Читать книгу Daniel O'Thunder - Ian Weir - Страница 16
ОглавлениеSPECTACLE, DEAR BOY. Never mind the mirror held to nature. If they want nature they’ll look at a tree. Bangs and whizzes—startling effects—characters who shriek and stab and get on with it. That’s what they want, and so naturally that’s what we give them. And why? Because we are not muffs.”
Edmund Cubitt peered down at the boards beneath his feet, and raised his voice. “Are we ready down there?” Silence below. Sounds of carpentry from the wings. He gave an impatient stamp. “Can you hear me? One knock for yes.”
Two muffled raps were given in reply on the underside of the stage, like goblin-knocks in a mineshaft. Cubitt rolled his eyes. “No, of course we’re not ready. We go up in two hours, and it hasn’t worked yet, so why would we be ready now?”
“About my play—”
“Could we be ready soon?” Cubitt’s voice rose into his tragedian’s register. This was the register he used for climactic moments of doomed heroism, and the hailing of cabs down the full length of crowded thoroughfares. “Could we aspire to readiness at some point in the identifiable future, or shall I just chuck it all over and go back to Punch and Judy in the provinces? I merely ask.”
Silence below.
Edmund Cubitt ground his teeth.
He was First Tragedian and Manager of the Kemp Theatre: a man of five-and-forty, brisk and brusque, with strands of boot-blacked hair painstakingly arranged upon a startlingly large head. He was already half costumed for his performance as the vampire lord in this evening’s melodrama, which meant he was kitted out in kilt and tam-o’shanter. No, don’t ask.
“My play?”
“Right. Short answer?”
“Well, yes, if—”
“No.”
I admit, this came as a blow. This time, I’d been so sure.
“You’ve read it?”
“Most of it. Enough of it. Can’t use it, dear boy.”
“Could I—could I ask why?”
I heard the damnable note of bleating in my voice, and for an instant had an image of myself as a cartoon drawing of the wretched fawning Poet: knock-kneed in supplication, clutching my scribblings in both hands, prevented from tugging my forelock only by the absence of a third hand to tug with. Christ, what is it about literary endeavour that strips a man of all dignity?
“A Scottish vampire,” Cubitt was muttering to himself. “Jimmy MacRevenant. Ah, well—why not, eh? Why not.”
He had fallen to contemplating his costume, having apparently forgotten completely about my play, which was one of the problems with him. His attention span was a hummingbird, darting incessantly from one topic to the next, and invariably returning to the one topic above all that riveted his attention: Edmund Cubitt.
“Romania—Hibernia—it’s all much the same to the gallery. Yes, they’ll like it well enough. They’ll like it a damn sight better than Shakespeare.”
The decision to mount a Scottish vampire play was not in fact an artistic one, incisive or otherwise. It came in consequence of an earlier decision to remove a production of Macbeth from the repertory, after audiences dwindled to the point at which there were scarcely enough lungs to give it a proper booing-off. This left the Kemp with both a yawning hole in its schedule and a wardrobe full of Highland costumes, which coincidence brought Cubitt darting to the honeysuckle-bush of inspiration: he would remount The Vampire, a melodrama written by Mr Planché some decades past and inexplicably set in Scotland. Cubitt had seen a pirated version as a boy, and later played it himself to some minor acclaim in the provinces. The story made relatively little sense, but it had fangs and imperilled virgins, both enduringly popular in the three-penny seats. Cubitt had added some innovations of his own, including Scottish ballads and dances, some caber-tossing, and a heroic charge by the Black Watch Regiment, complete with pipers. These had now begun rehearsing in the wings, setting up a plaintive Highland wheezing. In short it was a complete dog’s breakfast, bereft of any artistic merit whatsoever, and likely to be a great success. Cubitt was an indifferent tragedian, but a shrewd manager, occasional lapses into Shakespeare notwithstanding.
“I forget, dear boy—there’s the problem. I sit down with my text of the Scottish Tragedy, and I exclaim to myself, ‘This is good—this is in fact sublime—it is a mirror held to the Human Condition. But I forget about the audience. Anyone who can spell Condition—or Human—or The—is at the opera. The ones we’ve got are mutinous before we’re fifteen minutes in. ‘I liked them witches—they was all right—and it was prime that bit where they stabbed the feller. But why do they have to talk about it, rest of the bloody night?’ It’s the same with Hamlet. Give them the Ghost, and the Gravedigger and the five minutes of slaughter at the end, and they’d go off happy as clams. It’s the other four hours that bores ’em rigid.”
Cubitt’s limitations as Chief Tragedian had something to do with this failure as well. The last time he had essayed Hamlet, vocal elements had begun urging him on to self-slaughter by the middle of Act II. But there was a straw here, and I reached for it, albeit morosely.
“Are you saying that my play is beyond the grasp of the Kemp Theatre audience as presently constituted?”
“No, I’m saying your play’s no damned good. Same as your other ones. Sorry to say it, dear boy, but spade a spade. I’d put the quill away, if I were you, and look about for something I had a talent for. Ah, finally?”
An apparition had uncannily manifested down below, poking its head out through a little door in the stage apron and waving one bony hand to Cubitt. It looked for all the world like something the faeries had left behind, on one of their nighttime depredations into some ill-starred nursery. Remarkably this was not a performer in the evening’s extravaganza, but the boy who operated the trap. He was not above twelve or thirteen, with lank white hair and great unblinking eyes in a pale and sharp-chinned goblin’s face. We called him Tommy—short for Tommyknocker.
“We’re ready? My stars, can it be true?” Cubitt demanded, in the register he reserved for moments of tragic irony.
Tommyknocker disappeared beneath the stage without a word. He never did say a word—never a syllable, for apparently he was mute. He had been discovered at the stage door one morning, huddled and shivering, one of those waifs that the metropolis vomits up upon the cobbles. But one of the actresses took him in, and one of the carpenters found him a corner to sleep in, and eventually someone else discovered that he was no fool, and in fact ingenious with pulleys and mechanisms—amazingly so, in a child so clearly defective.
“Then let us screw our courage to the sticking point.” Stepping forward, Cubitt assumed the attitude of Lord Ruthven, Highland fiend, and declaimed: “Demon as I am to walk the earth to slaughter and something-or-other! Something else about a black heart sustained by human blood—oh, deuce take it, they’re not coming for the bloody dialogue.” With that, Cubitt precipitated himself headlong and disappeared, with a suddenness that would elicit great gasps and cries from the three-penny seats, for in tonight’s performance it would be accompanied by a hiss of smoke and a belch of hellfire. I gave a little jump myself, despite knowing how the illusion was produced. It was a simple stage trap, consisting of two India-rubber flaps underlain by a wooden slide fitting close beneath. This was slid back at the appropriate instant, letting the actor plunge through to be caught by a blanket affixed below.
As Cubitt disappeared I had a glimpse of Tommyknocker, staring up at me through the opening with those great uncanny eyes. For a disconcerting instant he might have been an imp squatting upon the infernal coals, contemplating the inevitability of my eventual arrival. Then the flaps snapped back into place and I stood alone, clutching my poor rejected manuscript while the muffled voice of Cubitt wafted up through the boards.
“Give it up, dear boy. I’m sorry, but give it up. Off you go then— I’ll want my supper at six o’clock—and don’t flounce.”
I HAD BEEN in London for nearly two years by this point, having fled there from Cornwall when my old life collapsed in ruin. For of course you have already made the requisite connection. The Revd Mr Beresford, pursued by Furies—this actor Jack Hartright, with his murky past and distinctive horseshoe-shaped scar—by God (you’ve exclaimed) they’re one and the same man! And so they are—or rather, so they were, for as I set this down four decades later I find I have transformed once again, and call myself by a third name. It is a dark one, this third name, but that need not concern us at present, for just now I am telling you of the bygone events of 1851, by which so much was set in motion—some that was great, and some alas that was terrible.
I won’t describe in detail my flight from Cornwall. Suffice it to say that there was a chance outcropping of rock along the cliffs below Scantlebury Hall. It broke my fall, although it broke my ankle as well, so badly that it never really healed. There was a friend who found me and took me in—Young Ned Moyle, bless his true heart—keeping me hidden and nursing my injuries until I could walk again, and then arranging secret midnight passage over the waves. Picture in your mind a cutter setting out from Sawle, and a young man shrouded in a cowl. Imagine an unseasonable storm arising, with such ferocity that the sailors began to mutter with white rolling eyes that there was surely a Jonah on board, carrying God’s curse. But picture safe harbour at last, and a post-carriage rattling through the night, and then finally there I am: stepping out into London under cover of darkness, with neither friends nor resources beyond a last few shillings and my own frail certainty that a new day must eventually dawn.
Going home to my family in the north was clearly no option. My father had intimated prior to my departure to Cornwall that arranging for my curacy was pretty much the last effort he could be expected to make on my behalf, although I should certainly write if I ever became a bishop. Besides, that was the first place the Scantleburys would look for me. No, it had to be London, where a man could dwell unnoticed amongst the teeming masses, and create himself anew. And on that first morning, as I gnawed a sticky bun from a coffee stall in the Strand, I felt that there was hope. London was vast and surging and bellowing—half the world, it seemed, was upon this thoroughfare alone. Carriages jostling, and pedestrians streaming, and costermongers with their barrows and their bullhorn Cockney voices, rising above the cacophony: Ni-ew mackerel, six a shilling . . . Wi-ild Hampshire rabbits . . . Fine ripe plums! No one pausing, and no one caring, and most of all no one noticing—not noticing the marks of deformity upon the poor, or the mute despair upon the faces of many, or indeed the fugitive priest who was sidling away from the coffee stall without having paid his penny.
“Oi!”
This from the stall-keeper, a burly oaf in an apron, who turned with a gentleman’s change just in time to see our hero disappearing into the throng like a river otter into bulrushes. The rushes closed behind me, and I was gone.
I confess to my shame that there were various such episodes in those first days and weeks in the metropolis, for after all a man must survive. But a chance meeting with some players in a public house led to a few pennies for passing out handbills advertising the Kemp Theatre’s new season, which led in turn to the discovery that the theatre manager, Mr Edmund Cubitt, required a secretary. This invaluable person would handle the great man’s correspondence and keep the books in order, and might in addition be required to appear on stage from time to time when an actor was indisposed—“indisposed” being a theatre term meaning “even drunker than the rest of them.” Naturally I clutched at the opportunity, although soon enough I discovered that the position involved other duties as well, such as washing the great man’s linen and mending his hose, not to mention putting up with his moods and indulging his maunderings, for it turned out the great man was in fact a mediocre man at best—indeed in many ways an utterly paltry and inadequate man—not least when it came to appreciating dramatic literature.
I had written several plays. I had done so in a joyful creative fever, having discovered that dramatic poetry was my true and genuine gift. I had scribbled them by guttering candlelight, often working clear through the night until dawn. My writing made the rest of it bearable—the moods and the linen, and the orange peels flung at my forays onto the stage—and as I completed each play I would convey it with buoyant hopes to Mr Edmund Cubitt, who wanted his supper at six o’clock.
But on this particular evening, he was not eating supper at six— or at seven o’clock either. By the time eight o’clock chimed, I’d been sitting for three hours in the corner of an unfamiliar public house. Having bolted from the theatre in high dudgeon, I had chosen the pub at random. It was dingy and dim, even by the standards of such houses, with a fire in a great stone fireplace that flickered upon the denizens and gave them rather the appearance of robbers in a cave. This impression was not completely fanciful either, for it turned out that this was a notable haunt of the sporting crowd. It was called the Horse and Dolphin, or more commonly the Nag and Fish. The walls and the mantel were festooned with sporting memorabilia, and pictures of horses and dogs.
I paid no attention to any of this. I sat in my corner, drinking my claret and brooding.
Perhaps my first few plays had indeed been lacking. One had for instance been a melodrama after the manner of Boucicault, about a virtuous young vicar who is falsely accused of a crime. I could accept that this was an apprentice piece, glittering here and there with flecks of gold, but admittedly the work of a Poet still finding his stride. But my new play—the play I sat clutching tonight—was different. John, Baptist; or, The Devil Distraught: a five-act drama that broke new ground in its treatment of the early life of the prophet—portraying him as a compelling but undisciplined youth, chafing in the shadow of a saintly brother, who was nearly undone by the erotic fascination he exerted upon women in general, and on one of them in particular, the duplicitous daughter of a Galilean pirate. But he redeemed himself, abjured the Devil, single-handedly cleared a path through the spiritual wilderness for the coming of the Lord, and finally triumphed in a last desperate battle against his Old Enemy, who came to him at the eleventh hour in the form of the beauteous Salome and sought to seduce him to his ruin. It was a work of truth and terrible beauty, despite the inability of Mr Edmund Cubitt to see this: Edmund Cubitt, purveyor of tartan ghouls to the illiterate, a man who tooth-picked his soul each morning in case stray bits of poetry had lodged there.
Except Edmund Cubitt was right, and as I reread the play I knew it. John, Baptist was a turgid sham, filled with wooden characters and leaden discourse, stinking of spilt poetry. And nothing I would ever write would be one whit better, because I had no talent. This was nothing but an illusion I had conjured, in my desperation to reinvent myself after that Cornish debacle. But it was time to face the truth about myself. Or at least to face a few selected glimmers of the truth, since this is really what we mean when we commit ourselves to self-knowledge, with all the tearful fervour that accompanies such moments. We won’t face the whole truth until we are dragged out shrieking upon Judgement Day itself, when each one of us will find himself loathsome—oh yes we will, my friend—beyond all hope of enduring.
LOOKING BACK ACROSS the years—scribbling these lines in my crabbed old hand here in Whitechapel, four decades later—I have to shake my head. What a preposterous youth I was! Hunkered in that public house, wallowing in self-pity, and scourging myself with self-hatred. Ecce homo, behold the man: the disgraced priest, fled to the metropolis and hiding under an alias like a rat in a bolt-hole—not that a rat has an alias, nor indeed a bolt-hole, but we’ll let that pass by—and now shaken to his very foundations by the discovery that his plays were drivel. Dear absurd self-aggrandizing idiot boy.
But at the time it seemed shattering. I was drunk enough—on claret and despair—to make a Gesture. Thus I bolted to my feet and shouldered to the stone fireplace, where a gingery man stood warming his hands. Ignoring him, I consigned John, Baptist to the flames, watching with savage satisfaction as my fondest hopes writhed and blackened and expired. With a bleak little snarl I turned away, but in doing so I lost my balance, and reached out to brace myself against the low table behind. That’s when I saw Him upon the wall. He was reaching out to me.
Prominent amongst the sporting pictures were images of pugilism: portraits of bare-knuckle fighters in sparring poses, and dramatic drawings of desperate battles. It was one of these that riveted me now.
It was a pen-and-ink engraving of two pugilists at close quarters, hemmed by a bellowing fight mob, surprisingly detailed and lifelike. The warriors wore breeches and clogs, and their bare torsos were improbably well-muscled, for the sketchers of prize-fights are notorious for seeing past the actual to the Ideal. The one on the left was hunched down, coiled to launch a blow at his opponent’s midriff. He was the shorter and stockier of the two, swarthy and black-haired and snarling with bad intent. His opponent arched over him in an elegant parabola. He was fair and perfectly formed and beautiful, this second pugilist, in the way that rugged men can have beauty. His left fist was held low, and with his right he was reaching over and past his hunched opponent, as if reaching out towards someone he had just seen in the crowd. His lips were slightly parted, and his eyes had just begun to widen, as if in surprise and welcome at whoever it was he had glimpsed.
But there was distress in his eyes as well. The artist had caught a moment late in the fight, for the ravages of terrible bare-fisted blows were evident on both men. When you looked more closely you saw that a ragged cut had been torn open on the fair man’s brow. Evidently the cut had been inflicted just an instant before, because it was clean and white; the blood had not yet begun to flow. Thus the distress—and yet it wasn’t distress, not quite. I gazed for fully half a minute before realizing what those eyes in fact contained. It was an enormous empathy—a great sorrowful complicity in the suffering of the world. This fighter recognized that his pain was commingled with your own—and he was looking straight at you. In his pain and sorrow, he was reaching out to you.
He was reaching out to me.
Evidently I’d exclaimed this out loud, because there was a chuckle at my elbow. “Reaching out to you? Naw, mate—he’s missing with his right, is what he’s doing.”
It was the gingery man who had been warming his hands. He regarded me with wry amusement.
“Missing him with the right, and dropping his left into the bargain, daft Irish bog-trotter, which was a terrible habit he had. And that’s what ended the fight, about an eye-blink later. The Gardener landed him a doubler to his liver—that being the Gardener on the left, there—Tom Oliver, the Battersea Gardener, famous for his sweet peas and nectarines. He followed that with a leveler to the conk, and that was that. Down goes our man like a toppling tree, and nothing I can do will bring him back again.”
“You?”
“I was his second, that afternoon. There I am, right there.”
He pointed to the picture—guiding me to a closer look with a hand on my side—and there he was indeed, just outside the rope by one of the ring posts. The man who stood beside me tonight was older—fifty years old, perhaps; his hair was thinning, and his whiskers were patchier than they once had been. But he was unmistakably the man in the sketch: frozen forever in an attitude of dawning horror, arching back and raising his hands as if to ward off the blows that were about to rain upon his champion, with all the wide-eyed woefulness of St John at the foot of the Cross.
“We did what we could, of course. Carried him to the corner, and blew brandy up his nose, and at the end of thirty seconds we carried him back to the line of scratch and prayed he’d stay upright when we let go. But down he went—flat down on his phiz in the mud—and that was that. Well, the Gardener’s friends hurried over, and I held up our man’s hand so the Gardener could shake it, for that’s what you do. You shake the man’s hand—partly for sportsmanship, but mainly in case you’ve killed him. The handshake can be cited in court to prove there was no hard feelings, y’see, and with luck the judge will reduce your sentence accordingly. All goes well, it’s six months for manslaughter—but if you’re not careful it can be worse. It’s a terrible thing when a man gets killed in the prize-ring—tragic beyond measure, for they’ll throw the seconds in jail as well. But nobody died that day, thank the Dear, though Daniel never fought again, and doubtless just as well. Do I presume that you’re a sporting man yourself?”
I was not in fact a sporting man. And yet I knew the man in the engraving—I’d seen that face. But where?
“My name’s Rennert, though my friends call me Jaunty. And if you’d care to stand us a drop of the daffy, I’d be honoured to count you among that number, and tell you tales all night.”
I was no longer listening. I was in fact on my way out of the door, for the room had all at once grown hot, and the claret was curdling in my stomach. But as I lurched out I had the most extraordinary conviction that the eyes in that engraving were following me. And moments later, as I disgorged the curdled claret onto the cobbles and straightened with a feeling of clammy relief, it came to me in an overwhelming flash of certainty.
I lurched back into the Nag and Fish, to discover that my new acquaintance Mr Jaunty Rennert had inexplicably disappeared. It wasn’t until some while later that I discovered that a small but rather valuable item—a silver snuff-box, with the masks of comedy and tragedy etched on the top and bottom—had disappeared as well, from my vest pocket. This discovery brought with it the memory of a hand being placed on my side and guiding me to a better look at the picture, and suggested a plausible reason for Mr Jaunty Rennert’s abrupt departure.
But in this moment I was hardly thinking of snuff-boxes. I was staring thunderstruck at the face, in the engraving. That face and the hand reaching out. And now I knew.
It was the face I had seemed to glimpse that dreadful night outside Scantlebury Hall, as the rocks had given way beneath my feet. The laughing face of the warrior archangel.
O’Thunder.
I WAS STILL unsettled when I arrived back at the theatre, but marginally more steady on my feet. Bagpipes were wailing as I slipped through the backstage door, and cabers were thudding. This meant The Vampire was well into its second act, and Edmund Cubitt had been left to struggle unaided through three costume-changes. Doubtless I would pay tomorrow, but tonight the spirit of bitter rebellion seethed.
