But the torch of the caravan was the somewhat argumentative passion of Henry W. L. Purvis, Ph.D., and Charlotte Levison.
Harry Purvis could make dirty puns in Greek, Italian and Chaucerian English. Even when they were in Greek, which naturally you did not understand as well as you did Chaucer, you knew they sounded dirty.
Harry was born in Gooversville, Georgia. Eight years ago he had graduated from William and Mary College, where he had majored in tennis and drinking and been the life of a small, rebellious dramatic society that put on plays ridiculing the Old South. He had taken his doctorate in English and Philosophy at Chicago, just barely cum laude; had gone to teaching in Hotchkiss School, and after six months of it, been enthusiastically fired.
Various reasons have been alleged: that he had been too obliging about lending Rabelais to students; that he had got drunk at Torrington with three students and, on the way home, not liking the diction of one of them, a young gentleman from Brooklyn, had chased him out of the car, removed his trousers, and left him beside the road; and that he knew more than all the rest of the faculty put together and mocked their learning. Being cheerful and handsome and completely penniless, he had been accepted by the Federal Theatre, and had played a Rich Young Man so pleasantly that the audiences cheered every night when he was killed off by a sturdy striker.
He had been in the theatre for four years now, and he was the most devoted trouper in the whole Romeo company. He even liked one-night stands, except that fourteen hours seemed to him too long to stay in any town that served highballs with the whisky in one glass and soda in another. He was never drunk before eleven-thirty p.m., and never sober between that hour and three a.m., and in all states of inebriety he quoted Ernest Dowson, Artemus Ward and Albert Jay Nock.
He looked like a young Velasquez cavalier.
At just what crisis he had been married, no one was certain, but his wife was tucked away on Morningside Heights. He did not speak of her often, but apparently she had been the youthful error of a lonely young man in a Chicago boarding-house, and apparently she was named Amarette (with an a).
Rehearsals had not gone on four days, back in New York, before the Don from Gooversville and the Gainsborough Duchess from Grand Street, Charlotte Levison, had begun dining together, and before the company left Belluca, the relationship seemed almost legal. Purvis and Charlotte sat up till three a.m., drinking and talking about stopping drinking, and arguing about the folly of arguing about Communism.
No Bible-kiver-to-kiver Southern Fundamentalist Baptist could have taken her Gospel, her Party Line, more seriously and more credulously than Charlotte. Whenever the Moscow government was shocked to discover that the highly placed and trusted Admiral Asky group were traitors and saboteurs, and re-educated them with pistols in the backs of their necks, and replaced them with the long known and loyal set of General Bsky, and then, with naive yelps, found that the Bsky scoundrels were even worse and had, without Stalin's noticing it, been sending notes to the English from his own back office when all the while he had thought they were sitting there playing solitaire, and he defended the rights of humanity by slaughtering them, too, and put in the incorruptible cohorts of Commissar Csky--who turned pale and hastily made their wills--then the kind Charlotte, who secretly loved Peter Pan better than she did Gorky and who wouldn't step on a backstage cockroach, not even a Trotskyist cockroach, just smiled and carelessly explained to Purvis that it was all for purity.
Sitting in a grill with Purvis, she liked to tell of her father's escape from a burning Jewish village in Russia, after seeing his father disembowelled before him, and then add brightly that no immigrant to America and particularly no Jew has a chance in this wickedest of all capitalisms, and that 78 per cent of these immigrants are lying out under the Brooklyn Bridge and rapidly starving to death--and have been for years.
Purvis, equally loving her and exasperated by her bland dogmatism, always snarled back that if he were a Communist, he would be out of this in five minutes and go live in a factory tenement; certainly not use an airy Communism as a means of being fashionable, and sit beside a tiled swimming pool, like the famous and fashionable Hollywood fellow-travellers, and condone slaughter over a mint julep. But it was the fate of this Tybalt to play whirligig through all his romance.
The moment he had done a passionate job of denouncing Charlotte, they would be joined by such reactionaries as Hugh Challis or Tertius Tully, and instantly, ranging up beside Charlotte, Purvis would be heard announcing that in Russia all actors are cared for by the government like pet rabbits and that any peasant just off the seat of a tractor can act with more disciplined technique than Noel Coward and design scenery more artfully than Oenslager or Bel Geddes.
Then, in Mason City, at a party given to the company by the citizens, Harry Purvis announced that Charlotte and he were going to be married.
The members of the company sat with dumb mouths. Purvis was already married! What about poor Amarette (with an a)? Had she gone to Reno?
In a pleased way he explained that there wasn't any Amarette. Ever a cautious drunk, Harry had invented her because otherwise he might never have known to whom he would find himself married some morning.
Charlotte was one of the people who were surprised and somewhat gratified by the announcements that Harry was unwed and that she was going to marry him. Oh well, said her ducal and matronly smile, you just never could tell what her bad boy would be up to next.
They were married after the show, in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and the wedding party was held on the train. Andy had provided champagne and canned alligator pears. But a few of the merry rout drank nothing at all--Bethel, Vera Cross, Mabel Staghorn, Douglas Fry and Dr. Henry W. L. Purvis.
In a long speech with footnotes Harry explained that he was now a teetotaller and a working Communist, and that as soon as the tour was ended, he was going to do something (vague but powerful) for the Cause.
His wife smiled on him sleepily and murmured, 'That's swell. But let's see if we can't save up for a month in Bermuda first, Harry, and rent a cottage. I've always longed so for a house of my own, where you can go up and downstairs.'
'Well, okay, then, dearie,' said that scholarly, that fierily crusading, that passionately romantic Tybalt, Comrade Purvis.
But the catastrophe to Bethel was the desertion of her heart's guardian, Doc Keezer. And it was actually to Mabel Staghorn that she lost him, and all along of Miss Staghorn's new kitten, a soft but in no way remarkable kitten, vilely named Pippy.
Miss Staghorn, who off-stage was Mrs. Wallace Tibby, wife of the esteemed taxidermist, was the kindliest and the friendliest person in the company, and much the worst nuisance. Anyone who did not dodge quickly, she would assault with loving greetings just at the edgy moment before he made an entrance on stage. Not for her the quick pat on the back and the cheery 'Good luck!' of the ordinary trouper. Just when Doc Keezer was trying to remember whether his entrance line, as Friar Laurence, was 'Romeo, come forth; come forth, thou fearful man', or 'Come forth, thou fearful man, come, Romeo', or 'Romeo, thou fearful man, come forth, come forth', or what the devil it was that came forth, Mabel Staghorn would maternally pat him, and gurgle, 'Now I just know you're not going to slip again on that line'. And so he would enter and slip.
On trains and at restaurants, Mabel took the trouble to go from seat toseat, conveying what she frequently called 'little bluebird greetings to keep everybody happy'. She always, on such occasions, cried cheerily to the men, 'Now don't stand up', and, if they didn't stand up, looked pained.