A Play of Isaac by Margaret Frazer

and Piers would not either of them be wearing their devil tails just now, not for a first practice. When Lewis would have protested that, Piers made it all right by saying, “I never wear mine for first practices. There’s too much else to think about.” He looked to his grandfather. “But what about the horns? Couldn’t we wear those?” Adding aside to Lewis, “They’re more trouble than the tails. The tails won’t fall off, once they’re on, but the horns do if you’re not careful.”
    “A point well taken,” Basset said as if it were a great matter worth heavy consideration. “Yes. I’d say you should wear the horns.”
    Being smaller and rag-stuffed, the horns were not so liable to damage as a hay-stuffed tail, and Piers, with Lewis following him, dove for the basket where the horns were kept, not only Piers’s small ones but several man-sized ones from when they had been a larger company, able to send more “devils” onto the stage. Lewis’s somewhat stubby fingers made clumsy work of tying on the black cap that held them to his head. Piers helped him, then did his own while Lewis went over to Matthew to show himself off.
    Basset took the chance to say at Joliffe and Ellis, “Since we did this only yesterday, I’m going to suppose, St. Genesius reward my faith, that you remember your lines . . .”
    “Rest it, Basset,” Ellis said impatiently, never good at being jested at, which was what made it such a pleasure to do.
    “So we’ll do just the last few speeches before the end.” Basset held up a warning finger. “But we’ll probably do it maybe five times, to satisfy Master Fairfield and take some of the edge off him. You see?”
    Joliffe and Ellis both saw. You had to care more than a little for the craft of playing to be willing to go on and on at a part, working it over and over into the best you could make it be in whatever time you had. If someone looked on it all as little more than a light game, as a chance to show himself off, the work of it soon palled, and it surely would for Lewis. The trick was going to be to rehearse him well enough that he could do his part, without quenching his interest in it along the way. Or maybe quenching his interest just enough he would be satisfied with what he was being given to do and want no more. To Joliffe’s mind—and to Basset’s as well, he suspected—that would be the very best of all.
    The Steward and the Devil was mostly taken from one of Geoffrey Chaucer’s tales, with changes made to suit their company but the story much the same. The Steward, a lord’s officer given to extorting money from hapless folk in his power, meets a friendly man who claims to be a Devil come from Hell. They make agreement to travel together a while, each taking their share from whatever people offer them. They overtake a man—Basset—carrying and damning to the devil a sack too big and heavy for him. When the Steward urges the Devil to take what he’s been offered, the Devil declines, saying the man did not truly mean it. Likewise, when they come on a drunken man (again played by Basset with a change of hat and doublet) damning himself to the devil because his wine bottle is empty, the Devil says again he doesn’t mean it, the offer doesn’t count. But when the Steward seeks to grind a false fine out of an old widow (likewise played by Basset in loose gown and wimple and veil) and she wishes him to the devil, the Devil cries, “Now there is a wish made from the heart and fully meant!” Revealing his horns and tail, he summons the demon Piers to help him drive the Steward off to Hell, ending the play.
    It was quick-paced and with laughs in plenty. The Penteneys would probably be well pleased simply because Lewis was in it, a second demon with Piers, no matter how ill Lewis might do his part.
    The surprise, as they began to play it, was that it seemed Lewis would not do ill at all. He understood easily when Basset showed him where and how he was to follow