Smiling Willie and the Tiger

by John Harris

  ‘The place’s full of soldiers,’ the Tiger explained. ‘We’ve got to keep it dark.’

  Pansy looked at him shrewdly. She’d never had any intention of not keeping it dark. ‘Where is it?’

  ‘I can’t tell you. None of us can. We swore this oath, see.’ They hadn’t but the Tiger wasn’t short on shrewdness either and he had no wish to diminish his share of the loot by introducing anyone else into the plot at this stage of the proceedings. ‘There’s got to be trust, see.’

  ‘I wouldn’t trust anybody who’d pinched that much,’ Pansy giggled. ‘What’ll you get a job as?’

  ‘A clerk p’r’aps.’

  Pansy didn’t think much of the inky-fingered young men with spectacles who slaved over the desks at the railway station, and in the warehouses or the various narrow-gutted diamond buyers’ offices. ‘A clerk,’ she said contemptously. She’d been thinking of a directorship of a gold mine at least.

  ‘All that writing,’ she went on. Writing had always been hard work to her and she regarded it as taxing as manual labour. ‘Make your eyes bad. Have to wear specs. Never did like fellers who wore specs. Fellers who wear specs are shifty and not to be trusted.’

  ‘Perhaps I won’t have to wear specs,’ the Tiger said.

  ‘You blink a lot. It might come to you. And what about me? What do I do for money?’

  ‘Polly pays you for looking after her place.’

  ‘She doesn’t pay much,’ Pansy said with a sniff. ‘Sometimes it’s a big temptation.’

  ‘What is?’

  ‘Fellers who come in see me about. Some of them ask for me.’

  The Tiger’s jaw dropped. ‘They do?’ The news alarmed him. Polly was broad-minded and accepted that a girl needed friends, and there had been an accommodating relationship between him and Pansy ever since Mace’s visit. When he’d had money he’d given it to her. Occasionally even he’d bought her a scarf or a trinket from one of the travelling Jews, but it had never been much and he was worried now that it wasn’t enough.

  ‘I’ll see you right, Panse,’ he said earnestly. ‘In time. You see.’

  ‘Maybe you ought to go to Kimberley,’ Pansy suggested helpfully. ‘There’s work there.’

  ‘Too far away,’ the Tiger said. ‘I don’t trust the Poser.’

  Pansy’s expression melted. ‘He’s a nice-looking feller, that Dolly,’ she said.

  ‘I twigged him long since.’ The Tiger sniffed. ‘I wouldn’t like to be the woman who married him.’ He looked at Pansy, blinking rapidly. Disaster seemed to stir him and lust began to ride him full pelt. ‘Let’s go to bed, Pansy,’ he said.

  Pansy studied him thoughtfully. If she held the Tiger in the palm of her hand, he just as surely held her in his. He had fifteen thousand pounds hidden away somewhere and if she played her hand carefully, she’d share it.

  ‘All right,’ she said. ‘But remember I’m giving you my best years, Horace Lavender.’ She was strong on clichés. ‘You’ve got to look after me.’

  ‘It’ll be all right.’ The Tiger was hopping about like a cat on hot bricks. ‘You see if it isn’t.’

  She giggled and began to undo her blouse. ‘You are a one,’ she said.

  He was indeed, but he was no financial wizard and, for that matter, neither were Willie and Fish, and it was only the appearance of Fortescue Nagel’s Travelling Repertory Company which saved the day. By then their poverty had reached the point where they’d been driven to selling Condys Fluid as sheep dip and grinding housebricks to dust to offer to Boer farmers as a specific against scab. But grinding bricks was hard work and since they could never return to the same place twice sales were inclined to be restricted.

  At first glance it didn’t appear even that Fortescue Nagel could offer much either. He was a tall lean man with a ringing voice, elusive aitches, the sunken cheeks of an ascetic and flowing gestures he didn’t hesitate to use. He wore his hair long and dyed his eyebrows and moustache and, despite the heat, affected an opera cloak at all times of the day.

  He arrived at the boarding house in Barberton Street accompanied by his wife, a faded blonde with sad eyes and a hat that looked as if a crow had died on her head, a thin-featured girl called Elvira they took to be his daughter and a large number of square baskets and theatrical props. He eyed the sad and sagging rooms of Mrs Dalgetty’s boarding house with the raddled dignity of an ageing lion, stalked across to Pruffer’s Bar for a bottle of brandy and established himself on the stoep with his wife and Elvira and proceeded to acquaint them all with him.

  ‘Played juvenile with Seymour Dallas,’ he announced. ‘With E V Sinclair in Hamlet and with Anna Bishop and Madame Mendelsohnn when Boothroyd Fairclough did The Bells. My dramatic selections from Othello was very much talked about and even Barney Barnato, who was no mean actor, used to appear with us from time to time.’ He eyed Willie’s innocent good looks with interest. ‘You occupied with thespianism yourself, young man?’

  ‘Run more to songs at the piano,’ Willie said. ‘When do you start performing?’

  Nagel took a large swallow of brandy and sighed. ‘Un’appily,’ he boomed, ‘we don’t.’

  Mrs Nagel and the girl nodded agreement. They never seemed to speak unless they were addressed directly.

  ‘Our leading man – a fine young feller by the name of Ulysses Truman – always good as the captain in The Flying Scud – was caught up with a fit of patriotism and joined a mounted infantry regiment. Moreover, he took with him the feller who played the ’eavies, a nice young chap by the name of Witherspoon to say nothing of the stage manager, Laurie Lorenz.’

  ‘Hard luck,’ the Tiger commented.

  ‘Harder than you think,’ Nagel said. ‘If I knew where the bastards was, I’d ’ave ’em in chokey. They made off with the takings.’

  There was a long silence, then the Tiger spoke. ‘Thought we might be getting a play for Christmas,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t ’ardly think so, son. Not short as we are of players.’ Nagel finished his brandy at a gulp. ‘No sense of loyalty, them lot. Of course, we were getting a bit short of money at the time, I admit, and they ’adn’t been paid, so here we are, all props and no players and there’s money to be made round here, I can see.’

  ‘Not much come our way,’ the Tiger commented.

  ‘It’s there, me boy. I can see it straight off. There’s a nice ’all – Pouter’s Place in Steyn Street – and a whole area of nice little towns full of people who ’aven’t seen a travelling company in years.’ Nagel sighed. ‘We had such a good company, too. Full of principal boys and unprincipled girls.’ He winked broadly at Elvira. ‘Tragedies. Comedies. Recitations like Eugene Aram and selections from Shakespeare for smoking concerts. Minstrel shows and musical turns. Elvira’s got a voice like Madame Patti when she’s in form.’

  Willie was deep in thought. ‘Had an idea,’ he said.

  They all looked at him and he rubbed his nose thoughtfully as he always did when something was germinating. ‘Think I know where you might find a leading man,’ he said.

  Nagel fixed him with a glittering eye. ‘Will he want much?’ he demanded.

  ‘Shouldn’t think so,’ Willie said. ‘Resting at the moment.’

  ‘Can he act?’

  ‘Ladies like him.’

  Nagel eyed Willie warmly ‘How about a ’eavy and someone for the small parts?’

  ‘Know just the men.’

  ‘Where are they?’

  ‘Here,’ Willie said gaily. ‘Before your very eyes!’

  Nagel regarded his new players with enthusiasm. The Tiger didn’t have much of a presence, with his pale hair and eyes and his blinking lashes, but Fish not only had a name that would look important on a theatre poster but he was good-looking in a way that would set the female members of any audience aglow. His wife was clearly taken with him already.

  ‘Just the ticket,’ Nagel said, walking round him and jabbing at his biceps with his finger. ‘We could do with someone to play Americans n
ow and then too. You a Canadian, son?’

  ‘No,’ Fish said proudly. ‘I’m from Texas. I got a ranch in Texas. You know that?’ he said to Elvira. ‘I got a ranch.’

  Nagel wasn’t even listening. ‘We used to put on a play called Our American Cousin,’ he said. ‘Same one they was playing when President Lincoln was shot dead in Washington. Well, not quite the same, of course, because we couldn’t get a copy, but I heard the story from a feller I knew and, wisely or otherwisely, I wrote it up meself. We also do one called The Shooting of Jesse James and we need a young feller to play the sheriff.’

  ‘I’m good with a gun,’ Fish said.

  ‘We also do Sweeney Todd, The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, Maria Marten and Richard III – well, a version, anyway – and if we’re making money we ’ave a nice little spectacle, The Massacre at Cawnpore.’ A hand waved in an expansive gesture. ‘Use Kaffirs. They play the mutineers. They only ’ave to yell a lot. We ’ave a white man darkied up to play the Nana Sahib and Elvira there plays the Rani of whatever it was. She blacks up nicely. I play the wise old sergeant who advises General Wheeler not to stay in Cawnpore and get surrounded.’ Nagel looked at Fish and then at Willie and his doleful face crinkled up in a vast smile.

  ‘Per’aps you better ’ad ’ave a go at it,’ he said.

  The season got off to a good start. Winifred was panting for entertainment after the fighting. With Mrs Nagel, made up as Maria Marten, taking the money at the entrance and the rest of them slaving behind the threadbare curtains of Pouter’s Palace to hoist the backcloths for The Red Barn into position, they found they couldn’t sell seats fast enough. The play ran for three days, during which time everybody with any kind of transport from Ochs Drift to Bushmansdorp and Lennox to Mimosa Grove came to see them.

  Fish wasn’t as good as Nagel hoped. He had no memory for lines but, by cutting his part to the bone and having him well prompted, they got by. They put on The Ticket of Leave Man, Oliver Twist, The Two Orphans and Uncle Tom’s Cabin – Nagel as Uncle Tom and Willie as Simon Legree – and between times smoking concerts and minstrel shows in billiard rooms about the town at which Willie’s songs proved the hit of the evening. He had picked up so many the audiences thought his talents bordered on witchcraft. For a fortnight they were wonderfully in the money, then it all came to an abrupt end.

  On the last night of Sweeney Todd, Fish forgot the mattress below the stage and the Tiger, as the Demon Barber’s victim, knocked himself silly as he landed on his head in the cellar below. They had to close the theatre for two days to enable him to get over it.

  Their finances never recovered and the end came with The Massacre at Cawnpore. The slaughter of General Wheeler’s garrison – Fish, Nagel and the Tiger, with Mrs Nagel as Lady Wheeler – by the Nana Sahib and his troops – Willie and three Kaffirs with Elvira as the Rani of Jhansi – just didn’t work out because Fish, as General Wheeler, with Pouter’s Palace full to the doors, suddenly got the bit between his teeth and refused to allow himself to be slain in the last act by the Nana Sahib.

  ‘The curtain goes up in half an hour,’ Nagel said furiously.

  Fish’s brows went down and his head lowered into his shoulders. He’d done well during the day selling his silent watches among the Boer farmers who’d thronged into the town for the play, and the whisky he’d drunk had put him in a stubborn mood.

  ‘I’m not going to get slain by a goddam savage,’ he insisted. ‘My old man fought with Custer.’

  ‘For God’s sake,’ Nagel pointed out, ‘Custer got slain by savages, didn’t he?’

  ‘What if he did?’ Fish said. ‘I’m not going to be.’

  It was too much for a man reared in the show-must-go-on tradition and Nagel exploded. ‘Would you like to play the bleeding Nana then?’ he screeched.

  ‘He was a darky.’

  ‘Well, ’oo do you want to play then, you great barmy idiot? Lady Wheeler?’

  Fish’s hand shot for his gun. It wasn’t there because he’d pawned it so, instead, he floored Nagel with a swing that lifted him off his feet and dropped him neatly behind the props baskets. There was a deathly silence. Willie and the Tiger looked at each other. They knew the signs of approaching catastrophe.

  ‘Fancy that Dolly going off like that,’ Pansy said disgustedly as she and the Tiger sat in bed together in her room at Poll’s. He’d had a little money left and he’d brought home a bottle of champagne.

  ‘Dolly’s a fathead,’ the Tiger said. ‘That temper of his’ll have us all in clink one of these days, you see if it don’t.’

  While they talked they heard footsteps outside and a moment later there was a bang on the door and the sound of Willie’s voice demanding the Tiger’s presence.

  The Tiger attempted defiance and reached for Pansy, but the door opened and Willie appeared, lifting his hat politely to Pansy as she clutched the sheets to her throat. ‘Nagel’s hopped it,’ he said. ‘Bunked with Elvira. Wasn’t his daughter at all.’

  The Tiger shuffled himself nearer to Pansy, sensing that histrionics of this sort were something that actors had to get used to. ‘Nothing much we can do about it,’ he said.

  ‘Not the worst,’ Willie went on. ‘Poser’s gone too!’

  This time the Tiger sat up. ‘With Mrs Nagel?’

  ‘No. She’s at the boarding house. Drinking herself cross-eyed on rum and tea. He borrowed a buckboard. And a spade.’

  ‘Where’s he gone?’ The Tiger demanded as they headed for the stairs.

  ‘Chichester Junction.’ Willie gestured at the sky. ‘No moon,’ he pointed out. ‘No stars. I think he’s got ideas.’

  They hired horses and rode at speed across the veldt in a wide detour via Brandewyn. All they had to do was pick up the railway line and follow it north until they hit the Junction.

  There were military encampments everywhere and as they skirted the town to cross the river by the bridge to the south, a man a with a rifle appeared from the shadows of the trees.

  ‘’Alt! ’Oo goes there?’

  They stopped at once, holding their breath. The soldier was a private of mounted infantry and they could see his horse tethered in the shadows. A corporal appeared with a lamp.

  ‘’Oo’re you lot?’ he demanded.

  The Tiger’s jaw worked agonisedly but Willie was equal to the occasion. ‘Legree,’ he said at once. ‘Simon Legree. Mining engineer. This is Richard Plantagenet. My assistant.’

  The sentry turned to the corporal, who consulted a notebook he dragged from his pocket.

  ‘Them’s not the names, are they, Corp?’ he said.

  ‘No.’ The corporal wrote laboriously in his notebook while Willie chatted cheerfully with the sentry. The Tiger was too petrified with horror to speak.

  They had just got to the point when the sentry was dragging at his wallet to show them photographs of his family when the corporal coughed. ‘Thank you, sir. I got it all down. Except where you’re ’eading.’

  ‘Reinhart,’ Willie explained. ‘To see a man about a dog.’ He tossed the corporal a florin. ‘Sorry to be a bother,’ he said. ‘Have a drink. For Christmas.’ He turned on one of his most brilliant smiles. It shone even in the darkness, and through the corporal’s loyal working-class heart went the thought that this one was a real toff.

  Under the circumstances, it seemed wiser not to head through the centre of Chichester Junction and, turning west among the outlying houses, they picked up the Balmerinostad–Winifred road. They could see huts and piles of stone in the distance and a lot of new houses.

  The night carts were out and they caught their whiff as they passed and the smell of the cesspits to the south.

  ‘Bouquet de blooming Boer,’ the Tiger said, wrinkling his nose.

  They found a spot among the eucalyptus trees on the Winifred road within sight of where they had buried the pay and settled down to wait. After a while they heard the rattle of wheels and the clink of harness.

  ‘Another foo-foo cart,’ the Tiger said.


  But this time it was a small pony-and-trap which appeared from among the houses and stopped near the cross-roads. The man who climbed from it had soldier and officer stamped all over him despite his civilian clothes. As he approached the group of jacarandas where the pay was buried, they heard a clank of corrugated-iron sheeting and a muffled curse, and to their surprise a man in uniform appeared from the shadows.

  ‘All quiet, sentry?’

  ‘All quiet, sir.’

  They saw the officer light a cigarette and offer one to the soldier.

  ‘How much longer do we ’ave to ’ang about ’ere, Mr Glover, sir?’ the sentry asked.

  ‘Until we’re told to stop. Captain Mace’s got a feeling that they got rid of the stuff somewhere round here.’

  The Tiger gasped. ‘He’s standing on it,’ he said in awed tones. ‘He’s actually standing on it!’

  The officer gestured with his cigarette, as though he found the whole thing a bit of a bore. ‘He feels they’ll come back for it. We have to keep a look-out in case they do. Railway station, crossroads, bridges.’

  ‘Where is he looking for ’em now, sir?’

  ‘He thinks they’ve gone to Jo’burg. He’s gone to alert the police there.’

  As he climbed into the cart and whipped up the pony, Willie and the Tiger watched the sentry disappear among the trees again. Then, unnerved, they moved cautiously away, keeping the eucalyptus trees between them and where the sentry stood as they circled back towards the Winifred road further east. Almost immediately they heard the clatter of a cart.

  ‘Poser,’ Willie said. ‘Making enough row to wake the dead.’

  They waited in a clump of thorn bushes until the cart appeared, then Willie rode forward. Fish’s reaction was unexpected but not out of character. He produced a revolver that looked as big as a cannon in the half-light.

  ‘Ye Gods!’ Willie gasped, backing his horse in alarm. ‘Where did you get that?’

  The revolver dropped. ‘What the hell are you doing here?’

  The Tiger edged his horse forward. ‘What are you?’ he said indignantly ‘Think we’re a couple of mugs, you do, Dolly Fish! It’s a good job we got here first or you’d have walked right into it!’