Boon Island - Kenneth Roberts [58]
Captain Dean got to his feet. "Just a moment," he said. "I've been thinking about that mate of mine, and about Swede's experience on the Minerva. How do you spend your days in the Naval Hospital, Swede?"
Swede laughed. "I spend 'em in the hardest kind of work, Captain. Doing nothing. Describing my aches and pains to others who have worse aches and pains."
"Do you have aches and pains?" Captain Dean asked.
"Everybody who does nothing has aches and pains."
"You don't look to me as if you had as many aches and pains as any one of my crew has. How'd you like to ship with me on the Nottingham Galley? I'd be glad to have you along, just to have the benefit of your advice. I'd sign you on as first lieutenant. We've got ten guns and a gunner who contrived to blow his eyes full of powder."
Swede looked from Captain Dean to Neal and back again. "Why," he said slowly, "I think that might be a good thing if my boy's going to help Mr. Whitworth. I felt like being a pensioner before my shoulder healed, but I don't feel like it any more. I think it would be a good thing all around if Neal had a first lieutenant as a father instead of a pensioner."
I thought, as I led Neal and his father to the street, how
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odd it was that, because the tide had thrust my dinghy against Deptford Steps, the lives of two people had been alteredand greatly for the better, I earnestly hoped. How many people's lives that tide had altered, I couldn't dream. We never know: we never know!
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Chapter 4
That was the beginning for my father, as well as for Captain Dean and me, of a course in the most popular of London's plays. Penkethman's playhouse was next door to the Hospital Tavern, and I'm bound to say Penkethman did well as a manager, for he went out of his way to add to his Drury Lane and Haymarket regulars, bringing in promising drifters from strolling companies like those in Dublin, Bath and Bristol. The plays he presented were held to be the best, and certainly Penkethman knew how to read his lines in such a way as to make words of no consequence seem irresistibly droll.
The curtain rose at five or six o'clock three times a week, and for a guinea apiece, the three of us had tickets that entitled us to see twenty-one plays. We by no means saw twenty-one, for our playgoing came to a sudden and unexpected end with the production of The Walking Statue on the last Saturday in July, the twenty-ninth; but until that day we talked theatre as though we ourselves were actors: of Penkethman as Daniel in Oroonoko, of Penkethman as Calico in Sir Courtly Nice, with Powell
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playing Sir Courtly: of Penkethman as Squib in Tunbridge Walks, of Penkethman as the painfully comical shepherd in The Libertine Destroyed: of Mrs. Kent's artistry as Caliban in The Tempest and of Mrs. Baker's beauty as Miranda: of the vast promise of Lacy Ryan in The Fair Quaker of Deal: of Penkethman as Fribble in Epsom Wells, and Spiller in The Emperor of the Moon and The Recruiting Officer.
If I were an artist, I could have drawn pictures by the score of those play nights in Greenwich: of wherries, barges and galleys unloading their tumultuous, half-drunken pleasure-seekers at King's Head Stairs while the hot July sun was still high enough to make the massed vessels in the river stand out sharply in black and white, and while the fishermen along the quays were still turbulent and noisy: of Londoners, both men and women, outside the doors of the innumerable Greenwich taverns, some standing, some sitting at little tables because the taverns were so crowded, each with a dish of whitebait and a tankard of ale before him, and each one tossing crisp morsels into himself with a great show of daintiness and refinement.
Even the sounds and odors of Greenwich on those play nights were fascinatingover everything the savory fragrance of the whitebait: and in the foreground the peculiar mangled gabbling of Londoners,