Clifton Crawford has been doing it in Boston and New York and Albee asked Julius to stop. Asked, don’t make me laugh! As if he’d have a choice, when Albee asked!’
‘But this isn’t even an Albee theatre!’
‘As you say! Except that now, whenever he does the bit, someone is sure to come up and accuse him of copying Crawford, and you know there’s nothing sooner puts poor Jay in a rage than being accused of any kind of stinginess of spirit like imitation.’
‘No wonder—it is entirely unfair!’
Sybil squeezed her arm and cozied a little closer. ‘You’re a dear girl, Clover. We never had a daughter, but if we had had, I’d have liked her to be just like you.’
Clover was abashed. She could not imagine being Sybil’s daughter.
Julius had come to the end and shouted the last line, ‘You’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din!’—then ripped his uniform away and stood in Gunga Din’s filthy linen wrap and shawl, bandy legs brown and bruised—which worried Clover until she realized it was only his dreadful ochre makeup. Then there was a terrifying blast of artillery fire and a vile puff of smoke, which drifted off into silence to reveal the linen clout, empty on the floor.
The audience applauded with moderate enthusiasm, but one lady in the front row, in a great black hat with red feathers and a veil, kept clapping wildly, and jumped up crying, ‘Do it again, Sonny, it’s great!’ Her escort tried to quiet her, and the people close by shhed, but she would not be silent. She announced in a forte voice, ‘I paid my money, and if I want to encore an act I’m going to do it.’
By this time the audience had become interested. Mattie stepped out from behind the proscenium arch and asked the woman not to talk so loud, as she was stopping the show.
‘I don’t care,’ she shouted. ‘My money is as good as anyone else’s, and I mean to have that handsome quick-change man on again. He’s the best thing in the show!’
‘Behave yourself, madam,’ Mattie warned. ‘Or we will send for the police!’
With a banshee shriek the woman brangled down into the orchestra pit and took three wild leaps—piano bench, keyboard with a reverberating dischord, piano lid—and then hopped up onto the stage, where she began to wrestle Mattie, bringing whoops and shouts for the manager from the audience.
She got the poor boy into a headlock, but he wriggled around like a greased pig and managed to tear the hat and veil off the lady—
And she was Julius.
‘If you can’t amuse ’em, amaze ’em,’ Sybil whispered to Clover. Under cover of the renewed applause they slipped out the back.
Not Pity Alone
Mayhew, standing to watch at the back of the house, followed the women down to the dressing rooms. He was thinking about girls and women, as he often had in a long life spent in theatres of one kind or another. Sybil, that old warhorse; Flora. Game old girls, a sad life behind each one. But pity was not everything, not anything much at all. Not pity alone.
He was not affected by Clover or Bella. It was all Aurora for him: the soft rounding of her chin, the eyes. And the mouth—at odd moments her mouth would look like she’d been hit, and must be shielded. It was the frailty that caught at him. How they were not quite professional, no matter how they twinkled and light-stepped. That was the charm of Les Très Belles Aurores—it would translate especially well if they were foreign waifs. He could make something of them …
He knocked at the door of their dressing room.
Aurora had taken down her mass of pale hair and was brushing it out, silk tatters, silk ribbons, dark yellow, paler yellow and gold, black brush sliding through the silk over and over. Smooth-spun floss, curving feathers at the ends. Black velvet ribbon down the back of her neck where the knobs of bone showed too clearly—and yet the softness of the line!
At first she did not see him; then she did. She did not turn around, but remained at her table, brushing her hair, watching him in the mirror. A self-conscious ploy. Her idiotic youth tore him open. Anxious fingernails bitten to the quick, beneath the pretty net gloves. Her mouth’s betraying softness that no hard expression could control. Her eyelashes were black against the white lids, thickly mascara’d. Yet he had seen her without stage makeup and