Boon Island - Kenneth Roberts [54]
He cogitated for a moment. "Well, not all of 'em ex-
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actly. I saw Betterton as Falstaff once, and damn near died laughing!"
I left my dinghy at the Hospital Yard the following afternoon with no thought of Neal Butler except that, with the tide flowing an hour earlier, he had probably netted enough whitebait to let me have as much as I wanted.
He hadn't though. When I caught a barge to Deptford Steps, Neal was where I'd seen him the day before, and on the step above him, in the blue-sleeved summer waistcoat and blue yarn socks of a pensioner of the Naval Hospital, was a lopsided man with a long yellow mustache and clumps of yellow fuzz protruding so far below the round, flat-topped black hat that they covered his ears. His look of being overloaded on one side was due to the way he carried his right shoulder somewhat lower than his left, as if he were about to reach down with his right hand and haul up an anchor.
Neal gave me that quick smile of his, but before he could speak, the lopsided man leaned forward, looked almost fiercely at me and spoke my name.
"Yes," I said, "I'm Miles Whitworth, and you must be Mr. Butler."
"Swede, not 'mister,' " the yellow-haired man said. "Swede Butler. Moses was my name; Neal's too; but they called me Swede because of my hair. I never thought much of Moses. There must have been something wrong with him if it took him forty years to get the Children of Israel out of the Wilderness. Neal dropped the Moses because Penkethman told him to."
That name-changing habit of actor-managers had often
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touched me on the raw. They never had the brains to understand that the actor makes the name: not the name the actor. Moses ButlerNeal Butlerwhat's the difference! It's the inner fire that an audience sees and feels: not the label by which a bailiff knows him!
"I wonder what Anne Bracegirdle's real name is?" I asked Swede.
"I won't even try to guess," Swede said. "I only want to know who my boy takes up with."
"I don't wonder," I said. "Your boy has a knack for catching whitebait. He has a way with him, too."
"Aye," Swede said. "He tells me your father's a magistrate. He tells me you're a member of Christ Church, in statu pupillari." He paused, as if surprised at his use of the Latin phrase: then again stared at me almost fiercely. "And he says he thinks you're an actor."
"That's putting it too strongly, Swede," I said. "We have a club at Christ Churchthe Buskin Club. We read plays, and once or twice we've staged one in the Hall; but I hope to write 'em rather than recite 'em."
"Good!" Swede said. "You need fish to fry and I need the advice of someone who isn't an actor. I've been an actor myself, and I wouldn't take an actor's advice any more than I'd take a sailor's. Do you suppose your father would trade a bit of advice for some of Neal's whitebait?"
"I'm sure he would," I said. "He'll take to Neal just as quickly as I did."
Swede put a big hand on his son's shoulder. "Pick up your fishes, boy. We'll go see Mr. Whitworth. Perhaps he can work out a future for youone that won't leave you rolling in a gutter or living like a beggar in a naval hospital."
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Chapter 3
John Dean was an old friend of my family, a sea captain from Twickenham, a little upriver from London, but he loaded and unloaded his cargoes at Greenwich, and always came to our house, before starting on a cruise, to have vessel and cargo insured. I know my father thought highly of him, and frequently ventured a moderate sum, which Dean would invest in coffee or tea or spices, thus providing education-money to be used by me at Oxford.
Behind our house on Church Lane was a walled arbor from which we caught glimpses of the river; and my father and Captain Dean were sitting there when I brought Neal and Swede Butler to the garden.
When Captain Dean