Men of No Property (26 page)

Day by day, the memory of Matt Stuart seemed to fade. Even his weekly letters accounting work and love and other men’s gold failed to conjure it. She could scarcely remember his face, or his voice save for the twang of it or his bad grammar when she heard another make his mistakes. Ha! that Peg Hickey should know bad grammar from good, or grammar at all itself! Peg Hickey. Margaret Stuart, a fine-sounding name that upon a playbill. God forbid her the thought!

What theatres there were in San Francisco had burned to the ground the summer before, some not once but twice, and yet another house named The Jenny Lind was up, and others in the building. Players there were a-plenty from Australia and New York. Not the least amongst them arrived and opening soon, the venerable Junius Brutus Booth and family. He had called upon her once as Mag, albeit on the arm of a young protégé more enthusiastic than his master, but he had complimented her and she expected never to forget the moment. God restrain her from calling now on him!

Peg stayed indoors the night he opened, her only company the spinstery wife of an evangelical preacher. She loathed the theatre, the evangelist’s wife, counting it lower yet than the gaming table, and pined after the souls of her veranda cronies as they departed in conviviality to sin. Peg made herself prim as a chipmunk and read aloud the woman’s Bible to her.

“My dear, you read like a true believer,” the woman said. “Wherever did you learn it?”

“Learn what?”

“To read the scriptures with such feeling.”

“It’s my business,” Peg said.

“I don’t understand,” said the woman. “Are you a Bloomer?”

Peg wondered if Bloomers were not even more offensive to the woman than all other mode of sinners. “No,” she said. “I am an actress.”

“Oh, no,” the woman whispered.

Peg arose and put the Bible at its owner’s side. “Didn’t you know the devil teaches scripture to his own purpose?” she said maliciously.

By evening of the day that followed everyone in the house knew that she was an actress. The men were more willing of conversation with her and the women more watchful of the men. “And what have you played in, my dear, and where, and should I have heard your name?” “My name is Margaret Stuart and I played Juliet to Hackett’s Romeo in New York town, and I’ve played Beatrice, Lady Teazle and Pauline and Rosalind…” (all the latter of course to Mr. Valois.) “But certainly, certainly, I remember you, Miss Stuart! You did Kate with that chap, what’s his name?” “David Valory,” said Peg. “That’s right, I was in the house that night.” If you were, thought Peg, you were in the commode, for the only Kate I ever did was in Mr. Valois’ parlor.

“Well, Miss Stuart, I wondered where I’d seen you. Permit me to re-introduce myself. My card.”

Thomas Foley, she read, ENTERTAINMENTS AND CURES. He was a man of fair height and considerable girth, and what she had most noticed about him before was the enormous silk vest he required to cover his stomach. He wore a watch chain across it from which dangled several fobs and all of them tinkled like bells against the chain when he laughed. He was fifty-odd years and his face yellowed beneath the brown beard from the wind and weather of an overland crossing.

“An excellent combination, Mr. Foley,” she said, “entertainments and cures. Do you administer them in that order?”

The fobs tinkled as he laughed. “You’re Irish,” he said.

“So I’ve been told.”

“By who?”

“By my mother, sirrah.”

“Ha! How long you’ve been here and unnoticed, Miss Stuart. But not by me. I’ve been biding my time and making inquiries. Not about you, but on your behalf, if you’ll permit me to say it. I knew you for an actress from the day you said goodbye to your husband.”

“Then you know me for a wife and therefore an actress no longer.”

“I know many a wife an actress,” said Foley, “and some the better at one for the other. Does your husband forbid it?”

Peg lifted her chin and said, “Yes.”

“You tell me yes and your eyes say no, which if I’m not mistaken, tells me the decision was of your making. Therefore can it be unmade by you if you are properly persuaded.”

“If I am properly persuaded,” Peg granted.

“”Will you take a cognac and coffee with me, Mrs. Stuart?”

“Where?”

“Oh, bless you, in the saloon if you like. My intentions are most honorable. Indeed I have a wife to whom I’m devoted. I might even say she is indispensable to me. She compounds my cures.”

“And plays in your entertainments?”

Foley shook his head. “Only in preference to taking her own compounds.”

There were no doubt some in San Francisco who considered Tom Foley a humbug, but the town was full of humbugs, and few of them provided as much amusement as did Foley. He had brought a circus troupe from the States consisting of three trained dogs and a performing horse. He added two dancing ladies from Australia, an Oriental acrobat and a Mexican snake-charmer recruited in the West. He was amongst the first entertainers to reach California, and when he lacked enough talent to make up an evening’s bill in the town, he betook himself with a banjo and whatever of his troupe he could transport into the mining camps. By day he peddled his cures, by night what he called
Tom Foley’s Fooleries,
and by the time Peg met him, he had acquired a fair-sized fortune.

“Like every clown who fancies himself a Hamlet,” Foley said, “I’ve for a long time looked to myself as a purveyor of genuine theatricals.”

To that purpose he had recruited himself a company and insisted that Peg meet them. As young as spring were most of them, and as eager to partake in Foley’s stock company as Foley was to launch it. The men must sometimes play as women even as in Shakespeare’s day, but never as leading ladies, Foley vowed. “Fool’s gold they’re getting enough in the hills. They’d tar and feather us to fool ’em here.”

Peg consented at least to a reading with them, having met the players and John Redmond who was to be the manager. She had forgotten his name, but the very night before she had been thinking of him: he was the lad who had brought Booth to see her at the Broadway. Not quite a lad now, and given more to melancholy by his looks than to easy praise, he took her hand in greeting as though never before on earth had their eyes met.

Redmond held the script on her reading of Katherina in
The Taming of the Shrew
and she was scarcely well begun when he flung the script to the prompter and played Petruchio himself. The excitement that ran through Peg was akin to the thrill of love. He was Petruchio and she must now be Kate, and would be: Kate alive and waking where Peg had gone to bed. A lifetime there seemed in those few moments, and when the scene ended both she and Redmond were wary again of each other and shy in their brief acquaintance. Not so Tom Foley; he came up wiping the tears from his eyes and kissed them both.

Had she been stronger, Peg could not have resisted the offer, and she wrote Matt by the next supply caravan. “A hundred dollars a week,” she wrote, “and a monthly benefit performance. In this way, my dear, I shall be helping. If fortune is slow in yielding to your pick and shovel, we shall be able to keep hammering at her until she gives in.”

Having dispatched the letter, she went directly into rehearsal.

F
OR THREE WEEKS THEY
rehearsed night and day, adding to the
Shrew
two modern comedies of domestic trial and triumph. Tom Foley had been to the diggings long enough to know the heart’s yearning of the men for home and hearth. “You can do one aristocratic piece to happify yourselves,” he told his manager, “to two for bread and gravy.” John Redmond yielded. To play upon the stage was all he asked. In truth, Peg thought, he was a pale and paltry sort not on it, given to posturing himself a broody poet, selfish and petty, and demanding of the lesser members of the troupe the tribute of court lackeys. “Eddie, will you fetch my cloak?” and the cloak within his reach if he stretched his arm for it. “You there, Michael, my boots are at the cobbler’s. I’ll need them after dinner.” But on the stage he was superb. The grace of a fencing master he had, and a fine voice the power of which he shepherded. “Better they alert themselves to catch the lines than cover their ears lest I split the drums.”

All in all they were weeks of pious ecstasy for Peg. The divorce between Redmond the man and Redmond the actor was ideal to her conscience, and Matt sent a letter in which he blessed her for wanting to help that much, enough to go back on the stage when she had never wanted to again. She had not intended a deception, Peg thought. She had merely changed her mind. Matt was lonely for her and weary and each of his weekly letters grew more maudlin in praise of her self sacrifice and wilder in the things he promised her by way of making up for it. He enjoyed these letters that he wrote, she told herself. She deceived him no more than he deceived himself. It was not faith she broke with him, whatever else it was.

Two women were added to the company coming down from Sacramento when word spread of Foley’s troupe. Foley engaged his theatre, the second floor of the finest barroom in town, equipped it, and called it The Rialto. Two thousand people could they manage and with an outside entrance for the ladies. The bills were posted and on November first they opened with
The Taming of the Shrew.

New York’s Niblo’s could scarcely have boasted a more elegant looking audience, the men in broadcloth swallowtails, the women in silks and cambrics. The rougher their lives in the gold fields, the more delicate their ways in society. If it required adventurers to come the long searching way, the adventurers required a certain patrimony to give them their start. In other words, many a man wearing a red shirt here by day was a gentleman at heart and welcomed a social outing by night to prove it.

The
Shrew
was much to their delight, and Kate their darling from her first threat to “comb your noddle with a three-legg’d stool.” Indeed, by their response it was apparent they found the
Shrew
an apt parallel to their own circumstance: it took a Kate to venture west with them, but her having ventured, they did long to tame her.

Call after call Peg took at the curtain, drawing always her Petruchio with her. He scowled and looked to her and not beyond the lights at all: a theatrical as clever as any in his trade, Peg thought, for by their squeals the audience betook him to be Petruchio still, who now upon his conquest would go hence and tumble Kate. With his eye to showmanship, Tom Foley came upon the stage with them at last, and shook his finger at Petruchio, rubbed his beard in sly contemplation and, winking to the house, shooed the lovers off the stage himself. The audience consented then to leave having shared in the final fellowship, and Foley ordered up champagne and oysters while the cast got out of costume.

Peg’s dressing room was improvised of canvas walls, the doorway curtained with a sheet. To it, in her absence, one of the players had pinned a star and hung beneath it was a letter which she took to the spirit lamp on her table and read:

“We have nought to give you but our love and the applause of players.”

From Tom Foley himself to the call boy, the company had signed it. The applause of players…Once again Peg wept, and remembered the night near two years before with Vinnie Dunne standing amongst the flowers in her dressing-room and saying: “I love you, Peg.”

Ah, Vinnie, would you love me now? And would your voice crack saying it? Full seventeen you must be, and almost a man yourself. I did not wait for you, Vinnie. I was never one for waiting. Well, she decided, she would write him now by the next post, perhaps, and if the
Alto California
were half as complimentary as the audience, she might send him its report and explain to him how it had come to be that she was Margaret Stuart. “I met Matt Stuart in New Orleans,” she might write, “and oh, Vinnie, but I was lonesome of love, heart-weary of Mag and wishing a home like Norah’s…He loves me very much and you would like him…” No, Vinnie would not like him. Matt had no humor; a rollicking sense of fun he had sometimes, but no power of making a joke at all, except to his private fancy. In no way like an Irishman. Dear, dear Vinnie, though I never write, remember me.

She was half undressed, looking now and then from the glass to the players’ letter to stave off a sudden melancholy, when she caught in her eye a little flutter of movement at the curtained entry. She caught up the skirt of the costume to her naked breast, and whirled around in anger at the unannounced intruder.

Matt was standing there as much surprised, by the gaping look of him, as she was. “I’m glad to see you cover up for strangers,” he said without a greeting.

“Strangers at least announce themselves,” she said. “Come in, Matt.”

“You two were mighty lovin’ on that stage,” he said. “You didn’t look much like you were pinin’ after me.”

She smiled, got up and reached her hand for his. “Ah, Matt, I wouldn’t be an actress if I showed my true feelings on the stage. I am glad to see you.”

His face was smudged with dust and the lines of weariness showed through the tan of his skin. He stood, rocking a little, as though fresh from the sea, and by the look he gave her he was deciding whether she was not acting her welcome, too. The fumes of whiskey came to her from his deep breathing. “I got no gold for you, Peg,” he said finally.

“Did I marry for gold, Matt? Did I ask it?” She opened her arms to him and waited.

He stumbled toward her then and the dust seemed to rise from his clothes when he caught her against them. “I was goin’ to bring you a bag of it tonight, Peg. Night and day I’ve been diggin’ and pannin’ till my hands are raw. Oh, Godalmighty, what I was goin’ to bring you when I saw you were playin’ tonight.”

“Yourself is enough,” she said. “Sit down here while I dress. You look worn out.”

“I am wore out, plum,” he said, and eased himself down into the chair. Great blotches of black beneath his eyes gave witness to his words.

“Did you like me?”

“Fine,” he murmured. “Them goddam nancies out there wouldn’t let me in till I swore I was your husband. They don’t know a gen’le-man except by clothes.”