"Hey?"
"Nay, question me not, master, for I cannot bring it to words. You tell
me that you knew him: and I--on the instant I clapped eyes on you it
seemed that somehow you were part of his world and somehow had belonged
to him. Nearer I cannot get, unless you tell me more."
"I knew him: to be sure, down in Warwickshire: but he has gone somedel
beyond my ken, living in London, you see."
"He goes beyond any man's kenning: he that has taught us to ken the
world with new eyes. I tell you, master,"--the apprentice stretched out
a hand,--"I go seeking him like one seeking a father who has begotten
him into a new world, seeking him with eyes derived from him. Tell
me----"
But the countryman was leaning over the gallery-rail and scanning the
pit again. He seemed a trifle bored by a conversation if not of less,
then certainly of other, wit than he had bargained for. Somebody had
drawn the curtains back from the stage, where the two lackeys who had
decked the balcony with lanterns were busy now with crowbars, levering
its wooden supports from their sockets.
"Sure," said he, musing, "they don't lift and pack away the stage every
night, do they? Or is this some new law to harass players?" He brought
his attention back to the apprentice with an effort. "If you feel that
way towards him, lad," he answered, "why not accost him? He walks
London streets; and he has, if I remember, a courteous, easy manner."
"If the man and his secret were one! But they are not, and there lies
the fear--that by finding one I shall miss the other and recover it
never. I cannot dare either risk: I want them both. You saw, this
afternoon, how, when the secret came within grasp, the man slipped
away; how, having taught us to know Falstaff as a foot its old shoe, he
left us wondering on a sudden why we laughed! And yet 'twas not sudden,
but bred in the play from the beginning; no, nor cruel, but merely
right: only he had persuaded us to forget it."
The countryman put up a hand to hide a yawn: and the yawn ended in a
slow chuckle.
"Eh? that rogue Falstaff was served out handsomely: though, to tell the
truth, I paid no great heed to the last scene, my midriff being sore
with laughing."
The apprentice sighed.
"But what is happening below?" the other went on impatiently. "Are they
taking the whole theatre to pieces?"
"That is part of the play."
"A whole regiment of workmen!"
"And no stage-army, neither. Yet they come into the play--not the play
you saw without understanding, but the play you understood without
seeing. They call it _The Phoenix_. Be seated, master, while I unfold
the plot: this hammering deafens me. The Burbages, you must know----"
"I knew old James, the father. He brought me down a company of players
to our town the year I was High Bailiff; the first that ever played in
our Guildhall. Though a countryman, I have loved the arts--even to the
length of losing much money by them. A boon fellow, old James! and yet
dignified as any alderman. He died--let me see--was it two year agone?
The news kept me sad for a week."
"A good player, too,"--the apprentice nodded,--"though not a patch upon
his son Richard. Cuthbert will serve, in ripe sententious parts that
need gravity and a good memory for the lines. But Richard bears the
bell of the Burbages. Well, Sir, old James being dead, and suddenly,
and (as you say) these two years come February, his sons must go suing
to the ground landlord, the theatre being leased upon their dad's life.
You follow me?"
The countryman nodded in his turn.
"Very well. The landlord, being a skinflint, was willing to renew
the lease, but must raise the rent. If they refuse to pay it, the
playhouse fell to him. You may fancy how the Burbages called gods and
men to witness. Being acquainted with players, you must know how little
they enjoy affliction until the whole town shares it. Never so rang
Jerusalem with all the woes of Jeremy as did City and suburb,--from
north beyond Bishopsgate to south along the river, with the cursings
of this landlord, who--to cap the humour of it--is a precisian, and
never goes near a playhouse. Nevertheless, he patched up a truce for
two years ending to-night, raising the rent a little, but not to the
stretch of his demands. To-morrow--or, rather, the day after, since
to-morrow is Christmas--the word is pay or quit. But in yielding this
he yielded our friends the counterstroke. They have bought a plot
across the water, in the Clink Liberty: and to-morrow, should he pass
this way to church, no theatre will be here for him to smack his
Puritan lips over. But for this hammering and the deep slush outside
you might even now hear the rumbling of wagons; for wagons there be, a
dozen of them, ready to cart the Muses over the bridge before midnight.
'Tis the proper vehicle of Thespis. See those dozen stout rascals
lifting the proscenium----"
The countryman smote his great hands together, flung back his head, and
let his lungs open in shout after shout of laughter.
"But, master----"
"Oh--oh--oh! Hold my sides, lad, or I start a rib.... Nay, if you keep
st-staring at me with that s-sol-ol-ol-emn face. Don't--oh, _don't_!"
"Now I know," murmured the apprentice, "what kind of jest goes down in
the country: and, by'r Lady, it goes deep!"
But an instant later the man had heaved himself upon his feet; his eyes
expanded from their creases into great O's; his whole body towered and
distended itself in gigantic indignation. "The villain! The nipcheese
curmudgeonly villain! And we tarry here, talking, while such things are
done in England! A Nabal, I say. Give me a hammer!" He heaved up an
enormous thigh and bestrode the gallery-rail.
"Have a care, master: the rail----"
"A hammer! Below there. A hammer!" He leaned over, bellowing. The gang
of workmen lifting the proscenium stared up open-mouthed into the foggy
gloom--a ring of ghostly faces upturned in a luminous haze.
Already the man's legs dangled over the void. Twelve, fifteen feet
perhaps, beneath him projected a lower gallery, empty but for three
tiers of disordered benches. Plumb as a gannet he dropped, and an
eloquent crash of timber reported his arrival below. The apprentice,
craning over, saw him regain his feet, scramble over the second rail,
and vanish. Followed an instant's silence, a dull thud, a cry from the
workmen in the area. The apprentice ran for the gallery stairs and
leapt down them, three steps at a time.
It took him, maybe, forty seconds to reach the area. There already,
stripped to the shirt, in a whirl of dust and voices, stood his friend
waving a hammer and shouting down the loudest. The man was possessed,
transformed, a Boanerges; his hammer, a hammer of Thor! He had caught
it from the hand of a douce, sober-looking man in a plum-coloured
doublet, who stood watching but taking no active share in the work.
"By your leave, Sir!"
"With or without my leave, good Sir, since you are determined to have
it," said the quiet man, surrendering the hammer.
The countryman snatched and thrust it between his knees while he
stripped. Then, having spat on both hands, he grasped the hammer and
tried its poise. "'Tis odd, now," said he, as if upon an afterthought,
staring down on the quiet man, "but methinks I know your voice?"
"Marry and there's justice in that," the quiet man answered; "for 'tis
the ghost of one you drowned erewhile."