Aurora grabbed the birdcage from behind the downstage leg and went into the spotlight all forlorn, a lost girl in the city. ‘My old man said, “Follow the van, And don’t dilly-dally on the way …’ ” Nice as it was to be centre stage, taking sympathy from the sea of faces down below, Aurora disliked this song. She wended through long verses about chamber pots (which they’d ditch tomorrow if Mrs. Cleveland happened to carp), into the chorus again. But by then the crowd was turning its attention to the programme, wondering what came next. She could see them shift in their seats, and only managed to keep panic from entering her voice by pushing it louder, which did not work.
Chorus again, this one the last: ‘My old man said, Follow the van, don’t dilly-dally on the way!’—and then, a terrible blank.
The music went on alone. She had forgotten the lyrics.
She looked over at Mendel in a panic and saw his head swivel quickly to look at her, and then an eyebrow lifted—he reached the end of the bar and swung his hand around in a circle to the band as if he’d meant to do that all along. A cheerful broad-faced lady in the audience took that as encouragement and sang along gaily, ‘My old man,’ and when they got to the second line it came back into Aurora’s head and she sang on, ‘Off went the cart with our home packed in it, I walked behind with my old cock linnet,’ while cold horror ran through her: she had forgotten the words. The stupidest of sins.
Bella nudged Clover to join in, and they sang along with the lady in the front row, rising up into a loud triumph on ‘Can’t find my way home!’ Aurora bobbed a curtsy to thank her for the lines, and knocked her head to show that it was empty.
Then the audience was all clapping, as much for their own woman as for the girls.
It was over. Except that they still had one song to go, and it was mostly hers to sing. So Aurora had to put despair aside. The Last Rose of Summer was Papa’s favourite. She knew the words inside her bones, because the sentences made perfect sense; it was the saddest song in the world, except you could not let the audience feel so much sadness, so you tempered it a little.
‘So soon may I follow when friendships decay
And from love’s shining circle the gems drop away.
When true hearts lie withered and fond ones are flown
O, who would inhabit this bleak world alone?’
Papa had not waited to follow, he had gone before them. His true heart lay withered in the Paddockwood graveyard and Aurora knew it was only because she was good at pretending that she could sing the song at all, hating him as she did for leaving them. Effortlessly, as if it required only to be unleashed, she let her clearest voice soar up above Clover and Bella, flying into the clouds on flown, and then sinking back to inhabit this bleak world alone.
Not alone, though. Together they were bowing, the lights dazzling in their eyes as their heads and backs dipped forward, their skirts curdled into curtseys.
Drop the Other One
A respectable amount of applause, Clover thought, but Aurora was prostrate with humiliation. She sat with her cheek down on the dressing-table, a shawl over her head to shade her eyes. So Clover took Bella with her, creeping into the wings to watch East & Verrall, the Sidewalk Conversationalists. Seeing the act from behind meant mostly the backs of their bowler hats, but from time to time one would turn to fit in some false teeth or twiddle a prop out of a pocket, and he (carrot-topped, rascally East, or darker, gentlemanly Verrall) would wink at them, which made both girls feel deliciously at home in this new world.
East was the good-natured fool, Verrall the educated man. They wore tidy black boots, and their black suits were too tight: East’s too short in the legs, Verrall’s too long.
‘Well, I don’t know nothing, Mr. Verrall,’ said East, rudely, when Verrall schooled him in some little fact or other.
‘I don’t know anything, Mr. East!’ said Verrall back, trying to teach him better grammar.
Delighted, East crowed, ‘You neither? I thought not!’
They walked along in front of a backdrop painted with a seafront scene, a promenade on a summery afternoon. Their walking was cleverly, expansively done: long legs moving in a loping stride, but each foot placed down only an inch in front of the other, so they made hardly any progress at all and could spend five minutes sauntering across the stage.
Talking about their lodgings, Verrall undertook to correct East again: ‘I say, East, you must be less noisy tonight. The sick man in the room below us is so dreadfully nervous, he jumps out of his skin at a sudden noise. When you pull off your boots, don’t drop them down the clattering way you always do! Set each one down soft.’
‘Well, I tried that, Verrall, my old companion, because I remembered you saying that. I was careful as could be, creeping upstairs, inching open the door … I read for a minute and smoke my cigar, and then, phew, I’m sleepy, so I blows out the lamp, and—’
They had reached a handy park bench and East sat, suiting the action to the words.
‘And I pulls off’—pulling off his boot with a tremendously agile flourish that took his leg nearly to vertical—‘my boot—bam!’
The boot crashed to the floor with a great bang, helped by the percussion man. Verrall flinched and jumped, as if he were the nervous man himself. ‘Ahh, but then I remembers!’ East said, calming his friend with a soothing hand on his sleeve, then attending to his second boot. ‘So I pulls the next one off easy—and slow—and sets it down so feather-soft it could not be heard at all … and off I goes to sleep.’
He arranged himself on the bench, forgetting to say his prayers, and then, poked by Verrall, murmuring and crossing himself piously. Taking off his bowler very carefully, he lay down in peaceful rest with the hat for a pillow. Then sprang bolt upright again: ‘Four in the morning there’s a terrible banging from the floor below and the sick man shouts out, Say! Pull off that other boot! I’ve been waiting for four mortal hours! I can’t sleep till you drop the other one!’ And Verrall, nodding and grimacing at the ripeness of the line, said it at the same time: ‘Drop the other one.’
Even Clover and Bella had heard that one, but they had not heard East tell it, so droll and innocent and misjudged. They laughed so loud a stagehand shushed them.
‘Enough of your nocturnal adventures!’ said Verrall. ‘We’ve been asked to keep it very clean here in Fort Macleod, because this is Refined Vaudeville at its most elegant.’
East had his boots back on and nodded, jumping up with an absurd flurry of his skinny legs, to begin their walk again. ‘Yes, and so I have a biblical query for you, Mr. Verrall: Why can a man never starve in the Great Desert?’
‘I suppose the Great Desert is a place where many a man has starved to death, East.’
‘Ah, you would think so, Mr. Verrall, but no! A man can never starve in the Great Desert, because he can eat the sand which is there.’
‘But what brought the sandwiches there?’
‘Why, Noah sent Ham, and his descendants mustered and bred.’
‘Oh, Mr. East, oh, Mr. East, I fear you tread the boundaries of decency. Bred, indeed!’
‘Man cannot live by breeding alone, you know, Mr. Verrall—much as we might like to,’ said East, with such a roll of his eyes that Clover worried the lady in the front row might have an apoplexy and stop the show.
‘Mr. East, I beg you, beg you—conform to the niceties of polite discourse.’
‘Oh, Mr. Verrall, absolutely. I look up to you as the arbiter of all politesse, noblesse oblige, et ceteratera.’ Then East shouted, with a comic-spasmodic helter-skelter jump of sweet alarm, ‘Drop the other one!’
The Fancy of the Management
The foaming rush of the Soubrettes flooded onstage, baby-doll frills and cross-tied black slippers, their skirts hiked up a good deal farther than Mama would have allowed, Bella thought.
Mama came up after the Soubrettes and stood watching beside Bella; Clover went down to see if Aurora would like to walk back to the hotel to rest before the second show. Bella tho
ught it very sad that Aurora should be so overset by a tiny mistake.
‘They’re graceful enough,’ Mama remarked, as the Soubrettes began Pony, their skittish bare-knee–baring second number.
‘Marry me, carry me, right away with you.
Giddy up, giddy up, giddy up, whoa! My Pony Boy.’
‘And pretty—you can see why they’ve taken the fancy of the Management.’ (By which, Bella knew, Mama meant not Mrs. but Mr. Cleveland.) ‘Those routines are nothing more than ballroom steps. They hardly sing, they certainly don’t act. It’s all costume and knees.’
Poor strange Patience stayed in the back row, watched by Joyful at her side. Mercy was the main singer, but Temperance did a bit to help, with a lisping babyish poetry recitation. She closed her mouth with carefully pursed lips at the end of every line—Bella made a note to herself not to do that. Anything tight or ungenerous became tiresome very quickly, she had noticed.
Exquisite
Aurora told Clover to go away, that she was going to die under this shawl but would be better presently if only she could be alone, so Clover went back up to watch. In a minute the door clicked open again and Aurora twitched the shawl off her head in a violent temper, whispering passionately, ‘Can you not leave me in peace?’ as she whirled around to strike at Clover.
But it was not Clover.
‘I did not intend to disturb you—’ the elegant young man said. He was very well turned out, in a Bohemian suit with a flowing neck-tie.
Aurora turned away, blushing, and found herself staring straight at his drawing of the King of Whiskeys bottle, looking quite friendly and familiar there on the wall. She couldn’t turn to face him. ‘No, I am sorry,’ she said. ‘I thought you were my sister.’
‘I’m Jimmy Battle,’ he said. ‘Jimmy the Bat, they call me. And you’re the Belle Auroras.’
‘Did you see our number?’
‘Nicely done, I thought,’ he said carefully. ‘The way you got out of that little mishap.’
She looked up and saw him smiling in the mirror.
‘I was so stupid,’ she said, without any airs.
‘Happens.’
‘Not to me, never before.’
‘Well, you wasn’t a professional before, then.’
The door opened again, and again it was not Clover. A tall woman flowed into the room on a wind of perfume and glamour. Dark hair clouded around her face, which was broad and open, with dark-hollowed eyes outlined in soot and a short nose above a very wide, mobile mouth. She must be Eleanor Masefield, the actress in the play. She wore something wonderful, a shimmering dark blue travelling costume in dull satin, elaborately cut and trimmed, but playing second fiddle to her magnificent head.
Jimmy the Bat jumped this time, standing almost at attention, some way off from Aurora.
‘Oh, I’m early,’ the apparition breathed, in a smoky whisper. She smelled of flowers.
Aurora tried to vanish back into her corner, but the woman’s head turned gracefully and she fixed Aurora in a charming stare, with a glimmer of a laugh. Of mockery?
‘You were the opener! You have an ex-quisite voice, my dear.’
Aurora found herself standing, and almost curtsying. Bah! She stood straight.
The woman turned from Aurora, dropping her out of the clutch of her attention to find the young man.
‘Jimmy, good—I’ve left my fur wrap in the carriage, and it’s gone back to Bell’s Hotel. Sprint along and get it. It’s cold in here. And give me your arm up those unspeakable stairs. I shouldn’t be down here before the interval, those galloping girls will be back.’
He bowed very slightly, a gentleman even while being a flunky. As he helped with the sweeping skirt’s exit he looked up at Aurora, a difficult expression on his face. Help! it said, and yet, Don’t worry, I’ve got her wound around my thumb! Rueful, and partly apologetic. It made Aurora quite sad to see that lowly apprentice look, but she was still lightly vibrating from Eleanor Masefield’s electric presence. ‘Ex-quisite!’ She must find Clover to tell her.
At the bottom of the stairs, Aurora bowed again to the rickety steps, the bow she should have given at the end of their turn. Strong beginning, strong end, doesn’t matter what happens in the middle, Mama said, and that was right. She looked up, and there was Jimmy the Bat, smiling down at her over the banister. He applauded, hands not quite touching, and threw her an invisible rose before leaping off to do Miss Masefield’s bidding.
Then Aurora had to dash herself, because the tunnel door opened and there was Mrs. C. with her bucket, come to do the dressing-room floor. Aurora hoped she had not seen the bow.
A Broken Spell
They were allowed to find a seat at intermission, if they were out of makeup and costume. Bella was poring over the melodrama script she’d found tucked into the old velvet armchair in the dressing room. She and Clover leafed through it—lines underlined, cryptic notations—before returning to the first page:
IN AN ARTIST’S STUDIO
Scene: An artist’s studio in Bohemia, in the heart of New York City. A model’s throne, Stage Left, heavy draperies behind a chaise longue. A great easel dominates the room, on which stands a full-length portrait of a beautiful raven-haired woman, carrying lilies. The woman of the portrait is caught, as the curtain rises, in the act of securing a diaphanous robe around her waist—had the curtain risen an instant before, her nakedness would have been exposed.
Nakedness! But they had to stop reading, as the lights were lowered and the music began for the Knockabout Ninepins. The Ninepins were just as startling as their audition had been, the fury of Mr. Dent if anything more ferocious than before. Nando, hair standing out like Struwwelpeter’s, was a shock-headed boy-broom whisking around the stage upside down. Mama gave a shriek, with the audience—impossible to believe that he was not being hurt in the act, but after yesterday’s run he’d had no bruises, no scrapes. Bella winced, as he whirled up into the air at the end of that long broom, to see his hands tightening in what looked like terror. But the crowd adored it. They had merely clapped before; now they stamped their feet, and when the beautiful Mrs. Dent rose up unhurt as well, there were cries of relieved admiration from the people sitting nearby.
Soon after the melodrama began, Nando came crashing into the seat beside Bella and filled her and Clover in on the plot: ‘She’s a wealthy society queen—that’s her portrait. He wants her to pose in the altogether, but she won’t do it. A good thing too, though she does keep her figure pretty well hitched in.’
Bella thought Miss Masefield very beautiful. Massive eyes under arching, piteous brows, masses of dark hair heaped behind her head like a Gibson girl. Nando told them she was on loan from the legitimate theatre—like Ethel Barrymore, only older, or Sarah Bernhardt, only younger and not so famous. Another actress deigning to come around the vaudeville circuit with a play. The surprise for Bella and Clover was that the man in the play was Jimmy Battle. They’d thought him a singer, or a dancer, but here was where he had been hiding! He was lovely, Bella thought: wavy dark hair, dark eyes, and a look of sophisticated and desperate loneliness.
The first part was waffle about her broken heart and the young artist’s empty bohemian life—his need for a woman who could teach him to love again, purely. He begged her to cast aside the shackles of society, and yield to him her soul. The words were racy, like those lyrics that Aurora’d sung yesterday, pretending to be chaste in order to be fast.
‘Hey, they cut the bit about him wanting to paint her in a state of nature!’ Nando whispered. ‘But they kept the sheer curtains on her. Need to for the plot, you’ll see.’ Bella clamped her hand on his arm to make him hush. The woman was moving about the room in her trailing draperies, dark and passionate, practically writhing in the throes of some terrible dilemma. Finally she subsided onto a low couch, close to Jimmy.
MRS. FARQUHAR: I must be true or I am nothing, can’t you understand?
Her great eyes stared up at his slim figure, his hand resting negligen
tly on the pillar. Bella wondered if he really did love her; he looked so hurt that she wouldn’t be his own. He was a good dancer, and he liked Aurora, so maybe he didn’t care about Mrs. Farquhar.
MRS. FARQUHAR: I married him—that is sacred.
AUBREY: I understand. You do not love me enough to brave the world’s disdain.
MRS. FARQUHAR: It is not disdain I shrink from, but I would not have you smirched.
AUBREY: Oh, you—darling!
Jimmy raised Eleanor Masefield up, and then drew her near. ‘They’ve cut the kiss,’ Nando said in Bella’s ear. ‘Couldn’t get it across Cleveland. The old girl was in a snit about that, said it’s played the toniest gigs from Boston to Topeka.’ But they nearly kissed, nearly. Jimmy the Bat’s long nose touched the actress’s long nose, and brushed along it until—she turned suddenly away. Her noble profile, the studied grace of her movements, made Bella’s stomach swoop. Eleanor Masefield walked away from Jimmy, holding out a white arm behind her, begging him to stop. She crumpled to her knees, then knelt, back straight, a white flame in a lonely chapel. How does she make herself look so holy all at once, Bella wondered—while busy believing it with all her heart.
MRS. FARQUHAR: I have a sacred duty to my husband, for he was the father of my little son—my son, passed on to heaven at three years old. That hallowed memory keeps me locked in my golden cage.
She smiled, a soft, sad smile, and lifted a serenely grieving face heavenward.
At that Bella’s fascination ended with a cool click in her mind. No. That is not how Mama looks when she talks about Harry.
Bella pulled her arm out of Nando’s and decided not to watch any more. But then there was a tramping sound, and Aubrey and Mrs. Farquhar turned as one towards the door in dramatic attitudes of apprehension and alarm which, now the spell was broken, struck Bella as funny. It was her husband! They sprang apart. He picked up his palette and she clutched her negligee around her once more, and shrank back onto the platform as if to hide behind it—but the artist was a smarty, and moving her arms into place as if she were a statue, he picked up the sheer drapery and flung it over Mrs. Farquhar.
The Little Shadows Page 6
