Chapter Eighteen
Everyone in the theater had a task to perform except for the one man who stood in the empty audience, looking up at the stage.
If it were a day later and a later hour, he’d have his own part to play; he’d be one of the opening-night audience, and everyone on the stage would be playing to him.
Now, they ignored him as they rehearsed and marked out their places, trying to estimate the best angles for their feet and faces.
A few minutes earlier, the chorus and dancers had done a lively Christmas medley.
Now they were gone, the musicians were taking their break; the tumblers and animal acts were practicing in the wings, leaving the stage to the actors.
They had no costumes on, some still held pages of scripts in their hands, and yet the man in the audience soon forgot that as they got more deeply into their drama.
The lone spectator had seen many plays far better than the truncated melodrama they enacted.
And he’d seen them performed by such great actors as Booth, O’Neil, Mansfield, Terry and Irving, Drew and Rehan.
But there was something elemental about Curfew Shall Not Ring Tonight—a tale of lost love and devotion, that never failed to please him.
And then too, Gray could not take his eyes from Hannah Darling-Roberts, the female star of the piece.
She was entirely different from the girl he’d once held in his arms. The Hannah on the stage was beautiful in a new way; everything about her seemed to be magnified, however far from him she was now.
Her dark hair drank up the spotlight, her eyes sparkled in it, her voice was pitched to the ears of those-who would love her from yards away.
She wore an everyday dress and no stage makeup, but there was something newly seductive about her, even in the way she moved.
Gray’s first brush with the stirrings of adult sexuality had come from looking at a set of much fingered cartes-de-visite a French photographer had taken of the actress Ada Isaacs Menken that some drifter had left behind in the bunkhouse.
He’d been transfixed by the sight of the reclining beauty’s flimsy skirt hiked high to reveal white thighs and long, plump female legs in high-laced boots.
He’d never seen anything so erotic before, and seldom since, not even in the best bordellos in New Orleans.
Yet now, Hannah, in her ordinary walking gown, high above him on the stage, radiated such sensuality as to leave him as breathless as that ten-year-old boy had been as he’d studied the sensational cards he’d found.
No, he thought with growing fear and sorrow, not precisely ‘our Hannah’ now, at all.
And yet, even so, he was happy for her. Because she was very good. And seemed to know it.
Her voice was clear and confident, her movements smooth and natural, for all their exaggeration.
There was nothing of the girl who’d laid in his arms in the wings of a western music hall that cold night, declaring she was brave enough to go onstage even as she trembled from the fear of it.
He’d loved that girl, and now wondered if he was selfish enough to love her more than this self-assured, newly emerged professional actress before him.
But then she glanced down, and seeing him, flashed a swift grin of recognition and welcome—even though her character was weeping—and he knew that nothing had changed for him, no matter what had become of her in the days since he’d last seen her.
Gray sat back to watch the play. He was amused when he finally realized the lovely little sister of the piece was the erstwhile “Little Polly,” and was embarrassed to admit, even to himself, that the only reason he hadn’t recognized her immediately was the interesting way she now displayed in her simple gingham gown.
But his amusement faded as he thought about it and realized how time was literally flying.
It wasn’t only Polly’s startling new femininity, it was the fact that a new year and a new decade, was only days away.
And as the play unfolded, he began to see that his chances might be fading as rapidly.
She was good, he thought with equal parts of pride and dismay—she was very good indeed.
And all he could offer her was himself. For he began to see that she could win her own fortune.
“I have not forgotten. Shall I forget the spring? Could I forget my beating heart? Oh, Father, let me go. I cannot stay, I must leave now. More depends on this than you can know…,” Hannah pleaded.
“Yes…,” Hannah’s portly “Father” said absently, taking out his pocket watch and studying it.
“God Almighty!” he exclaimed. “Look at the time! If you don’t let us go to eat now, we’ll never make it to opening night,” he shouted to the darkened audience.
“Here, Kyle, how long do you intend to keep us at it? We had to skimp breakfast, passed up luncheon, and dinner’s on the hob now.
I can’t hear my lines for the way my stomach’s growling! ”
“Little danger of you wasting away, Renfrue,” Kyle said distractedly from the orchestra pit, as he looked up from some papers a cigar-smoking man was urging on him.
“What time is it anyway? Ah, yes, well,” he said, glancing at a watch the man held up.
“The question is if you have it down, my children—and down perfectly? Remember, if you skimp on practice, it will go far worse than skimping on a dozen breakfasts. Hannah, my dear,” he called, “I leave it to you. Are you all indeed, done for the day, and ready for the big night as well?”
“We all know our parts and marks,” Hannah said, “as for our performances, that’s for you to judge. But I don’t think we’d know them any better if we practiced all night into the morning.”
“Then you are free, good night, get some rest, and we’ll see you dewy-fresh first thing in the morning,” Kyle said, and no one protested, knowing his “morning” would be long after noon, as any good actor’s was.
The actors began drifting off the stage, calling advice and comment to each other, and Gray stood and came up to the apron. He gazed up at Hannah as she stared down at him.
“Dinner? Please,” he said urgently, “I only just got back to town late last night. I have to speak with you. Yes?”
She hesitated.
“We might have some last-minute things to go over, we’ll not have the chance for any major changes as of tomorrow,” Kyle cautioned her from where he’d appeared at Gray’s side.
Indians, Gray thought sourly, had been known to move less quickly, and much less quietly.
Hannah bit her lip.
“Ah, but I thought we’d everything settled, and you wanted to spend some time with Mr. Jackson—so as to see if we have to slip his song in tomorrow night or not,” she explained, looking at Kyle.
Kyle glanced over his shoulder with a momentarily worried expression, and stared at the man he’d just left waiting for him.
Jackson’s new song mightn’t be good, but it wasn’t bad, or most importantly, difficult to learn.
And Jackson was willing to pay a good sum to have it included in the revue; after a few drinks, dinner, and a nice chat, he might be willing to pay even more.
Especially if he heard that Harty Carstairs already had a new song in the show.
This new breed of songwriters was a delight to work with—they paid to have their songs sung, on the generally correct theory that the more they were performed, the more they’d be performed in the future.
Forget about talking machines and box cameras—it was familiarity, not necessarily quality, that made the public’s heart grow fonder—that was the most important discovery of the decade, as Kyle was always happy to tell songwriters interested in his shows.
“Ah, yes. Well then, but be sure to get a good night’s rest. Remember, you’ve a big day and a bigger night tomorrow,” Kyle warned her, deciding, from the look of her hesitation with Gray Dylan, that he could spend his own evening with Jackson, since Hannah clearly was his bird in the hand.
“I won’t be a minute,” Hannah told Gray, and went backstage to get her coat and hat.
Their dinner was the strangest one they’d ever had together.
The food at the chophouse was excellent, but not so fine that she had to comment on it so much as she did.
That was after Gray explained that his trip home had been hurried, harried, but successful, and before, having exhausted the subject of her approval of the restaurant, she told him brightly about how well the play was going, and how sure she was that she was doing the right thing this time.
“And if your father appears in the audience…?” he asked, and hated himself when he heard what he’d said, even though he was willing to say anything to erase that charming, polite, impersonal expression from her face.
She was a very good actress, she’d kept him entertained through four courses, but she’d not looked him directly in the eye once since they’d sat down.
“Oh. But I haven’t told him. Still,” she said, cutting a tiny wedge from the corner of a cutlet on her plate, “if he comes, so be it. I am a ‘Darling’ by birth and right, and if I’m not good, at least I’ll be a curiosity, and Father, being an actor, will like publicity of any sort, just as Kyle says. ”
“Does he?” Gray asked.
She nodded, and immediately launched into a long story to do with Polly’s debut as a young woman.
“As to that…she said when she was done, and she realized she hadn’t gotten the laughter she’d thought the story merited. “She was just asking about Peggy again. I haven’t gotten a letter since she went back with you—how is she, and how is the family settling in?”
“I wouldn’t know,” Gray said, still gazing at her steadily. “I left them at the station. I stayed just one day and one night at home before I got on the train again. Why won’t you look at me, Hannah?”