The Trail of the Hawk: A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life
* * * * *
As second juvenile of the Tent Show, Carl received only twelve dollars
a week, but Mr. Riley made him promises rich as the Orient beryl, and
permitted him to follow the example of two of the bandsmen and pitch a
cot on the trampled hay flooring of the dressing-room tent, behind the
stage. There also Carl prepared breakfast on an alcohol-stove. The
canvas creaked all night; negroes and small boys stuck inquisitive
heads under the edge of the canvas. But it was worth it--to travel on
again; to have his mornings free except for an hour's rehearsal; to
climb to upland meadows of Virginia and Kentucky, among the pines and
laurel and rhododendron; tramping up past the log cabins plastered
with mud, where pickaninnies stared shyly, past glens shining with
dogwood, and friendly streams. Once he sat for an hour on Easter Knob,
gazing through a distant pass whose misty blue he pretended was the
ocean. Once he heard there were moonshiners back in the hills. He
talked to bearded Dunkards and their sunbonneted wives; and when he
found a Confederate veteran he listened to the tale of the defense of
Richmond, delighted to find that the Boys in Gray were not merely
names in the history-books.
Of all these discoveries he wrote to his mother, wishing that her
weary snow-bleached life might know the Southern sun. And the first
five dollars he saved he sent to her.
But as soon as Carl became an actor Parker Heye grew jealous of him,
and was gratingly contemptuous when he showed him how to make up,
among the cheap actors jammed in the men's dressing-room, before a
pine board set on two saw-horses, under the light of a flaring
kerosene-torch. Carl came to hate Heye and his splotched face, his
pale, large eyes and yellow teeth and the bang on his forehead, his
black string tie that was invariably askew, his slovenly blue suit,
his foppishly shaped tan button shoes with "bulldog" toes. Heye
invariably jeered: "Don't make up so heavy.... Well, put a _little_
rouge on your lips. What d'you think you are? A blooming red-lipped
Venus?... Try to learn to walk across the stage as if you had _one_
leg that wasn't wood, anyway.... It's customary to go to sleep when
you're playing a listening role, but don't snore!... Oh, you're a
swell actor! Think of me swallering your story about having been t'
college!... Don't make up your eyebrows so heavy, you fool.... Why you
ever wanted to be an actor----!"
The Great Riley agreed with all that Heye said, and marveled with Heye
that he had ever tried an amateur. Carl found the dressing-room a
hay-dusty hell. But he enjoyed acting in "The Widow's Penny," "Alabama
Nell," "The Moonshiner's Daughter," and "The Crook's Revenge" far more
than he had enjoyed picking phrases out of Shakespeare at a vaguely
remembered Plato. Since, in Joralemon and Plato, he had been brought
up on melodrama, he believed as much as did the audience in the plays.
It was a real mountain cabin from which he fired wonderfully loud guns
in "The Moonshiner's Daughter"; and when the old mountaineer cried,
"They ain't going to steal mah gal!" Carl was damp at the eyes, and
swore with real fervor the oath to protect the girl, sure that in the
ravine behind the back-drop his bearded foe-men were lurking.
"The Crook's Revenge" was his favorite, for he was cast as a young
millionaire and wore evening clothes (second-hand). He held off a mob
of shrieking gangsters, crouched behind an overturned table in a
gambling-den. He coolly stroked the lovely hair of the ingenue, Miss
Evelyn L'Ewysse, with one hand, leveled a revolver with the other, and
made fearless jests the while, to the infinite excitement of the
audience, especially of the hyah-hyah-hyahing negroes, whose faces,
under the flicker of lowered calcium-carbide lights, made a segregated
strip of yellow-black polka-dotted with white eye-balls.
When the people were before him, respectful to art under canvas, Carl
could love them; but even the tiniest ragged-breeched darky was bold
in his curiosity about the strolling players when they appeared
outside, and Carl was self-conscious about the giggles and stares that
surrounded him when he stopped on the street or went into a drug-store
for the comfortable solace of a banana split. He was in a rage
whenever a well-dressed girl peeped at him amusedly from a one-lunged
runabout. The staring so flustered him that even the pride of coming
from Chicago and knowing about motors did not prevent his feeling
feeble at the knees as he tried to stalk by the grinning motored
aristocracy. He would return to the show-tent, to hate the few tawdry
drops and flats--the patch of green spattered with dirty white which
variously simulated a daisy-field, a mountainside, and that part of
Central Park directly opposite the Fifth Avenue residence of the
millionaire counterfeiter, who, you remember, always comes out into
the street to plot with his confederates. Carl hated with peculiar
heartiness the anemic, palely varnished, folding garden bench, which
figured now as a seat in the moonshiner's den, and now, with a cotton
leopard-skin draped over it, as a fauteuil in the luxurious
drawing-room of Mrs. Van Antwerp. The garden bench was, however,
associated with his learning to make stage love to Miss Evelyn
L'Ewysse.
It was difficult to appear unconscious of fifty small boys all
smacking their lips in unison, while he kissed the air one centimeter
in front of Miss L'Ewysse's lips. But he learned the art. Indeed, he
began to lessen that centimeter of safety.
Miss Evelyn L'Ewysse (christened Lena Ludwig, and heir presumptive to
one of the best delicatessens in Newport News) reveled in love-making
on and off. Carl was attracted by her constantly, uncomfortably. She
smiled at him in the wings, smoothed her fluffy blond hair at him, and
told him in confidence that she was a high-school graduate, that she
was used to much, oh, _much_ better companies, and was playing under
canvas for a lark. She bubbled: "_Ach_, Louie, say, ain't it hot!
Honest, Mr. Ericson, I don't see how you stand it like you do.... Say,
honest, that was swell business you pulled in the third act last
night.... Say, I know what let's do--let's get up a swell act and get
on the Peanut Circuit. We'd hit Broadway with a noise like seventeen
marine bands.... Say, honest, Mr. Ericson, you do awful well for----I
bet you ain't no amachoor. I bet you been on before."
He devoured it.
One night, finding that Miss Evelyn made no comment on his holding her
hand, he lured her out of the tent during a long wait, trembled, and
kissed her. Her fingers gripped his shoulders agitatedly, plucked at
his sleeve as she kissed him back. She murmured, "Oh, you hadn't ought
to do that." But afterward she would kiss him every time they were
alone, and she told him with confidential giggles of Parker Heye's
awkward attempts to win her. Heye's most secret notes she read, till
Carl seriously informed her that she was violating a trust. Miss
Evelyn immediately saw the light and promised she would "never, never,
never do anythin' like that again, and, honest, she hadn't realized
she was doing anythin' dishon'able, but Heye is such an old pest";
which was an excuse for her weeping on his shoulder and his kissing
the tears away.
All day he looked forward to their meetings. Yet constantly the law of
the adventurer, which means the instinct of practical decency, warned
him that this was no amour for him; that he must not make love where
he did not love; that this good-hearted vulgarian was too kindly to
tamper with and too absurd to love. Only----And again his breath would
draw in with swift exultation as he recalled how elastic were her
shoulders to stroke.
It was summer now, and they were back in Virginia, touring the Eastern
Shore. Carl, the prairie-born, had been within five miles of the open
Atlantic, though he had not seen it. Along the endless flat
potato-fields, broken by pine-groves under whose sultry shadow negro
cabins sweltered, the heat clung persistently. The show-tent was
always filled with a stale scent of people.
At the town of Nankiwoc the hotel was not all it might have been.
Evelyn L'Ewysse announced that she was "good and sick of eating a
vaudeville dinner with the grub acts stuck around your plate in a lot
of birds' bath-tubs--little mess of turnips and a dab of spinach and a
fried cockroach. And when it comes to sleeping another night on a bed
like a gridiron, no--thank--_you_! And believe me, if I see that old
rube hotel-keeper comb his whiskers at the hall hat-rack again--he
keeps a baby comb in his vest pocket with a lead-pencil and a cigar
some drummer gave him--if I have to watch him comb that alfalfa again
I'll bite his ears off and get pinched by the S. P. C. A.!"
With Mrs. Lubley, the old lady and complacent unofficial chaperon of
the show, Eve was going to imitate Carl and the two bandsmen, and
sleep in the dressing-room tent, over half of which was devoted to the
women of the company.
Every day Carl warned himself that he must go no farther, but every
night as Eve and he parted, to sleep with only a canvas partition
between them, he cursed the presence of the show chaperon, and of the
two bandsmen, always distressingly awake and talking till after
midnight.
A hot June night. The whole company had been invited to a dance at the
U. C. V. Hall; the two bandsmen were going; the chaperon--lively old
lady with experience on the burlesque circuit--was gaily going. Carl
and Eve were not. It had taken but one glance between them to decide
that.
They sat outside the silent tent, on a wardrobe trunk. What manner of
night it was, whether starlit or sullen, Carl did not know; he was
aware only that it was oppressive, and that Eve was in his arms in the
darkness. He kissed her moist, hot neck. He babbled incoherently of
the show people, but every word he said meant that he was palpitating
because her soft body was against his. He knew--and he was sure that
she knew--that when they discussed Heye's string tie and pretended to
laugh, they were agitatedly voicing their intoxication.
His voice unsteady, Carl said: "Jiminy! it's so hot, Eve! I'm going to
take off this darn shirt and collar and put on a soft shirt. S-say,
w-why don't you put on a kimono or something? Be so much cooler."
"Oh, I don't know as I ought to----" She was frightened, awed at
Bacchic madness. "D-do you think it would be all right?"
"Why not? Guess anybody's got a right to get cool--night like this.
Besides, they won't be back till 4 P.M. And you got to get cool. Come
on."
And he knew--and he was sure that she knew--that all he said was
pretense. But she rose and said, nebulously, as she stood before him,
ruffling his hair: "Well, I would like to get cool. If you think it's
all right----I'll put on something cooler, anyway."
She went. Carl could hear a rustling in the women's end of the
dressing-room tent. Fevered, he listened to it. Fevered, he changed to
an outing-shirt, open at the throat. He ran out, not to miss a moment
with her.... She had not yet come. He was too overwrought to heed a
small voice in him, a voice born of snow-fields colored with sunset
and trained in the quietudes of Henry Frazer's house, which insisted:
"Go slow! Stop!" A louder voice throbbed like the pulsing of the
artery in his neck, "She's coming!"
Through the darkness her light garment swished against the long grass.
He sprang up. Then he was holding her, bending her head back. He
exulted to find that his gripping hand was barred from the smoothness
of her side only by thin silk that glided and warmed under his
fingers. She sat on his knees and snuggled her loosened hair
tinglingly against his bare chest. He felt that she was waiting for
him to go on.