The Playmaker

by Thomas Keneally

  “’Tis indeed the picture of Worthy, but the life’s departed,” read Henry Kable. “The man has got the vapours in his ears, I believe. I must expel this melancholy spirit.

  “Spleen, thou worst of fiends below,

  “Fly, I conjure thee by this magic blow!”

  Kable, as the play demanded, slapped Sideway on the shoulder, and Sideway—thinking it was expected of him—tottered like someone shot. Ralph did not dare look in the direction of the women for fear of being ignited to laughter himself. He clapped his hands and moved in closer to Sideway.

  “Perhaps, Robert, it might be better to begin in a more modest theatrical way and to build on that. Layer upon layer of gesture and feeling. Rather than to try to accomplish a finished performance on the first day.”

  “You think I am overdoing it!” Sideway accused thunderously, looking like the old Robert who in the cold southern seas had had to be fettered in the forrard chain hold.

  “For the first day, Robert, I think you may be attempting to be Mr. Munden at too early a stage. If you spoke to Mr. Munden, if you could reach him and speak with him, I think he might confess that at first reading he himself would not be as full-fledged as you are trying to be. Come now, Robby, I won’t stand for any black brows! We’re here to make a play and not for vanity. Though some would say that making plays is the greatest vanity of all.”

  In vengeance at being corrected, Sideway muttered his first line without any inflection.

  “Plume! My dear captain, welcome. Safe and sound returned?”

  “Do it as you will then, Sideway,” called Ralph. “As you will. I should have made you Captain Brazen.”

  For Robert Sideway, with his ridiculous gestures, was stealing the excesses of behaviour proper to the part of Brazen, which the Hereford Jew John Wisehammer would play in the overdone way normal to Jewish players. Ralph had spoken to Sideway only to save him from the scorn of his fellow players. But if he would not accept advice, Ralph concluded, then let him be mocked and so educated! “Remember,” he called at one stage, “Worthy is a noble person, not an oaf.”

  “I know, I know,” sang Sideway, in an artistic fever, his face glowing and beginning to sweat, since there was no line he recited which did not have an accompanying gesture or even a new orientation of the body. So that he worked as hard as any dancer, glancing only sometimes at the text Henry Kable held in his hands. If Sideway could have convinced everyone he had seen the play so often he knew it by heart, then he would have been delighted.

  Henry Kable could see at once the chance of defusing Sideway’s theatrical grandeur and of playing to the women, sharing with them the joke of Sideway’s overbaked style. Gradually he tailored his acting to that end. For he knew Sideway could disobey an officer and be honoured with a sentence from Davy Collins’s court for it. But you couldn’t disobey the convicts. They above all had the power of ridicule.

  Mr. Worthy is in love when he enters. He is in love with Melinda. Melinda is beyond his reach, since her aunt in Flintshire, Mrs. Richly, has died and left her a nearly unimaginable fortune of twenty thousand pounds.

  To which news Plume/Kable responds with military imagery. “Oh, the devil! What a delicate woman was there spoiled! But, by the rules of war now, Worthy, blockade was foolish. After such a convoy of provisions has entered the place, you could have no thought of reducing it by famine. You should have redoubled your attacks, taken the town by storm, or have died upon the breach.”

  Now, laughter of the right kind from the she-lags in the shade! And more laughter as Plume/Kable continued to give his earthy advice. “The very first thing that I would do should be to lie with her chambermaid, and hire three or four wenches in the neighbourhood to report that I had got them with child. Suppose we lampooned all the pretty women in town, and left her out? Or what if we made a ball and forgot to invite her, with one or two of the ugliest?”

  Soon they had reached the point where Plume speaks of his own desire, Silvia. Ralph saw Mary Brenham blink and smile vaguely as if it had only just struck her that Kable was to be her love on stage. Plume says, “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.”

  Ralph had to call to the carpenter, who had joined his admirers in the shade and had his hand on Nancy Turner’s hip.

  To end the scene, Kite enters and tells the Recruiting Officer, Captain Plume, that he has visited their old friend Miss Molly and has discovered there a footman in blue livery, Silvia’s footman, who has delivered to the unfortunate girl ten guineas from his mistress, a gift intended to be spent on baby clothes. (Kite, of course, being sharp, has at once married Molly and taken his share of the money.)

  Voicing his enthusiasm for the girl, Captain Plume leads sad Worthy off the stage. Departing into the shade on the edge of the clearing, Sideway did not stagger, gasp and groan quite so much as he had at his first entry.

  “This is wonderful,” cried Ralph, his eyes prickling with tears at the energy and craft of his players. He felt the particular surge of gratitude for the pace Arscott and Kable had already worked up. He waited till his blood ceased quaking with delight before calling, “Melinda and Silvia for Scene Two.”

  Mary Brenham covered her mouth with her hand, looked toward her son profoundly asleep in the shade, and rose.

  CHAPTER 8

  The Morality of Plays

  Ralph was soon depressed, though. He had gone to such lengths to cosset everyone’s sensitivity in the matter of having Nancy Turner the Perjurer as Melinda. But reading her lines she showed a shyness she had not exhibited as a lying witness in Davy Collins’s courthouse. “Welcome to town, cousin Silvia,” she mumbled. The happy and arrogantly artistic state the men’s performance had put him in now vanished. H.E. and Davy Collins would forgive him for using Nancy Turner the Perjurer if she were a dazzling Melinda. Those frightful Scots, Major Robbie Ross, H.E.’s deputy in government and commander of the Marine garrison, and his crony Jemmy Campbell, might even be appeased. But they would blame Ralph if Turner were poor, and their blame would be of the furious variety.

  But his sweet, composed thief, Mary Brenham, saved the balance of his hopes by expanding before his eyes into Silvia, the way Arscott had expanded into Kite. It was the mystery again. It was the word made flesh. She took fire at the lines: “I need no salt for my stomach, no hartshorn for my head, nor wash for my complexion; I can gallop all the morning after 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.”

  At “put to the trial,” she thrust her right thigh forward mannishly. It was sublime. Gardening could not match this, unless the turnips spoke back to you in the tongues of angels!

  Nancy Turner the Perjurer continued to cast him down in her rendering of such pert lines as the one about Silvia being tired of an appendix to her sex that can’t be as easily got rid of in petticoats as in breeches. The joke fled into the air, mute and muffled. Even Meg Long, sitting in her own mist under the native fig, could see nothing to beat the ground over.

  “You are meant to be a tease, Nancy,” Ralph told her. “You are—as Mr. Worthy says—a jilt. You must have levity and malice!” He nearly added, “You had enough damned levity and malice in the courtroom!”

  As Melinda maligns Plume’s character, Silvia storms out of her cousin’s house. Yet even for a first reading, the argument between Turner and Brenham came off dully, Nancy Turner’s mutterings and stumblings dragging Mary Brenham down. When Brenham vacated the clearing and Duckling entered representing Lucy, Melinda’s maid, the end of the act died, as it were, in their throats.

  Ralph took her aside again. “You must be quarrelsome, Nancy, quarrelsome! You have seen women quarrel? Weren’t there quarrels in the hold of the Lady Penrhyn? I want you, Nancy, to believe in your enmity for your cousin
Silvia, and to put some fist into it!”

  To his surprise Turner began to weep. In the heat of her grief, freckles became evident on her dark, luscious face. “You’ll work it up, there’s time yet,” he soothed her. “You will be a fine Melinda.” Duckling stood by like a true maid, frowning, and as he put his hand on Turner’s shoulder, an act which from a distance would look quite intimate, the Reverend Dick Johnson walked into the rehearsal.

  Ralph invited the Reverend Dick into his hut. It was one the clergyman was familiar with, since he had sometimes held Communion services there. “I seek always a house whose bed has not been sullied by convict concubinage,” florid, earnest Dick had once confided to Ralph. This standard disqualified many of the officers—George Johnston on account of Esther Abrahams, Surgeon Johnny White because of the young Southwark barrow woman he sometimes invited into his bed, and even Judge Advocate Davy Collins with his weakness for a milliner, that handsome Yorkshire woman named Ann Yates, condemned to death at York Summer Assizes for breaking and entering and now regularly reprieved in Davy’s arms. The unstained cot Dick Johnson sought was therefore a rare item of furniture in the convict town. Those officers who did not have a mistress were too scientific and self-assured for Dick’s raw evangelism—the astronomer Will Dawes, for instance, and elegant Watkin Tench, and even H.E. himself, who was rumoured to be an atheist.

  In Ralph’s small hut there was little but a table, a full display case for butterflies to take home one day to Betsey, a desk, two chairs run up by the carpenter of the Friendship, which had returned a year past to the known world, and that celibate bunk which made the place a suitable site of worship. There were also two sea chests, in one of which lay folded the Communion cloth from the first Communion taken in this quarter of the universe—the service having been held in Ralph’s marquee in the first days. Ralph’s mind was teased by such things—the first Communion, and now the first play. Ralph called for his servant, Private Ellis, a sullen man of about forty years who suffered from a permanent cold, and ordered him to make tea—not too strong. Ralph had a mere seven pounds of the stuff left—he had sent an order to Capetown for more with Captain Johnny Hunter of the Sirius, but Johnny and the Sirius had yet to be seen again, and it was feared the sea had consumed them.

  Ralph noticed Dick Johnson had his chin tucked down against his clerical bib and seemed embarrassed. He had broad and generous features, and his lips were wide and sensual, and all of that was at variance with his evangelical fury, which Ralph could sense simmering away in him as Private Ellis boiled up the water for the tea.

  Ralph asked him about the health of Mrs. Johnson and of the native girl, Booron, a child of perhaps ten or eleven whom Dick and Mary had just taken into their home. A horrifying form of smallpox had erupted among the ab origine Indians of the place—a mystifying plague, since no one in the city of lags, in Sydney Cove itself or at the outstation called Rosehill, had been stricken with the illness. Bodies of natives, swollen and thickly covered with pustules, were found unburied in various bays around the harbour, sitting propped against sandstone ledges or lying in caves. It was known that the strange unearthly beings of this region favoured some sort of burial, but the bursting out of these terrible rashes and tumours must have sent the healthy ones fleeing farther into the forests, leaving their stricken relatives to putrify in the open air. Watkin Tench, who always inquired into such things, said that the abandonment of the bodies of the wretched victims meant that the natives had never seen the disease before. But Johnny White and Davy Collins argued against that, since they had discovered through taking H.E.’s native Arabanoo to the hospital, where four stricken Indians had been placed, that the natives had a name for it. Gal-gal-la.

  H.E. had enquired at one time whether glass flasks containing variolous matter which Surgeon Johnny White had brought with him for some scientific purpose, could have somehow spread the malignancy among the natives. But Johnny mocked the idea.

  At the height of summer then, Johnny had gathered a party of convicts and Marines who had been marked by the disease in their earlier lives. He ordered them to carry to the hospital four Indians discovered stricken in an abandoned encampment. At the hospital the two grown male natives died, but the two children were nursed through. Johnny White wished to adopt the boy, whose name was Nanbaree but whom the surgeon had already christened Andrew Snape Hammond Douglas White. The less assertive Johnsons had adopted the girl, and surprisingly saw no urgency to lay the weight of a Christian name upon her. So she was still Booron.

  The mention of this new and fascinating member of his family did not, however, cause any generous rising of Dick’s chin this afternoon. Reverend Johnson was for some reason in torment, and Ralph guessed what it was. It was the use of Nancy Turner as Melinda.

  Private Ellis left at last, perhaps to see his convict paramour, Liz Cole, another of those shoplifting London milliners. Liz Cole was already married to a quarrelsome lag called Marshall, whom she had jilted for Ellis. Once or twice, Ralph had warned him of the danger of this sort of affair, and Ellis had nodded away for the sake of politeness. What Ralph couldn’t understand was how anyone would leave anyone for Ellis’s sake. It was one of those mysteries of passion.

  With Ellis gone from the hut, Ralph turned to the priest. “Please. You must feel unconstrained, Dick, speaking with me. I beg you.”

  Dick hid his full upper lip behind his full lower one and stared miserably at Ralph. At last he unclenched his mouth and spoke. “I must ask you to use any pretext to abandon this play which you are managing. I ask you to do this both in my capacity as a friend and as Christ’s priest in the vastest and most decadent parish in all Creation. I know certain people like to see me as a Methodist lunatic and an enemy of decent joy. You know I am not that, Ralph, and I beg you to go on believing I am not. My motives for asking you are based on the most serious considerations of both private and social morality.”

  And he closed his eyes, put his hand to his brow, and began to explain himself.

  “Mrs. Johnson,” he said, “has the convict Mary Brenham in a few times weekly to wash and iron. Brenham brought with her when she came to us yesterday a written copy of Act One of the play you propose to present. Mary—Mrs. Johnson—began turning the pages idly, and was astounded to find enshrined in the lines some of the principles of behaviour which have brought the prisoners to their present unhappy condition and led to their being located at the end of the earth like this.”

  “Dick, it is a comedy,” Ralph pleaded, astounded. He was as good a member of the Established Church as anyone, and he could not understand why Mary Johnson had not been consumed with enthusiasm for Farquhar’s work. That she had been in any way appalled looked to him like a wilful misreading.

  “In an ordered society”—Dick sighed—“one might be able to consider it a comedy, though I have to say there are some lines at which civilised people should not laugh. Here, however, in this society, where violations of property and person are the standard of behaviour, the play cannot be considered as anything but a dangerous incitement.” Dick made an appeasing motion with his left hand. “I hate talking like this to a friend, Ralph. I sound like a sermon.”

  And indeed the uneven white of an embarrassed friend was showing through Dick’s tanned face.

  “This girl Mary Brenham,” he continued. “She has a child by some sailor. She begot it while she was coming here aboard the Lady Penrhyn.”

  “So I believe,” said Ralph.

  “She tells me this. You remember that the Lady Penrhyn was the only ship in all the fleet which carried a convict shipment entirely of females. Aboard the Lady Penrhyn then, you had to align yourself with a sailor. If you did not—if you were not known to be the property of one of the seamen—then you stood the chance of being violated by the entire pack of sailors. So Brenham aligned herself with the sailor Crudis, one of the few who were better than beasts. But even so he forced her favours from her.”

  “Perhaps she did not give them en
tirely without wishing to,” argued Ralph, moved by an obscure fraternal defensiveness for Crudis.

  “Brenham was raised decently—you can tell from the way she carries herself. Consider that there is nowhere aboard a convict ship, neither in the hold nor in the sailors’ quarters, where bodily commerce could be carried out in the sort of privacy you and I, and for that matter Mary Brenham, would consider essential for the purpose. It was different for the officers, since they had cabins of their own, and indeed in some cases made use of them!

  “Let me assure you, therefore, that Mary Brenham’s sensibilities were outraged by the voyage and yet, even here, they still exist. So there is Brenham at one pole of our convict community, and she is encouraged—positively urged—by the arts of comedy to abandon her delicacies. And at the other pole we have the Perjurer Nancy Turner and others of that kind. Lacking in any moral sense, they will now see in The Recruiting Officer all their amorality exalted and laughed at by the members of this penal civilisation. This was always the peril of the theatre! The events even of Act One, which I have read and made a copy of, will serve as an exemplum for events which will no doubt occur later in the evening of the performance. No, no, Ralph, let me specify. First we begin with Sergeant Kite, who enumerates five women he is already married to simultaneously. Then we have Captain Plume asking whether Melinda is as great a whore as she is a jilt, and when Worthy denies it, Plume exclaiming, ‘’Tis ten thousand pities.’ Next, Plume’s advice on how Worthy should go about assuring Melinda’s affections. ‘The very first thing that I should do, should be to lie with her chambermaid, and hire three or four wenches in the neighbourhood to report that I had got them with child.’”

  “But,” Ralph pleaded, “the play makes it clear that Captain Plume is in fact a virtuous man, and that all his racy talk is merely talk.”