Chapter Four #2
The troupe straggled in. The interior of the hotel, Hannah had to admit, was not so horrid as the exterior.
The lobby furniture was leather and fairly new, there were decent rugs on the floor, and the wallpaper was a busyness of perfectly clean and satisfactory cabbage roses.
It was true that the some thirty persons, the entire crew of them, save for the stagehands—for those two stayed with the scenery, whatever mysterious place Kyle stowed it—crowded the little lobby, but that way at least everyone heard what Kyle had to say without his having to raise his voice.
They were grateful for that, at least, when they heard what it was.
He stood in the middle of the room before them: slender, disdainful, and elegant in his signature black.
“People,” he said, and then sighed in exasperation. And angry and disappointed as they were, some of them were already beginning to feel foolish for the fuss Lottie had made and they had tacitly supported.
“This is not Denver,” he chided them, shaking his head so that his long dark hair seemed to sigh with him as it fell over his high forehead.
“Nor is it Leadville. Nor Aspen, Telluride, or even Central City. It is Copperhead, a newly sprung mining town. Not polished or well-known. But then, I remind you, neither yet, are you.”
The fact that for the first time he hadn’t referred to them as “we” was not lost upon them, and a few shuffled their feet.
“Have you ever heard of a trial run?” he asked with awful sarcasm.
“Or were you supposing we’d step, unsung, onto the greatest stages in the West?
I thought, that like most troupes, we’d first want to know what the local humor was, what their preferences were for…
or at least, so it has always worked in the past. Had you a better idea? ”
They remained still, considered that, all of them, until the brash senior man in their juggling team spoke up.
“Yeah, fine. But Denver’s a pretty big town. And so are the others. I wouldn’t think that what they thought here would go over there, anyway.”
“No, you wouldn’t think, would you?” Kyle asked sweetly. “Nor, obviously, have you been West. This is not New York. They haven’t heard the same jokes, or seen the same sights.”
“You said they were so sophisticated,” the brash young man persisted.
“So they are,” Kyle said haughtily. “But sophisticated East is not sophisticated West.”
That was unarguable, not only because no one quite understood it, but because no one but Kyle could claim to have ever been West before.
Still, tryouts were a common practice, even if this town was uncommonly drab and depressing.
The young man subsided, but he grumbled something moodily to his partner, while the rest of the troupe pointedly ignored him.
“Now, unpack, my dears,” Kyle said. “And then we’ll meet again here, and go off to the theater together. Time’s wasting,” he said, clapping his hands together. “Our first performance is tonight. We shall be here two nights—or until we get it right!”
That got them to scurrying up the stairs to their diverse, but still shared, quarters.
But they slowed again when they came to “THE GILDED GARTER,” temporary home to “HARPER’s GOLDEN CIRCUIT TOURING COMPANY” as the badly printed lettering on the sheet that had been draped over the saloon’s front proclaimed.
Because, they realized, it was just that: a saloon— with a long glass window, behind which could be seen an enormous wooden bar, occupied mostly with persons in dusty clothes and with a great deal of facial hair, all staring back at them.
“Have you ever heard of beer gardens?” Kyle asked in exasperation, though no one spoke.
“Where do you think Tony Pastor got started? What do you think most of the theaters on the Bowery were when they began? Just remember,” he said in a low voice before he pushed the swinging doors open, “these towns are only newborn, some two hundred years behind those in the East.”
“Make that two thousand,” Lester Claxton said sadly as he came in the doors.
He was, by far, Kyle’s most famous player.
Hannah had heard of the comedian’s fame when she’d been a girl, and had wondered why she hadn’t heard of him much, more recently.
The look in his eye as he looked at the bar told her why.
But all their eyes brightened once they’d straggled down beyond the gaping bar patrons, and under the arch of a low doorway.
For they came to a wide, high-ceilinged room, floored with shining hardwood and with a hastily erected stage being hammered into place at the far end of it.
The long rows of benches would seat at least a few hundred, the acoustics were not at all bad, and when they put up a screen to hide their rehearsal from prying eyes, they could almost believe they were in a real theater again. Until they performed that night.
It was not so much what happened during the performance.
That, all agreed, was bliss. The audience of miners and whores was as appreciative and polite as any of New York’s four hundred could have been.
They sobbed in all the right places during the playlet of The Drunkard, and if one miner got so carried away by emotion when little Polly begged her erring pa to come home that he charged the stage with the object of knocking that selfish sot down, before his friends subdued him—why, that was all to the good.
No actor could want a higher compliment for overstepping the line of reality so completely.
And the chorus of sniveling during the renditions of A Handful of Earth From Dear Mother’s Grave and The Pardon Came Too Late made the room feel like a funeral parlor.
Which was fine, since after that, Lester Claxton had them roaring with just a twitch of his mobile brows.
If they tended to laugh hardest at his warmest stories, so that he, as a natural performer, warmed them to the point that not only Mrs. Jenkins, but an outraged tenor threatened to march out if he didn’t restrain himself, still the audience stood on the chairs to cheer him when he was done.
They sang with the songs, swayed in place with the dancers, and then applauded until their poor calloused hands must have ached.
That was never the problem. Or rather, it was.
Lottie liked admiration far more than the next girl, but even she was a little afraid to stay onstage after the welcome they gave her.
But then they hooted and whistled at Maybelle, too, which was, for those who didn’t know her well, like lusting after Martha Washington.
All the female dancers and singers wondered if they’d have to call the sheriff in order to get back to their hotel unmolested.
But that was nothing to what they saw in the audience itself between acts—both their own and the show’s—as Lester commented.
“The thing is,” Frank concluded to as many of the assembled cast that could fit into his room at their secret meeting that night, “that it’s damned unpleasant to play to them.”
“That’s only because they were going to lynch you when you said you were going to foreclose,” Nelson said.
“That’s a damn sight better ‘n what I thought some of them were going to do with you, dear boy,” Frank shot back at him. “There are far too few women in this town.”
“I’ll say,” Lottie said, darting an ugly look to where Maybelle sat preening herself like a pouter pigeon.
But, Hannah thought, she could be forgiven her spite, because for as many offers of dinner and more that she’d gotten after the performance, Maybelle had gotten as many, and neither dared to take advantage of the situation—not in this town.
“Yes, yes!” a male singer cried out, until they shushed him and he whispered, “But now I wonder how many more rattraps and flea palaces Harper’s got us booked into.”
“I, for one,” one of the minor actors proclaimed, “will not go on to many more!”
There was a whispered fever of agreement, until Hannah spoke.
“Still,” she said quietly, “if they love you in Denver as they do here…”
They decided, before they crept back to their several rooms, to wait and see.
The take was so good, they stayed on two extra days at The Gilded Garter, although Kyle insisted it was only because they needed the time to get their abridged Little Lord Fauntleroy down right.
They got on the train with high hopes, but the next stop they got off at made Copperhead seem like Eden.
At least they only played there one night.
But the next saloon theater they played after that was at the foot of the mountains, and some of the audience looked as though they’d come straight down from them, without, despite what Mr. Darwin said, having had to stop off at humanity first. “I was afraid of displeasing them—literally,” the juggler said in disgust, and he and his partner were off and headed back to New York on the next train they could find.
Kyle braced the more gullible in the troupe by telling them he’d actually been planning to let the jugglers go, anyway.
And stopped everyone’s grumbling when he informed them that they’d each have an extra five minutes onstage, because of the defection.
And solaced himself with the reminder that he’d two less mouths to feed.
But after the troupe was forced to play Downey’s Superior Saloon the next week, in a town where the water ran rusty as the blood that was spilled by the patrons fighting to get the best seats for the show, they confronted Kyle backstage that very night.
“But children,” he said charmingly, “are you sure you wish to go? Ah well then, I’ll not prevent you. But how hasty of you to leave me now, especially since we open in Denver in two nights.”
And so they got on the train singing, every one of them, even though there was no audience to hear but themselves.
“What do you want when we’re done with this tour, Hannah?” Peggy asked sleepily as their train streamed through the night.