Wappin' Wharf Part 1

Wappin' Wharf.

by Charles S. Brooks.

_A PROLOGUE TO BE SPOKEN BY BETSY_

_Our scene is the wind-swept coast of Devon. By day there is a wide stretch of ocean far below, and the abutments of our stage arise from a dizzy cliff._

_The time is remote, and ships of forgotten build stand out from Bristol in full sail for the mines of India. But we must be loose and free of precise date lest our plot be shamed by broken fact. A thousand years are but as yesterday. We make but a general gesture to the dim s.p.a.ces of the past._

_The village of Clovelly climbs in a single street--a staircase, really--and it is f.a.gged and out of breath half way. But far above, on a stormy crag, clinging by its toes, there stands a pirates' hut. To this topmost ledge fishwives sometimes scramble by day; but when a wind shall search the crannies of the night, then no villager would dare to climb so high._

_You will seek today in vain the pirates' cabin. Since the adventure of our play a thousands tempests have snarled across these rocks. You must convince your reason that these pinnacles of yesteryear, toppled down by storm, lie buried in the sea._

_We had hoped that our drama's scene might lie on a pirate ship at sea. We had wished for a swaying mast, full-set with canvas--a typhoon to smother our stage in wind. We had hoped to walk a victim off the plank, with the sea roaring in the wings. But our plot deals stubbornly with us. Alas, our pirates grow old and stiff. They have retired, as we say, from active practice and live in easy luxury on sh.o.r.e. Yet we shall see that their villany still thrives._

_How shall we select a name for our frightful play? There is a wharf in London that is known as Wapping. In these days that we call the present it has sunk to common use and its rotten timbers are piled with honest unromantic merchandise. But once a gibbet stood on Wapping Wharf, and pirates were hanged upon it. It was the first convenient harborage for inbound ships to dispose of this dirty deep-sea cargo.

So it was the somber motif of a pirate's life--his moment of reflection after he had slit his victim's throat._

_Tonight, although your beards grow long and Time has marked its net of wrinkles--tonight, the years spin backwards. Only the young in heart will catch the slender meaning of our play._

_We are too quick to think that childhood pa.s.ses with the years--that its fine fancy is blunted with the practice of the world. Too long have we been taught that the clouds of glory fade in the common day.

If a man permits, a child keeps house within his heart._

_Our prologue outstays its time. Already the captain of our pirates puts on his hook. The evil Duke limps for practice on his wooden leg.

Presently our curtain will rise. We shall see the pirates' cabin, with the lighthouse in the distance, Flint's lantern and the ladder to the sleeping-loft. We shall hear a storm unparalleled--thunder, lightning and a rush of wind, if it can be managed._

_Then our candles burn to socket. Our pasteboard cabin grows dark. The bl.u.s.tering ocean, the dizzy cliffs of Devon, melt like an unsubstantial pageant. Once again, despite the signpost of the years, we have run on the "laughing avenues of childhood."_

[Ill.u.s.tration]

BY WAY OF EXPLANATION

Several weeks ago an actor-manager requested me to try my hand at a play for the winter season. The offer was unexpected. "My dear sir," I said, "I am immensely flattered, but I have never written a play."

Then I hastened to ask, "What kind of play?" for fear the offer might be withdrawn. He replied with sureness and decision. "I want a play,"

he said, "with lots of pirates and--no poetry." He stressed this with emphatic gesture. "And at least one shooting," he added. It was a slim prescription. He left me to brood upon the matter.

The proposal was too flattering to be rejected out of hand.

After a furious week upon a plot and dialogue, I was given an opportunity to display my wares. The manager himself met me in the hallway. "Is there a shooting?" he asked, with what seemed almost a suppressed excitement. I was able to satisfy him and he led me to his inner office, where he pointed out an easy chair. The room was pleasantly furnished with bookshelves to the ceiling. Evidently his former ventures had been prosperous, and already I imagined myself come to fortune as his partner. While I fumbled with embarra.s.sment at my papers--for I dreaded his severe opinion--he himself fetched a basket of coal for a fire that burned briskly on the hearth. Then he sat rigidly at attention.

It now appeared that he had summoned to our conference several of his a.s.sociates--the subordinates, merely, of his ventures--his manager of finance (with a sharp eye for a business flaw), his costumer and designer, and another person who is his reader and adviser and, in emergency, fills and mends any sudden gap that shows itself.

My notion of theatrical managers has been that they are a cold and distant race--the more sullen cousin of an editor. Is it not considered that on the reading of a play they sit with fallen chin, and that they chill an author to reduce his royalty? It is naught, it is naught, saith the buyer. I am told that even the best plays are hawked with disregard from theatre to theatre, until the hungry author is out at elbow. They get less civility than greets a mean commodity. Worthless mining shares and shoddy gilt editions do not kick their heels with such disregard in the outer office. Popcorn and apples--Armenian laces, even--beg a quicker audience.

But none of this usual brusqueness appeared. Rather, he showed an agreeable enthusiasm as we proceeded--even an unrestraint, which, I must confess, at times somewhat marred his repose and dignity.

Manifestly it was not his intention to depreciate my wares. He exchanged frank glances of approval with his subordinates--with his costumer especially, with whom his relation seems the closest.

In the first act of my play, when it becomes apparent that one of my pirates goes stumping on a timber leg, his eye flashed. And when it was disclosed that the captain wears a hook instead of hand, he forgot his professional restraint and cried out his satisfaction. He was soon wrapped in thought by the mysterious behaviour of the fortune-teller and he said, if she were short and stout, he had the very actress in his mind.

But it was in the second act that he threw caution to the winds. As you will know presently, Red Joe--one of my pirates--seizes his trusty gun and, taking breathless aim, shoots--But I must not expose my plot.

At this exciting moment (which is quite the climax of my play) Belasco--or any of his kind--would have squinted for a flaw. He would have tilted his wary nose upon the ceiling and told me that my plot was humbug. What sailorman would mistake a lantern for a lighthouse?

Nor were there lighthouses in the days of the buccaneers. He would have scuttled my play in dock and grinned at the rising bubbles. Mark the difference! My manager, ignoring these inconsequential errors, burst from his chair--this is amazing!--and turned a reckless somersault between the table and the fire.

His costumer, who knows best how his eccentricity runs to riot, checked him for this and sent him to his chair. He sobered for a minute and the play went on. Presently, however, when the enraged pirates gathered to wreak vengeance on their victim, I saw how deeply he was moved. His exultant eye sought the bookshelves, and I fancy that he was in meditation whether he might be allowed a handstand with his heels waving against the ceiling. His excited fingers obviously were searching for a dagger in his boot.

You may conceive my pleasure. If his cold and practiced judgment could be so stirred, might I not hope that the phlegmatic pit in shiny shirt-fronts would rise and shout its approval at our opening? And to what reckless license might not the gallery yield? I fancied a burst of somersaults in the upper gloom, and tremendous handsprings--both men and women--down the sharp-pitched aisle. It would be shocking--this giddy flash of lingerie--except that our broader times now give it countenance. Peeping Tom, late of Coventry, in these more generous days need no longer sit like a sneak at his private shutter.

He has only to travel to the beach where a hundred G.o.divas crowd the sands. I saw myself on the great occasion of our opening night bowing in white tie from the forward box.

Our conference was successful. When the reading of the play was finished and the wicked pirates stood in the shadow of the gibbet, he thanked me and excused himself from further attendance by reason of a prior engagement. Under the stress of selection for his theatre he cannot sleep at night, and his costumer wisely packs him off early to his bed. She whispers to me, however, that although he had hopes for a storm at sea and a hanging at the end, his decision, nevertheless, is cast in my favor for a quick production, whenever a worthy company can be a.s.sembled.

[Ill.u.s.tration: On the tip of each he has bargained for a spot of red]

But we have gone still further toward our opening. The manager has already whittled a dozen daggers and they lie somewhere on a shelf, awaiting a coat of silver paint. On the tip of each he has bargained for a spot of red. Furthermore, he owns a pistol--a harmless, devicerated thing--and he pops it daily at any rogue that may be lurking on the cellar stairs.

All pirates wear pigtails--pirates, that is, of the upper crust (the Kidds and Flints and Morgans)--and at first this was a knotty problem.

But he obtained a number of old stockings--stockings, of course, beyond the skill of that versatile person who mends the gaps--and he has wound them on wires, curling them upward at the end and tieing them with bits of ribbon. The pirate captain is allowed an extra inch of pigtail to exalt him above his fellows. When he first adjusted this pigtail on himself, his costumer cried out that he looked like a Chinaman. This was downright stupidity and was hardly worthy of her perception; but ladies cannot be expected to recognize a pirate so instinctively as we rougher men. The stocking, however, was clipped to half its length, and now he is every inch a buccaneer.

As for the captain's hook, he is resourcefulness itself. These things are secrets of the craft, but I may hint that there is a very suitable hook in a butchershop around the corner. Surely the butcher--warmed to generosity by the family patronage--would lend it for the great performance. I have no doubt but that the manager, from this time forward, will beg all errands in his direction and that his smile will thaw the friendly butcher to his purpose. Certainly two legs of lamb, if whispered that the drama is at stake, will consent to hang for one tremendous day upon a single hook. Our hook is to be screwed into a block of wood, and there is something about knuckles and a cord around the wrist and a long sleeve to cover up the joining. Anyway, the problem has been met.

[Ill.u.s.tration: His smile will thaw the friendly butcher to his purpose]

In the furnace room he has found a heavy sheet of tin for the thunder storm, and I have suggested that he dig in a nearby gravel pit for a basket of rain to hurl against the pirates' window. But hard beans, he says, are better, and he has won the cook's consent. For the slow monotone of water dripping from the roof in our second act, a single bean, he tells me, dropped gently in a pan is a baffling counterfeit.

The lightning seems not to bother him, for he owns a pocket flashlight; but the mighty wind that comes brawling from the ocean was at first a sticker. The vacuum cleaner popped into his head, but was put aside. The fireplace bellows were too feeble for any wind that had grown a beard. His manager of finance, however, laid aside his book one night--a weary tract upon the law--and displayed an ability to moan and whistle through his teeth. The very cas.e.m.e.nt rattled in the blast. He has agreed to sit in the wings and loose a sufficient storm upon a given signal.

Our stage is cramped. Three strides stretch from side to side. "Can this c.o.c.kpit" you ask, "hold the vasty fields of France?" It is not, of course, the vasty fields of France that we are trying to hold; but we do lack s.p.a.ce for the kind of riot the manager has in mind in the final scene. He wants nothing girlish. Sabers and pistols are his demand--a knife between the teeth--and more yelling than I could possibly put down in print. A bench must be upset, the beer-cask overturned, a jug of Darlin's grog spilled, and one stool, at least, must be smashed--preferably on the captain's head, who must, however, be consulted. Patch-Eye and the Duke are not the kind of pirates that lie down and whine for mercy at a single punch.

At first our manager was baffled how the pirates were to ascend a ladder to their sleeping loft. They had no place to go. They would crack their ugly heads upon the ceiling. The costumer was positive (parsimony!) that a hole--even a little hole--should not be cut in the plaster overhead for their disappearance. If the chandelier had been an honest piece of metal they might have perched on it until the act ran out. Or perhaps the candles could be extinguished when their legs were still climbing visibly. At last the manager has contrived that a plank be laid across the tops of two step-ladders, behind a drop so that the audience cannot see. No reasonable pirate could refuse to squat upon the plank until the curtain fell.

[Ill.u.s.tration: With uncertain, questing finger]

We are getting on. Our company has been selected. We need only a handful of actors, but the manager has enlisted the street. The dearest little girl has been chosen for Betsy, and each day she practices her lullaby at the piano with uncertain, questing finger. A gentle rowdy of twelve will speak the Duke's blood-curdling lines. I understand that two quarrelsome pirates have nearly come to blows which shall act the captain. The hero, Red Joe, will be played by the manager himself, for it is he who owns the pistol. Is not the boy who has the baseball the captain of his nine?

I owe an apology to all the mothers of our cast; for the rough language of my lines outweighs their gentler home instruction.

Whenever several of our actors meet there is used the vile language of the sea. By the bones of my ten fingers has replaced the anemic oaths of childhood. One little girl has been told she cries as easily as a crocodile. Another little girl was heard to say she would slit her sister's _wisdom_--a slip, no doubt, for _wizen_. And Blast my lamps!

and Sink my timbers! are rolled profanely on the tongue.

In every attic on the street a rakish craft flies the skull and crossbones, and roves the Spanish Main on rainy afternoons. Innocent victims--girls, chiefly, who will tattle unless a horrid threat is laid upon them--are forced blindfold to walk the plank. If the wind blows, scratching the trees against the roof, it is, by their desire, a tempest whirling their stout ship upon the rocks. What ho! We split!

Mysterious chalkings mark the cellar stairs and hint of treasure buried in the coal-hole. At every mirror pirates practice their cruel faces.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Innocent victims ... are forced blindfold to walk the plank]

And now the daggers are complete, and their tip of blood has been squeezed from its twisted tube. Chests and neighbors have been rummaged for outlandish costumes. From the kindling-pile a predestined stick has become the timber leg of the wicked Duke. The butcher's hook has yielded to persuasion.