The Little Shadows (20 page)

But Verrall said the gag would get them tossed out of the theatre, even in the more relaxed environs of Butte, so they went back to the usual way. At the end of the whispering rehearsal Verrall shook her hand and told her she was
histrionic
, which she gathered was a good thing to be.

Butte was not Helena, no. The crowd was rougher—there was a woodsy smell in the theatre, a Paddockwood kind of smell, tobacco and tanned hides, drink, men’s working clothes; although there were women in the audience, they were well outnumbered by men. Faces visible in the spilling light were white and owl-eyed. Some of the men stood up when Aurora and Clover danced the
Music-Box
, the better to see them twirl.

And opening was not closing. The stone-cold crowd talked generally through the first number,
Buffalo Gals
, and gave only a smattering of applause. Bella, who had grown used to being liked, found that she was almost angry not to have that appreciative cushion; she put more vim into
I Can’t Do the Sum
and seemed to win the attention of the house. Aurora—and even, dutifully, Clover—twinkled and
glimmered at the boxes and caught what eyes they could, but it was uphill work, and then went all downhill during
Early One Morning
, for which that crowd was definitely not in the mood.

As they cleaned their faces, Aurora said, ‘If we’d had another number prepared, we could have caught them. Something with a little pep—or maybe a sentimental number?’

Bella shook it off. But she did think Gentry was wrong about the crowd down here.

Had ’Em, Lost ’Em

Bella trotted up to the stage-right side to be ready for East & Verrall’s number, and caught the last of the Tusslers’ act. That younger one had rangy legs curving in strong lines front and back. Arms bare beneath a brocade waistcoat, clean-boned and taut. He saw her watching and stared at her so boldly that she looked away and went through her lines in her head.

East and Verrall crowded into the wings beside her, kissed each side of her face, and went on. With an afternoon of hard work they had whipped their hotel number into slightly better shape.

It started in one, the seafront olio drop covering up the terrible mess left in two and three by the Furniture Tusslers. Behind the drop the hands raced to clear that mess.

Bella loved the dual view she had from the wings: East and Verrall’s chatty number going on in front, bathed in the sweetness of the pinky golden light, all alive—while at the same time, behind the olio, deathly silent in faint blue light, stagehands going through their practised moves, soundlessly crouching, lifting slowly as if they were in a dream; the Furniture Tusslers walked like ghosts through their old life to retrieve their props.

In front, Verrall opened their number, minding his own business in a straw boater on the promenade, whistling idly till East came rolling onstage as if punched, brought up short and saved from the ocean by Verrall’s foot.

‘I was living the life of Riley,’ East said, dusting off his coat.

‘And then what happened?’

‘Riley came home.’

Verrall was sympathetic. ‘Women! You got to keep moving, Mr. East.’

East, looking nervously behind him: ‘Now I’ll
have
to move. Can you recommend a hotel?’

Their turn went on, light pattering music up and down under their voices in the same absurd style as their pattering conversation. On cue—exactly as the last of the stagehands whisked across behind a broom—the seafront olio rose to reveal a hotel lobby drop and a desk, in two, and Verrall strolled back to become the hotel manager.

Sidling up to the desk, East took out a cigar and chomped it between his teeth.

Verrall cried, ‘Hey, put that out, there’s no smoking in here.’

‘What makes you think I’m smoking?’ asked East, eyes wide open.

‘You’ve got a cigar in your mouth!’

‘I got boots on my feet, don’t mean I’m walking.’

Verrall told him, in deep disdain: ‘You’re going to make some woman a wonderful husband.’

With a wild, agonizing roll of the eyes East said, ‘I’m afraid so!’

‘You don’t even know what a husband is.’ Verrall’s superiority was massive.

‘Oh, yes I do!’ East snapped back, uncrushed. ‘A husband is what’s left of a sweetheart after the nerve has been killed.’

After they’d tangled a bit over the price of a room, Verrall tinged his little desk bell and yelled, ‘Front! Show the man the elevator!’

But East said, ‘No, no, I want a room with a bed in it.’

‘Will you be needing a bath, sir?’ Verrall asked, very cold.

‘How rude!’ Then, anxious, ‘Would you say I do?’

Verrall rang his bell again with vigour, and Bella went skittering on in her dancing slippers, eyes wide as saucers for her first dramatic role. She was as helpfully unhelpful as they’d rehearsed and she said the lines as they’d told her to, and when she got a laugh she could not help checking the audience and laughing too—her naive pleasure
making it all the funnier; she was quick enough to play with that, the way East and Verrall played.

When they came off after their turn they told Bella she’d saved their bacon.

‘Cat-calls off, wolf-whistles on. That was all for you, cupcake,’ East said as they bundled her down the stairs at the intermission. He gave her bottom a thoughtful pat.

‘That last gag of yours was a three-person joke,’ Verrall told East. ‘I hope those three enjoyed themselves.’

‘Over the heads of the rest. Had ’em, lost ’em, had ’em, lost ’em—one long recurring nightmare. I’d hang myself if my belt would hold.’

‘It’ll be better at the second show, when the audience is half-cut.’ Verrall pulled the script out of his pocket and a pencil from the ribbon of his bowler hat, made a few swift strokes and scribbled a note. ‘Lose the dining room bit, lose
They raise chickens in the cellar, the guests are fond of dark meat
. Too highbrow for this house.’

‘We’ll have to put the girl back in,’ East said.

‘She was knocking on my door all night, but there were complaints and I had to let her out
—’ Verrall scratched.

‘Good, that’ll lead into
There’s a dead girl in the other bed …’

‘Yes, but how did you find out she’s dead?
’ Verrall said, accusing the imaginary guest. ‘Or do you think that’s going too strong?’

Bella was laughing too hard to talk, so exhilarated she could have turned right around and gone back out again; and the best of it was, she’d be able to do it again at the second show, and at the third, and then all this week! She put her fist over her mouth and made herself calm down so she would have something left for the next two shows.

An Artiste

Later in the bill, Clover slipped backstage again to watch Victor Saborsky. His act used a very complicated technical rigging which he checked and rechecked during the Old Soldiers’ performance, and right after the intermission Clover had seen him
standing motionless at the very back of the stage behind the last olio drop, lost in thought, or in prayer.

‘A true artiste,’ Sibyl had whispered as they filed past him. ‘Nothing comes before performance, with him. You don’t often find that in this business, really, that kind of concentrated effort. People work hard—look at East and Verrall!—but he’s a maniac.’

Clover had not mentioned him to her sisters, and she went up alone into the wings to watch him. Her white skirt and waist would be too evident in the wings, she thought, so she wrapped herself in a grey shawl and stood like a modest ghost just outside the hemp-bed’s painted line. The blue light from the prompt box shone on her pale, pointed face and haloed her hair. Victor saw her and smiled, because she had come up for his turn, then looked quickly away.

He wore a great-collared black velvet dress-coat, threadbare and ornate—he might have stolen it from an opera wardrobe, or inherited it from Beethoven. High-waisted black trousers made his long legs twice as long; he wore elongated boots that flapped slightly but retained a worn elegance of line. Clover could see the pattern of soft cracks filled in with black polish. The lights dimmed, the music changed, and the curtain opened to reveal two.

A country road, a tree. Evening.

Tattered silk battens, blown gently by a stagehand on the wind machine, gave the appearance of mist drifting over the stage. The drop, keeping the stage in two, showed a blurred grey landscape with the suggestion of a moon hidden behind clouds. Victor wandered onstage as if he had walked for a long time in those long black boots, and began to talk to the people in front. Clover had never imagined anything so charming and easy (but it was not easy, she knew, to make them yours).

‘Long ago I was a boy, and all alone,’ Victor told them, confidingly. ‘My father having died, and my mother being lost. She went to the Fabians, you know, and from them to even stranger company …’ He was a portrait of sadness. ‘But one must not repine.’

His feet flicked in a low flutter of ecstatic dance, then stilled. The wind began to blow, small particles of paper scudding towards Victor
in the wind machine’s draught, and he was blown askew, farther off gravity than ought to have been possible, before he turned to face the wind and was tumbled backwards into a slow-flurrying roll. He picked himself up and carefully brushed his coat.

‘Life is not without its difficulties,’ Victor said, and a sudden imaginary gust blew him back through three standing flips—his hands never moved from holding his coat, his body merely seeming to revolve on a still fulcrum. Lightning flashed in the blasted landscape. The thunder-sheet was directly across from where Clover stood—she could see the man yank mightily on the metal to make it crack, but jumped anyway when the thunder boomed out.

Victor staggered back again and hid behind the small tree, clutching at it—and as the wind continued to blow, his feet lifted off in the gale until his body flew straight out sideways, a black pennant waving in the wind.

At his farthest extent the wind dropped, the lights changed, music rippled through a discordant change into an old minuet, and Victor leaped into a story, which he told while tuning a battered violin (where had it appeared from?), rosining his bow, and finally playing it. In a very few words he sketched an ancient Polish music-master teaching him to play. The violin slid from dominating virtuoso to hopeless student, and back again: shimmering from the violent, impatient commands of the master to the trust and willingness to learn of the boy, Victor seemed to waver from seven feet tall to three. The pupil’s music grew from squawks to mastery, and then the master died, and Victor assumed his greatcoat.

Clover found her eyes aching for her father, for how he as much as Mama had set their feet on this path from her earliest memory.

Then the violin vanished into thin air, and lighter music began from the orchestra.

‘My next trick!’ Victor announced. He swept the black frockcoat into a wheeling circle and from it retrieved an egg, a feather fan, a bowler hat and a bamboo walking stick. He juggled first the egg, then the egg and the fan, then hat-egg-fan while twirling the bamboo cane in a windmill. The cane landed on his nose, the hat flipped up onto
the cane, and he juggled the egg while fanning himself. While he was so occupied, with understandable concentration, his feet began a clattering dance, the boot-ends clacking a gay percussion.

His absurdity, thought Clover, is not of the idiot variety, but of someone wanting too much, reaching for the moon. Every motion was comic, every flex of foot and straight-edge of elevated leg.

‘Yes, for some time I made my living rationally, as a juggler. But too much influenced by the moon, I became—if not an out-and-out lunatic—an eccentric. I shiver to see the moon each night, preposterous and separate. Why should we be so far from what we long for? But how to reach it?’

He pulled from his coat a large brass compass. ‘My only inheritance,’ he said, showing it off. ‘From my father, a moral compass … My great treasure!’ Flourishing it, he dropped it—oh no!—but caught it, dropped it, batted it forward, ran fast enough to be below it when it fell; he sighed with relief and shook it, and it all fell to pieces in his hand.

Clover was as horrified as Victor seemed. In a fumbling jumble he reassembled the pieces, making the compass into a birdcage, a lantern (lit!), and a drinking goblet before managing to shuffle it once more into a compass—although larger, and wilder. There was one piece left over: the glass cover, which he could not get to fix. Instead, abandoning the attempt, he stuck it into his eye as a monocle. It shone in the light and showed that eye magnificently magnified.

As Victor goggled at the audience, seeming to see everything new, the second drop rose and the stage was revealed in three: a dark forest of bare trees. Behind them a huge full moon and the night sky peppered with salty stars. Clover thought perhaps it would be a lady-moon, but saw no face—a faint suggestion of a rabbit was only shadows of pits and craters. Or
was
that a face, yellowy-green, hanging upside down?

Victor checked his compass to see how he should proceed, and showed the audience its needle wildly spinning. As the light increased, seeming to shine from the moon (but from the wings Clover could see the Klieg light), a path appeared in the darkness behind Victor, shining upwards, like a moonbeam. She took a breath, as the audience
did—as Victor did, when he spun and saw the road shining before him.

‘My destination!’ he cried, looking back over his shoulder to bring the audience along with him. He tried to walk up it: fell through, of course, because it was only beams of light. He backed up and ran, and somersaulted through as if it were a cobweb, seeming to stick … and fell.

Victor picked himself up and hobbled back to teeter on the edge of the stage, between two silver footlights. He raised himself on his long toes and leaped, dove forward into a handspring and a cartwheel and a fan of arms and legs and somehow—how? even in the wings Clover could not tell!—up onto the ribbon of light descending from the moon. She saw the stagehand hauling on his harness from the other side, but Victor moved so naturally as he strode up the sky that it was hard to connect the two. He leaped over the tall trees and forward and at last he put out a hand and touched the moon’s strange face, leaned in and kissed it, and exhorted the moon to explain to him: life, gravity, the persistent eternal pull of the tide, and of course, Love.