If the theories of scrambled time are correct, to this moment there stand all over the Middle West annoyed groups of male actors, holding their napkins and watching their minute steaks grow cold, while Miss Staghorn vocally caresses them in liquids like a brook at eventide:
'Now don't let me disturb you--I just wanted to see if you were all comfortable--is there anything I can do for anybody?--oh, did you notice how slow Andy was on his cues to-night?--I'm sure he's worried--my, I do hope we're making money this week. . . .'
Mabel believed in all the stage superstitions. Stronger even than her faith in a rabbit's foot for powder brush was her certainty that you mustn't whistle in the dressing-room--perhaps she wouldn't have asserted that the San Francisco earthquake was due to some noodle's whistling in his dressing-room, but she would have looked into it.
At a rehearsal you should never give the tag line--that finished off the show, didn't it? You mustn't open an umbrella on the stage (and this even after the cast had opened umbrellas all over the stage in Our Town), or put shoes on your dressing-table or pass anyone on the stairs on the way to your dressing-room, or have yellow in the room, or sing 'Home, Sweet Home' on the stage; and in your hotel room, to lay a hat on the bed was to affront God himself.
Doc Keezer didn't exactly believe in any of these voodoos. He just didn't take a chance on them. He grunted, 'Why the devil does Zed have to whistle in his dressing-room? I'm not superstitious about it. But it makes a such row. Why can't he just sing?'
Mabel Staghorn had an infallible taste for banalities. Having been on the stage since she was eleven, and reared on Shakespeare, Molière, Sheridan and Variety--whose renowned headline, 'Stix Nix Hix Pix', is but an example of its contribution to a living American Language--Mabel never said anything whatever that would have been unexpected in Mrs. George F. Babbitt. When Jeff Hoy observed that Mabel turned Shakespeare's Nurse into a Red Cross nurse, Mabel sighed, 'I never pay any attention to him; I just consider the source'.
She thought it all over and said profoundly to Zed, 'I do think people ought to make some little effort and try and be on time for rehearsals, don't you?' When he blandly answered, 'But don't you think that might cramp their individualities?' she fretted, 'Now I'm sure you don't mean that--a real, earnest young man like you--my gracious, I thought you were one of the young actors who realized that an actor's career is just one long devotion to duty'.
Mabel's dressing-table, in the theatre, was as domestic as Grover's Corners. She did not carry a steel make-up box, but a litter of salves and pencils and powders and brushes in a pansy-embroidered linen bag--once white, now stained with every shade of faded carmine--which she spread out on the shelf, with a little ivory Egyptian cat-god, her mascot, and a photograph of her nephew, who was 'doing very well' as accountant in the South Tallahassee Power and Lighting Corporation.
She had, to some degree, a husband, but she had no children. She spoke well and often of children, to whom she invariably referred as the 'dear little ones' or as the 'chickabiddies'. But personally she had no children. She had cats.
She had, she explained to everyone, seven cats, reluctantly left to the unfeeling care of her husband in the flat in New York. The husband meant well but, it seems, he never could remember that Frou-Frou had to have liver ground, not mashed, and Kittenkatz (aged nine) required three drops of cod-liver oil in her liquor, which had to be two-thirds milk and one-third cream.
'That woman's got cat blood,' said Zed, as he heard Mabel explain to Charlotte that 'kittens are just as knowing as children--the way they look up at you with their sweet little eyes--like forget-me-nots--and they're so much more sympathetic. You can get just as fond of them as of children.'
Said Zed, 'Yeah, but there's not much fun planning future careers for cats, Mabel.'
Doc Keezer, tolerant as sunshine, had always been amused by Mabel where the others were itched. And not even in Tertius Tully did Doc find so much of the ardent recollection of unimportant gossip that keeps the true trouper happy.
When he yawned at Mabel, 'Say, which of the Trout sisters was it that played Agnes on tour with Ambrose Gillyflower in The Brave Die but Once, in 1906?' she did not flee. She rubbed her nose, and looked eager, and sighed, 'Now, isn't that funny?--I guess I'm losing my memory--oh well, we all grow old--I often say, "It don't matter what you forget if you can still learn your parts"--but isn't it funny?--oh yes--now I remember--it was Tacoma Trout--Cheyenne Trout was in burlyque that season and Albany Trout was singing the Duchess of Dantzig.'
In a café, between midnight and train time, Doc Keezer noticed a kitten, a small highwayman kitten, white with a black mask over one eye, sitting on the bar among the port and sherry bottles, washing its nose. Having had three quick gin-and-vermouths, Doc was certain that it winked at him with its masked eye. He thought sentimentally of Mabel's loneliness, bought the kitten for fifty cents, went, with the highly encouraging Tony Murphy, to awaken an infuriated veterinary surgeon, bought a cat basket, and on the train presented the treasure to Mabel Staghorn.
He had been slightly mocking, but Doc was touched when Mabel lifted the kitten out of the basket, curled it on her bosom, looked up at him (she seemed so old and tired, in a cotton nightgown, with gum of make-up still crusted on her weary eyelids) and began to cry.
'No one's ever been so sweet to me, Doc,' she wept. 'I didn't know I had any real, warm friends in this company. Now I know. And that makes me even happier than this dear kitty . . . We'll call it Pippy.' Very cheerfully: 'It'll make Mrs. Boyle and her Pekinese sore as crabs. Oh, I could just kiss you for this, Doc!'
Mrs. Aurelia Boyle, the permanent Juliet of the Anglo-American-Australian-South African stage, was reserved and County English; she was well bred and bad-tempered; she often informed Andy--one of the few people to whom she ever spoke, off-stage--that she demanded nothing of life, and indeed she did demand nothing much beyond top billing, a salary equal to half that of all the other nineteen actors put together, the box-office statement for every performance, delivered--without fail--in her dressing-room before the third act, the bridal suite in hotels (at half rates), a drawing-room on trains, a combination of never being bothered by reporters or photographers and of daily seeing extensive and reverent biographies of herself in the press, a daily supply of whisky, and vice-regal precedence for her snarly-faced Pekinese, Pluto.
Andy walked it, Hugh Challis fed it lamb chops, Charlotte, slightly shuddering, petted it, and (though she declined) Bethel was once invited to shelter it for the night in her upper berth, when poor Aurelia could obtain nothing but a compartment. Aloof though Mrs. Boyle might be, her mutt was full of a sinister friendliness. Happy bridge players of the company, planning to overbid in hearts, would feel a queer, ghostly presence about their lower legs and look down to see Pluto grinning at them and thinking about nipping their calves. Sleepers on daytime jumps would dream of seven-headed serpents and start awake to find Pluto dribbling on their bosoms.
Not a popular dog.
But to Mrs. Boyle, who often bemoaned her childlessness, in some forgetfulness of a son by her first marriage, a son who now lived in Maidstone Hill and had two children and played badminton, the hound Pluto was her child and her soul.
When she saw the cat Pippy, in her miserable basket, being carried on the train by Mabel Staghorn, she screamed. She really screamed. She wailed at Andy, 'As if I hadn't suffered enough having that Staghorn woman for Nurse! And now she has that mangy animal. I won't endure it! You may laugh, my good man, but I tell you Pluto is sensitive as Shelley. He'll be terrified by that alley tiger.'