In another segment of the barracks Will Bryant’s lean, sad, knowing face was raised with touching and childlike attention toward the stage where his wife, Dabby, would be Rose. His daughter was probably asleep on blankets on the floor. Kable’s Susannah sat nursing one child and heavy with a second. All this complicated audience, then, Ralph took in at one glance through the window of Justice Balance’s country house, during the flux of time between Mary Brenham’s consoling touch and Farquhar’s first words.
In the constricted space by the back door of the barracks, all his players had gathered and were waiting for him. He could not prevent a frank conjugal smile from passing between himself and Brenham. As he faced the people of his play, he was aware of the smell of powder and fabric and excited sweat. “The audience is ready for you,” he said, his voice quaking. “Please do them and yourselves the honours you have done me as your manager and playmaster.” Dabby Bryant stared fixedly, with that gaze which had seen the Emu-Mother, into the centre of the small flame on the taper she carried.
“Rose and Bullock,” he murmured. “Light the torches on stage.”
Ralph heard a delightful gasp from one of the women players, but did not know whether it was Mary or Duckling.
As Rose in her robust country costume and Curtis Brand as a hobbling oaf appeared on stage with the tapers in their hands, a miraculous cheer rose from the crowd’s desperate voices and became one voice, raising in Ralph for the final time the mad hope that his play would unify this remote planet of lags.
The play was begun by Wisehammer, speaking Farquhar’s prologue, saving his own verse for the end of the event. Dressed as a captain of Marines, he intoned the lines with what Ralph thought, looking from the flats, to be a sublime mixture of grand eloquence and gesture.
In ancient times, when Helen’s fatal charms
Roused the contending universe to arms,
The Grecian council happily deputes
The sly Ulysses forth—to raise recruits.
The artful captain found, without delay
Where great Achilles, a deserter, lay.
Ulysses caught the young aspiring boy,
And listed him who wrought the fate of Troy.
Thus by recruiting was bold Hector slain:
Recruiting thus fair Helen did regain.
If for one Helen such prodigious things
Were acted, that they even enlisted kings;
If for one Helen’s artful, vicious charms,
Half the transported world was found in arms …
(Of course, Wisehammer put great emphasis on the word transported, and even the lags seemed to understand that this was a joke not intended by Farquhar. Wisehammer was therefore rewarded with the night’s first thunderous laugh.)
… Half the transported world was found in arms …
What for so many Helens may we dare,
(He rolled his eyes and gestured over the heads of the dignitaries toward the wedges of she-lags scatttered about the barracks.)
Whose minds, as well as faces, are so fair?
If by one Helen’s eyes, old Greece could find
Its Homer fired to write, even Homer blind;
The Britons sure beyond compare may write,
That view so many Helens every night.
And so with grotesque Brazen-like gestures, which promised that when he returned later in the play they would be given better laughs still, Ralph’s recent rival for the love of Mary Brenham backed from the stage. The action proper commenced with a drummer rat-a-tatting Sergeant Kite and the minor players onto the stage.
The next time Ralph was able to return to his hide behind the window of Justice Balance’s country house it was close to the end of the long Scene One, where Plume is pensive for once in declaring to Mr. Worthy his admiration for Silvia.
“I hate country towns. If your town has a dishonourable thought of Silvia it deserves to be burned to the ground. I love Silvia, I admire her frank, generous disposition. There’s something in that girl more than woman. Her sex is but a foil to her—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.”
He could see Plume’s ruddy, well-made features, powdered up to resemble those of an officer, and beyond them in the dimmer body of the barracks the pale features of H. E. apparently engrossed in this extolling of the heroine.
The scene ended. There was a miraculous throaty burr of anticipation. Ralph noticed, among the furniture-movers dressing Melinda’s apartment for Scene Two, Joe Hunt carrying on chairs and walking straight. His back had been so patterned and assaulted by the authority of the monarch whose birthday was being celebrated that a branch of a tree wielded by Ralph must have seemed a minor business.
In a stillness which grew to howls and cheers and whistles from the lags in the dim reaches of the barracks, Silvia and Melinda entered. It was Nancy Turner’s snowy beauty-marked breasts which evoked the enthusiasm—Priapus was in that roar, just as he had had a part in Joe Hunt’s earlier encounter with those powder-white mounds.
But to Ralph’s admiration, Nancy did not cease to be Melinda, she did not turn frontally to the crowd or bob her knee to them or wave or smile. She remained icy and poker-hot Melinda, as Mary Brenham remained honest Silvia. And of course, that is why she is so perfect, this Turner, Ralph saw now. That was why her act in court excited me as a prospective playmaker. I thought she was a perjurer playing the part of truth-teller, but her ploy was deeper than that—she was a truth-teller playing a perjurer and never breaking from that character no matter how much Jemmy Campbell might scream for her neck.
Ralph, seeing all this from the flats of the stage and then going to his hiding space behind Justice Balance’s country house, found the perfection of the scene almost beyond bearing.
Melinda speaks: “Our education, cousin, was the same, but our temperaments had nothing alike; you have the constitution of a horse.”
Silvia speaks: “So far as to be troubled with neither spleen, colic, nor vapours. I need no salts for my stomach, no hartshorn for my head nor wash for my complexion; I can gallop all the morning upon 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.”
How they paused for all the laughter yet played ignorant of it!
The laughter took on an edge at Melinda’s famous speech about that which Silvia is tired of: “… an appendix to our sex,” says Melinda, “that you can’t so handsomely get rid of in petticoats as if you were in breeches.” Ralph in his niche feared for a moment that the laughter might relate to the new state of Mary Brenham and himself. Yet it soon showed itself to be universal laughter, not directed at any single being. Ralph could see Davy Collins laughing frankly, supported by more dimly discerned hilarity farther back on the barracks floor. It did not sound malicious, though it had an archness to it, he was sure, a certain welcoming leer which he found difficult to confront. So, flushing absurdly, he left his place and went to the back stairs and gently out of the door into the night. There he began to laugh delightedly, like a tittering child, as barks of laughter and delight came to him from within. He did not return to the barracks until the tempest of foot stampings and clappings signalled Silvia and Melinda had accomplished the closing of Act One.
For the greater part of Act Two, he found himself outdoors as well. While Justice Balance becomes so alarmed at Plume’s intentions towards Silvia that he sends her to the country; while Robert Sideway/Mr. Worthy simpers and languishes for the termagant Melinda and Kite deceives honest country boys with lies of campaigning, Ralph paced the night. He could hear most of what the players said. When he could not, he would approach the barracks back door once more, tentatively, like a man about to receive a wound almost too pleasurable to bear. He had a sense that his players had somehow become their own actors, ind
ependent of him like grown children—that he was no longer bound to them by either pleasure or duty, that they had entered into a pact with the audience which was rightly none of his business and that only the approval of the crowd could justify them and assure the maturity of their craft.
Kite was still arguing with the bumpkins Costar Pearmain and Thomas Appletree, and Kable/Plume had only just entered with his song, altered to meet the facts of convict transportation—
Over the hills and o’er the main
To Flanders, Portugal or New South Wales,
The King commands, and we’ll obey—
Over the hills and far away,
—when Ralph saw a knot of Marines and convict constables approaching the front door of the barracks, one of them carrying a torch, many of them speaking at once and willing to intrude upon the play. His sea cloak whipping behind him, Ralph ran to prevent them. They were only some twenty paces from the door, seeming already to anticipate bringing a roguish disruption to the laughter within, when Ralph reached them. Harry Brewer, Ralph now saw, was with them, hobbling crookedly and talking to the constable, Bill Parr. These were the members of the night watch and of the Marine Quarter Guard who had been deprived of the pleasure of the play by the necessity of giving the settlement some security. Now they knew they had something worth interrupting a play with, something which would direct the love and the laughter of the audience towards them. For shackled in the middle of them was the great Madagascan Black Caesar, who seemed to be full of the same theatrical excitement as Harry and the handful of Marines and constables.
“Your concept, Ralph,” called Harry, joyously, “and my execution. We have the great black bastard!”
“But you cannot interrupt the play,” said Ralph. He was consumed with a fury at Harry and himself and at the recaptured convict. When he had proposed the plan he had imagined a capture in the small hours, after he and Mary had been ages asleep in Thespian triumph. He had not intended that the Madagascan should supplant the play. And yet he knew he could not delay the entry of the constables and their captive through three more acts of Farquhar’s—as it now seemed to him—modest magic.
“Please,” he said to Harry. “Keep the Madagascan out here until Act Two ends.”
Ralph raised his ear to find the progress his players had made. Plume was just eliciting laughs by pretending to chastise Kite for taking advantage of honest fellows like Pearmain and Appletree. Would the laughs be there, would they be so uncritically granted, once Black Caesar was introduced?
“Two minutes,” Ralph pleaded. “Could you delay your entry two minutes?”
“Of course, my dear friend,” said Harry, his words as muffled as usual yet full of comradely intent. “Two minutes, boys,” Harry called to the Quarter Guard.
“No fret,” said one of the boys benignly.
It was only now, having saved something of the integrity of his play, that he remembered the Madagascan had bruised and distressed his woman as well.
“For what you did to Mary Brenham,” he murmured, close to the Madagascan’s ear, “you will be heavily punished.”
“Oh, Your Honour,” Black Caesar told him, with a torch-lit gaze of transparent innocence, “I have been an evil fellow and will sure perish unless the Fragrant One smile on me.”
An ecstatic Harry Brewer clapped Ralph on the shoulder. “This is your invention, Ralph, and I will not take the praise that belongs to you. I would, however, desire the honour of presenting Caesar to the Captain.”
Ralph could hear Captain Plume’s raised voice exhorting Pearmain and Appletree to sing the refrain with him, and singing it they marched off stage to volleys of applause. All that would have to be moved on stage for the beginning of Act Three was a little wooden sundial, and the capture of the Madagascan would so delay the play there was ample time for that.
Harry now limped forward to lead the night watch in, their mouths agape with the celebration of their capture, and Caesar seemingly as joyous as any of them. Ralph followed behind. Art had been supplanted by a criminal sensation, or at least Art was about to be. As Caesar and his captors entered the barracks, Ralph, following on, noticed that Harry had put the twenty-eight-pound ankle irons on the prisoner, who nonetheless moved more or less like a dancer.
When the crowd saw him they gusted him forward with applause. The captors were sportingly applauded too. It was all a game, a hazard, a contract which had been skillfully concluded by both parties to it, by the Madagascan and the night watch. Harry led Black Caesar on a roundabout route, not up the centre by the braziers and past Goose, but around the outer aisles of the barracks, past the young wives of the private Marines and their sleepy children lying on blankets on the floorboards. Everyone had risen, except these children drugged by noise and the redolence of gin and brandy and tobacco which hung around the walls. Everyone rose as if the monarch they were celebrating were not George but Caesar. As Caesar and the night watch made the front row and the Madagascan was presented to a mildly smiling H.E., willing to tolerate such sportiveness because of the day, Ralph dodged onto the stage and through the flats to see his actors. He thought they all looked wan—it was not simply the powder of their faces. They knew Caesar had out-theatred them.
“Act Three will be a little delayed,” he told them.
He saw Mary Brenham, now wearing her white suit of men’s clothes and her wig, turn and flee down the steps and out the back door.
“Have courage,” he said to the others. “It is all progressing beautifully. Everyone is dazed with happiness and admiration. Otherwise they could not so applaud this villain from Africa.”
He knew it was a brave battlefield speech, delivered quickly, with half an eye to the back door Mary Brenham had left ajar. But it seemed to revive them. They turned to each other. There were modest caresses of congratulation—not the grand gothic ones they had expected an hour ago to be able to extend, but worthy of people ruggedly and competently taking on themselves the burden of three more acts.
Ralph took one more look at the front of the stage. There Black Caesar was doing a little kick-up with his fourteen pounds of iron on either ankle. Davy, who would bring down death or some other heavy sentence on the Madagascan, applauded and laughed as hard as anyone. Ralph felt for a moment bereft of bearings. When is roguery laughable, and when is it hangable? Davy Collins seemed to know all the answers to those questions which left Ralph baffled still.
Ralph said a brief goodbye to his actors and went to find Mary Brenham. For the second time in his life he pursued a girl dressed in a white calico suit of men’s clothes across the night.
He found her among the trees of the marquee. She had her back to him, one arm raised to the trunk of the thing, the other bent across her face.
“Come back,” said Ralph. “He is wearing the twenty-eight-pound chains and is as good as sentenced.”
“I cannot say my lines with him sitting in front of me there,” she told Ralph. She covered one side of her face with her hand. The side he could see looked suddenly like that of an unwise thirteen-year-old, the one who had erred for Andrew Hilton. “Knowing, too, that I’ll need to go to court and show my arse.”
“If you say rape, he will hang, my dear. And if you say merely bruises, he will still be put on a rock in the harbour, or sent to an outstation.”
“But you will want me to say rape. They will try to get me to say rape, so that they can have him, so that Ketch Freeman can twist him. And if I say rape, I will be forced to show myself. And you know by now, Mr. Clark, that I cannot bear it.”
She turned to him, and he could see her shuddering distress. He put his arms around her. “I have not a line of Silvia left in me,” she said.
He knew she was beyond reason—that he could not fruitfully explain to her that so long after the assault she would not need to show any limb or organ. Her face alone could hang Black Caesar.
“You do not have to say rape, and I will protect you from saying it. But please find Silvia’s lines
again, my love. Please, since the play still has half its way to run and yours is the foremost part.”
He had to go on repeating his assurances about the trial of Caesar, and he did it energetically and without faltering.
“I fear for my son,” she confessed.
“Remember,” said Ralph, “the Madagascan stole food and weapons. He made incessant raids. His attack on you was simply one element in the whole cloth of his crimes. If I told Davy there is no reason for you to show yourself, Davy will believe me.”
And so, with some halts, he coaxed her back across the clearing and to the barracks again. As she neared the door, Silvia revived in her. She asked Ralph if he could send the perfumier Nicholls out to her to restore the whiteness of her face, which had been somewhat furrowed by tears.
“Remember,” said Ralph, about to re-enter the barracks, “that if he is permitted to sit down in his chains and watch the play, he will not know you in your suit of white clothes.”
“He did not know me when he savaged me in my hut,” she said. “Just that I had a body to be bruised, and a son to protect.”
“So hide behind your Silvia mask and mock him,” said Ralph, kissing her cheek and feeling her breast behind the harshness of the cloth.
“Lieutenant Clark,” she told him, “you are such an honest poor fellow.”
“I shall send Dabby Bryant to fetch you when the play is to go ahead,” murmured Ralph, weak with her praise.
Back inside, Ketch Freeman the hangman, dressed in a scarecrow suit and heavily lined to pass as Justice Balance, was waiting at the head of the stairs like a child waiting for a parent. Ralph decided to be jovial.