Golden Hill

by Francis Spufford

  ‘The truth is,’ Septimus went on awkwardly, ‘I had in addition a political motive in casting old Philipse, for he belongs to no party in the ruckus over the Assembly; so if he were the villain, I could not be suspected of any satirical fling. I would not be saying that either side, the Governor’s or De Lancey’s, was a false friend to liberty. I was avoiding a danger.’

  ‘But now you have avoided Sempronius. He is not there at all.’

  ‘Cannot the success of the rest carry him along?’

  ‘A villain is hard to do without. – A fight scene is hard to do without, if it is meant to tie off a whole department of the story, with a satisfying clash. You saw what happened today, when we tried to rehearse it. He died like – like—’

  ‘Like a man sitting gratefully down in an elbow-chair, because he has a touch of indigestion. Yes. Damn it, yes.’

  ‘Would he mind very much, being replaced?’

  ‘Probably not. He is only doing it to oblige. I think he would as happily spectate. But the point is moot, when I have no-one who knows the part, to replace him with.’

  ‘What about doing it yourself?’

  ‘Oh!’ cried Septimus, after a fraction of a pause. (A fraction with a very low denominator.) ‘What an excellent plan! Who could possibly find matter for satire, if the Governor’s Secretary plays a notorious enemy to freedom? Is a grinning, cackling, hand-rubbing monster?’

  ‘I see you’ve given the part some thought. Not sure about the cackling, though …’

  ‘Richard! Be serious!’

  ‘I am being serious. You know the words – you know everyone’s words – and I think you could be good. You could do Sempronius with a surprising fire. I have heard you lose your temper, remember; I have heard you roar – and the contrast with your usual precise appearance is most striking and horrible.’

  ‘Why, thank you.’

  Smith sighed. ‘You know, it is not an insult, to an actor, to say that he can find some unpleasant quality within him. The assumption of the profession is, that everyone has every quality in ’em, and the trick is, how to find the needed one.’

  ‘You really think I could be good? – I don’t for a moment think you are taking seriously what consequences may follow; you just like to get your own way. – And I’ve no more idea than poor Philipse how to fight on stage, you know. I only know real sword-play.’

  ‘I can teach you! Nothing easier!’

  ‘Oh, Lord. I suppose you know your business. Pass the rum.’

  *

  When they shambled out at last onto the snow-crust of William Street, in a moonless night a single degree of blue removed from black, and gimleted with the steel points of stars, the shock of the cold hit the freshly steamed and softened flesh of their bare faces like a slammed door. It rocked them on their unsteady heels. Smith crammed down his tricorn and yanked up his scarf. Septimus, who was wearing a complex flapped cap of many layers on his shaved head, fumbled the buttons closed under his chin. Achilles, seeing them emerge, came out of the grog-shop opposite carrying a lantern.

  Smith was so full both of rum and of his thoughts for a whirling, exhilarating to-and-fro with wooden swords, that at first he paid little mind to the swinging light drawing closer, or to the swaddled long-boned small-headed figure crunching paternally across holding it, with a resigned look for the state they were in; or to the other dark-muffled shape that slipped from the same door-way at Achilles’ heels, and flowed away at once down the shadow-walled pale-floored gallery of the street, like a shadow itself, or like a streamer of black ink twisting in water, flying over long spaces of untouched snow between each light footfall. The loose, flying run was somehow familiar. And the long, straight hair. It was— With a distracted, a stupefied slowness, Smith recognised, or was almost sure he did, the thief of his portfolio on his first morning in the city.

  ‘Hey!’ he shouted, and set off to run after; but Septimus somehow clumsily contrived at that exact moment to jostle into him, and to get his foot tangled between Smith’s, so that instead of flying in pursuit, Smith just went flying, and measured his length with a powdery thud on the snow, face first. Septimus and Achilles crowded close, all solicitude.

  ‘Stop him!’ he said, spitting out snow.

  ‘Who?’ said Septimus.

  ‘Him! Him!’ said Smith, trying to point between their legs. But the figure was already gone. ‘He stole—’

  ‘What?’ asked Septimus. They helped him up.

  ‘My money. Some money. From me.’

  ‘That’s terrible. When? Recently?’

  ‘No, when I arrived.’

  ‘Well, alas, I am sure it is long gone now.’

  ‘But you must have got a good look at him,’ said Smith to Achilles, collecting himself a little. ‘He was just behind you.’

  ‘No,’ said Achilles.

  ‘I didn’t see anyone,’ said Septimus. ‘Did you, old thing?’

  ‘No,’ said Achilles.

  ‘But he was just there,’ said Smith. ‘You must have seen him. He came out with you. He was only a step behind you.’

  ‘No,’ said Achilles.

  ‘In fact,’ said Smith slowly, stumbling over again through his memory of the previous minute, ‘you were with him, weren’t you. Together. Weren’t you? I’m sure you were.’

  ‘No,’ said Achilles.

  ‘Come on, who was that?’

  Smith began to press forward, carrying his insistence close into Achilles’ face; but Septimus put an arm in his path.

  ‘Richard, stop,’ he said.

  The voice was muzzy, but the arm was definite. He smiled at Smith, and Achilles joined in with it. It was on both faces a friendly smile, an encouraging smile; yet with a patronage in it, a patient confidence of being in the position of power here, that startled Smith considerably. Thanks to the play, and Septimus’ deference, he had grown used to thinking of himself as holding the patron’s position. He felt a tremor of alarm.

  Septimus brought up his other gloved hand, and with both, began to brush inaccurately at the snow clotted into the wool of Smith’s coat-front.

  ‘You must allow me to know my business, too,’ he said kindly. ‘And I promise you, there was absolutely nobody there. Absolutely nobody for you to be talking to, do you see? Absolutely nobody it would do you any good to meet. Trust me upon this point. Now, Richard; now, you terrible persuasive fellow; you and I have drunk too much, and I have committed myself to something I am going to regret in the morning, and assuredly’ – some shushing and sliding in the s’s, there – ‘it is time to say farewell. Without saying anything else to make life more complicated than it is already, don’t you think?’

  ‘You should both be in bed, that is for sure,’ said Achilles. ‘The frost tonight is not safe for foolishness.’

  ‘You see! Farewell! Good night!’

  He planted on Smith’s cheek a neat, dry, Toby-jug’s kiss, and clasping rather at random at Achilles’ shoulder, was led away by him without looking back. Smith remained shivering in the silent street, with its hard meniscus of white creeping up the cold bricks on either side, and the few lights showing in windows seeming deep-sunk, dim embers inaccessible behind many ice-layers. It was certainly time to move. As he trudged to Mrs Lee’s, meeting no-one, a slow confused revolution took place in his ideas, the planets within him grinding sluggishly into new positions relative to one another, and new suspicions taking form according to the angles of vision thus revealed. He began to consider, what he should perhaps have considered before, that a person who gathered intelligence for the Governor – as Hendrick had actually told him Septimus did, as plainly as possible – might do more than simply listen in coffee-shops; that the plan of the enmity between the disputing factions in the city of New-York might have depths of detail he had not perceived; that the partnership of Septimus and Achilles, with its proficiency in handling swords and ropes and rooftops, might have wider applications than he had guessed.

  III

  Mr Smith u
pon stage was a different creature, with all the impulse shaken out of him. Whether he moved fast or slow, he moved deliberately, almost ceremoniously, with an impersonal grace of gesture. The white lead wrought a similar change to his face, as the little tongue of Terpie’s brush licked it over inch by inch. His caramel freckles vanished; the readily-colouring individual skin beneath; the mobile eyebrows; the lines of laughter and surprise around his eyes. In their place she drew the ideal slender black arcs of a male lead’s brow-lines part-way up his forehead. She added no beauty-spot, because Juba was not a fop. She drew, over the whited-out outline of his real mouth, a smaller mouth in carmine. Fierce brushing, fierce tying and a dense dredging of powder turned his unruly red-brown hair to a tidy whited-brown like a sugared date. His face had become an expressive mask, ready for the display only of selected, intended emotions – surely as far from betraying a natural truth as could possibly be required for a performance as an albino prince of Africa.

  Terpie being the possessor of the only complete equipment of make-up for the stage in the whole city, she painted everybody’s face during the waiting hour before the performance, on the afternoon of the 15th December, which was the Monday of the third week in Advent. Septimus had agreed to pay for the replenishing of her store, and she was generous with it, sitting on a stool in front of each of the cast in turn, gazing intently with her lapis-blue eyes at the effect she was making, and touching her teeth with her real tongue while she touched the faces with her brush. For Septimus as Sempronius, she drew on the jagged wrinkle-lines and jowl-lines that conventionally signalised age, and added muddy smears of rouge for choler. For Cato, she applied thicker brows, and a pair of lines at the corners of the mouth, for determination. Herself, she did last, in front of a piece of mirror held by Septimus, laying on a mask identical to Flora’s, from rosebud-carmine mouth to delicately girlish brows and lashes, except that for herself she omitted the faint blush of rouge on the cheeks, Marcia being after all a cooler soul than Lucia. All the while, they could hear the chatter and scraping as the audience came in, carrying chairs from home as requested. They were in the side store-room of the theatre, there being no curtain to raise or wings to lurk in: only, when the moment came to begin, a plain walk out from the store-room door onto the bare boards in front of the one set, facing the sudden sea of curious faces, and the row of candles in tin cups burning on the edge of the stage, which they must be careful not to kick over.

  First out, and all alone, came Smith to speak the prologue by Mr Pope, traditionally the task of the actor playing Juba. He stalked to centre-stage and gazed at the audience, and what in a more proper theatre would have been a mere gesture, aimed conjecturally into the blackness beyond the footlights, was here a real piece of looking, with the same pale winter light as yet painting the whole length of the room, and all of it mutually visible. There, murmuring and breathing together and warming one another with their shared breath, sat substantially everyone he had met since coming to New-York: the Governor and his household, Major Tomlinson and his brother officers, the Assemblymen and their families, De Lancey and his grandee cronies, the Rector of Trinity, the Van Loons and Lovells all in a row with Tabitha’s pinched face helplessly drawn up by the spectacle, the coffee-drinkers of the Merchants, and going back and back on stools and benches and eventually standing, the middling and lesser sorts of inhabitants, including Mrs Lee, and Quentin the waiter, and the murderous butcher of Pope Night, and a host of prentices eating nuts, and even (right up against the back wall) a line of the city’s slaves. A crowd halfway to becoming familiar to him, after only six weeks. But he made himself a stranger to them. He began so quietly, so much as if he were talking to himself, and the lines were coming to him as he thought of ’em, that his whole body of hearers involuntarily leaned forward to hear him better, though his voice in fact carried easily to the very back; and then, having as it were secured their confidence, while he mused aloud upon the notorious power of tragedy over even the hardest heart – the tragedy of the least deserving, the tragedy of mere hapless humanity – the white-faced clown before them began to move, and to reason with grander, bigger, more formal gestures, and to speak with quickly-mounting intensity of rhythm, like a white snake weaving before fascinated barnyard chicks; until, abruptly, he struck a pose as lavishly eloquent as the statue of an orator, and spoke the turn in his argument with the voice of a trumpet.

  Here tears shall flow from a more generous cause,

  Such tears as patriots shed for dying laws:

  He bids your breasts with ancient ardour rise,

  And calls forth Roman drops from British eyes!

  And the rest he delivered at full oratorical pitch. He had them; their eyes followed him, magnetised, as he stamped and turned, and boasted of great Cato, whom they were about to behold. ‘Who sees him act,’ he cried, ‘but envies every deed? Who hears him groan,’ he groaned, ‘and does not wish to bleed?’ Smith had from the crowd before him none of the sense of reticence or sluggishness you get from an audience that does not desire to be moved, and must be gentled into it by touches, against its inclination. These wanted it, and were off their marks and sliding fast and free into emotion without resistance, without restraint. Perhaps, therefore, he shoved them along more roughly than he would have done upon the London stage – where, in any case, he had never been of such eminence as to play the lead. They were persuadable, and he persuaded them. They wished to feel, and he obliged to the top of his bent.

  The effect lasted through the, frankly, rather humdrum expository scene that followed, in which Cato’s sons kindly laid out the political situation, and carried the play safely through into the meat of the drama, which succeeded it. They liked the girls, both Lucia’s bright, happy advocacy of love, and Marcia’s stern denial of it. Far from snickering at Terpie, they listened rapt. They approved of Juba, and nodded gravely as he explained that, instead of rendering him into some indoor milksop, the virtues of civilisation would set the stamp of self-control upon his manliness. Cato, they applauded whenever Addison gave him a speech of defiance, which was almost every time he opened his mouth as Lieutenant Lennox played the part, feet wide apart, fist banging his chest, growling the lines. ‘It is not now a time to talk of aught, But chains or conquest, liberty or death!’ Roars from the room.

  But they hated Sempronius. Smith had had time only to talk Septimus through the character once, and it had been their agreement that Septimus would treat the traitor senator as something like the stock figure of the hypocrite, turning one way to smile, another to mutter out his bile in soliloquies. But when, on his very first entrance, he declared himself Cato’s secret enemy, and virtue’s, they booed him like a pantomime villain; and after a moment of dismay and hesitation, in which he glanced reproachfully at Smith, Septimus decided to play up to it; played up to it with increasing relish, growing pantomimic himself, skulking and sneering, winking and cackling, making of his soliloquies insultingly direct speeches to the audience, in which he encouraged and solicited their hatred; drew it forth; flirted out further reserves of it. ‘I blame you for this entirely,’ he whispered to Smith, as they passed one another in the store-room door. ‘So, stop having fun,’ Smith whispered back. Septimus had particular fun, he judged, in delivering Sempronius’ extravagantly fake paeans of praise to liberty, and having them reliably jeered by the New-Yorkers. ‘A day, an hour of virtuous liberty, Is worth a whole eternity in bondage’ – Septimus’ head winsomely on one side; catcalls. Smith had hoped that there might be at least some frisson of consciousness and discomfort when Sempronius ordered his own rebel troops to be ‘broken on the rack, Then, with what life remains, impaled and left, To writhe at leisure round the bloody stake’. No chance of that, however. Sempronius was by then the voice of assured evil, and all his savageries could be comfortably condemned without reference to any sins on the onlookers’ part. The onlookers looked on and hissed. Tabitha did not. Less poisoned-looking now, infused almost against her will with the life of the oc
casion, she was sitting up and glancing fascinated – deeply entertained – about the faces of the hissers, as well as at the stage. Harvesting ironies, Smith was sure.

  When the time came for Sempronius and Juba to fight, Septimus and Smith circled in a series of flamboyantly clashing parries, and clinches sword to sword, nose to nose. Septimus had declined, in rehearsal, to fall in with Smith’s suggestion that he should at one point jump into the air, while Smith’s wooden foil swept under his feet. Ridiculous, he had said; much too likely to go wrong. But now, caught up in the pleasures of villainy, he overacted his share of the combat fearsomely, and managed to flick a candle with his sword-point into the front row, where it was fortunately caught. Puncturing the bladder of pig’s blood under his costume, he died in a gush of crimson; then rose to his elbow, gave a death speech of owlish excess with his painted eyebrows raised, and did it again. Cheers.

  It was a tribute to Terpie’s skill that, discovering his body dressed as Juba a moment later, and mistaking it for Juba’s, she was able to wrench the mood back to seriousness. Having, from the opening of the play, glided rather than walked, and moved her arms like marble come to life – now she jerked, trembled, widened her eyes, bit her fingers. The audience quietened, stared, pitied her. ‘O, he was all made up of love and charms,’ she mourned, and she seemed like great Cleopatra herself bewailing Antony, not like Addison’s faint, efficient copy of that queen. The pity of love squandered, mislaid, overlooked, ill-fated, was made present, trembling, in the room. Then Juba himself entered, and all was righted. ‘O fortunate mistake! O happy Marcia!’ More cheers, of a more benevolent sort; cheers of willing belief and relief. The same willingness to enter in seriously marked the response to the final act, with its sombre tableaux, first of Cato’s elder son displayed to his father in another heroic welter of blood, then of Cato himself, nobly extinguishing himself as the last light of Roman freedom guttered out. Deep hush. Sighs. Sobs! Leaning from the store-room door, Smith was surprised to see a generous, general weeping grip the room. Damp eyes everywhere. The butcher at the back cramming his big fist into his mouth, a pair of visiting gentlemen from Virginia blowing their noses, De Lancey himself wiping one eye with his finger. When the cast lined up for their curtain call sans curtain, the clapping was thunderous and long-sustained, with particular peaks for Cato, for Juba, for Marcia, and (with hooting) for Sempronius. They were a hit.