Men of No Property

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  “Not at the moment,” she said.

  “Will you have supper with me then at Windust’s?”

  “Oh I’d dearly love it,” she said, for Windust’s was the congregating place of writers and artists and theatre people.

  Mr. Valois, or Val as he bade her call him out of the shop, was well acquainted at Windust’s. He would introduce a player to Peg if he stopped at their table, or identify one and another for her as they passed and nodded without stopping. “He’s the heavy man at Burton’s,” he might say, or “She’s the walking lady at the Olympic. Did a commendable Lady Sneerwell last week.” The walking lady was the actress of all parts in a company. Peg could no more than sip at her coffee, nibble at the food on her plate. She thought she would choke if she tried to swallow.

  “Do you always eat so poorly?” Valois murmured.

  “Oh, no,” said Peg. “I have a fine appetite.”

  “Obviously then we shall have to come again to prove it to the management.”

  By the appetites of most of its patrons, Peg thought, Windust’s wasn’t often troubled about wasting food.

  They did go again, and often, sometimes after his taking her to the theatre where, Peg realized, he watched her almost as much as he watched the stage. He knew all the old plays by heart, and the new ones he took apart for her. And at Windust’s, when the players became accustomed to her presence, they would come and sit to talk with Valois, earnestly begging his opinion of their work, seeking to learn how others had played the role. He slit the fat from any pompous one, Peg thought, who came to him for praise instead of criticism, and larded the timid ones, though never with more than their due. He was more than a fancier of the theatre, and the books he loaned her proved it.

  “Do you mind if I ask a question, Val?” she said one night.

  He shrugged. “Please.”

  “”Were you ever on the stage yourself?”

  He pursed his lips for a moment. “In my mother’s womb, yes. I believe I was born during an intermission.”

  Peg looked down at the table. “I didn’t mean to pry.”

  “But of course you did and I’m flattered. Why, when I preach so exquisitely, do I not attempt the practice, so?”

  He was being French and flip again, she thought, touched on something he cared more about than he wanted to admit.

  She nodded. “So.”

  “What shall I play? Myself? I am not so enamored of the character. Do you see me a lover? The Gladiator perhaps, or a fragile Hamlet. To be or not to be. Can’t you hear them howl in the pit if I were to ask that question at, say, the Broadway, and after Mr. Forrest had bullied the moon with it?”

  “Please, Val,” she said, for he had gone quite pale.

  “You wished me to be serious,” he said. “I have not finished being serious. Miss Cushman may play in breeches, but I am resolved that I shall not play in petticoats.”

  Peg felt an aching pain in her throat. It brought the tears to her eyes and she kept them cast down.

  “Margaret?” When she did not look up he slapped his hand on the table. “Oh, God in heaven, what are we into? What folly it was I should have known. We should never have walked out the shop door together. Stop the tears or I shall do something stupid. I cannot brook tears in a woman. I’m helpless. I shall flee from here. Or worse, I shall discharge you.”

  Peg lifted her head. “Mr. Valois, I want to be an actress. That’s why I asked you—what I asked.”

  “Oh,” he said. Gradually the distortion of anger, of fear, of shame, of whatever haunted him left his face. It was, she decided, a beautiful face when it was quiet. He spoiled it again now with a sour smile. “Forgive me, Margaret.”

  “For what?”

  He shrugged. “For what—I thought you wanted. What did Jeremiah tell you about me?”

  “Nothing,” she said.

  “But before he sent you to me for employment?”

  “Less then. All he did was send Vinnie with word and your address.”

  He smiled. “Nothing and less than nothing. No wonder you know so much. He and I were begotten by the same spirits, you know. Both our families were strolling players.”

  “Then you’re not French at all,” Peg exclaimed.

  He laughed. “Sometimes I forget how innocent you are.”

  “Don’t make fun of my ignorance,” said Peg.

  “Your ignorance is as surface as dew.”

  “I was given to understand Mr. Finn has a low opinion of actresses,” she said.

  “He likely acquired it on suspecting your ambitions, but long ago he must have learned that the only cure for them enamored of the theatre is the theatre itself. What a sly fellow he is! Here we are four months discovering his intention. So! Will you go to school to me, Margaret?”

  “You think I’ve the makings then,” she said.

  He shrugged. “A mimic is not an actress. We shall see. Will you attend me?”

  “Oh, dear Lord,” she said. “On my knees, but what’ll I pay you for the privilege?”

  He fingered his fringe of chin whiskers. “Two dollars a week. Is it high?”

  “It’ll pinch,” she said, “but I’ll squeeze. Have you ever taught it before?”

  He laughed heartily. “So you’re asking me for references! Fair it is. Yes, Margaret, I have. For seven years I coached at the Theatre Royal in England as well as playing there. Then, ten years or so ago, I chanced my fortune upon the stage here at home. It was calamitous. This is the country where they worship manliness and wish nothing more of their women than acquiescence. Well, there you have me: Monsieur Valois, born David Valory, a merchant of poisonous sweets to a society pining after decadence before it has achieved a culture.”

  “What will you teach me?” Peg asked after a moment, for she could not altogether understand him.

  “I will teach you to walk,” he said, “and to breathe from where an actor must breathe, and I will rid you of that brogue if I have to cut it out of your throat.”

  “Am I never to play an Irishwoman upon the stage?” said Peg.

  “I hope not. At any rate not until you can play an Englishwoman—if it is proven you can play upon the stage at all.”

  The beginning of her instructions with Valois brought her socializing with him to near an end, and as well, for there were times when she despised him. He could not have driven her harder with a whip than he did with his tongue. It was barbed with mockery, and where she could mimic him, he made a caricature of her for herself to view her own gaucheries. Twice a week she went to his house from eight until eleven at night. She was admitted by a gaunt and withered woman who was neither introduced nor explained to her, and who sat in the room with them like a black ghost, making neither sound nor motion, and who after the first session was forgot entirely.

  Learning from him the spate of authority, Peg drowned Mrs. Riordon in it and obtained a key to the house. All she demanded of her girls, Mrs. Riordon explained to cover her retreat, was respectability. And nothing, Peg knew, was more respectable in her eyes than middle-aged bachelors who owned their own businesses. Three nights a week Peg went to Mr. Finn’s, sometimes not even climbing the stairs, for he gave over his office to her night-time study, and if there were eyes or ears attuned to her solitary practice, they belonged only to a journeying mouse.

  6

  NOTHING SHORT OF HIS death or her prostration, Peg came to believe, would release her from the routine Valois imposed upon her. She must rise a half-hour before her breakfast and exercise in breathing before an open window. If he but knew the smells she breathed in, she wondered, would he still insist upon it? Likely. Such was the concentration he exacted, she must smell a rose in a charnel house if a rose it was she must think of. She must lie on the floor and believe it a silken couch. She must walk with a book on her head and think it a crown. She must sit with her hands like dead birds in her lap and bring her knees to a point like an arrow. She must make sounds like a dove, like a lamb, like an owl. She must laugh like
a brook and call like a shepherd’s pipe. He came to pretend he could tell by the look on her face in the morning had she done her full work of the night. But beyond that inquisitor’s gaze, he scarcely noticed her now at all in the shop. He took on another girl the first of May although business did not warrant it and treated them with precisely the same indifference. Truly he was an extraordinary man.

  “We shall not have our usual session tonight, Margaret,” he said on the following Monday and while the other girl was out to her dinner. “Instead I shall take you to see Macbeth.”

  “Mr. Macready?” said Peg.

  “Certainly not Mr. Forrest.”

  “Oh, I shall love that,” said Peg, “but it’s a wonder you wouldn’t give me warning that I might have a gown in order.”

  Valois grinned like the demon she sometimes thought him to be. “Do you realize that there was a time you would have gone out from here to there in your pinafore?”

  “There was a time,” Peg snapped, “when I had naught to go in but my pinafore.”

  The rivalry between the English Macready and the American Forrest brought more than common interest to the New York stage that night. Forrest had been shabbily treated by the English press on his tour there, and the penny press of New York was set to make amends. If in the comparison of the two performers, their art was discussed at all it was to call attention to the virility, to the particularly American quality of Forrest’s. It was found apt that Forrest should appear at the Broadway Theatre while Macready found his home in Astor Place at the Opera House. Everyone seemed to think it “cracking” fun that they should both program Macbeth that night. The dandies, the gallants, and the best society would sustain Macready while at the Broadway Edwin Forrest would give the democracy a Thane of Cawdor they could hie till midnight.

  Peg was as much aglow as the Opera House itself as she followed the usher down the carpeted aisle. For all her complaint of the morning, her wardrobe was as well in order as her purse gave warrant: she had but the week before finished work on a gown of emerald silk patterned out of the latest Godey’s. She was wearing it first, and over her shoulders a Cornelia of white wool. Well aware she was of the gentlemen’s eyes, and she fancied their wives, if they patronized Mr. Valois, exclaiming in disdain when she passed: “A clerk, a common clerk, my dear!” A clerk, but an uncommon one, she thought, and not a clerk for long.

  Val had booked their seats ten rows from the stage, for in the Opera House the pit was most respectable. Not so the gallery that night as they discovered the moment Macready stepped upon the stage. The Forrest boys were not with Forrest. They set up a din of hissing and catcalling that made a dumb show of the play upon the stage. Peg’s first reaction was heartache for the players. Beside her then, she realized, Valois was trembling. “The curs,” he muttered, “the scum of the streets!” The hissing persisted. “Why don’t they ring down and clear them out?” Val cried aloud. Indeed everyone was talking now. A wave of silence followed. The play recommenced, then the hissing through it and the murmur rising again. Still the players went on until something struck the stage with a splash. A barrage of vegetables followed, and the metal clatter of pennies, the clack of wooden bricks, the thud of potatoes. A stench soon seeped over the gaslights and the women in the front rows hastened from their seats, perfumed handkerchiefs to their noses. Their flight pricked the glee of the mischief-makers. They howled in delight. The great velvet curtain fell and the lights were opened. Mr. Hacket, the manager, came to the footlights. The safety of his company, he said regretfully, required that they not proceed. The gallery rang with a cry of victory while below the respectability sat in awed silence. “Well,” a man near Peg said, “Mr. Forrest seems to have played in two theatres at once tonight.”

  “Then I’m glad we saw no more of him in either,” Val said, rising. Outside the theatre, he asked Peg if she would be offended were he to send her home alone in the carriage as he wished to be amongst those waiting upon Mr. Macready. She too would have liked to wait upon him, but such a duty was too stern for women.

  She found some consolation in carrying the news to the pipits in Mrs. Riordon’s parlor. They sat with their wide pale eyes catching the green of her dress in their glisten.

  “Oh,” cried one, “I’ll wager my Jimmie was there in the gallery!”

  “I remember Mr. Forrest in The Gladiator!” said another, “as long as I live I’ll remember.”

  Gallus, gallus, gallus!

  They were all soon chirruping at once, picking over the tale she had brought them, and the strange thing about it, Peg thought, going up the stairs and not missed from among them, it had not occurred to her once to wish herself amongst the gallery partisans.

  The morning papers were full of the incident, and there was talk of little else upon the street. Valois said nothing although Peg’s eyes begged him for an account of his interview with Macready. What a nuisance this other girl, this Ellen he had hired. Her presence made the merest reference to Peg’s relationship with Val conspiracy. Peg fumed and clattered the trays and slammed the panels until the cases shook; yet he paid her far less attention than he would a fly upon the counter. At ten o’clock he shed his frock, donned his morning coat and left the shop without a word.

  “Margaret,” the girl said, “you shouldn’t bang around like that. You put him in a temper, you do. Here’s a good position and times is hard. I wouldn’t take no more chances if I was you.”

  “Oh, you wouldn’t?” said Peg.

  “No indeed,” said the other, her face more solemn yet. “It wouldn’t surprise me if he went direct out of here to an intelligence office.”

  “Is that where he found you?” said Peg, pretending alarm.

  The little one cocked her head haughtily. “He picked me out of a dozen, he did.”

  “And what qualifications did he ask of you?” said Peg.

  “That I bathe three times a week.”

  “Oh,” said Peg, “and do you?”

  “In parts,” the girl said airily, “if not in parcel.”

  Within five minutes of Ellen’s departure for dinner, Valois returned. “My other bird has flown from the nest, I see.”

  “I pushed her out,” said Peg. “I’d gladly have drowned her this morning. What’s happening?”

  “You’ll be glad of her when you’re ready to fly,” Val said. “Or at least, I shall.” He took a great sheet of paper from his pocket and opened it before her.

  “A Petition to Mr. Macready,” she read aloud.

  “I delivered him a copy of this this morning. You will see his Macbeth after all. He will do it again on the tenth and we shall know who is in the theatre that night.”

  “Oh my God!” Peg cried. She had skipped the message of the petition to the names of its signers. Amongst them was Stephen Vincent Farrell. “I know him!” She pointed to the name. “I know him well.”

  “Do you?” said Val dryly. “And did you go to school to him also?”

  “Only on the boat,” said Peg. “He was disguised as a priest.”

  “I can believe it. How else could a gentleman pass amongst the Irish?”

  Peg flared up. “I’d rather be Irish than gentle, and if all of them capering in here are a sample of gentlefolk, I’ll find no company in their midst.”

  “Be quiet!” Val cried. “Your tongue is as thick as a Pearl Street whore’s. You know what I think of our gentle custom. I prefer the honest whore to them, but God deliver me from the ignorance of the Irish.”

  Fortunately a customer entered the shop at the moment. Both Peg and her master dropped their wrath as though it were the disguise and geniality their disposition. It was late afternoon before they had the chance of words alone again. “You were quite right, Margaret,” he said then. “I have so little pride in my own origins I forget how important they must be to others.”

  “If I was prouder of mine,” said Peg, as honest as himself, “maybe I wouldn’t be so violent in their defense.”

  7


  WORKING MEN

  SHALL

  AMERICANS

  OR

  ENGLISH RULE

  IN THIS CITY?

  The crew of the British steamer have threatened all Americans who shall dare to express their opinions, this night at the

  ENGLISH ARISTOCRATIC OPERA HOUSE!

  We advocate no violence, but a free expression of opinion to all public men

  WORKING MEN! FREEMEN!

  STAND BY YOUR LAWFUL RIGHTS!

  So read placards posted throughout the city on the morning of Macready’s second Macbeth. Peg saw them everywhere as she rode the bus down the Bowery into Chatham Street. And along the waterfront were strewn handbills addressed to the British seamen: “Englishmen, sustain your countryman. Be at the Opera House…” She wondered if she would see any more of Macready this time than the last for all their petitions.

  Valois did not appear that morning, sending round a messenger with the key and instructions for Peg to open the shop. When he came at noon, he wore such an air of importance it would have been amusing even in a person less theatrical than himself. She was beginning to understand him. He might be righteous in his indignation over Macready’s treatment, but he was enjoying the occasion. “I met with Mr. Greeley this morning,” he said, “… you know who Mr. Greeley is?” She knew. Well, she could not blame him truly. He was an artist who belittled his own artistry. He found little welcome no doubt in the company of the men he most admired and was the darling of women he despised. If the politicians were making capital of the occasion, she thought, so was Valois. For her own part she could scarcely wait the night’s excitement.

  In the afternoon when the custom was slowest and the day seemed longest she took the occasion to retire into the comfort room off the kitchen. Valois, in his passion for cleanliness, had installed a great tin tub there, and Peg bucketed herself a bath. She was returning to the shop at her leisure when she heard voices before she reached the swinging door, and one of them made her heart leap. Stephen Farrell was at the counter. She tiptoed to the door and watched and listened unobserved. He looked thinner, she thought, and pale and intense as on the night he had come into the ship’s hold to her rescue.