Yet the Whelp, with his usual arrogance, put up the pretense that he was thankful to be a mere spear carrier.
“I’ve played Malvolio for months,” he said to me. “There was nothing more to learn from the part. Blending into the background in so many new guises, on the other hand-that’s a challenge I look forward to.”
As if it requires skill to not be noticed! It took all my own considerable powers as a thespian not to laugh in his face.
Unfortunately, much as it would have relieved us to be rid of him, the Whelp didn’t rise to Sasanoff’s bait, and our manager was still reluctant to sack him outright. When we set off for Colorado a week later, the company was intact.
I’ve written much already about the peculiar torments of American rail travel, so I won’t dwell on them again except to say this: [Approximately three thousand words have been omitted here in the interest of (perhaps unattainable, given the source) brevity.-S.B.H]
All that was but preamble to the real tortures ahead, however. Leadville, it turned out, was a mining “boom town” not even two years old. No rail line had yet reached it, and the last hundred miles up from Denver required us to transfer to a pair of privately engaged coaches.
And when I write of traveling up, I do not mean we went north. Leadville actually lies to the southwest of Denver. It was further up into the snow-peaked mountains we had to go. And go and go and go. Mr. Verne and the other dreamers may assure us man will soon master fantastic flying machines, but if the like of Leadville is all we’ll find in the clouds, I say it’s not worth the bother.
After enduring nerve-racking rides along gaping gorges on rocky, hole-pocked roads plagued (the cackling drivers delighted in telling us) by both bandit gangs and bloodthirsty bands of Native warriors, we finally arrived at our destination: Gomorrah in the Alps. Or so it struck me at first. I would revise my estimation-downward-the longer I was there.
Surrounding the town on all sides were shoddily built shacks, tree stumps without number, and the yawning black mouths of the silver mines. Closer in was a fringe of tents-lodgings for newly arrived fortune hunters and the businesses (mostly “saloons” and drafty bagnios) that catered to them. And then at last we entered the city proper (if one could apply either word to Leadville) and found ourselves rolling down actual streets… broad ones comprised entirely of dirt and bracketed on both sides by only slightly sturdier variations on the canvas-topped groggeries and maisons de joie we’d just passed.
“To such a place as this we’ve brought the Bard,” Sasanoff said with an incredulous shake of the head.
Only I was on hand to reply, Sasanoff having granted me the honor of sharing his private car while the rest of the company crammed themselves into the other coach like so much meat into an overstuffed sausage.
“Indeed,” I said, and I reached out and gave little Master Sasanoff a hearty slap on one of his Lilliputian shoulders. “Dr. Livingstone himself couldn’t have claimed to do more for the spread of civilization!”
Sasanoff’s expressive features curled into a smirk.
“Nor could he have claimed to profit so handsomely by it,” he said.
I chuckled through gritted teeth, for Sasanoff had favored me in another way, as welclass="underline" by sharing an explanation for our presence in Leadville. The American silver magnate Horace Tabor had offered five thousand dollars for a week’s run in the town’s newly built opera house. Being under contract, of course, none of the players would see a penny’s extra profit. The windfall would be Sasanoff’s alone.
Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown, however, and Sasanoff’s wee little head was soon uneasy indeed. Construction of the Tabor Opera House (the tycoon, with the usual humility of his ilk, had named the theatre after himself) was behind schedule, and our premiere there delayed at least a week. It had been hard enough for Sasanoff to put off our engagement in New Orleans. If we tarried too long, our run there-and our subsequent appearances in Atlanta, Richmond, and Washington-might be cancelled. The second half of the tour could collapse like a row of dominoes.
Predictably, the days that followed saw Sasanoff in the blackest of moods, and most of the company-terrorized by both their illtempered acting manager and the town he’d marooned them in-barricaded themselves in their hotel rooms. The Whelp, on the other hand, was rarely to be found in his: he quickly took to disappearing for hours at a time. In one of my few forays into Leadville’s mud-splattered fray, I entered a low tavern (drawn, of course, by simple curiosity) and spotted him standing alone at the bar, watching all around him as if it were some great drama unfolding upon the stage. He seemed to be invisible to the ruffians infesting the place, yet upon me their attention seized instantly with hungry-eyed insolence. My ample frame and lordly bearing always served me well on the boards, but here it put me at a distinct disadvantage.
“Ho ho ho! Lookee who just walked in!” cried a miner so blackened with soot he looked like he bathed in cinders as the rest of us do water. He reached out a hand and took the obscene liberty of patting my stomach. “It’s Santa Claus a whole month early!”
“If you please,” I said, brushing away the man’s grubby paw. But before I could utter another word in protest, the saloon erupted with more shouts.
“Where’s yer sleigh, Santa?”
“Why ain’t ya in yer red suit, Santa?”
“What’d ya bring us, Santa?”
Miners, “muleskinners,” layabouts, even the lewd women such rough-hewn rustics consort with-all were jeering and laughing at me.
I turned to flee the raucous uproar. Before I could make my escape, however, I locked eyes, for just a second, on the Whelp. He was regarding me coolly, in that detached yet deeply probing way our fellow company members found so disquieting. And I could have sworn the young rascal was smiling.
I immediately relayed the incident to Sasanoff, taking an actor’s license to give myself a more flattering exit line (“I would give you bounders lumps of coal, only I see it’s smeared all over your filthy faces already!”).
“He’s the lowest utility player, consorting with rabble… yet he still thinks himself superior to us all,” Sasanoff mused darkly. “I should have sent him packing weeks ago.”
“Yes,” I said. “You should have.”
Sasanoff glowered at me-and a fine glower it was, too. The man may have been little taller than an overgrown squirrel, but he was undoubtedly one of the great Richard IIIs of his time.
Of course, Richard would have shown an impudent knave like the Whelp considerably less mercy than Sasanoff had, and why our otherwise irascible manager tolerated the stripling’s cheek was a matter of much conjecture in the company. It had to do with an incident early in the tour, some whispered-a predicament the Whelp freed Sasanoff from with his sharp mind and even sharper tongue. Whatever the reason, even I, Sasanoff’s closest confidante in the troupe, had not been made privy to the truth.
“Yes, well… you’d all better be on your guard,” Sasanoff snarled at me now. “I’m in a foul enough temper to dismiss the whole company-myself included!”
I soothed his savage breast with the sweet music of gentle (feigned) laughter, then changed the subject to something more mutually amusing: the latest broadside in Catherine P____________________ and Thomas B____________________’s ongoing battle for the affections of Louis H____________________.
[A short passage has been excised here by request of the B____________________ estate.-S.B.H.]