Boon Island - Kenneth Roberts [53]
My professors, my tutors, seemed to me like drone bees, living on some invisible college pollen; whereas actors from Drury Lane and the Haymarket, greatest of England's theatres, by contrast were truly alive.
Even at Oxford I suffered with those actors from the influx of Italian opera singers, who squalled so loudly as to threaten the existence of English players whose education in squalling was neglected.
The truth was, I was stage-struck. Aristophanes to me was a long-dead shadow who had written about frogs; but Penkethman, known by reputation to all of us in the Buskin Club, was Pinky, a genius who now was doubly a genius for having conceived the idea of coming to Greenwich for the summer with scenery such as had been first
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invented at Christ Church by Inigo Jones, and with all the machines, devices and appurtenances necessary to cause sprites to fly through the air and demons to rise from the earth.
When, that night, I guardedly told my father about Neal Butler, I emphasized his association with Penkethman's players more than I did his aptitude as a catcher of whitebait or his association with Langman; for my father said, "Pah!" and immediately used the very words that Neal himself had used, "Fops and rakes!"
"This boy isn't a fop or a rake," I said. "He's no more a fop or a rake than I was at his ageor than I am now."
"He's an actor, isn't he?" my father asked, putting his hands on the table and thrusting his head toward me, as he did when he'd caught a witness in an outrageous evasion of the truth. "That's what actors are forever representing, isn't it?" he demanded. "Pint-sized clowns in tatters and tarnished gold lace, making faces and laughing like hyenas at their damned dull witlessness. Overdressed harridans with breasts half exposed, pretending to be Sir Courtly Nice's mistress, or aping a droopy doll, all prunes and prisms, fainting if a man says, 'Split me'! Players with perukes two feet high and scented with pulvillio and essence, screeching and squalling, 'A harse! A harse! My kingdom for a harse!' Otway had the right word for 'em! Punks, my dear Miles, corrupting the morals and principles of the youth!"
"But, sir," I protested, "this boy isn't that sort. If I had a brother, I'd be proud if he were like Neal Butler: looked like him: behaved like him. He's as uncorrupted as can be!"
I told him how the boy had shied away from menot
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frightened exactly, but wary, as if he'd had occasion to question the motives of someone.
"I liked him the moment I saw him," I said, "and so would you, unless I'm greatly mistaken. There's something about himsomething that makes you sure he'd be good at anything to which he turned his hand. Even the whitebait seemed to be attracted to him. He had a little trap with the edges bent upa sort of wire platter with a cord at each corner. The four cords were lashed to a larger cord, and the large cord was fastened to a short pole. I think it must have been instinct that told him when to pull that trap! He certainly couldn't see the whitebaitat least I couldn't. The water was brown, as it always is when the tide first turns. I think he might become a great actor."
My father snorted. "He'll probably grow up to rewrite Shakespeare, like so many damned foolsDryden and Tate and D'Urfey, for example!"
"Or like Cibber," I said. "The Tatler seems to like Cibber, and the Butler boy mentioned Otway with a good deal of respect. Was Otway a damned fool?"
"No," my father said, "not when he wasn't rewriting Romeo and Juliet. He was no Shakespeare, any more than Shakespeare was, but he makes people talk like people instead of gingerbread mannikins. Come to think of it, so does Vanbrugh."
He pulled off his tie-wig to rub his short gray hair with an impatient hand. "I've no objection to buying this boy's whitebaithave 'em every day for a week