Wise Children Read Online Free PDF

ice-cream sundae was named after Estella in Melbourne, then an entire dried-out township in New South Wales was renamed Hazard, after she and Runulph put on al fresco Coriolanus. A street in Hobart, Tasmania. And they toured India, not once, but several times – crossing, crisscrossing the subcontinent. The gleaming rails sliding beneath the churning wheels, the puffing smokestack, the leaves falling off the calendar and blowing away in the wind . . . A maharajah gave the boys a baby elephant but they couldn’t take it with them on the train. He fell in love with Estella, and promised her her weight in rubies if she would stay behind and recite him every night Viola’s ‘willow cabin’ speech. What did she do? we asked. She made him happy, said Peregrine. She had a gift for that. She made him happy, then she left him. She had a gift for leaving, too.
    The red-haired woman, smiling, waving to the disappearing shore. She left the maharajah; she left innumerable other lights o’ passing love in towns and cities and theatres and railway stations all over the world. But Melchior she did not leave.
    A theatre, long since demolished, named the Hazard, in Shanghai. Then Hong Kong. Then Singapore. Everything a little threadbare, now, a little shabby. The ocean, again. North America, again – Montreal. Toronto. Crossing, crisscrossing the prairies. Hazard, Alberta, flat as a plateful of snow. Hazard, North Dakota – no township too small to receive them, nor to reciprocate the honour by rechristening itself. The touring was turning into a kind of madness. In Arkansas, the Hazards’ patched and ravaged tent went up in the spaces vacated by the travelling evangelicals: Ranulph, lean, haggard, bearded, more and more resembled John the Baptist had John the Baptist reached old age.
    They arrived at last in the south-west and pitched their tent in arid scrub in a town called Gun Barrel, Texas, renamed Hazard, after the Hazards played Macbeth there with a hired band of campesinos as the Scottish army, holding spiked ears of prickly pear above their heads to mimic Birnam Wood. Of all these wild, strange and various places, Hazard, Texas, was the one that Perry remembered best; he went back there, later, a grizzled old-timer or two wept in his beer to recall how Estella made him happy, they made her son an honorary sheriff.
    Props and costumes were lost or stolen or fell to pieces and then were begged or improvised or patched and darned. Ranulph drank and gambled and declaimed; he was going to pieces, too. He shouted at America but it would no longer listen to him. One night, in a bar at Tucson, Arizona, he gambled away his crown from Lear and Estella put together a new one for him out of a bit of cardboard. She dabbed on some gold paint. ‘Here you are.’
    Why did she stay with him? Perish the thought, perhaps she truly loved him; perhaps all those people she made happy were just so many sideshows. But she’d lost the knack of making Melchior happy.
    Then, one day, deep in the Midwest, as they were setting up in a townlet where they had hopes of a decent-sized audience since all there was to do in the evenings, otherwise, was to watch the corn grow, Ranulph received a cable from New York. While the Hazards roamed themselves to rags for the greater glory of Shakespeare, Cassius Booth, Estella’s old Horatio, stayed in one place and prospered. Now he was an actor-manager himself, with his very own theatre on the Great White Way. And was he a man to forget old friends? Not he! Estella looked enigmatic and she smiled, said Perry. She was still a girl, remember. No more than thirty. Or, at most, thirty-five. While Old Ranulph was pushing seventy and staked his final gamble on it, on one last triumphant prayer meeting. He’d show ’em all! He’d flare up one last incandescent time on Broadway in a sort of Shakespearian funeral pyre. But the play he picked on was, alas, Othello.
    Thirty or thirty-five, whatever she was, she