Sherlock Holmes In America (8 page)

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.
]

My rendering of these inanities
d'amour
lightened Sasanoff's spirits considerably. And just in time, too. Horace Tabor and his wife were hosting a reception for the company in the hotel's paltry ballroom. It was time to kiss the backer's backside.

Tabor himself I found to be the epitome of the American ideal: a “selfmade man.” Alas, what he'd made of himself was vulgar in the extreme, and the making of him seemed to involve little more than a layer of dumb luck slapped over a foundation of slavering avarice. But, for all that, selfmade he was. God certainly would want none of the credit.

The other town notables who turned out to greet us (and drink Tabor's flat champagne) I have even less to say about, except that they were “notable” only for their wretched clothing and abominable manners.

Still, let it never be said I couldn't play to the groundlings, and I was, as always, the darling of all. Sasanoff, as was
his
way at soirees, stuck close to the hosts (and the money), and I swooped in from time to time when it looked as though the conversation could use a little enlivening. Which was frequently. Tabor was the sort of man who grew forlorn and bewildered if the talk strayed far from commerce, while his wife . . . well, she made such a faint impression I can't, at this late date, recall her at all. In fact, I could barely remember she was present even when she was speaking to me.

I was giving the Tabors a comical foretaste of my performance as Sir Toby Belch, alternately huzzahing and haranguing as only the great old reprobate can, when I noticed Sasanoff scowling at something behind me. I glanced back to find the Whelp sauntering in a full hour late.

Usually, one might expect a sense of decorum—or, at the very least, self interest—to discourage public sniping between a leading man/ manager and his supporting players. Yet (as exhaustively chronicled in previous chapters), Sasanoff and the Whelp had clashed at one gathering after another, and always on the same tiresome subject.

To wit, acting. That, so far as any of the troupe knew, the Whelp was a nobody from nowhere hadn't stopped him from airing his foolish views on proper dramatics. Sometime after leaving London, it seemed, he'd been infected by that always-fatal (to good acting) disease known as “Naturalism,” and he'd increasingly insisted that Truth demanded the avoidance of “stylized bombast” (his phrase, not mine) and scrupulous attention to realistic detail. Sasanoff (and I, when sufficiently provoked) quite rightly countered that audiences don't care two figs about Truth. They crave Big—big characters, big emotions, big laughs, big tears. Any actor who chooses to be Small is also choosing empty houses over full ones. To which the Whelp invariably replied that he hadn't taken up the study of acting in order to enrich himself with
money
. Which was fine, it was always pointed out in return, because his approach to the craft would surely leave him penniless.

Round and round it ever went, and I certainly had no desire to see the circuit run again. Yet Sasanoff, sadly, couldn't resist a dig—the first, it turned out, in what would soon become a very deep hole indeed.

“Let me guess,” he said to the Whelp. “You were studying your lines and lost track of the time.”

The Whelp replied with a tight smile and a “touché” nod.

“I apologize for my late arrival,” he said, addressing Mr. and Mrs. Tabor. “But I did indeed lose track of the time—while exploring this most intriguing community of yours.”

I only barely stifled a roll of the eyes, but the Tabors (apparently afflicted with the same baseless provincial pride I'd encountered everywhere in America) grinned and cooed and practically adopted the Whelp on the spot.

“Think nothing of it!” Mr. Tabor said. “Why, there's so much to see around here, so much to do, I can understand a man getting a little lost in it.”

“To be honest, I was surprised any of you
were
on time,” his wife added with what I'm sure she imagined was coquettish levity. “Aren't actors always supposed to make a dramatic entrance?”

“Only the great ones,” I said with a censorious sniff.

The Tabors just kept grinning idiotically, my point blunted by the impenetrable thickness of their plebeian skulls.

Mr. Tabor turned to Sasanoff.

“And what role will we see our young friend here playing come opening night?”

Sasanoff begrudgingly provided proper introductions, dismissively presenting the Whelp as “one of our junior utility players.”

“What Mr. Sasanoff means,” the Whelp said, “is that you will see me in a variety of roles. You won't, however, do much
hearing
of me. The parts are very small.”

“Oh, that seems like a shame,” Mrs. Tabor simpered. “You're such a striking-looking young man, and your voice is so—”

“It takes more than pleasing looks and stature to make an actor,” Sasanoff declared, puffing himself up to his full height . . . which almost brought him even with the Whelp's chest. Of course, the woman hadn't mentioned the Whelp's height at all, but poor Sasanoff could never stop measuring himself against other actors—literally. I think that's one of the reasons he tolerated me. I was five times the man he was side to side, but toe to top of head he was nearly my equal.

“There's a deportment, a regality that sets the truly fine actor apart,” Sasanoff went on. “Goliath himself would have made a poor player if he lacked
presence
.”

“Indeed!” I chimed in. “Just look how little David upstaged him!”

My bon mot—and the quick change of subject to the weather I had planned—might have defused the situation if the doltish Mr. Tabor hadn't relit the wick.

“Well, son,” he said to the Whelp, “you just keep studying Mr. Sasanoff here, and I'm sure one day you'll be a leading man just like him.”

“Good heavens, I hope not,” the Whelp replied. And then sensing—correctly—that he'd gone too far this time, he chuckled and tried to explain away his effrontery. “I find I prefer the small parts, Mr. Tabor. Roles sized to human proportions. I was drawn to acting as a way of better understanding how and why people
act
—which is to say, behave—the way they do. I was searching for the reality behind the artifice. Unfortunately, I've found it's almost impossible to see anything real when blinded by the limelight. So I'm happy to leave center stage to those who crave it. Truth, I believe, you'll more often find lurking in the wings.”

Though he'd started out trying to soften the sting of his words, the Whelp had instead packed salt upon the welt, and even he knew it.

“Please forgive me,” he told the Tabors with another light, self-mocking laugh. “You're not here to listen to the ramblings of a ‘junior utility player.' My eminent associates here are the ones who should be sharing their wisdom. When it comes to acting and stagecraft, they're full of it.”

And with that he excused himself and fled to the refreshments table—which was certainly no refuge for a sane man to seek.

[
A five-hundred-word aside on the supposedly life-threatening inedibility of “hinterlands victuals” has been cut here.—S.B.H.
]

At any rate, with the dazed expressions a pair of sheep might wear at a performance of
King Lear
, the Tabors watched the Whelp go to his culinary doom. They could sense that something was happening before their very eyes yet lacked the powers of perception to understand what it was.

There was nothing sheepish about the look on Sasanoff's face, however. It was so wolfish, in fact, I feared the man would bare his teeth and growl.

“So,” I said, “is it always so beastly cold this time of year? The scenery here is beautiful—
beautiful
—but one risks frostbite with each pause to admire it!”

Predictably, the Tabors responded with a gushing rivulet of drivel about the incomparable splendors of a Colorado spring. And, as always at such moments, the actor's craft served me well, for I managed to project rapt interest, though I heard not a word after the first few bleatings about streams of fresh-melted snow sparkling in the sunshine of a golden-bright May morn, etc., etc.

Sasanoff's performance, on the other hand, wasn't nearly so convincing. He nodded and grunted out impatient
Hmms
and
I sees
more or less at random, all the while shooting dark scowls at the Whelp. At first opportunity, he found some pretext to extricate us from our hosts and drag me away to a quiet corner of the “ballroom” (which, in the interest of accuracy, I should report was hardly big enough for a
pas de deux,
let alone a proper ball).

“I've endured that amateur's slights for the last time.” Sasanoff nodded over at the Whelp, who'd not only struck up a conversation with a rough-looking fellow chipmunk-cheeked with half-masticated
hors d'oeuvres
—some sort of local constable, we'd been told—but actually seemed to be
enjoying
it. “It's high time I taught him a lesson, wouldn't you say?”

“I not only would say, I've been saying it for weeks. So you're going to cashier the overweening rogue at last?”

Sasanoff's expression turned sneeringly sly, and he fed me one of my own lines from
Twelfth Night
.

“Wouldst thou not be glad to have the rascally sheep-biter come by some notable shame?”

I replied as per the Bard.

“I would exult, man.”

“Then this is what we shall do.... ”

And Sasanoff proceeded to lay out a plan of such diabolical ingenuity I hardly could believe he'd hatched it in a mere ten minutes. Yet I knew he'd done just that, for it had as its inspiration an anecdote Horace Tabor shared with us shortly before the Whelp arrived.

I myself had but one concern, every actor's first and foremost: the size of my role.

“What part do I play in all this?”

“Why, the most important of all,” Sasanoff said. “You will be the audience. For what good is a great performance—or a great humiliation—if no one is on hand to witness it?”

I offered Sasanoff as deep a bow as my magnitude would allow.

“It shall be my honor to serve, thou most excellent devil of wit.”

“It's settled, then. We must prove once and for all who the master actors are here.” Sasanoff grinned as he again quoted
Twelfth Night
. “We will fool him black and blue, shall we not?”

The next midmorning, we attempted our first full dress rehearsal in the still-unfinished opera house, but it was a hopeless effort all around. [
A lengthy account of the rehearsal—including critiques of various company members' performances and personal foibles, complaints about the “drafty cow barn about to be passed off as a theatre,” and a condemnation of the “loutish workmen” who made concentration impossible by “hammering away at Art more successfully than their nails”—has been removed here.—S.B.H.
]

Eventually, Sasanoff saw the futility of it all and released us for the day. He'd seemed remote and distracted anyhow—and only I knew why.

The Whelp disappeared almost immediately, and I braved another outing into the town to seek him out. I found him in a little den of iniquity that was, difficult as this was to believe, even more iniquitous than the one I'd seen him in the day before. Instead of rotten boards for a floor, this one had only dirt liberally garnished with sawdust, and puddles I made it a point not to study at length. The clientele were of a sort to inspire the same policy, and between avoiding their surly, suspicious gazes and ignoring the repellent plashes at my feet, I practically had to navigate the place staring at the ceiling. That I made it to the Whelp's side without bumping into some thug's beer and sparking a “shootout” I count as a miracle.