Galapagos Regained Read Free Page B

ale.”
    â€œAnd the natives are all lyric poets as handsome as Lord Byron and witty as Mr. Pope.” Phineas made a jaunty pirouette, as if to tell the onlookers that, though bent, he was not yet broken. “If my daughter doesn’t get a lyric poet out of this adventure,” he said, sauntering away, “I want naught to do with it.”
    *   *   *
    In a universe rife with ambiguity and riddled with whim, Chloe Bathurst knew one thing for certain. No matter how great her popularity with aficionados of tasteless spectacles, any actress in the employ of the Adelphi Theatre would never accumulate two thousand pounds. Even before learning of her father’s predicament, she’d endeavored to join a more prosperous troupe. Over the years she’d secured auditions with the great patent houses—the Drury Lane, the Haymarket, the Covent Garden—all three still trading on the fact that, prior to the Theatre Regulation Act, they’d been the only venues in London licensed to mount respectable fare. The directors offered her not a word of encouragement. Her voice, they insisted, was ill-suited to substantive plays. She could never do right by Goneril, Ophelia, Rosalind, or even Juliet.
    When Mr. Kean assumed management of the company, Chloe had hoped she might enjoy a corresponding increase in salary, for that conceited actor regularly insisted he was not in the business of directing mere melodramas. He preferred the term “tragical romances,” which sounded to Chloe like the sort of challenge a dedicated thespian could meet only with the aid of monetary incentives. She’d first learned of Mr. Kean’s affectation when, eight days before the show was to open, they got around to rehearsing The Murders in the Rue Morgue, Mr. Buckstone’s adaptation of a mystery story by the American writer Mr. Poe.
    â€œWhat a marvelous potboiler we have here,” remarked Chloe’s colleague and rooming-companion, Fanny Mendrick, after the company had read the script aloud. A pocket Venus whose ringing voice seemed transplanted from an actress twice her size, Fanny had been cast as Mademoiselle Camille L’Espanaye, fated to die at the hands of an Indonesian orang-utang. “But I’m not looking forward to getting rammed up a chimney by an ape.”
    â€œI do not direct potboilers,” Mr. Kean informed Fanny. “I direct tragical romances.”
    â€œShow me a maiden being ravished by an orang-utang, and I’ll show you a potboiler,” said Chloe.
    For all his vanity, she admired Charles Kean, who was touchingly devoted to his actress wife, the protean Ellen Tree, cast as the mother of the orang-utang’s victim. Chloe also pitied him. As Dame Fortune had arranged the matter, Charles Kean was born the son of Edmund Kean, England’s most celebrated actor, now fifteen years deceased. Though gifted in his own right, Kean the younger seemed destined to spend the rest of his life boxing with his father’s shadow.
    â€œI beg your pardon, Mr. Kean, but I must agree with Miss Bathurst,” said the dashing Mr. Throckmorton, who’d lost Chloe’s hand but secured the role of Inspector Dupin. “Here at the Adelphi we do last-minute rescues, ridiculous coincidences, volcanic eruptions in lieu of plot resolutions, and apes stuffing young women up chimneys. It was ever thus.”
    â€œThey do potboilers at the Lyceum,” retorted Mr. Kean. “They do potboilers at the Trochaic and Sadler’s Wells. Perhaps you’d be happier working for those tawdry houses.”
    â€œA question, Mr. Kean,” said Chloe, who’d been assigned the part of Dupin’s mistress, a character not found in the original tale. “Since we’re all tragical romancers these days, might we be paid a tragical romancer’s salary?”
    Mr. Kean confined his reply to a sneer.
    In subsequent months the Adelphi Company labored to do