The Playmaker Read Free Page B

Brewer came fully into the tent now. There was a bottle of port in one hand. “If I come out to your island with you, we could sit in the shade and watch your old lag do the hoeing and recuperate ourselves. I want to get away from this Bedlam here. Every whore calling congratulations to me because Baker’s hanged. Sometimes I wish I was a man of virtue, like you, Ralph.”
    â€œYou have lost a rival.” Clark smiled, lively now that the prospect of going out to the island had been raised—inspired also to eloquence by having read all morning the playwright George Farquhar’s well-balanced sentences. “And gained only the small annoyance of a ghost.”
    A shudder—the sort of spirituous shudder good bottlemen seem to suffer as they get older—rattled through Harry’s features.
    Harry Brewer protested, “But you know I am unhappy to see any rival vanish that way. The hemp quinsey, as the convicts call hanging, and the shitten breeches. Christ, I swear I hate it.”
    â€œWell, there are no executions in our little comedy here,” said Ralph, patting his two copies of the play.
    â€œDeo gratias,” said Harry. He had picked up fragments of Papist Latin in such places as Rio and Narbonne. He and H.E. had once spied on harbour fortifications in France, but enjoyed the occasional High Mass as well.
    On the way down to the dinghy, Harry murmured, with that terrifying nothing-to-lose candour of his, “What I fear is that she had more ardour for Handy Baker than she does for me.” Ralph felt desire pass through him like nausea.
    The she Harry spoke about was a nineteen-year-old convict who was still known by the name she had been given in childhood by her mob, her canting crew. The name was Duckling. Ralph did not think Duckling was very clever, but she had wonderful breasts and good sharp features. Harry Brewer, thirty years older, was possessed by her and it did not make him happy.
    â€œWhen I put my hand on her,” Harry continued with his usual frankness, “her eyes deaden. What would you expect? She has been on sale since she was eight years of age. All I hope is that her eyes deadened when she was with Baker.”
    Private Ellis was already at the dinghy in his shirtsleeves. He grunted in a way Ralph associated with low intelligence as he rowed them forth across the deep anchorages of the cove. Even from a little distance the town looked what it was—a pitiably half-matured conception of some distant and dispassionate idea. On the east side of the stream they saw H. E., “the Captain” as Harry called him, strolling with the native Arabanoo in H.E.’s vegetable garden. H.E. looked comically bandy, but the native—in white knee breeches and naval jacket—dazzled the eye. Harry Brewer gave a little shrug. No more than a lot of other people had he approved of H. E.’s plan of finding one of the savages of the locality and quickly turning him into a gentleman ambassador back to his own people. But Harry could not say so even though others loudly did. There was a sort of balance operating between H.E. and Harry. H.E. did not condemn Harry for sleeping with a convict, and so Harry did not condemn H.E.’s strange enthusiasms.
    â€œI would like to use Ketch Freeman for the role of Justice Balance,” Ralph confessed as, groaning and sniffling and muttering to himself, Private Ellis pulled wildly on his starboard oar to yank them round the point of the cove. “Do you think it’s proper to use him?”
    â€œKetch Freeman came to read lines for you?”
    â€œYes. He has the right sense of bitter funniness.”
    â€œI suppose the poor bastard would have.”
    â€œIf he is known as an actor, people won’t spit in his shadow.”
    Ketch Freeman was the public hangman.
    As they rounded the point and H.E.’s garden, H.E. bending to demonstrate the nature of com to Arabanoo, Ralph was able to perceive