soothe Molly and to set up as fortune teller as a means of deceiving recruits into Captain Plume's company. Kite/Arscott was applauded out of the glade by the women, and now it was time for Robert Sideway to enter, in the persona of Mr. Worthy.

He did it so excessively, Ralph thought. He staggered and pressed the back of his wrist to his forehead. He blinked and clutched his left breast to subdue a quaking heart.

“'Tis indeed the picture of Worthy, but the life's departed,” read Henry Kable. “The man has got the vapours in his ears, I believe. I must expel this melancholy spirit.

“Spleen, thou worst of fiends below,

“Fly, I conjure thee by this magic blow!”

Kable, as the play demanded, slapped Sideway on the shoulder, and Sideway—thinking it was expected of him—tottered like someone shot. Ralph did not dare look in the direction of the women for fear of being ignited to laughter himself. He clapped his hands and moved in closer to Sideway.

“Perhaps, Robert, it might be better to begin in a more modest theatrical way and to build on that. Layer upon layer of gesture and feeling. Rather than to try to accomplish a finished performance on the first day.”

“You think I am overdoing it!” Sideway accused thunderously, looking like the old Robert who in the cold southern seas had had to be fettered in the forrard chain hold.

“For the first day, Robert, I think you may be attempting to be Mr. Munden at too early a stage. If you spoke to Mr. Munden, if you
could
reach him and speak with him, I think he might confess that at first reading he himself would not be as full-fledged as you are trying to be. Come now, Robby, I won't stand for any black brows! We're here to make a play and not for vanity. Though some would say that making plays is the greatest vanity of all.”

In vengeance at being corrected, Sideway muttered his first line without any inflection.

“Plume! My dear captain, welcome. Safe and sound returned?”

“Do it as you will then, Sideway,” called Ralph. “As you will. I should have made you Captain Brazen.”

For Robert Sideway, with his ridiculous gestures, was stealing the excesses of behaviour proper to the part of Brazen, which the Hereford Jew John Wisehammer would play in the overdone way normal to Jewish players. Ralph had spoken to Sideway only to save him from the scorn of his fellow players. But if he would not accept advice, Ralph concluded, then let him be mocked and so educated! “Remember,” he called at one stage, “Worthy is a noble person, not an oaf.”

“I know, I know,” sang Sideway, in an artistic fever, his face glowing and beginning to sweat, since there was no line he recited which did not have an accompanying gesture or even a new orientation of the body. So that he worked as hard as any dancer, glancing only sometimes at the text Henry Kable held in his hands. If Sideway could have convinced everyone he had seen the play so often he knew it by heart, then he would have been delighted.

Henry Kable could see at once the chance of defusing Sideway's theatrical grandeur and of playing to the women, sharing with them the joke of Sideway's overbaked style. Gradually he tailored his acting to that end. For he knew Sideway could disobey an officer and be honoured with a sentence from Davy Collins's court for it. But you couldn't disobey the convicts. They above all had the power of ridicule.

Mr. Worthy is in love when he enters. He is in love with Melinda. Melinda is beyond his reach, since her aunt in Flintshire, Mrs. Richly, has died and left her a nearly unimaginable fortune of twenty thousand pounds.

To which news Plume/Kable responds with military imagery. “Oh, the devil! What a delicate woman was there spoiled! But, by the rules of war now, Worthy, blockade was foolish. After such a convoy of provisions has entered the place, you could have no thought of reducing it by famine. You should have redoubled your attacks, taken the town by storm, or have died upon the breach.”

Now, laughter of the right kind from the she-lags in the shade! And more laughter as Plume/Kable continued to give his earthy advice. “The very first thing that I would do should be to lie with her chambermaid, and hire three or four wenches in the neighbourhood to report that I had got them with child. Suppose we lampooned all the pretty women in town, and left her out? Or what if we made a ball and forgot to invite her, with one or two of the ugliest?”

Soon they had reached the point where Plume speaks of his own desire, Silvia. Ralph saw Mary Brenham blink and smile vaguely as if it had only just struck her that Kable was to be her love on stage. Plume says, “The ingratitude, dissimulation, envy, pride, avarice and vanity of her sister females do but set off their contraries in her. In short, were I once a general I would marry her.”

Ralph had to call to the carpenter, who had joined his admirers in the shade and had his hand on Nancy Turner's hip.

To end the scene, Kite enters and tells the Recruiting Officer, Captain Plume, that he has visited their old friend Miss Molly and has discovered there a footman in blue livery, Silvia's footman, who has delivered to the unfortunate girl ten guineas from his mistress, a gift intended to be spent on baby clothes. (Kite, of course, being sharp, has at once married Molly and taken his share of the money.)

Voicing his enthusiasm for the girl, Captain Plume leads sad Worthy off the stage. Departing into the shade on the edge of the clearing, Sideway did not stagger, gasp and groan quite so much as he had at his first entry.

“This is wonderful,” cried Ralph, his eyes prickling with tears at the energy and craft of his players. He felt the particular surge of gratitude for the pace Arscott and Kable had already worked up. He waited till his blood ceased quaking with delight before calling, “Melinda and Silvia for Scene Two.”

Mary Brenham covered her mouth with her hand, looked toward her son profoundly asleep in the shade, and rose.

CHAPTER 8

The Morality of Plays

Ralph was soon depressed, though. He had gone to such lengths to cosset everyone's sensitivity in the matter of having Nancy Turner the Perjurer as Melinda. But reading her lines she showed a shyness she had not exhibited as a lying witness in Davy Collins's courthouse. “Welcome to town, cousin Silvia,” she mumbled. The happy and arrogantly artistic state the men's performance had put him in now vanished. H.E. and Davy Collins would forgive him for using Nancy Turner the Perjurer if she were a dazzling Melinda. Those frightful Scots, Major Robbie Ross, H.E.'s deputy in government and commander of the Marine garrison, and his crony Jemmy Campbell, might even be appeased. But they would blame Ralph if Turner were poor, and their blame would be of the furious variety.

But his sweet, composed thief, Mary Brenham, saved the balance of his hopes by expanding before his eyes into Silvia, the way Arscott had expanded into Kite. It was the mystery again. It was the word made flesh. She took fire at the lines: “I need no salt for my stomach, no hartshorn for my head, nor wash for my complexion; I can gallop all the morning after the hunting horn and all the evening after a fiddle. In short, I can do everything with my father, but drink and shoot flying; and I am sure I can do everything my mother could, were I put to the trial.”

At “put to the trial,” she thrust her right thigh forward mannishly. It was sublime. Gardening could not match this, unless the turnips spoke back to you in the tongues of angels!

Nancy Turner the Perjurer continued to cast him down in her rendering of such pert lines as the one about Silvia being tired of an appendix to her sex that can't be as easily got rid of in petticoats as in breeches. The joke fled into the air, mute and muffled. Even Meg Long, sitting in her own mist under the native fig, could see nothing to beat the ground over.

“You are meant to be a tease, Nancy,” Ralph told her. “You are—as Mr. Worthy says—a jilt. You must have levity and malice!” He nearly added, “You had enough damned levity and malice in the courtroom!”

As Melinda maligns Plume's character, Silvia storms out of her cousin's house. Yet even for a first reading, the argument between Turner and Brenham came off dully, Nancy Turner's mutterings and stumblings dragging Mary Brenham down. When Brenham vacated the clearing and Duckling entered representing Lucy, Melinda's maid, the end of the act died, as it were, in their throats.

Ralph took her aside again. “You must be quarrelsome, Nancy, quarrelsome! You have seen women quarrel? Weren't there quarrels in the hold of the
Lady Penrhyn?
I want you, Nancy, to believe in your enmity for your cousin Silvia, and to put some fist into it!”

To his surprise Turner began to weep. In the heat of her grief, freckles became evident on her dark, luscious face. “You'll work it up, there's time yet,” he soothed her. “You will be a fine Melinda.” Duckling stood by like a true maid, frowning, and as he put his hand on Turner's shoulder, an act which from a distance would look quite intimate, the Reverend Dick Johnson walked into the rehearsal.

Ralph invited the Reverend Dick into his hut. It was one the clergyman was familiar with, since he had sometimes held Communion services there. “I seek always a house whose bed has not been sullied by convict concubinage,” florid, earnest Dick had once confided to Ralph. This standard disqualified many of the officers—George Johnston on account of Esther Abrahams, Surgeon Johnny White because of the young Southwark barrow woman he sometimes invited into his bed, and even Judge Advocate Davy Collins with his weakness for a milliner, that handsome Yorkshire woman named Ann Yates, condemned to death at York Summer Assizes for breaking and entering and now regularly reprieved in Davy's arms. The unstained cot Dick Johnson sought was therefore a rare item of furniture in the convict town. Those officers who did not have a mistress were too scientific and self-assured for Dick's raw evangelism—the astronomer Will Dawes, for instance, and elegant Watkin Tench, and even H.E. himself, who was rumoured to be an atheist.

In Ralph's small hut there was little but a table, a full display case for butterflies to take home one day to Betsey, a desk, two chairs run up by the carpenter of the
Friendship
, which had returned a year past to the known world, and that celibate bunk which made the place a suitable site of worship. There were also two sea chests, in one of which lay folded the Communion cloth from the first Communion taken in this quarter of the universe—the service having been held in Ralph's marquee in the first days. Ralph's mind was teased by such things—the first Communion, and now the first play. Ralph called for his servant, Private Ellis, a sullen man of about forty years who suffered from a permanent cold, and ordered him to make tea—not too strong. Ralph had a mere seven pounds of the stuff left—he had sent an order to Capetown for more with Captain Johnny Hunter of the
Sirius
, but Johnny and the
Sirius
had yet to be seen again, and it was feared the sea had consumed them.