The dining-car supplies were, by two in the afternoon, reduced to coffee and griddle cakes.
The train moved now and then, perhaps a mile; and everybody jumped up and laughed and said that in Alhambra they would have a 'lovely great, big, juicy steak, in a warm dining-room'. They now saw Alhambra as a combination of Simpson's Chop House and a beach in Samoa.
By five in the afternoon the storm had thinned to a nasty grey fog. The train moved on, slowly, and at eight in the evening they arrived in Alhambra.
The actors could have dined and been made up and have started the show by eight-thirty, but the scenery had to be trucked to the theatre, through the tail of the blizzard. Everybody hoped that there would be no show, but Andy hurried to the theatre and back and announced that a few hardy lovers of the Bard were already seated, and he hoped to have the curtain up by nine-thirty. They all sat down to dinner in the Alhambra House, which still has vinegar cruets, and there was no question any longer about the steak being lovely, great, big or juicy. There wasn't any steak.
Now Alhambra was not so mammoth as Dalesburg. It had nine thousand population, and the theatre wasn't a theatre--it was the auditorium of the high school.
At eight-thirty, Andy commanded them, 'Take your time and eat. I'm going to the shop and try to keep the customers amused. Zed, I want you to come with me. You can talk better than I can. You wouldn't do some ventriloquist tricks for them, would you?'
'I would not!' yelped the outraged Zed, but he went along.
At nine-fifteen, word came to them from Zed that they hoped to have the curtain up at ten, that sixty-seven patrons were waiting, and that his ventriloquism had gone over big.
Not even Tony Murphy or Jeff Hoy suggested that it was foolish to give the play at all. Whatever lamentable crimes they might conceal, they were troupers.
As they ran along the streets, the town, with its warm lights shut away from them behind frost-glittering windows, seemed dug-in and unfriendly to vagabonds.
The dressing-rooms were classrooms, and Bethel was so taken back to Point Royal College and A Doll's House that she giggled as she sat in a row with Mahala, Mabel, Charlotte, Iris and Vera, their small mirrors on school desks and their rouge and mascara staining the virgin maple slabs dedicated to Evangeline and the square of X.
And that night, before sixty-seven patrons, they played well.
For the sixty-seven, feeling as heroic as the actors themselves, were a good audience who were willing to enjoy themselves, and the whole show had the gay insanity of a Christmas party in snowbound mountains.
But to-night was Thursday, and to-night the closing notice did not come down.
The call board was hung in the school corridor, and the closing notice was still on it. Bethel thought of A Tale of Two Cities and the aristocrats awaiting the morning's list of the condemned. The company sneaked to it, one by one, and stood in a shaky group, re-re-reading it.
'It would come during a blizzard,' sighed Tudor Blackwall.
'Say, Andy couldn't just possibly have forgotten to take it down?' hoped Harry Purvis.
But Andy came by, glanced at the notice, regretfully patted Hugh Challis's shoulder and passed on.
Between acts Andy called Bethel into his star dressing-room--which was the office of the high-school principal. Not speaking, he held her to him. He was shaking; he seemed to be weeping without tears.
'The tour's really over, then?' she said.
'Yes. Finish on Saturday. I wish I could say something in excuse, Beth.'
'I wish I could say something in comfort!'
'Your being here comforts me. You're the only one, baby, that I want to see . . . I think that the latest bulletin, as of five minutes ago, is that Mahala again considers me a poor young man.'
It was inconceivable that she should be so intimate with this king whom she had seen red-gold on his red-gold throne six months ago; but it was doubly and tragically inconceivable that she shouldn't very much care, and that the touch of his hand should be only the amiable contact of a passing friend.
He explained to her the deadly financial aspect of the closing--and after that not even all her fancy could give her hope.
They needed about six thousand dollars a week barely to pay expenses, and on one-night stands, with only six performances a week, that meant a gross of a thousand dollars a performance. In Topeka they had grossed $856.50; in Wichita, $922.70; in Dalesburg, $368.75; but to-night, with the blizzard, they hadn't done quite so well--they had just $99.65 in the box office.
'And so,' said Andy, quite cheerful now that he had pencil in hand, 'that means an average loss of about four hundred dollars a day, spread over the past four days--and all I have in the world is enough to finish up this week and take us back to New York. I'll be paying these debts for the next ten years. Well, it's been worth it. The Forty-niners never had so much fun as a theatrical tour--with Hugh and Zed and Mabel and you!'
After the play the younger members of the company left the two available taxicabs, which were Ford sedans, to the seniors and ran to the station, Zed and Lyle dragging Bethel through the cold hell of wind that bit her nose, through the great sculptured snowdrifts that were golden with purple shadows under the street lights. And then, since their Pullman would not have heat till it was connected with a locomotive, they waited for the train in a small station waiting-room stinking with cheap tobacco, overheated from a sheet-iron box stove whose sides turned cherry. Douglas Fry brought out a Temple Hamlet, and they passed it from hand to hand, reading aloud. Zed made the astonished station agent, in his coop, seem to be saying, 'This is the brightest night I've had since Edwin Booth was here when he was out with Tobacco Road'.
Doc Keezer forgot the sanctified, the basic rule of all trouping, which is, 'I love you, dearie, but carry your own suitcase', and dragged across the street to a decayed boarding-house and brought back a gallon of coffee. The train came in, and they panted to lift their bags aboard before it should contemptuously pull off without them, and, half undressed, they fell into a dense sleep, and awoke to tranquil sunshine on the snow in the vastly greater town of New Prague . . . population 16,000!
They still had to get through to the fatal Saturday night.
In New Prague, Friday night, they were so successful, their take was so large, that Andy lost only about two hundred and fifty dollars that beautiful starry evening.
And so they came to Pike City and to the end.
Pike City had seven thousand population; it was much the smallest town in which they had played, and the most barren. The New York booking office, which controlled their fate with all of Providence's indifference to results, had sent them there because in Pike City was the Santa Fe Trail Opera House, the grand old theatre in which four thousand people, cowmen and gamblers and ladies of a certain fashion, had once listened to Melba and Patti. Pike City had been larger then and more famous than Dodge City, and its saloons more crimson. There was still a reckless, friendly, pioneer blood in the people, but the Romeo Company had no chance to encounter this. All they saw was one long street, open at either end to the hungry ferocity of the winter plains, unprotected and most unprotective of the tender arts, and on either side of it, streets that after a scattering of small wooden houses wandered off discouraged and were lost on the prairie.
'This,' said Andy, at the frame hotel where he would send his final telegrams, make his final gay long-distance calls, 'is really the jumping-off place'.
Before an audience next in smallness to the blizzard-blown huddle at Alhambra, they gave, as their last performance, the best they had ever done. They played like a May breeze; there was a lightness to Mahala's pedestrian Juliet; Andy was so manly and incurably young that Bethel, glowing from the wings, fell in love with him all over again; Zed was a newly polished blade; and Bethel, Lady Capulet, had an inner light.