Mr. American

by George MacDonald Fraser

  'Well, I'm twenty-three,' said Pip seriously. 'Twenty-three, professionally, that is. I'm twenty, really, but I've been in the business five years, and you daren't tell 'em you're just fifteen, you see. Anyway, I've always been plump enough, but I'm small, that's the trouble - you've got to be tall, really, to be a principal - but I make up for it with bounce and bubble - that's what Mr Edwardes used to say.

  Here we are - the Monico. All right, Ginger -'she tapped the driver on the shoulder - 'double or quits.'

  The driver, who was elderly and had no vestige of hair, ginger or otherwise, sighed heavily and glanced at Mr Franklin, who was producing change. Pip snatched a coin from him, spun it and clapped it deftly on her gloved wrist. "Eads,' said the driver hopefully, and she crowed with delight. 'Too bad, Ginge - it's tails. Better luck next time,' and she skipped out onto the stained velvet carpet which covered the Monico pavement, leaving Mr Franklin to present a tip which more than covered the lost fare.

  Within, Monico's was a blaze of crystal and gilt, with a small covey of flunkeys greeting Miss Delys by name, removing her wrap, and bowing obsequiously to Mr Franklin. It was at this point he recalled a name, supplied by Samson, and felt himself obliged to mention it.

  'I'd like to speak to Maurice,' he told the nearest minion, a small Italian who looked puzzled and repeated: 'Morris, sir? Ah - Morr-ees, but of course.' Pip raised a questioning brow.

  'What's that, then? I thought you were a stranger. Never mind, Renzo - table for two on the balcony, for champagne, and a supper-room afterwards.' To Mr Franklin she went on archly: 'How d'you know the head-waiter's name, straight from the backwoods? I can see you'll need an eye kept on you - flowers at the stage door, too. Well, well! You're a dark horse.'

  He explained, as they were conducted to their table by the balcony rail, that the name had been learned accidentally, but Pip was too occupied to listen; she was making her entrance, keeping an eye cocked and a profile turned for theatrical managers, calling and waving brightly to acquaintances, keeping up a running fire of, comment while the champagne was poured, and pausing only to take an appraising sip.

  'Not bad for a tanner a glass,' was her verdict, and Mr Franklin, who had tasted French champagne for the first time on the Mauretania, would not have presumed to argue. Privately, he thought it an overrated drink, but he was content to sip while his companion prattled, and watch the well-dressed throng in the dining room below.

  'Thin house tonight,' was how Pip described it. "Course, it's early yet; there'll be more later.' Mr Franklin remarked that so far as he could see, every table was full, and Pip clicked impatiently.

  'I mean real people, silly celebrities. They're nobodies-' and she dismissed the assembly with an airy wave. 'Let's see, though - there's one or two - see, over there, that dark lady with the pearls, beside the chap with whiskers? Mrs Pat Campbell, that is - you've heard of her. They reckon she's a great actress - in all them grisly plays by Henry Gibson, or whatever his name is. She's got a new play now, at Her Majesty's, but I heard tell it was a stinker. False Gods, I ask you!' Pip rolled her eyes and pronounced in a strangled contralto: ' "Desmond, our ways must part - forevah! Yah touch defiles me!" Honest, that's the sort of thing they put on - well, how can that run against revues and variety and niggers singing in the bioscope?'

  She drained her glass, and twitched at the sleeve of a passing waiter. 'Menus, Dodger - I'm peckish.' She suddenly put her forearms on the table and leaned across towards him, smiling impishly, but with a hint of apology. 'I'm sorry - I'm dead common, aren't I? Chivvying waiters and taxi-drivers, shouting out and making an exhibition of myself. Aren't you ashamed? Sorry you came? But it's the way I'm made - and being in the show business, you see. I'm just a Cockney sparrow - well, you can tell by the accent. And I squint, too.'

  Mr Franklin was spared a gallant denial by the arrival of the menus, imposing documents of several pages in ornate script, most of it in French. Pip seized on hers with satisfaction.

  'Oysters! Say a couple of dozen between us? I love oysters - prob'ly comes of having a father in the fish business.'

  'He keeps a shop?' said Mr Franklin, idly scanning his menu.

  'He had a barrow. Jellied eels and whelks - but you won't know about those, I guess. He's retired now. Rheumatism - and rum, too, if you ask me. Poor old Dad. Here -'she suddenly lowered her menu and regarded him seriously '- you all right for a fiver, are you?'

  'I beg your pardon?'

  'Have you got five quid? - let's see, that's twenty-five dollars, your money. 'Cos that's what this'll cost you, including our private room. Well, we could eat out here, but nobody does who's anybody in the theatre - and then we could get away for three quid, if you're stretched.'

  'If your standing in the theatre is at stake,' said Mr Franklin gravely, 'I think I could manage five pounds without embarrassment.'

  'You're sure?' The pretty face under the blonde tresses was earnest,

  and Mr Franklin found himself liking this girl a great deal. "Cos if you're not - we can go dutch, you know. That's fifty-fifty. Oh, stop grinning like that-' Mr Franklin realised that he had been smiling at her with pure pleasure. 'Just for that, I'll have the consomme, the salmon stuffed with shrimps in champagne sauce - let's see, the veal cutlets, the pheasant-and we'll see about pudding after. That'll take care of your fiver, all right ..'

  Five pounds at the Monico ... ten cents at Yancy's if you hadn't any grub of your own to bring ... eggs at a dollar apiece when the boom was at its height at Tonopah ... the Indian girl baking bread at Hole-in-the-Wall, and Sundance Harry Longbaugh burning his fingers on the crust ... tortillas and flapjacks, and his father frying bacon and corn that morning after the Battle of Shrewsbury on the El Paso road. .. `No beef this trip, son ... "I am a great eater of beef, and I believe it does harm to my wit" ' ... the old man saying grace over the frying-pan . . . salmon and shrimps in champagne sauce . . . that steak and fried onions at the Bella Union, with the tin plate on his knees as he sat on the trunk watching the door, looking over a balcony rail just like this one, but instead of the orderly parties of diners in their evening finery, eating off china and crystal and snowy cloths, with waiters hovering - instead of that, the huge crowded bar-room of the big bonanza time, with bearded, booted miners capering on the tables with the sluts, yelling and sprawling and smashing furniture while the fiddlers on the stage scraped out, `Hurrah, boys, hurrah!' and the long bar was three-deep with drinkers, awash with beer and red-eye, while he finished his steak, touching the hilt of his Remington every so often as his eyes ranged over the inferno of celebration, looking for the Kid and his gang, and old Davis snoring drunk on the bed with his britches round his ankles . . . and he had sat through that thundering, boozing, carousing night on the tin trunk, drinking coffee with his back to the wall, shaking his head at the brown girl with smoky eyes in the red silk dress, and she had tossed her head and spat in disappointment and left him to his determined vigil in the brawling, bawling Bella Union, with a fortune in silver six inches beneath his pants-seat... .

  'You haven't heard a word I've been saying, have you?' Pip was laughing at him across the table. 'Where were you? Renzo wants to know if you want Bordeaux or Burgundy - unless you want to carry on with the bubbly?'

  Of course they continued with the champagne, and as they ate their splendid dinner in the velvet-lined little private cabinet on the second floor, Mr Franklin wondered if it was the working of the wine that made him enjoy himself more and more with each passing minute. No, to be fair, he decided, it was Pip herself; she was merry and animated and full of gossip, about the theatre, and herself, and her eccentric parents and their large family, who appeared to live on laughter and a portion of her earnings, and about London, which was all the world to her, and her ambitions, which consisted simply of being the Queen of Musical Comedy some day, and strutting the boards of the West End, singing the latest rude songs, having hosts of admirers waiting at the stage door, preferably in carriages with crests - and mar
rying one of the richest and most noble of them? wondered Mr Franklin.

  'No,' said Pip, and sighed. 'I'm not the kind they marry. Oh, plenty from the chorus finish up as My Lady - they say half the heirs to the Lords married Gaiety Girls, and it's not far wrong. But I like the theatre, you see -couldn't be happy away from it, and all the noise and chat and fun. I couldn't give that up. Can't see me in a stately home, dishing out tea - not while there's curtains going up and orchestras playing my cue.' She laughed. 'I'm just a shameless, painted hussy of the variety stage - common as dirt and glad of it. You have to be, if you want to get to the top in my trade - look at Marie Lloyd, she's no lady, but she'll be topping the bill until she drops, no matter how fat she gets. Maybe I've got a little of what she's got - not just the voice, and the figure, and the cheek, but - well, you know, it's how you put it over. If I've got it, then I'll go on until I drop, too - and if I haven't, I'll prob'ly finish up married to some sobersides in Ealing, if I'm lucky, with six kids and a couple of maids.' She chuckled happily. 'Sing 'em "Boiled Beef and Carrots" at the church social, too. Meantime, I'm enjoying myself, so who cares? Anyway,' and she stretched a hand across and patted Mr Franklin on the arm, 'I'm fed up talking about me, and you must be, too. What about you, Mr American? You've just sat all evening, very polite and quiet, listening to me gassing on and on and on, and you haven't said a word about little ole New York, or Redskins, or anything.' She pushed her plate aside, put her elbows on the table, cupped her chin in her hands, and smiled eagerly. 'I'm listening.'

  It took him by surprise - but what was even more surprising was that he found himself responding. Later, he was to reflect that in all his life he had hardly ever talked about himself - certainly not to a stranger, and that stranger a woman. Perhaps it was the novelty or, he was prepared to admit, that he was under the spell of that lively beauty hanging on his every word. It did not occur to him that Miss Pip Delys, the professional performer, could be as skilled a listener as she was a prattler. In any event, he found himself talking – about half-remembered Nebraska, and about the time of wandering, with his itinerant schoolmaster father, from one small settlement to another -'I don't even remember their names, just the wall-paper in the rooming-houses where we stayed; one or two of them didn't have wallpaper'- and later, the brief years as ranch-hand, railroad ganger, timber-jack, miner, and transient on the dwindling frontier; it was a fairly bald recital, and far from satisfying Pip's curiosity, which was evidently well-grounded in comic papers and Colonel Cody's Wild West Show.

  'Weren't you ever a cowboy, with them hearth-rug things on your legs? Didn't you have to fight Indians, or rustlers? You must have had a six-gun, surely . . . ?'

  'Yes, I was a cowboy,' he said, smiling. 'Anyway, I worked with cattle - it isn't all that fun. No, I didn't fight Indians, or rustlers - there aren't really many of them about, nowadays. A six-shooter? Yes - mostly for scaring prairie dogs.' There was no point in telling her of that night of waiting at the Bella Union for the Kid and his cronies. But it was in his mind when she asked her next question.

  'Outlaws? Now, why on earth should I know any such people? D'you think America's peopled by bandits and pistoleers? You've been reading dime novels.'

  'Well, you can't say there aren't any!' said Pip indignantly. 'I mean, it didn't get called the Wild West for nothing, did it? Why, I don't suppose we've had an outlaw in England since ... oh, since Robin Hood. I just thought - if you'd been a cowboy -'

  'That I might have been a road agent myself, on the side? Texas Tommy, with pistols stuck in a crimson sash and a big sombrero?'

  This sent her into peals of delight. 'Course not! Though you could look the part, you know - you really could! Specially when you come all over grim and thoughtful - like when you were thinking, faraway, down on the balcony. Made me all goose-pimply.' She shuddered deliciously. 'You might have been planning to rob the stage to Cactus Gulch, or - '

  'You've got a real theatrical imagination, I'll say that for you.' He shook his head. 'If you must know, I've seen outlaws, one or two - and they look pretty much like anyone else, only a bit more in need of a bath. Matter of fact, my old mining partner, Pop Davis - he'd been outside the law in his time, I guess. But you wouldn't have thought much of him-looked just like any old tramp. He was all right, though, Good partner.'

  'But the other ones,' she insisted. 'You said one or two - what were they like?'

  'Oh, just ordinary fellows; nothing very romantic, I'm afraid. And yet - I don't know. You'd have liked Big Ben Kilpatrick, I guess - very tall, good-looking; and Cassidy, too - he must have been the politest brigand that ever was, and quite presentable when shaved. Ever hear of them?' She shook her head, wistfully. 'Well, they're the best I can do for you - and I couldn't claim more than nodding acquaintance. Old Davis and I stayed with them once for a spell, at a place called Hole-in-the-Wall; he'd once been teamed up with one of Kilpatrick's gang -'

  'Hole-in-the-Wall! You're making it up!'

  'That's what it was called. And they called themselves the Wild Bunch, if you like. Not so wild, either; they'd robbed a train or two, I guess, but didn't make much of it. Pretty harmless outlaws, I reckon.' He picked up the menu. 'Most of them. Anyway, what are you going to eat for dessert?'

  'Oh, never mind that! I want to hear about the Bad Bunch - and the ones who weren't pretty harmless!'

  'Well, you're not going to - or you'll wind up with the idea that I'm some sort of crook myself. And I'm not.'

  'No, you're not,' said Pip, dutifully consulting her menu. 'You're a very respectable cowboy, visiting England, wearing silver and diamond cuff-links and studs, and dining in a swish restaurant, as visiting cowboys always do.' She stole a glance at him over the top of the menu. 'I'm real cheeky, aren't I? And it's none of my business, is it? All right, I'll keep quiet.'

  'I doubt it,' said Mr Franklin drily. 'I'd just like you to understand that this dinner is not going to be paid for out of the loot from the ... the Cactus Gulch stage-coach. You're eating the result of a lot of hard, dirty, very ordinary digging in the earth, and an old man's crazy hunch, and a great deal of luck. Now, what - '

  'Ooh!' Her eyes were wide. 'You mean you struck it rich!'

  'Crepes Suzette,' read Mr Franklin. 'Bombe Caligula, whatever that is; Poire Belle Helene; Macedoine a la duchesse - '

  'Mean thing! I just wondered ... right-ho, then, I'll have trifle and a double helping of whipped cream. But you might tell a fellow

  But Mr Franklin felt he had said enough for one evening, and when Pip had worked her way through a mountainous trifle, and coffee was served, their talk returned to normal channels - in other words, the theatre, and the possibility that she might play Dandini in the forthcoming Gaiety pantomime, but then she might find herself replaced at the Folies, and it was a good billet, with excellent prospects, but Dandini would pay at least an extra pound a week ... Mr Franklin smoked a cigar, and nodded attentively, and presently, when the waiter presented the bill, Pip rose and stretched and sauntered in behind the crimson curtain which screened off a small alcove at the back of the supper-room. Mr Franklin paid, and added a handsome tip, and smoked for a few moments more before he began to wonder idly what she was doing. At that moment there came a soft whistle from behind the curtain; he rose, slightly startled, and going across, pulled the curtain aside. There he stopped, stock-still.

  The third principal of the Folies Satire had piled her clothing neatly on a chair, all except her stockings, and was reclining on a large couch which filled most of the alcove, observing herself with approval in a large overhead mirror, and humming softly. She glanced at Mr Franklin, smiled brightly, and asked:

  'Did you bolt the door?'

  'My God,' said Mr Franklin, and then paused. He turned away, put his cigar in an ash-tray, and returned to the alcove, looking down at her.

  'Pip,' he said, 'you don't have to, you know.'

  Pip stopped in the act of smoothing her stockings. 'Course I don't,' she said, and winked at him. 'But
I'd rather. Here,' and she patted the couch beside her, 'come and sit down. You make me feel all girlish, standing there.'

  Mr Franklin frowned. Then, in response to her outstretched hand, he came to the couch and sat down, looking at her steadily.

  'I don't,' he began, and paused before adding: 'I just brought you out to supper, Pip.'

  'No, you didn't,' said Pip. 'I brought you. And it wasn't just for supper, Mr American.' She slipped her arms round his neck and pulled his face down to hers, parting her lips and flickering her tongue at him. 'You don't get off that lightly.' She kissed him, slowly at first, then very deeply and lingeringly before drawing her lips away. 'Are you looking at my damned squint again?'

  A rather dazed Mr Franklin shook his head. 'Good,' murmured Pip, 'now you'd really better go and bolt the door, so we won't have any distractions. I want to enjoy myself.'

  Which she did, so far as Mr. Franklin could judge, for the next twenty minutes, at the end of which time she lay very still, panting moistly into the pillow until she had recovered her breath, when she observed that that was better than working, or standing in the rain.

  'Aren't you glad you bought that bunch of flowers, then?' she added, and Mr Franklin admitted, huskily, that it had been a most fortunate chance. She nodded happily, running her fingers idly up and down his naked back while she studied her reflection overhead.