had brought her:
Dear Miss Aurora,
Miss Eleanor has decided to return East, which means I must go too for now. We’ve lost Mr. Hanrahan (who played her husband in the melodrama you might recall) and cannot do the show longer so she pulls it back to NY or Boston and we will do ‘The Slap’ again.
So it may be some time before I make it back Out West again and I am sorry for it. Keep up with your dancing and one of these turns it will be you and me.
Yours already, without any Right to style myself so,
JIMMY BATTLE
No, he did not have any right. It made her warm to think of it, but almost equally irritated. He was the puppy of that actress, even if he was working on a song-and-dance routine on the side. But it was comforting to think of him. She touched the signature, Jimmy Battle. Small writing, but not cramped. He would not ever shove her away and curse her. He was a good match for her; they were the same in many ways. But there ought to be some balance in things. Perhaps she too would find a patron for a while.
Glass Crash
The orchestra master knew his work and put the Belle Auroras through their cues like lightning, wasting no time at all on compliments but treating them like veterans, which was better. He nodded them off and turned to the more difficult cues for the Furniture Tusslers, a robust pair of young men with small eyes and ham-shaped arms who threw tables and chairs, and each other, across the stage at predetermined intervals, to the loud crashing of cymbals. The wood-crash operator was irritably busy stage right—when the girls crossed his line of vision he missed a cue. They fled.
Bella (who had looked back at the younger, quite-handsome Tussler) stomped on the foot of the waiting glass-crash man. He swore horribly, but gave her a black-toothed grin when she apologized. She loved his glittering basket of glass shards and the spare bottles he had lined up to break in it; but the wood-crash machine with its heavy handle frightened her. It sounded too much like a real man falling down stairs, or landing in a woodpile, or breaking a spindly Sheraton desk, depending on the velocity at which the handle was turned.
East and Verrall were quarrelling on the stairs as the girls went down, as they seemed almost always to be doing, when not performing or testing out their routines on personable girls. Bella knew that Aurora felt herself to be above them, although she could not have said why; and Clover liked them well enough but was still shy of their patterschtick. Bella, however, was one of their company now, and they put out black-suited arms to stop her halfway down, and got her to run through her lines again at a whisper. ‘Would you like to take a bath?’ ‘No thanks, I’ll leave it right where it is!’ and all the rest of the old gags. The second time through, Bella’s tongue tripped up and she said, ‘Would you like me to take a bath?’ Quick as lightning East said, ‘Whoo-hoo, absolutely!’—eyes goggling happily out of his head, hands somehow conjuring a claw-footed tub.
She didn’t hesitate either, but asked, as if it were his luggage, ‘Where would you like me to take it?’ which made East laugh out loud instead of carrying on—and that was winning the trick, so she was proud of herself.
But Verrall said the gag would get them tossed out of the theatre, even in the more relaxed environs of Butte, so they went back to the usual way. At the end of the whispering rehearsal Verrall shook her hand and told her she was histrionic, which she gathered was a good thing to be.
Butte was not Helena, no. The crowd was rougher—there was a woodsy smell in the theatre, a Paddockwood kind of smell, tobacco and tanned hides, drink, men’s working clothes; although there were women in the audience, they were well outnumbered by men. Faces visible in the spilling light were white and owl-eyed. Some of the men stood up when Aurora and Clover danced the Music-Box, the better to see them twirl.
And opening was not closing. The stone-cold crowd talked generally through the first number, Buffalo Gals, and gave only a smattering of applause. Bella, who had grown used to being liked, found that she was almost angry not to have that appreciative cushion; she