Golden Hill

by Francis Spufford

  Smith, knowing himself not part of that circle, rose to his feet warily. He did not want to receive the saint’s judgement, whatever it was, at De Lancey’s feet. He could see that this ceremonious clowning had been supposed to furnish a cement for the agreement they had expected to reach with him, but what present they were trying to give him, what balm they thought they could offer – he did not know. The judge stepped forward, the candelabrum a crusty anchor for streaming ribbons of light, and held it so that the two of them were looking at each other through the flames, with all the world dark beyond. The judge’s real eyelashes were a sandy pink, like bristles in pigskin.

  ‘Had us disappointed for a while there, son,’ he said quietly; ‘thought we’d wasted all that consideration on a nobody. Steady there, hey? Play your part, hey? You mean to dance on the rope, I conceive, not dangle from it.’

  He raised his voice back to the jocular blast required of the saint.

  Alone and bold, mysterious Smith,

  You wander far from kin and kith:

  Thy manners wild, thy actions tame,

  As if thou schemest, but in game.

  By accidental ills assailed –

  Misjudged, accused, arrested, gaoled –

  You endured in Christian meekness

  Showing forth your soul’s true sweetness.

  Quick to forgive, when made amends,

  You turn your adversaries to friends!

  This verse could not give the satisfaction of confirming a known character in Smith, Smith having none to confirm: but it drew a very pleasing and pathetic picture, with the different satisfaction of surprise about it, and so when the saint then clapped his hands together, to show what the reaction should be, the jury at his back and in the door-way obligingly joined in a ripple of applause. Sinterklaas indicated by a lift of his beard, and an opening of his hands, that Smith might reply if he wanted to; but Smith only smiled, tightly, and the saint turned away with a swirl of his robe, candle-stick held high.

  ‘Black Peter,’ he said, ‘there remains one more in the room, does there not?’

  ‘There does.’

  ‘Has she deserved a gift from Sinterklaas?’

  ‘She has not. For she is a very froward, meddlesome, mischievous soul; a bad daughter, and a curse to her acquaintance; a notorious shrew and scold.’

  ‘What have we for her in the sack, then? A switch, a whip, a lump of coal?’

  ‘Harsh words, good holy man. Words to sting her for her offences, and to offer recompense where she has offended.’

  A paper was passed, and the saint began to inflate himself within his robe for the oration, the bolster at his waist moving upward in a lump as he took breath; yet Smith was suddenly paying him little heed, for as Sinterklaas had turned towards Tabitha’s chair, the candles had at last illuminated her, and shown him what the chair contained, and it was not at all the mocking, self-possessed creature that he had all this time imagined. Curled up on the seat, with her knees drawn up to her chin, she was indeed twisted as far away from the company as she might turn: but not laughingly, not in a posture of proud refusal. She seemed clutched in on herself as an animal is who curls tight against pursuers, who presents brittle spines or creaking plates of horn because it cannot contend with the world by any more active means. The flames made her look yellow, but she might have been so anyway, without them, for her skin seemed wizened into a mummified dryness on her bones, with dark shadows practically amounting to bruises under her eyes; and she appeared to have shrunk, to have thinned past slenderness to a dry, jointed angularity. She did not look well, or young. In the sudden glare of light from the candles she only stirred and winced sluggishly, like a wasp left over from summer. The same momentary glare seemed to accomplish an entire revolution in Mr Smith. It has often been observed, how our desires take strength or force from having a minute dash of repulsion curdled into ’em, the fruit no doubt of our fallen state. Now desire ceded to repulsion altogether. The soft expansive wish to reach for her, with mouth, with tongue, with hands – the bare-skinned greedy gentle unprotected urge to hold, stroke, suck, coddle, transfix – recoiled in alarm, as if he had been wishing to kiss (indeed) a creeping wasp in winter, or a crab, or a furr’d and feeler’d moth. He had believed till that instant that he hated her, but to hate a strong enemy, full of resource and will, is to continue to admire, after a fashion, especially if what you hate you also find beautiful. Now, rather than a girl who made mischief from an excess of spirit, a wicked lively freedom, it seemed he saw a being miserably compelled, venomous and yet helpless; self-stung, self-poisoned; unequal to the catastrophes she caused.

  To set thy virtues down in song,

  Miss Tabitha, would not take long.

  Had I a nag as bad as you,

  I’d sell her carcass cheap for glue,

  Had I a dog with such an itch—

  Smith felt his anger shrivelling away to ash inside him. What was there in the chair was too small for the great feelings it had stirred: too ugly for love, too ingrowing for passion, too negligible for hate. But not too small for pity. If it was wretched to care for her, it must be still worse to be her.

  ‘Please, stop,’ he said.

  ‘What’s this?’ said the saint, baffled.

  ‘Please, enough.’

  ‘Don’t you want your cake from Sinterklaas?’

  The saint peered from face to face for guidance, the verse still poised.

  ‘Stupid,’ muttered Tabitha into the upholstery.

  ‘Can you not stop this?’ Smith said to Hendrick.

  ‘Mr Smith is very tender-hearted,’ said Hendrick, discovery in his voice, and something like glee. ‘I think Mr Smith wishes to renegotiate. Six per cent,’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Six per cent.’

  ‘Ten,’ said Smith, but not as if he meant it.

  ‘Six,’ said Lovell.

  ‘Six,’ rumbled Piet.

  ‘Alright,’ said Smith. He reached for the paper in Sinterklaas’ hand. Hendrick nodded. The saint made him tug on it before he released it, grinning. Smith crumpled the poem in his fist, and threw it into the hot coals of the grate, whose crackle could be heard in the room’s sudden hush. Everyone was looking at him – the Van Loon men and Lovell, De Lancey, the mob at his back, even (slow as a serpent) Tabitha. On the window-sills wax had puddled and run on the oranges. ‘But you must give me a few days to think how I take it,’ he said, and pushed his way out through the room, and down the stairs between the prosperous men and women and the children gnawing marchpane, while the buzz of speech resumed behind him, and the saint began to laugh.

  Outside the fine flakes fell in patient multitudes.

  II

  It was still snowing in the morning, and by noon the streets of New-York had turned a solid white Smith never saw them lose for the rest of his stay. Then the sky cleared, the mercury dropped, and the promise of cold the green sky of St Nicholas’ Eve had made was fulfilled with a vengeance. From the north came airs so hard with frost that Smith’s exhalations froze on his pulled-up scarf in icicles as he crunched gingerly to rehearsal, and the skin on his forehead tightened as if it might snap. All who could, kept indoors. Out on the East River, the pulse of the tides between Manhattan and Breuckelen swept more and more hesitantly, with more and more weight of tinkling, lumpish obstruction, until the reaching fingers of ice growing out from each shore met in the middle and locked, and the water between the city and Long Island became a hummocked, granular plain, into whose depths you could look and see swirls of grey brine and glassy freshwater fused together as still and rigid as in the heart of a child’s marble. Thicker and thicker grew the ice-sheet. When the clouds returned and the temperature rose, the ice ran too deep to weaken. The snow – this time falling in fat, tumbling clots, as if the stuffing of furniture were being tossed over the balconies of heaven – only laid a soft, thick dressing atop the ice, smothering the prospect in indistinguishable white on white, except where the Hudson sti
ll tore an iron-coloured path out toward the leaden harbour. The city’s houses became a congeries of specks, perched on the white edge of a white shore: the white tip of a continent layered in, choked with, smoothed over by, a vast and complete whiteness. Undaunted, the city’s people reappeared, once the sharpest bite of the cold was past, in furs and beaver hats (and foot-cloths for the poorest). After the briefest pause, the mails to Boston and Philadelphia and Newark resumed, whisking in on sledges drawn over the white roads by horses helmed in steam. Which means of mobility, the rich of the city also favoured for their own pleasure and use. The Philipses, the Van Rensselaers appeared in sleighs big enough to seat six, eight, ten persons; Chief Justice De Lancey drove in with a fine rasp of runners to the sittings of assizes, from his farm out in the Bouwerij, while little boys ran alongside shouting. The snow of streets was rammed by feet, drilled with holes where passers-by had pissed, and printed by horses’ hooves in confused stanzas of c’s, n’s and u’s. When the sun shone, loose handfuls of crystal hissed off the rooflines in prismatic eddies.

  *

  Meanwhile, Smith concentrated on the play, there being little else on which he could fix his attention with pleasure. Every day, he received a note from Lovell demanding a decision as to the nature of his payment, which he ignored. Otherwise, his only contact with the family was Flora, the Merchants having been shut during the extreme of the freeze, which made it easy to avoid Hendrick.

  ‘It is a terrible waste of everybody’s effort,’ she remarked severely, when first they met in the icy barn of the upstairs theatre on Nassau Street, ‘if someone is so selfish, that he will not fall in with what has been prepared to please him.’ Her pretty pink lips, now chapped with the cold, were squinched together in disapproval. ‘Honestly!’ she said.

  It was not apparent to Smith, whether she blamed him most for failing to enjoy the come-uppance designed for Tabitha – or simply for not appreciating the party – or more commercially, for being difficult where the interests of the clan were concerned. Her manner did not invite questions, and in any case he was not inclined to ask any. She had demoted him from ‘Richard’ to ‘Mr Smith’ again, and when she needed to address him in the business of the play, did so with what she meant to be a lofty coolness, though it leaked annoyance. It was a good thing that she was no longer Marcia, required to fall in love in the piece with Juba, but instead the noble Lucia, her heart divided between Cato’s sons. These two were played by a couple of genuine twin brothers her own age, sprigs of one of De Lancey’s supporters in the Assembly, in town for the winter; and she took to Lucia’s dilemma in relation to them with such innocent alacrity, such a frank wholesome delight at the situation of having two suitors, that the lewd suggestion Septimus had feared was completely dissipated, but Joris gave up glaring at Smith and glowered at both twins instead from where he invariably sat watching the rehearsal, hunched up in fur like a dyspeptic bear.

  While Smith had been in prison, the production had crossed the elusive but distinct line between the early stage of rehearsal, where the nature of the production is still to seek for, and experiments are welcome, and that later stage where the effect to be aimed for is essentially agreed, and it would be a distraction and an annoyance to the other players, to introduce any very significant new idea. The lines were almost all learned, a coffin-maker on John Street with a sideline in fancy painting had been commissioned to produce a backdrop of columns and ruins, and breastplates and skirts were in hand for the men. Pig’s blood for the death scenes was on order at the butcher. In a way, Smith welcomed this settled state he returned to, for it made much easier the task of fitting in with a group who (apart from Terpie Tomlinson) were all amateurs. They must not be too sharply pulled-away-from, for fear of rending the shared fabric. It was already a little awkward that, after a scene was done, and they all stood waiting in the indoor dusk of Nassau Street, hugging themselves and stamping, Septimus would have many remarks to make to the others, much advice to urge upon them, but to him and Terpie would only say, ‘Very good, Mrs Tomlinson. Admirable, Mr Smith.’

  But he was sorry for the chances he had missed to influence the fabric’s weaving; especially since it seemed clear to him that in one respect Mr Addison’s tragedy of Roman virtue was presently tangled, knotted, snarled, drawn into an unsightly bunch.

  ‘So, how did it all strike you?’ Septimus enquired that evening with a careful carelessness, as they sat in the bath-house, now almost empty, and let the heat melt the ice out of their bones, take the crystallised kinks from fingers and toes. The roof of Smith’s mouth felt like a raw cushion, yet the sting was delicious compared to the air outside. They had some rum in a bottle between them on the bench.

  ‘Very tolerably.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Yes!’

  It was true, too, with the grand exception he had in his mind.

  ‘You’re not disappointed by Lennox?’

  ‘Not in the least. I mean, he could not be called a natural actor, but Cato is a part to be played on one note, and he has it secure, it is a bell he can ring again and again. When he talks about duty, and dying for your country, and so on, there’s conviction in his voice; he sounds like a man who means it. And he growls along steadily through the verse. No; rough sincerity will not fail of its effect, I think you’ll find. You should probably prime him to expect applause for “Remember, O my friends” in Act Three, and to stop and wait while it dies, or he’ll speak on through, and lose some.’

  ‘Very well.’

  ‘Have you remarked, though,’ added Smith, grinning, ‘that he’s taken to heart the comparison of Cato to Mount Atlas?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean, whenever he comes on, he gets to his mark, and he plants himself like this’ – Smith got up to demonstrate – ‘one foot here, bam, and one foot far-removed over here, bam.’

  ‘Lord, you’re right. You think he’s making himself more … massive—’

  ‘—mountainous—’

  ‘—triangular! Good God, he is, though, isn’t he? On account of his looks, probably, wouldn’t you think? Which all agree are …’

  ‘Stony?’

  ‘Craggy!’

  ‘Hail the man-mountain! Pass me the bottle.’

  ‘There you go.’

  ‘Hail!’

  ‘Hail!’

  ‘And Terpie’s good too, of course.’

  She was. Having first established herself as young, pure and high-minded, she was now painting upon this severe white surface the innocent upheaval of first love; its fright, its fluttering, its undefended convulsions of feeling; with such tender touches of nature, as stoic Marcia lost her self-control, that the spectator quite forgot on what a slab of preceding illusion this new illusion rested.

  ‘But?’ said Septimus. ‘For I sense a “but” coming.’

  ‘Your Sempronius won’t do. He puts out no passion at all. The play becalms whenever he speaks.’

  It was essential to Addison’s design in the play that Cato be flanked by two figures of equal weight. Not the statesman’s two sons: they only provided a romantic subplot, and a contrast between a cool and a hot head, as the great Roman waited in Utica for the tyrant Julius Caesar to arrive and extinguish the last flame of liberty. The piece advanced instead by the difference it made between, on Cato’s one side, Juba the African prince, a barbarian who wanted to be a Roman, and on his other his supposed ally, the wicked senator Sempronius, a Roman who behaved like a barbarian. Sempronius endeavoured to hide his villainy yet out it came in the excess and savagery of his language, and in the end he displayed it pure, purposing to carry off and rape Marcia while dressed as Juba. Thus, when the false Juba encountered the real one in Act Four, and they fought, and Sempronius was killed, this combat proved the play’s contention – that at root the civilised virtues were matters of the will and soul, and not of blood. They were elective, freely to be chosen. The skin was not the character. Anyone could be a ‘Roman’. Anyone who cared enou
gh for liberty could be great Cato’s inheritor. Pre-eminently of course to Mr Addison, Britons, they being the famous citizens of the present world’s empire of liberty; yet his message ran on wider, without respect to nation. Unfortunately, the gentleman who must embody the half of this conceit, who must plausibly portray a bag of furies writhing in the skin of a legislator – was a country uncle of the Philipse clan, incapable of representing any fraction of it.

  ‘Come now, he is not so bad,’ protested Septimus.

  ‘Come, yes he is; and you know it.’

  ‘He speaks the pentameter very correctly – which you always make a great point of?’

  ‘Indeed he does; and he beats time comfortably upon his waistcoat with his thumbs as he goes, to make sure of it. And he is entirely an amiable soul besides, as is witnessed by the way he beams at us, when anyone else on stage is speaking. But the nasty libertine in the mask of virtue is nowhere. He does not speak him, act him, or (I am convinced) even imagine him. What were you thinking of, in casting him for your villain? Had you a fainting spell that day? A fit of the mulligrubs?’

  ‘He is the right age,’ said Septimus defensively, flipping a drop of sweat off the end of his nose. ‘He is the right age; he stands straight; he speaks clearly; he was willing. This was accounted very full qualification for the role, you know, before you came along and commenced to raise up expectations.’

  ‘I am not spoiling it for you, am I?’ Smith said, smitten by a sudden compunction.

  ‘Never in life!’ cried Septimus. ‘No, no, never think so. It is a pleasure to see how much better a thing we may make of it, with your help. – It is a pleasure to be shown, how the results I admire from the boxes are achieved on the stage. A privilege, even.’

  Smith looked down, embarrassed, but Septimus did not see, since he too was studying the floor between the pale knobs of his knees.