Boon Island - Kenneth Roberts [60]
''I suppose it's amusing in Venice Preserv'd," my father asked politely, "when an actor says, 'In what whore's lap have you been lolling? Give but an Englishman his whore and ease, beef and a sea coal fire, he's yours for ever.' "
"Sir," Neal said, "that was a Frenchman said that. The answer was 'Frenchman, you are saucy!' " He seemed puzzled that my father should have questioned the speech.
We discovered how Penkethman's players had built up their wardrobes by begging discarded gowns and gentlemen's silks from such people of high station as were fascinated by theatrical mattersas so many of them were.
We learned how benefits were arranged to increase the pay of various actorsbenefits to which the actors themselves sold tickets, running after the carriages of rich folk, begging them to subscribe, or calling at houses to sell tickets as a fishmonger might solicit patronage.
Such a benefit, Neal said, might bring as much as one hundred guineas to an actor, and make all the difference between a season without profit, or one that would let
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him live in comfort for two months or more if he were so unfortunate as to be unable to obtain work.
On one subject he was silent. He recognized, from our descriptions, the fops who had caught our attention by their posturings and grimacings as they stood in the stage entrances. He nodded understandingly at our imitations of Sugar-leg and Jackdaw; but when my father described the mask-like face of the little man we called Tintoretto, Neal's face and eyes were expressionless. He seemed almost to have stopped breathing.
We found out nothing at all from Neal when we first mentioned Tintoretto to him; but we learned a little morenot much, but more than enoughabout him on the twenty-ninth of July, when Penkethman's company performed The Gamester and, as "a cup of tea," threw in a second play, The Walking Statue, with the gibberish-interlarded epilogue which Neal recited to appreciative laughter. The Walking Statue had been a great favorite at Drury Lane and was equally so in Greenwich. The words "a cup of tea," we knew from Neal, had come to be actors' slang for anything likable. Tintoretto, obviously, was not Neal's "cup of tea."
Probably my father and Captain Dean and I would have waited for Neal, the night of July 29th, and walked him home with us if it hadn't been for that epilogue, which made it necessary for Neal to get out of his costume and makeup. Unfortunately the night was warm and all three of us were eager for a bottle of chilled claret; so home we went.
When we got there, we did something we seldom didopened our downstairs windows. This was a dangerous
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practice in Greenwich, as it was in any naval town, because of the almost unbelievable number of thieves, streetwalkers, wandering Jews, irresponsible sailors and light-fingered dockyard workers who roamed the streets at all hours of the night, alert to snatch anything from an unguarded room, provided only that the anything was small enough to be lifted through an open window.
We sat there in the semidark, listening to Captain Dean's comments on his Nottingham and his forthcoming voyage to America. Every sea captain considers his own vessel somehow superior to every other vessel, no matter how much larger; and I could sense how Captain Dean felt because of knowing how much finer my own dinghy was, in sailing qualities and clean lines, than larger shallops and even some yachts.
Since the Nottingham was a galley, Captain Dean explained, she was fitted with oars for rowing