by Judy Alter
"Not bad, Pearl," I said as I stared at our images. "Not bad at all."
"Oh, Cherokee, what will I say to an Englishman?"
"I don't think they talk much," I said. "You'll have to do all the talking. Tell them about Texas—they'll love it!"
And so we went to high tea. My English adventure was about to begin.
Chapter 12
I don't know what I expected, but high tea was different from anything I had ever dreamed of. Pearl and I went with a group from the show, including the colonel, who had forsaken his usual business suit for a long-jacketed black suit, a starched white shirt with a boiled collar, and a string tie—I accused him of looking like something out of the Wild West fifty years ago, and he admitted sheepishly that he had dressed for show. The members of the band wore their tan uniforms piped with brown velvet, and for just a moment I expected to find Buck in their midst, so familiar was the outfit. But I shook my head to clear it and reminded myself—with regret or relief, 1 wasn't sure—that Buck was on his way to Hollywood. The other cowboys wore clean denims and starched shirts, and every head sported a carefully creased Stetson.
When we arrived at the estate outside London to which we'd been invited, we were shown into a huge ballroom. You could have fit Papa's house into it five times, with room left over. The walls were paneled in a dark wood—mahogany, the colonel whispered when he saw me touch one tentatively—and the big tall windows with curved tops were hung with rich red velvet drapes. The floor was of patterned wood—parquet, the colonel said—with rich rugs on the floor—Oriental, the colonel whispered.
"I know," I whispered back, wishing he would stop treating me as though I'd just come in from the ranch for the first time. Maybe I didn't know mahogany from teak, but I did know about Oriental rugs—Louise had them in her house.
Pearl was not blessed with even my slight familiarity with the richness we were seeing. "Gollee!" she said too loudly. "Would you look at the size of this room!"
I smiled frostily at her, desperately wanting her to lower her voice and yet not wanting to hurt her feelings by saying so directly.
She must have gotten the hint, for her next words were sort of breathed into my ear. "Them curtains are velvet!" she said. "Wow-ee, I never did see so much richness."
"The curtains," I whispered back, "are velvet."
"That's what I meant," she answered, grinning and undaunted by my correction. "The curtains are velvet—and they got no moth holes in them."
I gave up and began to look at the people assembled in the room. Because they spoke English in England, I had supposed that the people would look pretty much like us, only they wouldn't be dressed western. I was wrong—they were dressed funny. The men wore suitcoats as long or longer than that strange one the colonel wore, but where he had a string tie, they wore puffed silk scarves. I saw at least two men with monocles, countless with mustaches and goatees, and several with canes, though as far as I could tell, they all walked perfectly fine without any help. I'd have thought they'd get tired of carrying those canes around.
The women, though, they were dressed as though they were going to a fancy dress ball in New York City—and here it was only late afternoon. Their hair was sleek and shiny and obviously well cared for, making me feel that my casual curls were a little country—and they wore so many strands of pearls that I wondered there was an oyster left in the ocean. Their dresses were of silk and satin, elaborate with beads and lace and trim. But it was the expressions on their faces that most intrigued me—they were clearly amazed by us and uncertain how to react, so they ended up looking snooty.
Fortunately I found out through conversation that they weren't really that way, or at least not all of them.
"How do you do," I said to one woman who looked to be just a little older than me. She was blond and pretty in a kind of fragile way, and she was clutching a stemmed glass of something kind of yellow. "I'm Cherokee Rose," I said in my most pleasant manner.
"Cherokee?" she echoed. "The star of the show?"
"Yes, ma'am, I guess I am."
She held out a welcoming hand. "I'm so glad to meet you. We're all so looking forward to your show. I can't imagine doing all the things you do from the back of a horse."
"Do you ride?" I asked.
"Oh, yes, every day, in the park."
Well, nothing would do but to make arrangements to ride together the next day. Just as we confirmed our plan, Pearl found me.
"Cherokee, you got to see this food. I—I never seen anything like it."
I smiled fleetingly at my new friend—her name was Lady Charlotte MacLeod.
"Try the sherry," she said softly as I made my excuses and turned away.
The food that had so amazed Pearl was far different from cowboy fare, and there were great tables piled high with it—sandwiches that, upon tasting, proved to have cucumber and watercress in them. I knew about watercress because Mama had grown it at home by an old dripping faucet, but hers was never as pungent as this. And there were platters of a pinkish-looking whole fish, which the butler or someone carved into the most delicate thin slices I'd ever seen and sprinkled with small black things.
"Smoked salmon with caviar," the colonel said, sidling up behind me.
I wondered if I dared try it and decided I'd be missing an opportunity if I didn't. I never could figure out which taste came from what, but the whole thing—served on a tiny piece of toast—was salty and tangy and delicious. Pearl took one bite and began to look for some acceptable way to rid herself of it—she finally had to make a beeline for the ladies' room.
A harpist played gentle music in one corner of the room, though she was almost drowned out by the buzz of so many people talking gently among themselves. It wasn't that any one person was loud—far from it—but the cumulative effect was a loud hum.
I drifted through the crowd, avoiding Pearl when I could and then feeling so guilty that I sought her out. But in between times I talked with an aging earl who told me that as a young man he'd spent a year or two in "the American West—fantastic experience, absolutely fantastic. Made a man of me, it did!"
I looked obliquely at him and could not see that he looked like he'd ever benefited from the West as I knew it, but I said nothing and listened attentively as he told me about his experiences on a Texas ranch. Oklahoma, I told him carefully, was just above Texas. I let him interpret above any way he wanted.
I wandered through the room, talking to this person and that—a middle-aged woman whose knowledge of America was so slim that she thought the Sioux still were scalping people right and left, a young man who rather leered as he asked what I did for amusement when I wasn't riding, a young girl of fourteen or fifteen, probably on one of her first social outings, who declared it her everlasting ambition to be as free as I was.
And when she said that, it occurred to me that I was indeed free—not in the sense she understood it, but I was free from Buck. I didn't have to worry who he was talking to, what he thought about my talking to someone else, what he might say when we got back to our rooms. I was deliciously free to be myself, to talk to whomever I wanted whenever I wanted. I had a wonderful time at that high tea.
"If that's food," grumbled one of the cowboys on the way back to London, "I'm a rabbit. Wasn't nothin' there a man could properly introduce to his stomach."
Pearl agreed. "I feel like I haven't eaten. Colonel, are we gonna get supper tonight?"
The colonel agreed that there would be supper at the inn, but when he turned to me, I said, "I filled up on salmon and those little bitty roast beef sandwiches and that nut bread—it was richer than anything my mama ever thought about baking."
By then, Pearl and I were sharing a room, since I'd recovered my health and every way we could cut corners and save pennies was important to the colonel. As we readied ourselves for bed, she said, "Cherokee, you just simply amaze me. I mean, eatin' all that stuff like you enjoyed it."
"I did enjoy it," I said. "Pearl, you're going to have to open
yourself up to new experiences—new people, new tastes, new everything—or you're going to be in England without ever really being here."
She nodded wisely. "Yes, ma'am, Cherokee. You're right. You're soooo right!"
I had no idea how much she understood.
* * *
The next day I rode on the royal bridle path with Lady Charlotte MacLeod. It was an experience, right from the bridle path itself down to my amazing visit with her graciousness, as I kept trying to call her. Finally she said she thought Charlotte would do, if she could call me Cherokee. Feeling like an awkward country bumpkin, I allowed as how that would be fine.
Because I'd already revealed my lack of sophistication, I was hesitant to ask Lady Charlotte—that's what I finally settled on, and later I learned it was correct—who all these people were on the royal bridle path. Were they all royal? I couldn't believe that, for the place was so crowded that I was afraid even Governor, the best-behaved horse I knew, would begin to shy.
And these people rode funny. I knew about English saddles, of course, and how they didn't have the horns, and I knew that the ladies would be riding sidesaddle, the men wearing jodhpurs and high boots. After all, hadn't I once ridden with Mrs. Roosevelt in Washington, D.C.? But I was unprepared for the seriousness with which they rode. When I was riding just to be riding, I kind of loafed along in the saddle, letting Governor go at a good walk and have his head, while I enjoyed the weather or built one fantasy or another in my mind.
Not Lady Charlotte. She rode at a trot the whole time, standing high in her stirrups with almost every step the horse took—posting, they call it in English riding. I greatly admired the amount of exercise she was getting, but going very far at a trot frankly wore me out, and I was hard put to talk while we were riding.
Lady Charlotte had me beat there, too. She kept up a steady conversation, mostly telling me about her life. She had two children who were being raised by a nanny—she visited with them every day for tea. I bit my tongue to keep from asking if that was the only time she saw them, but I gathered it was. Her husband was a barrister—lawyer, I guess—and she usually only saw him on weekends. They went their own separate ways. Since Lady Charlotte had a thick British accent—she probably thought my Oklahoma twang was unlettered—and spoke rather rapidly, I wasn't sure I was getting all that she said, but somehow I got the impression that her husband had a "friend" with whom he spent much time. That made me think of Buck and how he thought perhaps he could have his pie and eat it too—apparently Lord MacLeod did just that, but it didn't seem to bother Lady Charlotte. "We have our own lives," she said.
I nodded as wisely as I could.
After that ride, Lady Charlotte was my friend, and I was always glad to see her at the parties we went to.
* * *
With the show set to premiere before the king and queen in less than three weeks, we were practicing the better part of each day, getting the animals accustomed to a new arena and learning its limitations ourselves. One morning as I arrived for workout, the colonel stood talking to a group of somber-looking Englishmen.
"Don't saddle up yet, Cherokee," he said gruffly.
Puzzled, I went to the stands and sat and watched from a distance. The colonel was obviously angry with these men, gesturing widely as he talked. I couldn't hear what he said, but I could hear his raised voice.
The men, on the other hand, stood calmly, almost without moving, and seemed from a distance to be talking without moving their lips much.
How, I wondered, could two groups react so differently in a disagreement, the group of men so calm and the colonel so impassioned? And what could they be arguing about? Of course that answer should have been obvious to me, and it was the minute the colonel stomped over toward me and said in a loud voice, "The damn humane society!"
It seemed they wanted us to stage a special performance for their inspection or approval, the very idea of which sent the colonel into rigors.
"I think we best do it, Colonel," I said. "They'll see that we do treat the animals well, and it'll be all right. If we refuse, who knows what kind of trouble they might cause?"
In the end that's what we did—put on an entire performance of the Wild West show for a group of five sour-looking Englishmen who never moved a muscle during the entire show except to make notes on the pads they carried. We were left with no idea whether they were damning us with faint praise or outright condemning the entire show—the colonel had made it plain to me that, should they wish, they had the power to ban the show in England. In which case, we would be headed home in disgrace, and the colonel—and the entire 101—would be bankrupt.
They neither damned nor praised. They quibbled about the calf roping, but they applauded, generally, our treatment of our horses and in fact were downright curious about Guthrie's training. Deliberately showing off, I gave them a demonstration of all he could do, hoping that they would be so impressed, they would forget to worry about calves being caught in a loop. For heaven's sake, I wanted to thunder, how else do you catch a calf? In a calmer mood, I sincerely urged them to visit a working ranch in the American West. Meantime, at my most humble, I hoped they would enjoy—and approve—our show.
They did. Just days before the scheduled premiere, we received word that the humane society had approved the show. Now all we had to do was draw the applause of a king.
There is nothing like a royal performance to bring on a case of nerves—especially in the show's producer. The colonel, who had been so kindly lately that it almost made me nervous, went quickly from father figure to tyrant.
"Cherokee, if you don't make that entrance more spectacular, the king's gonna die of boredom! Make that horse step!"
I glared at him and retreated to try the entrance again.
When he picked on Pearl, I'd almost had too much. She was in several of the reenactment scenes, always in minor parts, since she was not a trick rider or roper and, in truth, was only a middling rider of any kind. Her only virtue was that she wasn't afraid of horses.
"Make that horse run for its life!" the colonel shouted. "There're Comanches after you! If you can't ride to save your life, you better ride to save your job in this show!"
Pearl quirted her horse, urging it on to greater speed, but the only effect—for some reason I never did figure out—was to make the horse pull up abruptly and begin to buck. Pearl held on like a trooper, but the colonel was furious.
"Get that horse under control!" he yelled, and I wanted badly to tell him we all knew she'd do that as soon as she could. In truth, Pearl quieted the horse fairly quickly, but when it stood, panting, the colonel yelled so loud, the horse almost offered to buck all over again.
"Get off that horse," he yelled, "and come here!"
From where I stood at the edge of the arena, I wasn't close enough to see that Pearl was shaking with fear and nerves, but instinct told me that was exactly her condition. When she got off the horse, I knew. She managed to dismount all right and ground-rein the horse, but when she started toward the colonel, her legs almost buckled. She caught herself, and I could see her use every ounce of her nerve to straighten. Then, step by slow step, she walked toward him. Those of us standing and hunkering around the edge of the arena held our breath collectively.
I couldn't stand it. As Pearl walked slowly across that long distance to the end of the arena where the colonel had fixed himself a chair, I suddenly ran toward him, beating her there by a second or two.
"Colonel," I said, "go easy on her. She didn't do anything wrong. The horse bucked."
"Can't have a horse buck when it's not supposed to in front of the king," he growled. "Cherokee, you leave me to run this show!"
My temper flared. "You can run it without me if you're going to treat people that way. That's a scared young girl who's doing the best she can—and her best is pretty good. You need to take a deep breath and tell yourself kings and queens are just people like you and me." With that, I turned on my heel and walked away from him.
Pearl, who had heard every word, stood openmouthed behind me. The colonel sat motionless for a moment, too stunned by my anger to say anything, though as I walked away I half expected a dagger in my back. But finally, he looked at Pearl and said wearily, "Go put your horse up. We'll do it again tomorrow." It was as close as he could come to saying he was sorry.
By the time we played for King George V, Queen Mary, and their royal party—Empress Alexandra of Russia, the Princess Royal, and her daughter Princess Maud—we had a better show than we'd ever had before. I couldn't help wondering what Russian royalty thought of the Cossack scene, but they were generous in their applause, so maybe it was all right. The Paul Revere/Betsy Ross scene was still shaky, but the attack on the settlers' cabin would take your breath away. When the Indians attacked, the mother took two young children and escaped through the brush—all right, brushy scenery—while the father and two young sons called for their rifles and fought a desperate battle on the front stoop of the cabin. The mother and youngsters were supposedly in the background but were clearly visible, watching with horror as their menfolk fought off the Indians. In real life, of course, those menfolk were goners, but in our scene they triumphed, and the Indians fled. Whoever said art had to mimic life hadn't seen many Wild West shows!
I had wanted Pearl to ride for me in the act where I roped a rider coming toward me, but she was so unnerved by the colonel's anger that she couldn't do it. One of the new young cowboys rode through my loop, but I didn't rope him afterward and I sure didn't pull him into a loop with me. The romanticism that Buck and I, as a pair, had given the act was gone, but the king wouldn't know what he was missing, and the act was still spectacular in a land where they used ropes only to tie animals to this post or that. I had another of my brief flashes of missing Buck, but it didn't last long.
The only stipulation for the command performance for royalty was that there could be no guns in the show. That hampered us in a few acts—the fighting in the reenactment of Custer's Last Stand had to be all hand-to-hand, but that was no problem, and neither was the attack on the settlers' cabin. I was glad to be rid of the popping of the guns and the acrid smell of smoke from the blanks they fired.
