No Good Deed 46

Sir Garrick Cattermole reached for the bottle, raised it half-way to his lips before he caught my eye and roared at the man behind the bar,

'A vessel, a glass, a cup, a tumbler, a goblet, you buffoon! Do I wear feathers and buckskin?'

A smeared and dusty tumbler appeared, so far from being the twin of my own as to belong to a different race altogether. Cattermole slopped a goodly measure into the glass and onto the surface of the table serving as the bar. The colour leeched from the wood in several moments more than the taste of the spirit might have led one to believe. The actor took a long draught from the glass and replenished it with a little more accuracy than before.

'That it should come to this,' he said.

This seemed to require no answer, and therefore I gave him none, merely taking a sip from my own glass.

He fixed me with a fearsome glare, the noble brow above it darkened and I could see that perhaps he would find ideal rôles in certain of Sweet William's creations. The fool on the heath perhaps, or Caliban: his lighter range might even have included poor maligned Malvolio. At length, he spoke again,

'I have trod the boards in Drury Lane, sir, Kean himself told me that I should be as great as he, one day.'

By my own estimate, unless the man was much older than he appeared, he could not have been more than 23 years old at the time of Edmund Kean's disastrous last appearance on the stage. The manner of Cattermole's speech indicated that if he had ever encountered the late actor at all, his own rôle had much more likely been that of hansom driver to Kean's customer, than any theatrical part.

'Well,' I began, 'you are, sir, an Actor-Manager, no doubt with charge of a sizeable troupe. I do not see that it has come to so very little.'

The actor's chest puffed up to a size he could not maintain for too long and his next utterance came with an exhalation which put me in mind of the rotting corpse of a pye-dog.

'You are kind to say so, Mr Northrup, but it is a poor substitute for London Theatre.'

His smile would have had to stretch beyond the flesh of his face to have reached any wider extent. I could see that he was no more immune to the effects of flattery than any actor of my acquaintance. Indeed, in my view, a follower of Thespis was only conquered in the matter of vanity by that empty-headed and strident creature, the politician. Reckoning that there must be at least one member of the actors' company who might prove diverting on the long voyage to New Orleans, I brought myself to compliment the fool further,

'We shall see, I look forward to the matinee with some fascination and expect to be, if not royally, at least nobly entertained.'

The improbable smile wavered not a jot, although I confess my own slipped a little when the door swung wide once more and the remaining members of the troupe entered. These five seemed more suited to employment in Cooper and Bailey's Circus than any theatre.