The Grub-and-Stakers Pinch a Poke

by Charlotte MacLeod

  Positioning the piano had been a tricky business. Osbert was too devoted a husband to make Dittany sit with her back to the audience all evening. However, she had to be out where people could see her. Minerva had sacrificed one of her late Aunt Bessie’s hand-crocheted pillowcases to make those lace-trimmed pantalettes and it would be wicked to hide them.

  After a good deal of shoving and panting, the stage crew had got the piano just right. Everybody could see as much of Dittany as was proper but not too much; since hers was, after all, only a supporting role. Better still, Dittany could see everybody. She didn’t get to move around a lot but had to be onstage throughout the play, so sitting at the piano could otherwise have become a bore.

  She hadn’t expected there’d be any sort of audience tonight. As things turned out, though, she had quite a decent gathering to observe. The stagehands, the makeup and costume teams, the scene painters, the ushers and ticket takers, and even the Girl Guide mistress were all out front, along with miscellaneous spouses and offspring who’d come along to help carry things. The miners and dance hall girls, already in costume, had sat down to watch the first act in comfort since they wouldn’t be going onstage themselves until after the intermission.

  Wilhedra Thorbisher-Freep, wearing all her minks because the old opera house was none too warm this time of year, had joined her father in the front row. Two rows back, directly behind them, sat an even more lavishly minked woman who Dittany had never laid eyes on before. Who could she be, and what was she doing here? Furthermore, what was she looking so cross about? Maybe she was some connection of the Thorbisher-Freeps whom they’d dragged along against her will. Then why wasn’t she sitting with them?

  Halfway through “Home Sweet Home,” Dittany had a better idea. The woman must be a spy from one of the rival companies. Performances were being given according to the order in which entries had been filed. Because Desdemona Portley had taken so long to get her act together, the Traveling Thespians would be the last to perform, and because they’d been pressed for time, they’d had to rehearse instead of attending the other plays. Dessie had sent her husband to scout them all, though. He’d reported that none was anything much to write home about and their competitors were all worried sick over what the Lobelia Falls company was going to come up with. Mr. Portley, of course, was not without prejudice.

  Obviously that woman in the third row was prejudiced, too. She must be looking so sour because she already sensed the Traveling Thespians had the competition in the bag. Her scowl only grew blacker as the rest of the on lookers sat rapt and breathless, absorbing every move, every word, every gesture. Dittany could see a number of the more tender-hearted ones dabbing at their eyes while the deposed feedbag man emptied his pockets of their meager store and delivered his farewell soliloquy to the mournfully attentive Fido before going forth into the night on his ill-starred adventure.

  By the time the SOLD sign had been hung on the piano and the cruel landlady had delivered her ultimatum to the impoverished mother and daughter, there was hardly a dry eye in the house. Even Wilhedra looked a trifle blurred around the mascara. Dittany watched eagerly to see whether she was going to haul out a mink-bordered handkerchief. However, Wilhedra appeared to brighten up when Arethusa yielded at last to the lascivious importunings of Dan McGrew. At that point, Dittany had to put on her cap and mittens and go to the Yukon, so she never did get to find out about the handkerchief.

  The curtain went down in a puff of dust. Osbert made a clever little speech about how well it was going and would all the miners and dance hall girls please go fix their makeup, eh, and get onstage for the second act. Dittany changed to her red hair ribbon, rearranged her curls, and went back to the piano. As the curtain went up again, she was thumping out “Whoa, Emma!” for the miners to roar forth while they pounded their whiskey tumblers on the bar, on the tables, and occasionally on each other’s heads to demonstrate what an uncouth lot they were.

  After that she played a cancan so the dance hall girls could show off their petticoats and black net stockings, then a hoedown so they and the miners could all stamp around together amid raucous laughter and a certain amount of rude horseplay. Then she played a medley of sentimental airs to quiet them down and let them arrange themselves for the dénouement. Finally she swung into “The Maple Leaf Rag.”

  This was the signal for the miner’s entrance. Samantha Burberry’s husband, Joshua, who knew all sorts of scientific tricks, had contrived a wonderful howling gust of wind to herald the stranger’s arrival. Joshua had also powdered him with some stuff that looked for all the world like snow but would conveniently disappear without leaving a mess on the stage for somebody to slip in while he tilted his poke of dust on the bar and called for drinks for the house.

  The bartender began setting them up. Dan McGrew went on playing solitaire. Standing behind him, the lady now known as Lou eyed the newcomer with an artistic mixture of perturbation and puzzlement. He’d changed a lot from his feedbag days, of course. As the miner watered the green stuff in his glass and the drops fell one by one, Dittany tripped over to the bar, corkscrew curls aswing, and lisped her request for a tharthaparilla. This move left the piano stool free for the miner to take her place, which he stumblingly did.

  And now his fingers flew over the keys. The tape recording tugged at the listeners’ heartstrings. The miners were plainly thinking of home and mother, the dance hall girls of a cleaner, purer time when they’d been somebody’s daughters.

  Now that he’d got them properly spellbound, the forspent wreck who’d once been a rising young feedbag man staggered to his feet and began to speak, fumbling in his dirt-glazed poke as he did so. At last, his voice rising in a passion of hatred, he hauled out his six-shooter and delivered his final words:

  “One of you is a hound of hell, eh, and that one is—”

  “Carolus Bledsoe!”

  It was the woman in mink, on her feet, her face contorted in rage and hatred. As she shrieked out the name, her arm flew up. Something smallish and round hurtled straight at the object of her loathing. Carolus Bledsoe recoiled slightly from the impact, put up a hand to his unkempt crepe beard, and drew it away tinged with sickly pink.

  “He’s bleeding!” cried Arethusa.

  “He’s anemic,” snarled Andrew McNaster.

  “You can’t get a decent ripe tomato this time of year for love nor money.” Even in a bright red skirt and three flounced petticoats, Hazel Munson was keeping her usual firm grasp on the facts.

  Bill Coskoff leaned across the bar, waving the bar cloths he’d been holding ready to spread over the two anticipated casualties. “Wow!” he shouted, forgetting he wasn’t supposed to have any lines. “Right on the button. It’s a walk.” Bill was a Blue Jays fan.

  There weren’t many left in the audience now that the miners and dance halls girls were all onstage. Those left, notably Wilhedra and Jenson Thorbisher-Freep, were crowding forward with exclamations of surprise and concern. Dittany was the only one of the lot keeping her eyes on the woman who’d thrown the tomato, hence the only one who saw her sweep her minks about her with a smirk of self-satisfaction and scoot from the theater under cover of the confusion.

  There was no sense trying to stop her. Anyway, Dittany was on her side. She was pretty sure who the woman was, and so was Carolus Bledsoe.

  “My ex-wife’s idea of a joke, no doubt,” he explained. “She has a deadly aim. Sorry everyone. Shall we take it again from where I speak that last line?”

  “We’ll need another bar cloth,” said Hazel. “I used one of Bill’s to wipe up the tomato. It didn’t splash much. They’re hard as bullets this time of year.”

  “As I know to my sorrow.” Carolus Bledsoe gave the company a rueful smile through his seed-strewn beard. “You could use my bandana.”

  “That’s okay,” said Bill Coskoff, “I brought an extra, just in case.”

  So the show went on, though there wasn’t much left to go. After the pyrotechnics of a moment ago, the ac
tual shooting lost a little bit of its impact, but they got through with no further hitch and everybody assured everybody else that it would be all right on the night.

  There was no earthly reason why it shouldn’t be, provided the former Mrs. Bledsoe could be prevented from bringing in another tomato. Nevertheless, everybody in the cast, along with everybody else from the director to the youngest lemonade peddler, was affected with a certain unease the following morning.

  “Something else will go wrong, I can feel it in my bones. There is a dark fatality which pursues me.”

  That was Arethusa Monk, speaking rather indistinctly because she was eating the last molasses cookie. Dittany wished, considering how little they’d had of Arethusa’s company at the table lately, that she could have held off for another twenty-four hours and kept her forebodings to herself.

  “That dark fatality is obesity,” said her nephew with some heat. He’d been all set to eat that last cookie himself, although he’d planned to offer Dittany a bite, for his was a love that was greater than love. “One of these days all that free food you’ve been wolfing off us will go straight to your hips and you’ll blow up like a hot air balloon. You know what happened to Aunt Obelia.”

  Arethusa licked her fingers in defiance. “Figo for Aunt Obelia. Figo for you, too. Speaking of which, Dittany, what happened to all those Fig Newtons you used to keep around the house?”

  “Osbert doesn’t care much for Fig Newtons.”

  “And prithee is Osbert the only star in your firmament?”

  “Need you ask? I don’t go in for polymorphism like some people I could mention.”

  Arethusa’s jetty eyebrows went up. “Are you quite sure you mean polymorphism?”

  “Certainly. I mean those three morphs you’ve had fluttering around your flame for the past month. Have you decided yet which one’s whiskers you’re going to singe?”

  “I see my scurvy nephew has infected you with what he is pleased to call his sense of humor,” Miss Monk replied coldly. “What a pity there isn’t a vaccine against him. Ecod, is that Jenson Thorbisher-Freep’s car I just saw turning in your driveway?”

  Osbert sneered. “Just can’t keep the morphs from swarming, eh? What the blazing heck would old Jense be doing here?”

  It was in fact Jenson Thorbisher-Freep and what he was doing, they soon discovered, was dithering. “Arethusa—Osbert—Dittany. My dears, you must prepare yourselves.”

  “We’re prepared,” Dittany assured him. “Even Arethusa was a Girl Guide once, though she still can’t tie a square knot. What’s happened?”

  “The opera house has been bombed.”

  “What? When? How?”

  Which of them said which is immaterial; their desire for the facts was unanimous. Jenson held up a hand that had probably never done a day’s work in its life.

  “Let me explain. When I said bombed, I didn’t mean bombed. Not in terms of an explosive or incendiary device, that is to say. What took place was more in the nature of an olfactory bombing.”

  Arethusa’s dark eyes turned vast pools of wonderment. “Olfactory, Jenson?”

  “He means a stink bomb,” Dittany told her impatiently, “and he’s too refined to say so. Right, Jenson?”

  “Well, yes,” he admitted. “Since you put it that way, I—well, yes. It’s quite dreadful, I assure you. Rather as if someone had stampeded a herd of skunks down the center aisle, if I may be permitted so rude a simile.”

  “Have you opened the windows?” Osbert asked him.

  “Oh, yes. That is to say, I had the fire brigade put on their gas masks and go in to do what they could as soon as I discovered the dreadful situation. They hold out no hope that the building will be usable this evening. Or any evening in the foreseeable future,” he added despairingly.

  “Then what are we to do, egad?” cried Arethusa.

  “I can only see two alternatives, dear lady. One is for the Traveling Thespians to cancel tonight’s performance, which I’m afraid means they’d forfeit their place in the competition. The other would be to rise to the occasion and find another space in which to perform.”

  “Where, for instance?”

  “Aye, there’s the rub. There’s nothing available in Scottsbeck, I’m afraid. I took the liberty of making some inquiries before coming to you, though in doing so I may have overstepped the bounds a trifle. Under the circumstances I trust I may be forgiven, and I trust you won’t bruit it about that I did so.”

  “Heck, no,” said Osbert. “Did you happen to inquire about the Scottsbeck High School gymnasium?”

  “That was my first and almost only hope. By an unhappy coincidence the school is playing a home game there tonight with Lobelia Falls.”

  “Then that means our gym’s free.” Dittany was already reaching for her cap and mittens. “I’ll go talk to Desdemona Portley.”

  “Excuse me,” said Thorbisher-Freep, “but wouldn’t it be advisable to check with the school principal first?”

  “Nope, I’m going straight to the top. The principal’s Dessie’s husband, he wouldn’t dare say no to her. Darn good thing Minerva took all our costumes home last night. What about the scenery, eh? Can we get it out of the opera house?”

  “The firemen seem to be of the opinion that you wouldn’t want to. Can you possibly make do without it?”

  “No problem. The Traveling Thespians always used to perform in the gym, so a lot of their old scenery’s still stored in the basement. We’re bound to find something we can cobble together.”

  “Then you truly believe you can rise to the occasion?”

  “Rising to occasions is what we do best in Lobelia Falls. Osbert, you’d better phone the radio stations right away and get them to announce the change, then start rounding up the troops. Get Ellie Despard to make a big poster for the front of the opera house, and have somebody run it over there. Tell them not to forget the thumbtacks. Oh, and alert Sergeant MacVicar to be sure and come tonight so he can keep an eye out for that nutty wife of Ch—I mean Carolus Bledsoe’s.”

  “And what shall I do?” said Jenson Thorbisher-Freep.

  “Why don’t you take Arethusa out for a ride and buy her a nice lunch somewhere to calm her nerves? Think you can handle that?”

  “She and I will handle it together,” Jenson replied gallantly. “Until this evening, then.”

  Dittany didn’t hear him. She was already out the door.

  Chapter 7

  HAVING TO MAKE SUCH a drastic last-minute change turned out to be a blessing in disguise. Nobody had time to work up a serious case of stage fright because everybody was too busy doing what needed to be done.

  Principal Portley had not only said yes to the gym but helped the stagehands put away the tumbling mats and set up the chairs. Luckily, Minerva had indeed taken all the costumes home for a final pressing after the dress rehearsal, so they were fresh and ready for use, or would be once the pressing crew finished their tea and got on with the job. The infallible Roger Munson, in charge of props, had tested the opera house locks and found them wanting; so he and the stagehands had lugged everything stealable back to the safe haven of the Munson garage, whence it was easily lugged over to the gym.

  The piano could have been a sticker, but Roger solved that one by causing Miss Pickley’s ancient instrument to be moved down from the kindergarten. Dittany knew that piano well; she’d made her public debut as a musician by playing “I know a little pussy, his coat is silver gray” on it when she was five.

  The school basement had yielded up a few scroungy old flats. With hasty repainting and some changing of props these could be converted to a basic set that would serve well enough for both acts. While the scene painters labored, a squad of dance hall girls stood beside them with hair dryers set on high to make sure nobody was going to back into wet paint during the performance.

  Osbert was everywhere except the one place he’d intended to be. His agent and the big theatrical producer were due into the airport at half past three, but th
ere was no way he could go to pick them up when his very play was at stake. Andrew McNaster, of all people, volunteered as fairy godfather.

  “Say, eh, how about if I send my head clerk over to the airport in the limousine? Lemuel can bring them here to the inn and get them settled in the Premiere Suite free of charge. That way Dittany won’t have to change the pillowcases at your place. My housekeeper can have tea and little bitty sandwiches and some what you’d call liquid refreshment ready for them when they come. She knows all that V.I.P. stuff. They can rest their feet awhile, go down to the restaurant when they get hungry and have a steak or whatever they want on the house, then Lemuel or somebody will chauffeur them over here in time for the show. I’d go myself, only I expect likely you want me to hang around here so’s I can be on hand to jump if there’s any villainy you want perpetrated.”

  “You’re no villain, Andy, you’re an angel.” That was the last thing on earth Dittany had ever thought to hear herself saying, but it was the least she could say in the circumstances.

  They did need Andy and all the rest of the cast to walk through the entire play one more time because the gym stage was about half the size of the one they’d rehearsed on last night. The first act, which didn’t have a great deal of moving around in it, worked all right except for Ethel.

  “Too bad she’s not a Pekingese,” Osbert lamented. “You’ll just have to scrooch up as much as you can, old pard, and try not to wag your tail.” He gave her an encouraging pat and called places for act two.

  Right off the bat, it was obvious that Ethel would have to sit this one out and come on again only to take her curtain call, for which she was going to wear Dittany’s blue hair ribbon as a symbolic gesture. There were greater dilemmas to be dealt with. They could crowd all the miners around the bar, but the tables and chairs would have to go. They could manage the cancan by having the dance hall girls come right up to the front of the stage and kick out over the footlights. However, there was no way to stage the hoedown without risking a massive pileup over the footlights and down on the basketball court.