The Playmaker (19 page)

Some of the wives and lovers of the condemned called advice and endearments before and after the drop, and wept. Nancy Turner, still held separately from the others and standing by Harry Brewer—a circumstance which might have led Jemmy Campbell to believe she was under permanent arrest—kept her reserve and closed her eyes as her lover was thrown off the platform. Perhaps she would later be comforted by the observations of others that, whereas his condemned comrades had brief though terrible struggles, and Handy Baker bit through his own tongue, Private Dukes seemed to lose his senses at the very instant of the drop.

CHAPTER 14

Playing to the Indian

The play, Ralph concluded after a few weeks of readings, though crowded with characters, was in fact a simple matter at heart:

•    Two gentlemen, friends, desire two country cousins—fortunately each a different cousin, so that their friendship is enlarged by their longing.

•    Both girls, Melinda and Silvia, inherit a terrible degree of wealth which puts them beyond the two friends.

•    Through the loud stubbornness of one lover, Captain Plume, and the painful melancholy of the other, Mr. Worthy, the women are won over. But this doesn't happen until Melinda has persecuted poor Worthy by pretending to prefer the ridiculous Captain Brazen, or until Silvia has disguised herself as a young man and enlisted herself in Plume's regiment.

All the other characters, Ralph saw as he considered the play, were for high colour.

It was, he concluded, at the beginning of Act Three that the chances for love seemed leanest. Mr. Worthy, expressing the bitter equation which has overtaken his own life and that of his friend Plume, brought to Ralph a painful but languorous sense of his own hollow desire, which was part for the impossibly distant Betsey Alicia and part nameless, even though the name Mary Brenham did present itself in one corner of that yearning.

“I cannot forbear,” says Worthy at the start of the act, “admiring the equality of our two fortunes. We loved two ladies, they met us halfway, and just as we were upon the point of leaping into their arms, fortune drops into their laps, pride possesses their hearts, a maggot fills their heads, madness takes 'em by the tails. They snort, kick up their heels, and away they run.”

And of Silvia, who has vanished from town, Plume says in Kable's Norfolk accent, “The generous good-natured Silvia in her smock I admire, but the haughty, scornful Silvia with her fortune I despise.”

Ralph had been waiting for this act to see how Dabby Bryant would play the country girl, Rose, described by the playwright as possessing particular beauty. When she first enters she is accompanied by a large oaf of a brother—his name Bullock. Ralph had made his Bullock Harry Brewer's gardener, Curtis Brand, who did double duty as Costar Pearmain, a bumpkin recruit. Brand was a convicted poacher who knew the rustic manner well and, not being quite a bumpkin himself, could convey it.

Rose enters selling imaginary chickens. Soon Dabby and Curtis and Kable as earthy Captain Plume were well advanced into Farquhar's double-meaning jokes, which Dabby delivered with a succulently slack mouth and a slight breathiness. Most of this passage of the play, Ralph reflected, the Reverend Johnson would no doubt indict.

Plume (feeling Rose's chickens): Let me see. Young and tender, you say?

Rose: As ever you tasted in your life, sir.

Plume: Come, I must examine your basket to the bottom, my dear.

Rose: Nay, for that matter, put in your hand. Feel, sir! I warrant my ware as good as any in the market.

Through all this, Melinda/Turner the Perjurer, the threats of Jemmy Campbell and Robbie Ross building behind her like an unregarded cloud, sat in the shade of a native fig, waiting for her first appearance since Act One. She paid attention as the bizarre Captain Brazen, acted by the Jew Wisehammer, arrived on stage with Ketch Freeman as Justice Balance. Mary Brenham had already mentioned to Ralph that John Wisehammer was in his English past a theatregoer like Sideway. But unlike the excessive Sideway, Wisehammer knew exactly how to handle a grotesque line with the proper pitch and emphasis, and so Nancy Turner studied him with calm intent as he spoke.

Brazen (to Justice Balance): My dear, I'm your servant, and so forth. Your name, my dear?

Balance: Very laconic, sir!

Brazen: Laconic! A very good name, truly. I have known several of the Laconics abroad. Poor Jack Laconic! He was killed at the Battle of Yorktown. I remember he had a blue ribband in his hat that very day, and after he fell we found a piece of neat's tongue in his pocket.

Balance: Pray, sir, did the Americans attack us, or we them at Yorktown?

Brazen: The Americans attack us! Oons, sir, are you a rebel?

Balance: Why that question?

Brazen: Because none but a rebel could think that the Americans durst attack us! No, sir, we attacked them on the Charles. I have reason to remember the time, for I had two and twenty horses killed under me that day.

It was remarkable to Ralph that Wisehammer, like Dabby, somehow had a gift for the exact theatrical emphasis to place on a line. He believed that if he had had to find his players from among the officers and the better wives of the Marines they would have brought to Farquhar none of the instinctive touch which seemed to be there in Arscott and Wisehammer and merciful Dabby Bryant.

In the midst of that scene of farce and complication, Harry Brewer turned up with Bill Parr his constable on the edge of the glade. That he had Parr with him was a sign he was not there as a private man, and a number of the players grew nervous and forgot their lines. Ralph held up his hand and went and spoke with Harry.

“How is my girl, Ralph?” Harry murmured.

“She has the manner, Harry. And no risqué lines.”

“There is the line about Flanders lace, Ralph, how soldiers bring it back as presents for women.”

“You've read the play, Harry. But that is mainly Melinda's line. ‘Flanders lace is as constant a present from officers to their women as something else is from their women to them.' That is Melinda's whimsy.”

“Fair enough. I cannot lock the girl away from all earthy meanings, not when she was a whore at nine years. But tell me the truth. She's good?”

“She is excellent,” said Ralph, overstating it a little and understanding all at once that he was bargaining for Nancy Turner and wanted his Melinda safe from arrest.

And certain now that the preamble was over, Harry called Turner out of the press of players.

“The order is that you consider yourself under arrest,” said Harry. “You should not take to the wilderness. Stay here with Lieutenant Clark and learn your lines. For the case against you can't be proven, Turner. A better thing to stay here and learn Melinda than go out there and become a shadow for nothing. So should I chain you up, Nancy? Or will you stick with the playmaker here?”

“I will stay, Mr. Brewer,” said Nancy Turner.

“For God's sake, Nancy, don't be found outside your hut after curfew. At least not at ground level. If as some say you are a witch and a necromancer, by all means avail yourself of the upper air.”

As Harry laughed and nudged her upper arm, she smiled and looked away.

Harry sent her back to the rest of the company. “Jemmy Campbell says he has a witness,” Harry murmured to Ralph. “It's a worse business than I told her.”

“Witness?”

“Someone who saw her take the goods from Private Dukes.”

“If it's the truth, I won't have a Melinda.”

“The court has not hanged a woman yet.”

“But even if she is commuted to life imprisonment,” said Ralph, “they will not let her act.”

“You must be philosophic, Ralph,” said Harry, patting his arm as he had earlier patted Turner's. Ralph wanted to say, You should be philosophic when you see the ghosts of the hanged!

“Isn't there another Melinda somewhere here?” asked Harry.

But Ralph knew now, from his new avocation as a play manager, that artistic necessities operated in the theatre—that was the charm of the thing. All art proceeded by reducing contingencies and accidents to the essential, and to the part of Melinda, Turner the Perjurer was essential beyond all question and quibble of the law.

“I must hope she is not hanged then,” Ralph whispered. And he felt oddly, in keeping secrets from Turner, that he was betraying the theatrical and artistic necessity he felt in his blood: by not permitting her to choose whether she would flee into the forest and die quietly there, or await her accuser in the settlement.

That same afternoon of Nancy Turner's arrest, H.E. himself appeared on the edge of the clearing. Ralph was by now used to the continual appearance of officials. H.E. had with him the native hostage, Arabanoo, who wore the uniform of a petty officer in the Royal Navy. Ralph wondered did the native remember Ralph's part as a Marine officer in the painful capture—but Arabanoo never gave any sign of memory or resentment.

Everyone said the native was captivated by H.E.—some said unkinder things still. Arabanoo looked from the players to H.E. and back again, as if to verify that their excessive theatrical emotions were approved of by the man he called father—
Be-an-na
. (Davy Collins had made the point to Ralph once that the nouns of the natives had an emotional conjugation. For when in pain, Arabanoo would call on H.E. by the variation
Be-a-ri!
) And “
Be-an-na?
” he called, faced with Ralph's players.

Ralph had always found Arabanoo an affecting figure. He was a man of perhaps twenty-two or -three years, lean, with a beautiful anthracitic blue to his native blackness. His eyes were a different and penetrating blue and seemed to Ralph to convey polite bafflement. Somewhere in the forests were his relatives, who, as Ralph had once remarked to H.E., might well be dependent on him for their provender. But H.E. had claimed to need the native more, so that he could be cultivated and then sent back to his people as an ambassador. Not that H.E. had yet dispatched him to talk to the natives either on this side of the harbour or on the other, the side from which he had been captured.

There were jokes in the officers' mess about H.E. training Arabanoo for as long as an Oxford undergraduate, and there were the normal insinuations which had prevailed in the matter of H.E.'s friendship with Harry Brewer—stories of how long ago H.E.'s wife had left him, and why she may have done it; the intimations of sodomy.

Ralph knew the imputations were unjust. It was apparent H.E. took his task of communing somehow, soul to soul, with these strange beings too seriously to take easy gratification with a robust young native, even if that had been his taste, a matter never proven by anyone. Perhaps the business of living inside a petty officer's uniform in the city of lags would not have confused Arabanoo as much if H.E.'s appetite for keeping him at his side had expressed itself in some obvious carnal manner. Ralph thought you could tell, by the Indian native's puzzlement, that it had not.

After a particularly flamboyant exchange between Worthy/Sideway and Brazen/Wisehammer, Arabanoo raised both hands in the air, vibrated them and let loose a congratulatory vibrato wail, his tongue trembling between his lips like a bird's.

Given that the native so clearly liked the preparations of the play, H.E. began to visit the playmaking with him every afternoon. Arabanoo was somehow aware these were not the convicts in their normal persons, but in their transformed persons. And given that ritual was not unknown among the Indians themselves, Arabanoo seemed to take some comfort from the rehearsals. It was possible, thought Ralph, that he considered the reading of the lines and the rehearsal of actions to have religious meaning, and Ralph was beginning to wonder himself if it were so.

Arabanoo was captured on the lag city's first New Year's Eve in the middle of the previous summer. Or as H.E. looked on it, he was rescued, taken out of his
ab origine
timelessness and introduced to breeches and naval jacket and the Gregorian calendar. 1789, which according to the astronomer Lieutenant Dawes promised—through its combination of cabalistic numbers—to be an exceptional year, would be a lake Arabanoo must enter and swim in, just as Ralph and H.E. and Dawes himself did. He would have to interpret this new and unfamiliar framework of days to his brothers and sisters, the
ab origine
inhabitants.

H.E. had become convinced that a native must be captured and trained as a mediator, since no one saw the Cadigal people any more, the tribe who shared the south side of the harbour with the new penal society. The smallpox epidemic had not yet manifested itself, but there were other reasons the tribe avoided the town—the stealing of Cadigal nets and weapons by the convicts, and the passing of venereal sores to the Cadigal women. There were incidents which H. E. chose to take as a warning of coming battle.

A week before Christmas a number of the lags who worked at the brick kilns came running into town, out of breath and mad in the eye, claiming two thousand natives had appeared from the south that morning and stood facing them with painted faces and bodies. Some of these faces which presented themselves at the kilns were entirely an unearthly white, or were striped with white and ochre in the most frightening way. All were armed with spears whose points of bone, stone, and stingray tails were a poignant reminder to any European that his blood was not absolutely supreme.

The natives had dispersed only when the convicts pointed their spades and shovels at them in the manner of the Marines' muskets. The entire confrontation had proceeded in awesome silence.

Davy Collins had already, of course, made up tables of population for the Cadigal, and he was sure they did not have two thousand warriors. Even so, both he and H.E. agreed on the need to find a man to stand in the middle between the Cadigal and the penal society.

The finest minds in the penal settlement wanted a native seized and groomed: H.E., Davy, Watkin. When it came to finding officers for the enterprise, however, Jemmy Campbell nominated George Johnston and the astronomer Will Dawes. It was believed that reclusive young Dawes was beginning to consider himself a civilian, and that to make him participate in a more or less military expedition would recall his mind to his true position. Dawes, however, who was making the map of these skies and had the authority of that behind him, went to H.E. He pleaded not only that he was too busy at the observatory but that he could not in conscience and honour take part in any punitive or man-trapping excursions into the forests. And because of his frankness, and H.E.'s prejudice in favour of science, he was excused.