Chapter Three
Singing on a train was no different from singing in the bath, it took faith in one’s talents, even as it gave an entirely wrong idea of them.
The Lord gave talent, rehearsal preserved it.
One might be able to not eat for a day and live, not drink for a day and survive, but only two things were invariably fatal: not breathing for an hour, and not rehearsing for a day.
An actor who didn’t know his lines was like a peacock who’d lost all his feathers—a queer bird that wasn’t good to look at, not good to hear, and not even better off dead, since he was too tough to eat and too big to bury fast. Kyle was full of adages like that, and those he didn’t know, he made up when the need arose, which was every five minutes, or so it seemed to his newfound troupe.
He made them work all the way from New York to their destination in the West as much as he’d made them work back in New York.
Since they hadn’t had much time to rehearse before they’d left, they didn’t object.
Nor did they mind the myriad scripts and musical scores they were handed to look over, they were professionals, after all.
But when they fell to looking out the train windows and seeing the rapidly changing scenery: the sudden dearth of houses, the increasingly empty vistas, the landscapes that weren’t enlivened by human hand or eye—that was when they resented his urging them to work.
Because that was when they wanted the time to fret and brood.
“I never saw so much nuttin’ in my life,” Lottie sighed as she gazed out the window at the deepening dusk.
“ ‘Nothing,’ ” Hannah corrected her absently, as she matched her sigh.
“Oh no! My books say there are many jackrabbits, elk, and antelope on the high plains, as well as deer, and bison, Indians, and countless new settlers,” Little Polly Jenkins, their “infant prodigy,” said brightly.
She spoke with irrepressible good spirits she seemed to believe were expected of her, but which, as their resident comedian, Lester Claxton, often said when she wasn’t within earshot, more nearly insured her never surviving to adulthood.
“Wonderful houses that will make for us,” Nelson DeWitt said, bending to peer out the window.
“Just how does one appeal to an elk—or rather, elkess?” he added quizzically, turning to grin sidewise at the ladies who were clustered by the window, causing even little Polly to blush.
For though he was very handsome, in the slightly exaggerated way of all leading men, for a wonder, he seemed almost as nice as he was nice-looking, for all he was a leading man.
“ ‘Music hath charms to soothe the savage beast,’ ” their all-around villain, Frank Dupree, misquoted wryly. “A few rounds of ‘Home on the Range’ would probably do it.”
“Yes, or ‘Never Take the Horseshoe from the Door’ and ‘With All Her Faults I Love Her Still,’ if that doesn’t turn the trick,” Nelson put in merrily.
“That’s ‘breast,’ ” Maybelle Ansonia, their dignified older woman, corrected them. And when they turned to look at her, she added, shaking her silver head in her best mother-of-the-clan manner, “ ‘charms to soothe the savage ‘breast,’ was what you meant to say.”
“In your case, certainly,” Nelson said, grinning and making a great show of ducking should she take offense, as he added, “but Frank’s an engaged man, so he’s better off staying with ‘beast,’ I think.”
“Please! Think of the child,” Polly’s mother said reflexively, scarcely looking up from her knitting. Then Frank said gallantly, “Very true, but a man’s a man for all that,” and he bowed to Maybelle, stroking his mustache and arching an eyebrow in the grand manner.
“That’s as it may be,” Maybelle said in a lofty way, while she nonetheless smiled as she smoothed the massive bodice of her gown. She added gloomily, “But I don’t sing, nor do I wish to charm livestock.”
“It is most awfully empty out there…” Hannah agreed softly, for she’d been staring out the window as they’d been rehearsing, watching the evening creep over the barren land, sowing it with shadows.
Her sad little comment quieted them. She felt, as well as heard the sudden silence that had fallen over them, and blinked, for the light in the railway car contrasted with the cool shades of purple and gray that she’d been staring at.
Seeing the somber faces gazing out at what had hypnotized her, she added quickly, “But I daresay that’s because of the hour—why it’s actually blue out there now.
Twilight is such a sad time. I’ve never seen it properly before.
In New York there’s no time to see the sunset and the moonrise. ”
She saw the huge new moon continuing to rise, banishing the blue twilight, but flooding the landscape with an even eerier silvery light, and went on, “We hardly ever look up really, except to see if it will rain, we just see the sky brightening behind the buildings before the dark comes over everything. If we see that at all…Why, right now, the gaslights would be being lit, people would be hurrying home from work—or out to dinner, the traffic would be beginning to pick up…” She swallowed hard against the unexpected lump of homesickness that threatened to close her throat and added, too brightly, “How lovely nature is, after all.”
They remained still, each lost in thought, until they heard the omnipresent background sound of clattering wheels increase as the door to the car slid open.
“Ah!” Kyle cried as he entered the car and startled them back to reality. “Not rehearsing! So you’ve all got your parts in Her Fatal Charm down pat. And so speedily! I can scarcely wait to hear you.” He settled himself on the edge of a chair and looked up at them with great expectation.
“We haven’t,” Maybelle admitted, “we were merely…taking a break.”
“Breaking your hearts, more like. What is this? Come, come,” Kyle said, rising and pacing down the center of the long aisle before he swung back to confront them again.
“My songbirds in the next car are in as high spirits as they are in voice right now. Ah, but I see…” he said wisely, cocking his head to the side, “that’s just it.
We’ve the singers and the comedians, the magicians and the dancers in there.
All the lively arts. You, my poor fellow tragedians, are likely exhausted in spirit after enacting the trials of those you portray.
Such, such is the price of drama, my friends,” he said sympathetically.
Since none of them, not even Polly, felt the smallest twinge of sympathy for the stock characters they played in Her Fatal Charm—a playlet to do with the tribulations of an erring daughter, a drunken husband, and a greedy landlord, that they all agreed wasn’t a patch on East Lynne, although it was stolen from it as deftly as copyright laws would allow—they fell still again.
Kyle still wore his outsize look of sympathy when Hannah spoke up.
“We…we were taking a break and observing the twilight, merely,” she said.
“We were wondering whether we’d have anything in our audience but tumbleweeds,” Frank said.
“We were thinking of New York,” John Wills, their lead middle-aged male, said.
“Polly was learning her lines,” Mrs. Jenkins volunteered, earning her a sour look from everyone, even Kyle.
“Ah,” Kyle said on a long, audible sigh, “I am lucky that none of you were my forefathers or mothers.”
He let them regard him doubtfully before he went on.
“I’d never have tasted oysters if you had been.
Imagine!” he said in a such a thrilling tone that they all were willing to imagine whatever he proposed, even the possibility that he was being sincere.
“If any of you had been the first man or woman, upon seeing your first oyster—a rock, some of you might say, or a barnacle, another would guess—and then whatever you thought it was, you’d have tossed it away.
Because it was an ugly thing, ridged, hard, and shelled, covered with a beard of weed, brine, and sand.
If you’d seen a gull cracking one open and feasting on it, you’d certainly not have bothered to try one once you’d seen the naked, pulpy thing within.
But what you’d have missed! What I’d have missed!
Something rich, meaty, and tangy. And nourishing.
And some say, ah—in deference to dear Polly—invigorating. ”
They smiled as he went on, “Now look at what you’re doing!
The same thing. You look out the window and see nothing but brush and grass, and are immediately prepared to fly back to the city, where everything is apparent, where the spirit of adventure means crossing a street against traffic.
Oh dear!” He sank to a seat and seemed to lapse into a despondency so profound that even those who knew his usual gambits began to worry for him.
Then he bounded up again and pointed a long finger at them.
“Tell me!” he demanded. “If you lived out there, in among the rocks and the mountains and the grass, what would you want most in life?”
“Ah…, company,” Hannah said, seeing the finger aimed at her.
“Entertainment,” Maybelle added immediately in turn.
Kyle pointed at each of them, and they each responded in their turn and according to their own temperament, or what they thought he was after them to say; “Excitement,” “Civilization,” “Friends,” “Crowds,” “People,” One even putting in a weak: “Umm—interesting things,” when all other city pleasures had been mentioned.
“Exactly,” Kyle beamed upon them. “Just so: theater,” he said triumphantly.