The Little Shadows

by Marina Endicott

  ‘I respect her fervour. Since my father died she has had no outlet for her energies; no way now to return to Paris, with the war.’

  That word hung in the frozen air like the moon, Clover thought. Distant, constant, overlooking, undeniable. Victor did not pause at it, but continued his account of Galichen selling a carpet to the widow whose son he had cured, by hypnosis, of a terrible opium addiction. ‘He is one of the great storytellers. That is half—three-quarters of his mystery. He travelled the east as we vaudevillians tour, performing, gathering tales, working with yogis. He swears there is no truth to the rumour that he was once a secret agent of the Russian Tsar—and the Scales are definitely not secret semaphore code.’

  ‘The scales?’

  He stopped in his tracks and laughed. ‘Wait, I will show you. Sometimes his followers are not allowed to speak, but must communicate only by physical movements he has taught them—his sense of humour is so strange that I do not know what this means. It might be nonsensical gyration—or a powerful gathering and expending of energy. The movements, which he calls directions of intent, are arranged in scales, sequences as permutable as the layouts of Tarot cards.’ He took off his overcoat, threw it to a bank of snow, and struck a twisted attitude, staring and reaching backwards with his arm across his face. ‘The numbers go up on a notice board in the garden hall of the London house: Eleven to three!’ he cried, and drew his right arm from behind him as if it wanted to go through his body, then slipping it round and out in front, stretching heavenward and to the right. ‘Three to one, one to eight!’ The arm described a wide circle over his head, flung down and back, then reached out yearningly to the middle left as if begging a coin from a passing king. She had seen him doing movements like these before, alone on the empty stage after the band call. ‘All the community comes pouring out into the garden in the yellow-green light of spring to convey unearthly concepts. Is he at an upstairs window, laughing at his foolish followers? But the movements feel wonderful. Eight to four, four to twelve, twelve to seven!’ he continued, reaching to different points, like da Vinci’s drawing in her father’s book, a trebled man inside a globe.

  ‘But is it a code?’ Clover demanded. ‘What are you saying now?’

  ‘I am attracted to you, as to a vast electromagnet!’ Victor answered as he swept through the compass. ‘You are the light and warmth upon which life depends, the glow of the ray of creation—in the magnetic economy of the universe nothing is lost, ten to six, and the energy that entwines us, six to eleven, having finished its work on this plane, will go to another—and eleven to three!’

  The scale complete, Victor pulled her down onto the overcoat which he had flung on the bank, sinking them into the drift as into a feather bed.

  He pointed up. ‘Man cannot tear free from the moon, Galichen says. All our movements and actions are controlled by her. If one kills a man, the moon does it. If one sacrifices himself for others, the moon does that also. All evil deeds, all crimes, all heroic exploits, all the actions of an ordinary life, are due to the influence of the moon on our minds and hearts.’

  She stared at the monstrous moon and then at Victor’s face.

  He caught her eyes and stopped playing the lunatic. ‘So says Galichen, and I love him for his madness, but it is not true. You are the moon for me, Clover.’

  They turned together in the warmth of his coat, as if true magnets were pulling them—no need to be apart. No outdated falseness, no propriety could keep them from each other. No buttons, no belts, no cold, no hollow, wall-eyed moon could slow their snowy marriage.

  A Pair of Scissors

  Across the fields, upstairs in Mrs. Ardmore’s boarding house, Aurora lay in a trapezoid of moonlight, half awake. Mama and Bella had stayed to play cards with East and the others, but she had found herself unaccountably sleepy, and had slipped away. She ached underneath, as if from riding, and she did not know why. She held herself cupped in her hand, unable not to, needing comfort or company, somehow, in this new loneliness.

  Clover was out walking with Victor, in the snow, but that was all right. Although Aurora could not imagine loving the Eccentric herself, he and Clover were as well matched as fireplace dogs, or the two halves of a pair of scissors. Neither useful without the other, it seemed, now that they had found each other.

  No need to weep, Aurora told herself. But she had time before the others came up to bed, so she did.

  A Drop Too Much

  A few days later, with East and Verrall but without Victor, they disembarked at the train station in Swift Current. A hilly place, pretty in the noonday sun. Motes of snow fell through still air. Clover was relieved to be out of the train and felt somehow freed by the height of the cloud-straddled blue sky, clouds like cotton batten pulled thin.

  The Lyric had a woman in charge. Calm, barrel-bodied, Lyddie ran the place with an iron thumb strong upon the neck of all; she had even rented out the basement of the theatre for the drilling and training of soldiers, so there was a martial stir about the place. Lyddie slapped East’s shoulder and gave Verrall an arm, and put them all straight to work. Her stagehands were well trained, and everybody involved in The Casting Couch relaxed, knowing it would go well that night.

  It was a good house, too, the people of Swift Current being starved for entertainment with only two theatres open. At the end of the play, when the cast stood together to bow, the audience looked to Clover, peeking from the wings, like people who have been to an unexpected feast. Pleased and full, grateful to the cooks. That is what we are, she thought.

  But Mrs. O’Hara’s boarding house, booked on Julius’s recommendation, was appalling.

  The woman herself was fully drunk. They had been late arriving, it was true, past ten-thirty, and nobody would blame a poor woman for taking a drop in the evening, but Mrs. O’Hara opened the door in her nightgown, pulling a dirty plaid shawl around her, far gone in drink, reeking of sweat and homebrew. Her burnt-red hair was slipping down at the back and sides. She bunched it up and solemnly, stupidly, fixed a pin in it again. After thus repairing her hair, Mrs. O’Hara pulled herself up the stairs ahead of Mama by hauling on the handrail. She threw open the door of a double room with pride, wincing at the slam as the door met the wall behind.

  Mama put out an arm to stop the girls, bidding them stay in the hall, and moved into the room, a squalid chamber with bare dirty windows and a sagging bed, ill-covered by a torn quilt. She pointed, and twitched one end of the covering, to reveal the bed-legs standing in rusted tin cans. She sniffed for kerosene.

  ‘empty, but you know what they are there for,’ Mama said quietly.

  The landlady leaned against the wall, seemingly dizzy. Mama went to the head of the bed and turned back the bedclothes—and something, many things, moved on the unsheeted mattress. Nothing matches the scuttle of a bug, Clover thought. Prickles moved up and down her arms.

  ‘Bedding?’ Mama asked, speaking sharply, to wake the woman from her stupor.

  ‘I’ll get sh-sheets,’ the woman said. She coughed phlegm into a filthy hankie. ‘Water jug, my son’s supposed—but—he’s away—’

  ‘It’s a wonder to me that you have not been closed down,’ Mama said.

  The woman laughed, ‘Nobody minds my housekeeping when they’ve et my cooking! I’m the best cook in the province of Saskatchewan, and damn anyone who doubts it.’

  ‘Enough!’ Mama said, with a chilling absence of emotion. ‘Never receive a guest when drunk again. You’ve lost the custom of many more than us by this disgraceful room—we represent the vast part of your clientele, and you’ll find vaudevillians stick together.’

  Pushing the girls before her, Mama marched down the stairs and out.

  ‘My son has gone for a soldier,’ Mrs. O’Hara said from the top of the stairs. ‘And if I’ve took a drop too much that’s the cause of it.’

  Clover looked back up the flight to where the woman lolled against the banister rail.

  ‘I didn’t raise my boy to be a soldier!’
Mrs. O’Hara fumbled with her shawl, heavy with the drink, almost fell and then stood upright again. ‘I’ll fight anyone who says I did!’

  They went down the front steps and out into the street, a small phalanx with no bed for the night.

  ‘You can’t have your deposit back,’ Mrs. O’Hara shouted after them.

  Since they had paid none, they were not worried about that.

  Above the Lyric

  Arriving so late, they perplexed the prim hotel clerk at the Alexandra, a block from the Lyric, who was reluctant to admit he had a room available and made all kinds of difficulties. Aurora was reminded strongly of Verrall in the hotel sketch—then realized with a laugh (as East and Verrall sauntered in the door from the beer parlour) that of course the performance must be based on this very man.

  East and Verrall gave them bona fides, and winked and worried the clerk into finding them a room with two beds—on the shady side, so the morning would not strike too harshly in their eyes, as Verrall put it, with a flowery bow that clearly impressed the clerk. When Aurora explained that they had come away from Mrs. O’Hara’s, East shouted, ‘No, not there! What were you thinking?’

  The desk clerk, succumbing to East’s personality, or to Verrall’s kindness, swivelled the register around to Mama, took a pen out of a glass of buckshot, dipped it in the inkwell and handed it to her.

  Verrall took Aurora aside for a conference: he and East were not staying in the hotel, but were putting up in the small apartments above the Lyric—‘Shall I ask Lyddie to fit you in there too?’ Aurora snatched at this intervention. The next day, after a quick tour of the suite Lyddie had to let—four small rooms opening off each other, an ingenious arrangement whereby one large skylight served to light all the rooms—Aurora closed with the offer.

  The Love Magician

  East & Verrall had a new bit, twenty minutes all on love. Bella was featured in the middle sketch, but their act opened with East alone onstage, as a Love Magician in a vast flashy turban. He called out to the audience for a volunteer, in a ludicrous accent intended to portray the mysterious Hindu: ‘I must have a man with the physique of Hercules, the courage of Napoleon—above all, with what we might delicately call It.’

  At that, Verrall slid out of his seat and came down the aisle, slumped into a scrawny slope.

  ‘Sir, did you not hear the particular criteria?’ East demanded, turban bobbing. ‘I am looking for someone with It.’

  ‘Oh!’ said Verrall. ‘I thought you said If.’

  Backstage, Bella laughed at that every time, a corner of curtain-leg over her mouth to muffle it.

  East read Verrall’s mind, retrieving from concealment in the turban a miner’s reflector and a magnifying glass, and peering in Verrall’s ear. ‘Ahhh! Down here … down this very dark tunnel, I begin to see …’

  ‘What, what?’ Verrall asked, agog.

  ‘No. I was wrong. Nothing there at all.’ He tapped with a small hammer on Verrall’s head. The orchestra timpanist made a lovely knock on the wooden block.

  East promised to conjure up a wife for Verrall, but all his magic failed, as lovely visions (Bella, popping up from behind a screen in a succession of hats) appeared, took one look at Verrall, and vanished again in small puffs of smoke (which East continually begged the stagehand to make very small, since smoke-powder was expensive).

  Finally the magician tore off his turban and stomped on it. ‘By jinks, I’ll have to marry you myself!’

  After a musical interlude they were back, in their usual bowlers, criss-crossing the stage with their loping lallygagging stride—Verrall saying sadly, ‘If it weren’t for pickpockets, I’d have no love life at all.’

  East suggested that Verrall send for a mail-order bride.

  ‘I tried that once,’ Verrall confessed. ‘Put an ad in the classifieds: Wife Wanted. Next day I had a hundred replies! Each one said, You can have mine.’

  Pa-dum-cha! from the timpanist.

  ‘I’m a married man myself,’ East said, passing again. ‘People ask the secret of our long marriage, and it is simply this: we take time to go to a restaurant every week. A little candlelight dinner, soft music, dancing … Mmm.’ He stared dreamily into the middle distance.

  ‘And does it work, Mr. East?’

  ‘Works like a charm. She goes Thursdays, I go Fridays.’

  Another cymbal.

  Bella turned up in the second half of their act, in a very short skirt (now that they were wearing the brief butterfly skirts, nothing seemed too short, even to Mama) with a very large bow tying up her ruffly hair. She and East became instant pals, and he recruited her as a possible mate for his pal Verrall.

  ‘Not for me,’ he promised her. ‘No no no no. I’ve got a wife, who is worth her weight in gold.’

  He took out a photo to show Bella, who exclaimed, ‘Oh my, I didn’t think there was that much money in the world!’ He nodded, proudly, then did a lovely double-take. Some nights he made it a triple-take—Verrall kept challenging him to try a quadruple.

  Bella changed clothes almost without ceasing, but she enjoyed that, with always the laughable risk of going on in the wrong costume. Lucky the wings came first, she thought, and Clover now helped her to lay out her quick changes, since the night she’d missed one change and had been scolded by East and docked fifty cents of her pay—still one silver dollar per performance. They ought to address that ridiculous deal, Aurora had said, but it was only through East and Verrall that they’d got this gig at all.

  Pie

  In the street in front of the Lyric that evening, as they set off to the late-opening café for supper after the second show, a small crowd had gathered. The usual bold young men wanting to speak to East, shy ones sending furtive glances to the girls. A woman detached herself from the group and rushed forward to Aurora, who felt Clover move closer to protect her.

  It was Mrs. O’Hara, from the filthy boarding house.

  ‘Oh miss,’ she cried, drunk again, but not as far gone as before. ‘I wanted to tell you how good you was. I’m ashamed of how you saw me the other night and I—you made me cry so, that song.’

  Verrall, leaving East to the young men, tried to motion Mrs. O’Hara away. He waved to the seven-foot-tall policeman strolling the sidewalk across the street.

  ‘No, Mr. Verrall, it’s all right,’ Aurora said.

  ‘My own boy, gone to the war already,’ Mrs. O’Hara said. ‘Not old enough to let him go. I live in fear, miss, and I can’t bear, but needs must, you know, needs must, needs must, and there was no work here for him to—’ She cracked into ugly weeping.

  ‘You must be proud of your son for serving his King and country,’ Aurora suggested. Clover took Mrs. O’Hara’s arm and gave her a hanky.

  The tall policeman had arrived; he bent to listen.

  ‘He was a gentle boy,’ Mrs. O’Hara said. ‘He could not smack a fly, you know.’

  Bella patted her other arm. ‘Well, but he is going to defend poor little Belgium,’ Aurora said.

  ‘I’ve seen the last of him, I tell myself. I know it to be true. He always liked my pie.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Aurora. ‘You told us you were a good cook, I remember.’

  ‘So I am,’ the woman said, and she turned away, hiccuping, and reeled up the street into the darkness, unquestioned by the giant policeman, who crossed the street again slowly on long stilt legs.

  ‘You belong in vaudeville, you know,’ East called after him.

  They turned away to the lit windows of the Modern Restaurant.

  All the rest of their time at the Lyric, a pie arrived for Aurora every afternoon.

  Dummy

  Their next stop, Regina, was a wasteland of snow. The day they arrived a blizzard came in behind them, and no sooner had they established themselves in Mrs. Mead’s, the boarding house where East and Verrall always stayed, than the world went white.

  When the storm finally let up they rushed to band call through fresh-sugared streets, in air so still and cold th
eir nostrils froze together. Wish as Flora might to run, her legs would not obey. Bella’s gloveless fingers were beet-red with cold when they arrived, and Flora took her hands between her own to warm them—only just stopping herself from thrusting Bella’s hands into her bodice, as she used to do when the girls were very small.

  The Regina bill was sharps and flats, East had said. The Belle Auroras were preceded by a terrible act, Scintillating Songsters: two small bald men with wheedling smiles, a bull-shaped woman swaying between them, in rousing roundelays of slightly-off songs like Mrs. Binns’s Twins in English accents. After them, it was a haul to retrieve whatever audience was already there. Stragglers, coming in as the girls began, were easier to catch.

  East and Verrall were headlining at the Regina Theatre, but did not put on airs about it. They always behaved the same, whatever their position. The bill was filled out by a semi-amateur blackface troupe, Hubert’s Loop-de-Loop. Eight slender young men, who ought to have had better things to do than sing college songs with shoe polish on their faces, Flora said, aside, to East.

  ‘Once conscription starts up,’ East said, ‘they’ll be gone. Make the most of ’em, ladies.’

  The Butterfly number went over big, with those long fluttering wings, which Bella and Clover made fan and flicker in the footlights. In the cold backstage Flora confided to Aurora her worry that the costumes might edge over the line into tawdry: ‘And the more high-toned an act, the better the pay, it has to be faced.’ The butterfly idea was pure art—but seeing Clover’s goose-pimpled arms and bluish bare legs, Flora imagined light-floating skirts (and perhaps pale green leather slippers?) when they finally reached Winnipeg and had some money to work with. The loss of that money in Mayhew’s bank had bruised her deep in her soul, leaving a dank sense of foreboding, and along with everything else it made her feel very low.