The Dress Lodger (17 page)

LAURA: (looking longingly away) Yes, Uncle.

While the others continue talking, Mr. Eliot sets down his peacock fan and crosses downstage to retrieve Gripeall’s silver platter of pills. How he detests these old-fashioned tallow theatres with their dirty flickering candles. Critics complain that actors fall over each other to play at the edge of the stage, where, lit from below, even the sweetest ingenue appears hellish and infernal. But what are they to do? In tallow theatres center stage is a shadowy void that neither foot, overhead, nor shuttered sidelights can seem to penetrate. They must play in a straight line downstage, like prating hieroglyphics, just to be seen!

Mr. Eliot feels the heat of candles on his chin as he bends over for Gripeall’s tray. He sneaks a peek at the front rows, at his people, as he’s come to think of them tonight. Times are changing. The people, his people, are done with court foppery and aristocratic infidelity, finished with comedies full of words they don’t understand. The new breed of playwrights,

GRIPEALL:

Pray, Jeremiah. What is this pill for?

JEREMIAH:

Why, don’t you know? It’s for that most Dread Disease of all. It is for—

Mr. Eliot indulges in a huge wink to the audience.

JEREMIAH: —the Cholera Humbug!

The pit explodes with wild applause and shouts are heard from every corner: “Cholera Humbug! Cholera Humbug!”

GRIPEALL:

Cholera Humbug? I’ve never heard of it. What are its symptoms?

JEREMIAH:

Well, we have it not yet in England, but abroad it has been said to Starve the Poor, Ruin the Tradesman, Fright the Rich, and Turn Men Blue.

GRIPEALL:

Blue, you say?

JEREMIAH:

Yes, blue. But have no fear, m’lord. It hunts only them that are so wretched they can afford no food for their bellies, and it kills only them poor saps who yearn to be free men. You are already inoculated from Cholera Humbug. You have the Right to Vote!

“Reform!” screams the audience. “Reform, not Humbug!”

GRIPEALL: Give me the pill anyway, Jeremiah. A man can never be too sure.

JEREMIAH:

Whatever you say, m’lord.

As Gripeall reaches for the pill, Patches the parrot swoops down and takes it. After a series of choreographed dives, the parrot lands on Jeremiah’s silver tray, rolls onto its back with its claws in the air, and plays dead.

Bravo, parrot! Bravo!

“Look, it killed the parrot!” screams the man who had challenged the doctors. “Look what use their pills are!”

Listen to them, thinks Mr. Eliot, jubilantly. My “Cholera Morbus” is an unbridled success! He glances off stage right to where Mr. Webster is making his entrance. The portly quack physician is decked out in a coat of saws and knives, hung in such a way that he might not turn around without causing the other actors to leap back in alarm. His top hat is stenciled about with skull and crossbones, his pockets bulge with pills, and prominently displayed upon his chest is a hastily constructed pasteboard replica of the Sunderland doctor’s India medal! Bravo, Webster! Bravo!

“Did someone call for a doctor?” brays Mr. Webster in Clanny’s Irish lilt.

And in that instant of recognition, the audience releases a cry that a playwright hears but once or twice in his career. It’s the subtle moment when hilarity jumps a pitch to hysteria, when the audience suddenly hears in its own applause the shattering of windows and the cracking of skulls. Miss Watson glances over worriedly. She has the next line, but the crowd is so loud she cannot be heard. Let them shout, glories Mr. Eliot. After opening night of the ferryboat tragedy in Lyme Regis, en masse the audience stormed a corrupt shipbuilder’s and set his warehouse on fire. He can’t help scanning the boxes to note the impression his comedy has made on the doctors. The young one, furious, is on his feet; the girl (well, he’ s sorry about her) has fallen back in what looks to be a faint. The old doctor, though—old Cross of India^wearing, body-snatching, burking doctor that he is—sits rigidly upright, as contemptuous and calm as if the whole theatre did not demand his blood.

But then, just as suddenly, the shout changes again, and now Mr. Eliot grows worried. Is it a note of panic he detects? One woman—he can see her quite clearly, off to his left, fifth row from the front—has leapt upon her bench in horror, flapping her arms like a demented bird. She shrieks long after the rest of the audience has quieted in alarm, shrieks so long and loud, in fact, that her neighbors in the pit move away to clear a space for her. She is pointing to the ground, where a man lies, a man she’s never met before but who was sitting beside her and who, just as Mr. Webster took the stage, vomited quietly into his cap. While the others were shouting down the doctor, he had tried in vain to struggle from his seat and make his way up the aisle, but had, to the woman’s horror, collapsed at her feet in convulsions. Now his bowels have let loose and a horrible stench pervades the pit.

“Please someone help!” screams the woman. “This man is dying!”

Is this someone’s idea of a joke? scowls Mr. Eliot. He looks over at fat, crestfallen Mr. Webster. The quack’s saws and knives quiver, sweat runs down his cheeks and drips onto his pasteboard Cross of India medal. It is not very witty to make fun of doctors when a man is dying in the audience. He is put completely out of his part. Quick, Eliot, he hisses, what are we to do?

But Eliot too is at a loss. He turns upstage to Mr. Mortimer and Miss Watson. With a withering look at the two men, intrepid Miss Watson sweeps to the lip of the stage. She, too, had overheard the altercation between the pit and the doctors in the box, had felt for the elderly physician who had stood up to the crowd. Her father, before turning actor, had studied medicine, and as a girl at dinner she’d sat upon his medical books so that she might reach the table. Now she bends her pretty knee, stretches her white arms beseechingly up to the boxes, and calls out in her most becoming tragedienne voice: Doctors! Oh please, is there not a doctor in the house?

“Don’t go,” says Henry sharply as his uncle rises. “They don’t deserve you.” He’d watched his uncle’s proud face blanch when that mincing bit of fatty tissue had taken the stage, speaking in his voice, sporting a tasteless sham of his medal, and had wanted to leap from his box to throttle the lot of them. What does his uncle owe this crowd? They need him until the moment he makes a mistake, and then they will turn on him and tear him to pieces. Henry has seen it. Back in Edinburgh, after the murderer Burke had been executed and Hare had fled, the mob came after his mentor, Dr. Knox, who had not been indicted. They hung him in effigy outside his house at 10 Surgeons* Square and, with Henry watching from the window, fell upon the doll like a pack of wild dogs. The constables came, and the crowd grew hotter, smashing the windows, hurling stones and screaming, Burker! Burker! They ran through the city, scattering and regrouping in elegant Princes Street, welling up in lowly West Port, where the sixteen murders had been committed. Back at i o Surgeons’ Square, Dr. Knox sat haughtily in broken glass, watching them try to light his greenwood trees on fire, and Henry, standing behind him, understood then—no matter how guilty you may be, it is still better to be one against the crowd.

Audrey is crying quietly in the chair beside him. He sees the other wealthy members of Sunderland society craning in their boxes, so much more excited by this turn of events than they had been by the tedious play. Down below, a hundred resentful, fearful faces stare up at him, each one mutely commanding—save him, you bloody bastard; save him or we will rip you limb from limb. Can his uncle not see it is unsafe to go downstairs? They are just waiting for us to make a mistake so that they might devour us. “For God’s sake, help him, Uncle,” Audrey sobs into her handkerchief. Dr. Clanny smoothes his coattails, straightens his India medal, and walks to the door.

“Don’t!” shouts Henry, throwing his arm out to block his exit. “They have humiliated you. They want to hurt you.”

Clanny smiles at his young nephew. “In my day, we used to fight them at the gallows for their hanged men. The relatives bit and punched and tried to rip them out of our hands, but we had the right. I know how to handle myself with the mob, son. You must believe in what you do.”

Henry steps back and watches his uncle make his way downstairs to the pit. Inside the auditorium, the men and women who only moments before were calling him burker and body snatcher step aside so that he might pass unmolested. The woman on the bench shrieks again, and now Henry can see it is because the convulsing man has hold of her ankle.

“Please, back away,” Dr. Clanny commands the curious coster boys who crowd around him. The stricken man is half under the fourth row of benches, his knees drawn into his chest, his elbows striking staccato against the wooden floor. He will not release the woman’s ankle and it is beginning to swell from lack of circulation, turning bulbous and blue under her white stockings. She screams and screams until Henry is sure his uncle will strike her, but instead he brings his mouth close to the patient’s clinched hand and bites it—hard. The hand flexes for less than an instant, but long enough for the woman to lurch away and fall heavily off the bench behind her.

Clanny feels about for a pulse, shakes his head, and shouts up to his nephew in the box.

“Henry!” he calls. “I need you.”

Henry takes the stairs two at a time; he would have leapt over the box to help, for, in truth, a deep sense of shame had come over him waiting upstairs with Audrey. The smell of the patient is overwhelming when he reaches the pit, and even accustomed as he is to the stench of decaying cadaver Liss, Henry finds it difficult to choke back his rising vomit. The sick man’s face is contorted and his eyes are sunk deep in their sockets, but something about him seems familiar.

“You, you, you, and you,” Dr. Clanny singles out four strong men in the audience. “Carry this body out into the lobby.”

The workingmen, used to taking orders, obediently rise and lift the patient. The ill man throws back his head and groans through thin blue lips, “Put me down.”

Henry unties his cravat and wraps it around his mouth and nose to keep from choking. Where has he seen this man before?

“Where ayr takin’ me mate?” demands the red-faced man in the fustian jacket who had challenged Clanny earlier. He has pushed his way through the crowd and now lunges for them. “Where ayr you takin’ Jack?”

“To hospital” answers Dr. Clanny.

“Over my dead body,” the man says, and plants himself so that the four men might not maneuver around him. “No one who goes in there comes out alive.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Henry sneers, though his contempt is lost beneath his wrapped cravat. “You people never come until it’s too late, and then you blame us for not working miracles.”

“You don’t even wait for people to die in there before you cut them up,” the man growls. “And when you’re done, you feed what’s left to your dogs.”

“Stand back and let us pass,” commands Dr. Clanny, nodding for the men to move forward. “If this man has cholera morbus he needs immediate attention.”

“Take him to his house, then,” counters Fustian.

“We don’t know if this disease is contagious,” says Clanny. “It could kill his whole family,”

“He touched me!” screams the lady whose ankle had been grabbed. “He’s killed me with his Cholera Humbug!”

“We don’t know if he has cholera,” Henry tries to calm her. “We won’t know until we take him to hospital.”

“If he’s going to that hellhouse, I’m goin’ with him/’ declares Fustian. “This man is a national treasure. This is Jack Crawford, hero of Camperdown you’re lugging.”

So that’s it, thinks Henry. Jack Crawford. I’ve been looking at this man’s face tattooed on cadaver Liss’s fleshy left biceps for the last three days.

“You are not allowed in unless you are ill,” Clanny frowns. “A hospital is not a circus.”

“They won’t let you go, Bob,” yells the woman who called Dr. Clanny a burker, “because they’re using this cholera as just another excuse to hack up our loved ones!”

“He’s not goin’ if I’m not goin’.” Bob, as Fustian seems to be known, bears menacingly down on Henry. Clanny looks worried, and poor Jack Crawford is groaning in pain.

“Have it your way,” Henry says at last. “Come along. If you have the stomach.”

The theatre is absolutely silent. It was all too easy, and Bob, who has no desire to set foot inside a hospital, looks searchingly around the pit. He can’t go there—walk all alone into their territory. There in that dark and lonely place, at the mercy of their saws and scalpels, he too might “develop” cholera and need to be taken apart limb by limb. What if neither Jack nor he comes out alive?

“Witness, my friends!” he shouts with such a ringing note of pathos, the actors onstage are jealous. “I leave here a well man. Sound in mind and body, possessed of both arms and legs. Witness—my head attached. If I come not back, revenge me, friends, and revenge poor sick Jack Crawford!”

Henry motions impatiently for them to be off, and together he and his uncle lead a groaning Jack Crawford through the crowd. Red-faced, contentious, fustian Bob follows the procession with his hat in his hands, his eyes fixed straight ahead on the highwater mark of his mortality. Jesus, why can’t he keep his fat mouth shut?

“Ladies and gentlemen, we have a play to perform,” Mr. Eliot announces, but it is a good ten minutes before the audience ceases its buzzing and quiets down. What a demoralizing turn of events, he sighs, changing offstage into his costume for the final act. He fumbles into his blue hose and laces up his blue doublet. To have them so completely in his power and then lose them to a whiff of disease. Fickle, fickle, wretched crowd. He yanks on his blue boots and fastens the clasp of his blue cape. A few minutes more and he would have had that mob at the doctor’s doorstep, dismantling his house brick by brick, banging their foreheads against his windows and tearing apart his sofa cushions with their teeth. Mr. Eliot stands before a rudely hung mirror and smears his face with blue greasepaint, wipes his hands on a shammy, and draws on a pair of elbow-length blue leather gloves. Instead, at the first sign of illness, they are begging, whinging creatures, groveling on their bellies before the gods of medicine. Through a gap between the curtains and proscenium, he can see straight up into the boxes, high above the pit, protected from the contagion of the crowd. The woman who accompanied the doctors has moved to the box of another rich family, and now wilts among them, cosseted and kissed. You will have to get used to it, he can imagine they are telling her (all the while urging sips of ripe brandy), if you plan to become a doctor’s wife.