“And Heathcote obtained these favours, although he was a convict? Well, what do you know!”
“Yes, indeed. Not only that, but, after his release, he stayed out there, too, made a modest fortune, and returned to England on his father’s death to become squire of the village.”
“Say,” observed Gracechurchstreet in admiring tones, “that’s quite a story, Mr. Sparowe. You mean ‘local boy made good’ in the little old United States? Well, sir, that’s where men are men. I guess William Heathcote was a promising lad gone wrong, and it took my own great little old country to put him right and show him the way to the stars.”
“He went to work for English Puritans who had gone out to the English colony of Virginia to escape the Restoration,” said Toby flatly. “There was no United States of America in Heathcote’s time. This Puritan family treated him well . . .”
“Yes, sir, you bet they did,” interposed Gracechurchstreet emphatically. “And why? No, don’t answer; I’ll tell you. As I seem to see it, they treated William Heathcote real swell, and why not? Hadn’t he rid the town of Bad Guy Maxie, the scourge of Prisoners’ Gulch? Say, this begins to work up real good!”
“This Puritan family treated him well,” repeated Toby firmly, “for no reason except that they were those kind of people. Moreover, being Puritans, they did not gamble, drink or swear. Heathcote, therefore, was weaned from all his bad habits and began to write the poems which, later, brought him a modicum of fame. As they were mostly about Virginia, our village has become a place of pilgrimage for patriotic American visitors, wherefore this station was built and so was the large pub on the other side of the road.”
“O.K. Now, Mr. Sparowe, we are here to proposition you, like I said. We want you to write this up as a play for us, but you must keep to the lines I lay down. It’s commissioned work, and it’s got to be done my way.”
“Look,” said Toby, “let’s get one or two things straight. You want me to write a play based on the life of William Heathcote. How did you know I had written his biography? Did you say you’ve read it?”
“Yeah, I chanced to pick it up, and Mr. Maverick here saw your Tale of Two Cities and liked the style of it. I made enquiries and found you had taken over this railway station. Well, I could see only one reason for that. You wanted to be on the spot to get local colour for your book on this poet, so—”
“It wasn’t that at all. I took over this place for purely personal reasons. Nothing to do with my work,” protested Toby.
“Ah, that’s what you claim, Mr. Sparowe,” said Gracechurchstreet, stroking the black kid gloves which lay on his black-clad knee, “but when I realised that there was a genuine, ail-American poet buried in the village here, as I did when I took a gander at your book, why, I went straight away to work with friend Maverick here, and it’s taken us all of fifteen days to track down the writer. Well, after making more enquiries than I could get you to believe, finally we came up with this address, so here we are and here’s our proposition. You see, I figured that a young guy like you would never have buried himself in a one-horse lot in Dorsetshyer unless he was on to a good thing. Well, now, a good thing for you might be a better thing for us, you being included in the ‘us.’. You’ve gotten yourself a corner in this William Heathcote guy, but right now, Mr. Sparowe, you’ve got to share. I don’t know how you cottoned on that this poet was going to be big money, but a smart guy like you will get his pickings somehow, on account you can’t keep a good man down, so what I’ll do . . .”
“Half a minute,” said Toby. “You seem to think I came down here because I realized the possibility of making money out of writing a life of Heathcote. It wasn’t like that at all. It wasn’t until I came to live here (simply to get away from London) that I even knew there was such a chap as Heathcote. Well, then, when I began reading him up—the Morchester library has quite a lot of stuff on him and I’ve had access to private papers as well—I admit it did occur to me that his life-story might interest Americans. We get quite a number of them here to visit his grave, as you probably know. All the same, you must realize that all this occurred to me after I had moved down here. It was certainly not the reason for my coming. Furthermore, as I’ve tried to indicate to you, I am not a dramatist. I am the only professional writing man in the amateur dramatic society to which I belong, but I have never done any work of any kind for the professional stage. I tell you this to save you from wasting your time. It’s very kind and complimentary of you, and all that, but—”
“Just a moment, dear thing,” said Maverick. “Wait until Gracechurchie explains. This wouldn’t be for the professional stage as such. You’re jumping to conclusions, laddie.”
“Oh?” said Toby. He grinned. “That means you’re putting on an amateur show and expect me to do the job for nothing. Well, as Shakespeare says somewhere or other, nothing will come of nothing, so that’s that.”
“Oh, now, look, Mr. Sparowe,” said Gracechurchstreet, in a pained tone, “we wouldn’t expect to have you give us your services for nothing. No, sir! Please give me a chance to explain. It’s this way: I am what I believe is known as an impresario. Now I am an admirer of your great little country and I confess to taking a mighty interest in your institootions and traditions, particularly your folk-lore and your reverence for the past. Now, Mr. Sparowe, down the years I have attended your big Druid gatherings in Welsh Wales. I have been present at your Highland Games in bonnie Scotland. I have witnessed your Morris dancers, your sword dancers, your horn dancers, your country dancers, your pancake races, your barrel-rolling contests, your cycles of medeeval plays, and much more of great antiquity and significance, and I revere them, Mr. Sparowe. Yes, sir, it is not too much to state categorically that I revere them.”
“Well, quite,” said Toby, “but I can’t see where this is getting us.”
“Why, my idea is simply this: I want to take your old-time English folk-lore over to the United States of America. I want to sell it to all our big cities. I want . . .”
“But, even if all this was possible, Mr. Gracechurchstreet, the life of William Heathcote isn’t folk-lore. It is simply and solely history. It’s in the records. It’s in letters and memoirs. It’s in a bill of indictment for murder. It’s in the account books of Heathcote Hall and it’s in the village parish registers. It’s not traditional; it’s all written down in bits and pieces here and there, and all I’ve done is to collect and edit these and turn them into a book.”
“Now, wait a minute! You young fellows are so impatient and hot-headed and impulsive. Here is my argument: I could get country dancers, yes; folk and ballad singers, yes; caber-tossers, mummers, fellows who can play sackbuts and crumhorns and rebecs and all those kind of weird and wonderful things, and all this would be of very, very great interest to the great American public which, as you know, goes in for culture in a big, big way, and my programme could be just dripping with old-worldliness in every respect you can figure out. But you perceive my difficulty?”
“Salaries, transport and lodgings, I should think,” said Toby. For the first time since he had entered the station, the American bared tombstone teeth in a death’s-head smile.
“You young fellows will have your little jest,” he said. “Our college boys back home are just the same. No, Mr. Sparowe, my difficulty is that there would be nothing on my programme with which the great American public could identify, unless . . .”
“I thought all your policemen were Irish. Give ’em Molly by the Shore and they’ll applaud the roof off.” Toby was beginning to tire of the conversation.
“What I’m going to give the great pan-American nation, Mr. Sparowe, is your play about the noble Virginian poet William Heathcote. What is more, I am offering you five hundred dollars plus a percentage for a drama with a playing-time of one hour fifteen minutes. That is all the time I shall need, with the rest of my programme to fit in. I should have mentioned that my programme is to be televised. Well, now, what do you say?”
“Why don�
�t you get somebody to write a play about the Tolpuddle Martyrs? They were transported, too, you know,” said Toby, getting up from his chair.
“Because, sir, they may have been martyrs but they were not Americans . . .”
“Oh, come now, I know they were shipped to Australia, not America, but Heathcote wasn’t American either,” objected Toby, sitting down again.
“My second point,” pursued Gracechurchstreet, “is that I can find no romance in their story. Now, in the case of William Heathcote, I seem to see the kind of romance which is going to bring an ail-American audience to its feet—all of those who are not sobbing into their pocket handkerchiefs, that is to say—and they will be yelling for more. There’ll be this love scene when Nelly and William meet secretly after William has kay-owed the king, and then there’ll be this great renunciation. I seem to hear Nelly saying, in broken tones and with her red-gold hair falling all about the two of them, I seem to hear her say. ‘It breaks my heart to send you away, Willie darling, but Charlie’s need is greater than your own.’ Now, sir, is that a line, or is that not a line, to call for the slow fade-out on the long passionate embrace? Is it? You tell me!”
“But nothing of that sort happened, I tell you!” said Toby. “Heathcote killed a man—certainly not the king—in a tavern brawl. He got transported, lived with Puritans in Virginia, mended his ways, came home and wrote poetry. And that’s your lot! I’ll try to write you a play on those lines, if you like, but I will not bring in Charles the Second or Nell Gwynn, and a bout of fisticuffs doesn’t enter into the story at all, so far as I know, but a killing did, and not a romantic one, either.”
“Well, see here, then,” said Gracechurchstreet, after exchanging glances with Maverick, “I’ll agree to leave out Charlie and Nell, so long as you will agree to give us a good scene embodying the brawl, with plenty of action and at least one knockdown before we get to the murder. How was it done, by the way?”
“Oh, Heathcote, like all landed gentlemen, wore a sword. He drew it and ran his man through.”
“That, surely, was a dooel, not a murder? A dooel in the play would be quite a thing! Yes, sir, I’ll go for that.”
“The other fellow hadn’t got a sword. He was the local clergyman, come to intervene. That, I suppose, is why there was such a hoo-ha about it, because it was a murder, plain and simple.”
“A preacher in a tavern brawl?” Gracechurchstreet affected horror.
“Apparently—in fact, definitely,” said Toby, “He’d been sent for to restore law and order.”
“You’ll have to leave him out of it, Heathcote has got to be presented as the hero of the piece. You can’t, in the great country of which I am honoured and proud to call myself a citizen, equate a stabber of defenceless preachers with anybody the great American public would wish to identify with. No, sir! You’ll have to make it some hobo who has bandied Heathcote’s sweetheart’s name about, or insulted Heathcote’s mother—something that will get the great American public on Heathcote’s side and keep them there for the doo-ration of the drama.”
“Look,” said Toby, with weary patience, “we’re wasting time. Do I have to spell it out? If I write this play, I write it as history, not as fantasy; as fact, not as romance.” He got up again. “I really think, gentlemen, there’s no point in our continuing the conversation. My conception and yours of what can be done in the way of presenting history in terms of the drama are obviously poles apart. It’s very good of you to have sought me out and offered me this commission, but I must absolutely decline to accept it.”
Gracechurchstreet took a bulging wallet from an inside pocket of his funereal overcoat and tapped on the arm of his chair with it.
“Mr. Sparowe,” he said, “you will surely reconsider this intransigent attitood. In here I have one hundred English one-pound treasury notes. I am willing to give them to you, here and now, irrespective of the five hundred dollars I promised you for the play. There is only one stipulation. There must, sir, be a fist-fight. Apart from that, you may deal with the material as you see fit. After all, you don’t know they didn’t come to blows before the killing. And, sir, that fist-fight has got to be good, and it must be with a villain. I have to insist that you substitoot for the preacher. William Heathcote must hold the sympathy and goodwill of the vast American public throughout the play from first to last. Surely you can figure that out for yourself? Now, sir, are we in agreement?”
“It doesn’t seem like it, does it?” said Toby. “And now, gentlemen, I’m sorry, but I’m a busy man.” He held out his hand. “I’d better wish you good-day. Thank you for calling.”
CHAPTER TWO
Training Quarters
“But what strong hand can hold his swift foot back?
Or who his spoil of beauty can forbid?”
William Shakespeare—Sonnet 65
Toby, although he claimed to be a busy one, did not consider himself an imaginative man. If he had been, he thought that he would probably have written novels, poetry, or plays rather than biographies. All the same, biographies need sympathetic interpretation, which implies one kind of imagination and this he possessed. Having seen them off in their noisy little battered Prendergast Minor (the property, he supposed, of Maverick), the more he thought about his visitors the stranger did their mission appear. In the end, he shrugged away the incident, glanced at his watch, and realized that it was well past opening time at the Swan Revived. The public house, like a seaside lodging, expected to be busy only between Easter and the end of September. From October until the first week of April it was run by a skeleton staff consisting of the landlord, his wife, and one maid who happened to be the wife’s cousin. The landlord had to be on call in the bar during the late autumn and winter licensing hours, but at other times he cleared up the garden and did odd jobs in the way of interior decorating so that the place was ship-shape and ready for an influx of custom in the spring. The women did a kind of autumn spring-cleaning in the bar, kept the housework going, washed and put away the summer curtains, drove into Morchester for the shopping, and lived what amounted to a peaceful private life compared with the somewhat hectic summer season when the inn was invaded by coach-parties, hikers, and motorists.
Toby was surprised, therefore, after some months of having the saloon bar to himself most mid-mornings, to see a large green Cosmo-Carrick drawn up outside the inn, and the house in the throes of what amounted to an invasion. No fewer than four men were seated on stools at the counter. Three of them, who were drinking beer, were middle-aged. The fourth was a gloomy young man, hardly more than a boy, who had an empty bottle of bitter lemon at his elbow and was eyeing with bitter dislike the remains of what was in his glass. Except that he had an ear which had been in the wars, there seemed nothing except his morose expression to distinguish him from the Apollo Belvedere. Toby did not think he had ever seen so remarkably beautiful a youth. Even the slouch of his discontented body could not disguise its graceful strength. His muscular thighs strained against his tight trousers and the strong pillar of his neck rose from his open-necked shirt like the tower that David builded.
There was no other resemblance to the lover in the Song of Solomon. A nearer analogy, Toby thought, was to be found in William Blake, for there was something feline, something tigerish, about the young man which, taken in conjunction with his slightly misshapen ear, marked him out as a professional boxer. “What immortal hand or eye,” muttered Toby to himself, “could frame thy fearful symmetry?”
He nodded to one of the middle-aged men who happened to catch his eye and who closely resembled an ape, ordered a pint, and retired with it to one of the small tables. He took out a cigarette but, before he could light it, the ape said sternly,
“No smokin’ in the bar while the Moonrocket’s in ’ere. Spile ’is wind.”
Toby lit his cigarette and took a swig at his tankard. The ape came over and loomed menacingly.
“’Ear what I said, mister?” he demanded. “Out that drag!”
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br /> “Get lost,” said Toby. The man appealed to a beringed and flashily-dressed companion who was at the end of the bar, a slightly-built fellow with large, sad eyes and a curly Levantine mouth.
“Shall I dot ’im one, Mr. Gorinsky?” he demanded. “’E’s give me lip.” Before he could receive any reply, Apollo Belvedere slid from his stool.
“Aw, nark it,” said the beautiful young man. He came across to Toby’s table and gave the ape a shove. “You leave ’im be. I ain’t a prima donna and I likes the smell of baccy.” He hitched up a chair and sat down. The ape retired, muttering, and the flashily-dressed Mr. Gorinsky wagged an ornately-ringed forefinger at him and said warningly,
“Don’t go making trouble, Chris, boy. We ain’t in training quarters, is it?”
“These is trainin’ quarters.”
“Only upstairs.”
“Cheese!” growled the ape, returning to his beer. Toby said to the youth,
“In training, then?”
“Ah.”
“I’ll put out my fag, if you like.”
“Naw. You don’t want to take no notice of old Chris. ’Ave me in nappies and gimme a baby’s bottle if ’e could. ’E’s me trainer.”
“Got a fight in prospect, then?”
“Wants me,” said the youth, too full of his wrongs to answer the question, “to keep me weight dahn and do bleedin’ road-work. Road-work! And me wiv my foby!”
“Too bad,” said Toby, hoping for enlightenment on the last point. It was soon made clear.
“Just because I got to keep meself dark till we goes across to the States, vey brings me to vis bleedin’ country pub where I can’t even ’ave no beer ’cos it might put on a bit of fat. And I got to do road-work! I wouldn’t mind so much if one on ’em could run wiv me. I got vis foby, you see. Miles and miles and miles we come froo on the way dahn ’ere, and all of it open country wiv bleedin’ trees and vat. Drive me rahnd the bend to run on me own, and none on ’em as’ll see forty again, so vey’re no flamin’ ’elp. Vey’ll set on ’ere and set on ’ere, gettin’ corns on veir flippin’ fannies and drinkin’ all the flamin’ beer, while all the time vere’s me doin’ bleedin’ road-work, and gettin’ the screamin’ ’eebies. I’d chuck it, if I ’adn’t signed the pipers. Can you get quodded for signin’ papers, mate, and ven ’oppin’ orf aht of it?”
Gory Dew (Mrs. Bradley) Page 2