New Albion Page 6

  Called to the stage, Fanny smiled at me and touched my arm and then strode into the playing area toward young Master West. “You are my brother,” she declaimed, “and dearer than life to me.”

  I confess to being half in love with Fanny Hardwick. It is a doomed love and an exquisite love and a foolish love and a sublime love. I am forty-two, she is probably twenty. I am a respectable widower, and she thinks of me as a daughter might think of a father. I have watched her leave the theatre, late in the evening, escorted by a handsome-looking young man in evening attire, a young man she has never bothered to introduce to me or to any of the denizens of the New Albion. She lives on the edge of a mystery for me and for others. Who is she, and where does she come from?

  Monday, 14 October 1850

  Mr. Hicks was ivre again, tonight, during David Hunt.

  In the dress rehearsal, this afternoon, Mr. Watts had reacted with composure to Mr. Hicks’ habitual drunkenness. He seemed to be thinking, “You may offend God and Providence, my dear man, but you will never move me to behave as a ruffian.” Tall and slender and of noble bearing, with a thin high forehead and a long aquiline nose, Mr. Watts seems to me the antithesis of the burly, sanguine Mr. Hicks. When he is not on the boards, Mr. Watts wears a spartan suit of grey, cut thin in the modern style, as if economy were the watchword of his life off the stage as well as on. Whether performing his beloved Shakespeare or in the lesser works of Ned Farquhar Pratt, he acts with a restraint hitherto uncharacteristic of East London theatres. He neither splits the ears of the groundlings nor tears a passion to tatters.

  During tonight’s performance of David Hunt, however, Mr. Watts was in a passion, hissing sotto voce at the other actors to stand up straight and complaining to them about Mr. Hicks’ drinking habits. For his part, the inebriated Mr. Hicks was particularly vehement in declaiming his revelatory line. He wrang the last bit of articulatory tincture out of “I am he who has seduced your daughter, brought about her ruin, and cursed your dotage,” hitting the consonants with such force that I also feared the ruin of his vocal chords. Mr. Watts repaid this herculean vocal effort by shoving Mr. Hicks backward. It was a limp two-handed shove against Mr. Hicks’ shoulders, but it managed to send him sprawling to the boards. The denizens of Whitechapel, themselves brawling in the gallery, were delighted.

  Afterwards, in the dressing room, Mr. Hicks accosted Mr. Watts. Mr. Hicks had come down late from the curtain call, and his costume was in a state of dishevelment, the leather frontiersman’s coat hanging off his shoulders and the broad-brimmed hat perched precariously on one side of his large round head. Mr. Watts was seated at his dressing table, removing his makeup with a sea sponge and facial cream, and fuming mightily. “You have taken a liberty with me tonight, sar,” said Mr. Hicks, his esses so sibilant as to conjure visions of the snake in the proverbial garden. “See that it does not occur again.”

  I happened to be in the dressing room with the valuables box, at the time, and I saw the hair on the back of Mr. Watts’ neck rise. “And you, sir, should take care to drink one dram less on the evening of a performance,” he said, his eyes in the dressing table mirror fixed stonily on Mr. Hicks. “I marvel, when there are rag-tags such as you about, that the minor theatres have not gotten a worse reputation in this country.”

  Mr. Hicks trained a jaundiced eye on Mr. Watts and belched quietly. “Have a care,” he growled. “I used to be a boxer when I was sarvin Her Majesty the Queen.”

  Neville Watts threw his sponge petulantly on to the dressing table in front of him and commenced scrubbing vigorously at his reddened face with a handkerchief. “Well. It would be symptomatic of your sort to descend to physical violence rather than argumentation.”

  With a calm made hilarious by the fact that he had to steady himself against his dressing table to achieve it, Mr. Hicks set his jaw and responded, “Aye, sir, argumentate all you wish, but depart from the original blocking again, and I will dance a hornpipe upon your testicles.” He slurred the last word so badly that I thought at first he said “spectacles.”

  Mr. Watts leapt out of his chair and addressed me. “A threat, Mr. Phillips. You’ve heard him issue a threat. A most palpable threat.”

  Even Algernon, the dressing room cat, was becoming agitated at the animosity between the two men. He stood up on the sofa in the corner of the room, arched his back – no mean feat for a feline as fat and well-fed as he – and hissed with lionate ferocity.

  I placed the valuables box on a dressing table, anticipating that I might be called upon to intervene in the event of a physical altercation. “Gentlemen,” I said, in a low and hopefully measured voice, “it is time to reason coldly of your differences. Mr. Watts, I must ask you to dress in the Green Room for the time being.”

  Mr. Watts snatched up his hairpiece from the dressing table and marched to the door. “I will gladly accede to your request,” he declared. “Better that than to have truck with pettiness.” With a haughty turn of the head, Mr. Watts disappeared down the hallway.

  * Chapter Five *

  Tuesday, 15 October 1850

  There is still no script for the pantomime.

  Pratty has scarcely been seen inside the theatre. The other day in the Green Room, I asked Mr. Tyrone if he and Mr. Farquhar Pratt had been working on a play script, and he responded: “How the feck should I know? Pratty just feeds me excrement and keeps me in the dark like a mushroom.”

  “Has he got you working on anything?”

  The young man leaned back on the two hind legs of his wooden chair and put his boots up on the table before him. “His Nibbs’ advice was fer me to read the Bible and the Newgate Calendar. He said the two of ‘em should be essential readin fer me. Said they would provide me with moral instruction and corrective tutelage.”

  As luck would have it, Mr. Farquhar Pratt made an appearance in the backstage area the next day. He was looking sober and bleached after his tussle with King Laud last week. His eyes were dull, his face was grayer than usual, and his chin was a maze of razor cuts from a shave he’d probably given himself earlier in the day. I asked him when we might expect to see the script for Yoyayeyayowowhatchumacallit, and he looked at me with feigned innocence. “Oh, I’ve left the writing of that in the capable hands of young Tyrone,” he said.

  I could not contain my incredulity. “But Mr. Tyrone has only been with us for a week. He can hardly be expected to take on the New Albion pantomime with so little training.”

  Waving his downstage hand abstractly, the old man said, “I beg your pardon, Mr. Phillips, but the good Mr. Wilton has led me to believe that this young man is the new Ben Jonson, nay, in fact, the new Shakespeare. There is nothing young Master Tyrone cannot do. Ask him to fight a tiger. Scale Olympus. He will do it.” Pratty toddled off into the dark recesses of the backstage area and appeared to be enthralled by something up in the rigging, where Mr. Sharpe and Mr. Manning were whistling to one another and untying ropes.

  Usually, the best course of action is to reason with the old man, to employ a Socratic dialectic with him, and to show him the illogic of his arguments by way of reductio ad absurdem. I followed him into the backstage area. “Have you provided Mr. Tyrone with the benefit of your wisdom in these matters?”

  “Indeed I have.” Pratty’s eyes never left mine. The only hint of his inner rage was that his gray cheeks began to crimson slightly.

  “Well,” I said, ”Mr. Tyrone tells me that you left him with a Bible and the Calendar and ordered him to read. I hardly think that that is adequate preparation for the writing of a pantomime.”

  “The Bible and the Calendar are preparation for life, my dear man.” The old man’s voice was booming now. “And life is the only preparation for a playwright. Since Master Tyrone has led a varied life, which has included, by his own account, bricklaying, street vending, and roughing up theatre managers who’ve dared to compete with Mr. Wilton, I have to conclude that he is eminently qualified to replace me as stock playwright at this establishment.”
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  Pratty was immoveable; there was no way but for me to complain to Mr. Wilton. I went to his office later that afternoon. He was in his customary place, at his oaken desk, sorting through the liquor receipts of the previous evening. If Mr. Wilton had his way, he would spend every hour of the day out of doors, leaving this desk and this theatre far behind him. He looked up at me with a pained expression. “This business with Mr. Bancroft and Mrs. Simpson,” he said. “Shameful behavior. We’ll have to keep it quiet. Something like this is only adding faggots to the fire for Mr. Mayne of the Police Commission. Do you know what he said to me last Friday?”

  “Who, sir?” I was a trifle overwrought.

  “Mr. Mayne. He said to me that after months of study, it has become apparent to him that our little theatre is a hotbed for prostitution and thievery.”

  “Sir, did you alert him to the fact that our theatre is situated in Whitechapel? Half the resident population consists of prostitutes and thieves. The rest are weavers and furniture makers.”

  I wasn’t entirely certain how Old Stoneface would take this, and I was relieved when he commenced to chuckle. “Yes, that’s a good one, Phillips. I’ll use that the next time I see Mr. Mayne. That is, if he doesn’t close us down before I see him next.” He smiled a moment longer, and then his smile turned into a vacant stare. “You’ve come to see me about something, I presume, Phillips.”

  “Yes,” I said, after an awkward pause. “It’s Pratty again. He insists that Mr. Tyrone will write the panto.”

  “And is Mr. Tyrone capable?”

  “I’m not certain of what Mr. Tyrone is capable,” I said, “but no play script has been forthcoming.”

  Mr. Wilton sighed heavily. He looked for a moment like a man who would rather do anything than what he had to do next. He slumped back in his rolling armchair and, looking like a caged bear, he said, “Perhaps you and I and Colin Tyrone and Farquhar Pratt should meet and have a discussion.”

  Wednesday, 16 October 1850

  Mr. Hicks was ivre during last night’s performance of Crosby Ravensworth. Because of his drunkenness, he had to be prompted at least twenty times and nearly succeeded in setting the Parisian Phenomenon’s crinolines on fire for a second time at the end of the play.

  To make matters worse, the Lord Mayor was in attendance with his wife. After the performance, some of the leading actors were escorted to their private box above the stage, where Mr. Hicks bellowed a few lines of Shakespeare, something about women trotting, ambling, and lisping, and then clasped the Lord Mayor’s wife to him and kissed her ardently upon the lips. The Lord Mayor’s wife, a thirty-fivish lady who might in some lights be called handsome, emitted a high-pitched squeal and wriggled out of Mr. Hicks’ alcoholic embrace. In an eye blink, she was standing on the other side of her husband and squeezing his elbow. “For gawd’s sake,” she whispered hoarsely to the Lord Mayor, “keep that wretched man away from me.” I do not think that Mr. Hicks’ ill-mannered behaviour will enhance the reputation for sobriety, moral rectitude, and high art that the theatre’s management is trying to inculcate in the face of a Police Commission study.

  At nine o’clock this morning, the stock playwright and his apprentice met with myself and Mr. Wilton in the latter’s office. Mr. Wilton was smartly dressed in a waistcoat and cravat, as usual, but he stood and fidgeted near his empty bookcase like a man with swimmer’s itch. Mr. Tyrone sat in the chair nearest Mr. Wilton’s desk with a look on his face which intimated that nothing was too good for him. I sat next to him, and Pratty isolated himself by sitting in a chair near the door.

  Mr. Wilton cleared his throat before speaking. “I am given to understand,” he said, “that little progress has been made on the pantomime. This despite your assurance, Mr. Farquhar Pratt, that the script would be delivered to Mr. Phillips by the fourteenth of October.”

  “I’m leaving the panto to young Tyrone,” Mr. Farquhar Pratt said curtly, his face taut.

  Looking first at me and then back at Pratty, Mr. Wilton cleared his throat again and said, “But Mr. Tyrone has no experience of writing pantomimes, sir.” Having been an army man, Mr. Wilton is fond of calling people “sir” in moments of conflict.

  “Nevertheless,” said Pratty, manufacturing an air of nonchalance, “he is my apprentice, and that is the exercise which I have decided would create the best possible learning experience for him.”

  Old Stoneface drew in an audible breath, and it seemed to me that he was counting silently to a thousand-and-one in an effort to contain his emotions. “I do not have to tell you, Mr. Farquhar Pratt, that the pantomime is the single most important event of the season at this establishment. It makes more money, by far, than any of your other plays have done.”

  “Have done here,” corrected Mr. Farquhar Pratt. “You have forgotten that The Vicissitudes of a Servant Girl ran for a hundred nights at the Royal Victoria.”

  Subtext and innuendo are not Mr. Wilton’s forte, and I could see that he was rapidly losing his patience. “Damned insolence!” he responded, his voice suddenly rising. “You are sacked, sir.”

  Pratty got up from his chair as if this was completely expected. He thrust one arm into the sleeve of the ratty greatcoat which had been slung over his knees during the brief conversation. “Pearls before swine, as they say.”

  Mr. Wilton was fairly bouncing with anger. “Beg pardon, sir?”

  Pausing at the door, Pratty said, “Pearls before swine. A common phrase for common folk.”

  “More insolence!” Mr. Wilton bellowed. “Never darken my door again!”

  All would have been lost at that moment had I not said, in a pitch that sounded a little like high C on the organ at St. Paul’s, “Em, Mr. Wilton, we have less than two months now to mount the pantomime. The puffs will have to be written posthaste, the transformation scene created in our workshop, and the play rehearsed. I do not believe that the production can be gotten up in time if Mr. Farquhar Pratt is sacked, sir.”

  “We’ll find another playwright,” Mr. Wilton shouted, his face taut and hard and craggy as a mountain peak. “A better one.”

  “I’m afraid,” I said quietly, trying not to offend my employer, “that all of the reputable playwrights in London will have been hired by other theatres for their own pantomimes. Of course, there is always Eustace Heywood to fall back upon –” I was referring to Mr. Farquhar Pratt’s predecessor as stock playwright at the New Albion, a man more noted for sleeping off a night’s debauchery on the curb outside the theatre than for anything he did within. Mr. Heywood and the theatre had parted company nine years years earlier.

  “Drunken sot!” replied Mr. Wilton, his fists clenched. “Even so, he would probably be better than what we are saddled with now.”

  “Of course,” I added, “we would have to bail Mr. Heywood out of debtor’s prison, where he currently resides.”

  Mr. Wilton could not sustain his rage. He sat down in his leather armchair and looked as miserable as any animal in the London Zoo. “Is there no one else?” he asked quietly. “What about young Colin here?”

  Having been slouched in his chair, Mr. Tyrone came to attention. “I could give it a try, sar,” he said. “It’ll be a farst, but I’m haccustomed to farsts.”

  All of the colour in Mr. Wilton’s cheeks was dispelled at that moment. “Is there really nobody else?” He was looking at me.

  “Nobody that comes to mind,” I said.

  There was a brief pause, and then Mr. Wilton spoke in low measured tones. “Very well, then,” he said to me. “Call Pratt back in.”

  Pratty was nearly down the stairs and out the stage door by the time I tracked him down. Breathlessly, I told him that Mr. Wilton had had a change of heart.

  “A change of heart?” he replied. “Assuming Stoneface has a heart at all!”

  “He would like to speak to you again,” I said.

  Pratty looked me in the eye. “Do you think that insults roll off my back like water? I will not attend him in his office again.”
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  “He had no intention of insulting you, Mr. Farquhar Pratt,” I responded. “What was said was said in the heat of the moment. On both sides.”

  It took some doing, but at last I was able to persuade Mr. Farquhar Pratt to relent in his desire to leave the theatre forever. We trudged in silence back up the creaky staircase to Mr. Wilton’s office. Mr. Wilton and young Tyrone were sitting in exactly the same positions in which I had left them; it was as if they had created a stage tableau. Mr. Wilton’s face was white as a new tombstone.

  There was a silence, and then Mr. Wilton spoke. “I will reinstate you, Mr. Farquhar Pratt. On the condition that you will agree to write the pantomime and that you will be faithful, from now on, to the schedule which Phillips has put before you.”

  It was Pratty’s turn to be haughty. He stood up straight. I could almost hear his spine cracking. “What of my fee?” he said, resolutely.

  “Your fee?” Mr. Wilton said.

  “Yes.”

  The blank expression on Mr. Wilton’s face intimated that Mr. Farquhar Pratt had just been talking about something far beyond his comprehension or that there was some other enormity which had disrupted his focus. “Why, your fee is three pounds per play. Your fee was in fact raised to three pounds a month ago, sir, and three pounds will continue to be your fee for the foreseeable future.”

  Pratty’s face was that of a pale grey bulldog. “The pantomime, as you have maintained, is a veritable pot of gold. I see no reason why I, as stock playwright for this theatre, should not share in the wealth produced. In addition to that,” Mr. Farquhar Pratt added, with a withering glance at Mr. Tyrone, “I now have the responsibility of educating my asinine friend here.”

  The apprentice leaned forward in his chair. “What’s he mean by tha?” he inquired. “Is it a good thing he’s accusin me of?” He eyed Pratty as a stray dog eyes a rabbit.