Men of No Property

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  A chair scraped across the floor in one of the booths and Dennis saw a tuft of black hair above the panel. It told him the height of the man rising. He fancied his own hair rising by the feel of his scalp. He moistened his lips and glanced at the men before him. They were as tense as himself, dapper chaps for the most part. If there was a fight, they’d give odds in a minute and stand ready to hold your coat. “By the glory,” Dennis murmured, making of his remark a confidential aside to them at the bar, “I was afraid there was holes back there for the rats to crawl out of.”

  The big man hove out of the cubby and lumbered forward, flexing his shoulders as he came. His face was near black with his beard, the flesh surrounding his eyes like a mask. His hair crept down his forehead leaving a scant half-inch between itself and his brows. It was more the face of an ape than a man and the prowling walk on him let you know he was aware of the resemblance and intended to make the most of it. In the crouch he wore, his face was the level of Dennis’ when he came up. Would he straighten his back, he’d be a head taller.

  “’Tis Mulrooney I wanted,” said Dennis, “and though I can see the resemblance, you’re not the man.”

  “D’yer know who I am?” said the black one, smiling with great yellow teeth. “Tell him, boys!” This he flung to the men at the bar.

  Not a word did they answer, which meant, Dennis calculated, that if they were not his friends, neither were they overly fond of the black one.

  “I’m the Albany ‘Buster’ and I speak for Mulrooney!” he roared in his own praise. “State yer business.”

  Dennis brought his fist up like a hammer catching the jaw hanging out for it. The “Buster’s” feet left the floor at the crack on his jaw and for the instant he lay against the men he had crashed into the bar with his fall, the metal knobs shone on the soles of his boots. God save the man he got down, Dennis thought, poising himself as the men hoisted the “Buster” back at him. He came like something sprung from a catapult and Dennis aimed to meet his mouth with his fist. Instead, his knuckles slid along the beard searing the brute’s floppy ear. The black one was upon him like a clinging beast, his arms a vise and his legs crooked around Dennis’ till they bent at the knees and Dennis tumbled down atop the brawler on the floor. Dennis heard a crack as the man hit the floor and smelled the foul breath of the “Buster” in his face, heard the clacking of his teeth, and hoped it was his skull was cracked. Nary the sign of damage. As though his back was curved and crusted like a turtle’s, the “Buster” rolled from side to side with Dennis atop him, helpless in his animal grip. Dennis strove with his might to break it, but he could not. He could not get his fists on the bastard. He’d be crushed like an egg before he got loose.

  “Your teeth, lad. Use your teeth!” someone screamed at him.

  They were all screaming now and lights were coming up for them better to see. The ear of the “Buster” was at Dennis’ mouth. But he could sooner have chewed off his own finger than put his teeth to it. The “Buster” gave a great heave and Dennis found himself flat on his back. He hugged his enemy to him, learning from him, for in the instant he gave him a few inches trying himself for leverage, he saw the brute’s mouth working like an infant’s in search of its mother’s breast. No qualms had he on using his teeth. The great bulging neck turned like a capstan and Dennis felt the mouth brush his ear. He strained his own head away until the veins in his neck felt like bursting and yet the brute atop him stretched further and caught the lobe of his ear in his teeth. The pain shot through Dennis, so fierce there was color to it. He clawed at the brute’s back and bouncing his own buttocks on the floor, he lifted the “Buster’s” weight, let it fall on him, lifted it again, down and then up, down and then up until one knee slipped free of the bowed leg knotting it, and Dennis brought it up full force into the bruiser’s groin. The Albany “Buster” howled and went limp for as long as it took Dennis to break free of him, to get astride him, and then Dennis began to shave and blister his face. He worked at it till his knuckles were raw. A cheer went up for him, but not a man who cheered him put more of himself than his voice between Dennis and the screeching crew that plowed toward him from the rear.

  Dennis rose to meet them, swinging, kicking, stomping like his foes, enjoying the pain in his hands with every blow he struck, the wild mad hurt of crashing his head into a welter of flesh and bone. He was not altogether alone against them he realized when he was flung into the bar and lay a moment on his elbows against it. Two of the muggers coming for him were caught from behind and flung off. He laughed inside at the sight, for he could not seem to part his lips. The men on his side were in nightclothes. He grew weak with the effort to laugh and felt himself slipping his hold. The last thing he saw was the brass spittoon, shining like the sun in the sky as he thought he was lifting his face to it.

  He came to, stretched out on a bed, with his brother Kevin standing over him, and beside him Jeremiah Finn, and all round them the peculiar crew in their nightclothes. He closed his eyes as soon as he had opened them, for the pain in his body was torture.

  “I’ll bleed his ear again soon,” someone said. “But it’s best not to move him. He may have a broken rib or two.”

  I’ll be lucky, Dennis thought, if I have one or two whole. But he said nothing. Clinging to the rim of consciousness he caught bits of conversation that told him the men in their nightclothes were lodgers on the top floor of the club and that Rynders himself was amongst them. He hoped it was himself they were praising in their talk. It must have been for presently Mr. Finn was explaining the business of the market, and Kevin chiming in on the wreckage. Norah must have flown like a bird in the night to alarm them. He parted his lips on that thought, and managed the sound of her name.

  “Vincent is with her.” That would be Finn said that, thought Dennis. He was the only one calling the boy Vincent.

  “Rest easy, Lavery,” a voice said into his ear. “You’ll soon be restored, and so will your market.”

  Dennis groaned his thanks.

  “He doesn’t know where he’s at.” That would be Kevin, Dennis thought, always with the poor mouth among politicians.

  “I hope he don’t think it’s Mulrooney’s bosom.” Whoever said that brought a great laugh, and Dennis felt snug amongst friends.

  6

  THERE WAS BUT ONE reason Valois resented Peg’s relationship with Stephen Farrell: it distracted her from her study. He cursed the man’s return at this time especially, and so was especially pleased when Peg turned up from their reunion in so bleak a humor. It portended well, by his calculations, for her attention to her imminent debut. The approximate date had been set for it. She had been viewed and interviewed by Mr. Richards, manager of the Broadway, with Valois coaching first the one of them and then the other because, Peg thought, Mr. Richards needed prompting to see the virtues in her Val proclaimed. But all the occasion waited was the proper vehicle. “A lady of some gumption,” Val specified the role he wanted for her. There were several ladies of gumption in a new play he contemplated doing, Mr. Richards said dryly. Mr. Valois might have his choice of gumptions for his protégé.

  Mr. Richards was a man of disturbing suavity, and Peg thought from her first meeting with him, he was the sort who could smile on you with his mouth, caress you with his voice, and at the same time cut out your heart with his eyes.

  “Val,” she said, the day after Richards had told them of the new play, “are you paying him for taking me on?”

  “Indirectly, I am.”

  “How?”

  Valois sighed. “Sometimes you are very wearisome, Margaret. The chore is sufficient without my having to account it. I am to give his mistress instructions also in the art of acting.”

  “Has she talent?”

  “Sufficient to the needs thereof,” he said maliciously.

  “I don’t like it at all,” Peg said then. “If I’m worth my hire he will profit from it, and if I’m not he can discharge me at no great loss.”

  Valois yawned.
“Of whom are you seeking to be independent, Margaret? Of him or of me?”

  She did not answer for he had probed a tender root.

  “Don’t you think I know how eager you are to escape my tyranny? Let me tell you, Miss, the profession you aspire to is a greater tyrant. So don’t flee one until you’re prepared to cope with the other. And I will tell you more while you listen: this is not a profession where you start at the bottom and work your way up. Nine out of ten who start there stay there. The street is alive with two shilling players who have waited their lives in poverty for their one great chance. And hear this well, my dear: one thing only would drive them from the stage, the getting of that one great chance. They would flee it as they would the cholera.”

  Nonsense, Peg thought, but she said nothing. They bickered a great deal now in the shop and out of it, due in part to her impatience, but more to his cynicism. He spared her nothing of his opinions, using her like a household mirror before which he might pose them. He was at ease with her, but his ease was that of a caged animal. He did not miss a chance to flaunt the Irish at her, to remind her of how poorly Farrell did at their hands. If he disliked them before the Macready affair he loathed them now. His very nostrils turned white at the chance recollection of the night when he was closer to them than he had ever been to any mortal. All the perfumes of Arabia, Peg thought.

  Then at last the letter came from Alvin Richards. He was about to produce The Streets of New York and would Mr. Valois and Miss Hickey call to read the script that morning? Ellen was put in charge of the shop—parts and parcel, Valois told her, for Peg had passed along the girl’s remark about her bathing practices, and it served them often as a catch phrase. Ellen herself saw nothing familiar in the phrase, but she had long since sensed the familiarity between Peg and their master. She was waiting herself the day of Peg’s departure from the shop, parts and parcel, and if this foretold of it, Godspeed to them.

  They took a cab although the Broadway traffic at that hour would have clogged a prairie, but within the cab Val could remind her of all the things she had forgot in the first excitement, her speech, above all she must watch her speech. I’ll have no speech to watch at all, Peg thought, if I can’t get the lump out of my throat.

  “Margaret,” he said then, “I’ve decided you must change your name.”

  That banished the lump. “I’ll not,” she said. “I’m not ashamed of it.

  “Hickey,” Val said. “It’s an outrageous name. It sounds like a carbuncle.”

  She had never in truth been over-fond of it herself. “I’ll trade it for one that’s Irish then,” she said after a moment’s thought.

  He sighed. “Why not just…Margaret? No last name at all.”

  “I wasn’t born an orphan,” she said, “to go about with but one name.”

  “Better you were than what you were born, an Irish mule! If you’re as supple on the stage as you are in the mind, we’d better turn back now to the shop.”

  “Are you trying to unstring me entirely?” Peg cried.

  The cab pulled up at the Broadway Theatre and Val grinned like an imp. “Only your tongue, my dear. Only your tongue.” He hopped out of the hack and gave her his hand. For the first time he kissed her. On the cheek to be sure, but it was a kiss. And having paid the hack, he gave her his arm and whispered, “I have never had more confidence in anyone, not even in myself.”

  The boxkeeper opened the door to them, and left them in the lobby while he carried their names to where Mr. Richards was engaged in the day’s rehearsal. An old, old man, the messenger looked to be able to carry nothing heavier. “There is but one thing wearier than a boxkeeper,” Val said. “That’s a call boy.”

  Peg looked at the pictures hanging on the walls: portraits of Edmund Kean, Junius Brutus Booth; daguerreotypes of Anna Cora Mowatt, Charlotte Cushman, Davenport, Forrest…She turned to see Valois open the door to the pit through which the boxkeeper had passed. He left it open and stood, peering down toward the stage, his hands on his hips. Then he thrust his head forward in the manner of the old man, and as Peg watched, fascinated, she saw a change come over him as truly as if the hand of God was ladling the years upon him in that instant: his knees bent, his shoulders hunched, and slowly, painfully it seemed, he worked one hand toward the other behind his back until he could clasp them. The boxkeeper looked no older. Suddenly, aware of her observation, he sprang back into shape and remarked that he had once taken on years to play Richelieu. She would not forget that instant, Peg thought. In front a single branch of gas shooting up from the footlights was the only illumination in the house. Beyond it the players moved like blue ghosts.

  The boxkeeper returned and fetching a lamp took them to Mr. Richards’ office on the second floor where he unlocked a case and gave them a script copy of The Streets of New York. He opened the shutters and left them side by side at the one script. As its title implied the play was a series of scenes depicting life high and low of the city. Some humor there was in the writing, but as Val murmured once, “It will take playing.” Richards came in when they were nearly done and sat down opposite them. He lit a cigar and seemed to be watching its smoke, but it was their faces he was trying to read.

  “There are moments in it,” Valois said, “good moments.”

  Richards made a noise in his throat and waited Peg’s finishing. “I want to try something,” he said. “Before you say anything I want each of you to write on a piece of paper, without consulting one another, the role you think proper for the young lady here. Mrs. Haversham is out, by the way. That goes to our leading lady.”

  “If I were your leading lady,” Peg said, “I shouldn’t want to play Mrs. Haversham.”

  “Oh? Write as I directed. Then we can talk.” He gave her paper and dipping the pen, handed it to her.

  Without hesitation Peg wrote: “Gallus Mag.”

  “Miss Trueheart,” Val wrote and said the name aloud as he wrote it. A dozen Miss Truehearts passed through the door of his shop every day.

  Mr. Richards had taken Peg’s paper. He shook with amusement and Peg could feel the color climb up her throat and crimson her face. Without a word Richards gave Peg’s paper to Valois.

  “I won’t permit it!” he cried and crumpled the paper in his hand.

  “Why not?” said Richards.

  “I didn’t attend a rose to harvest a cabbage. You don’t have an actress in the company who’d essay that part with pleasure and you know it.”

  Richards shrugged. “Fools that they are,” he said blandly, “you are right. Miss Cushman before she became a star would have done it.

  “And unsexed herself in the doing,” Val said. He looked at Peg with scorn.

  Peg felt herself suspended between the tempers of the men, and her own was calm in the balance. She could be cruel now to Val, for she knew how to clinch the role for herself with Mr. Richards. Docile to her teacher she would be, but true to her own instincts also. She tried to find a delicate way of explaining to him that Gallus Mag was very feminine, however low her place in society. All she could remember was something Stephen told her once, and in her mind it seemed quite apt. “Val,” she said gently, “they say there were more children born out of the famine in Ireland than out of prosperity.”

  “What in the name of God has that to do with the matter?” Valois leaped out of his chair and began to pace the room. “Can you see it, Richards?”

  The producer nodded. “I think I can. Courtship, so they tell me, occurs even among animals.” He took the cigar from his mouth. “If she will do it, I will have Miss Margaret in the role of Mag, even over your protests. It might be very interesting.” He studied the ash on the cigar. “And Miss Haversham may wish she had not been called.”

  Peg flew first with her news to Norah, never counting it strange she had not apprised her sister of her training or its purpose although the training had been evident to both Norah and her husband. Dennis had made his own calculations on it, but now the purpose might prosper all of them.<
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  “A sister-in-law an actress,” he said aloud, testing the notion.

  “Not just a come-on and go-off sort of actress either,” said Peg. “It’s an excellent part I’ll be playing.”

  “Well,” said Dennis, “I thought you playin’ a part since the day I met you.”

  Norah rocked the burden within her and began to recount little things in Peg’s childhood pointing ever and anon to the stage had they but the eyes at home to see it. She was turning into a grandmother, Peg thought, and only out of childhood herself.

  Dennis poked up the fire. A great lump of plaster surrounded his ear like a dumpling, the last token of his fight with the “Buster.” “Maybe you’ll give me a hand one day on my speakin’.”

  “From what I’ve heard you don’t need it,” Peg said.

  “Did you hear about it?”

  “Didn’t she send round a cake?”

  “Oh, aye,” said Dennis, “and my stomach like a sour churn at the sight of it.”

  “There were stomachs able enough amongst your chums,” said Norah. “What an army of men brought him home to me, and paradin’ in and out since.”

  “They’re all big men,” said Dennis, “and they’re lendin’ me a hand, startin’ again. Did you ever hear of Fernandy Wood?”

  “No,” said Peg. “Should I have?”

  “He ran for mayor of New York last year.”

  “Did he win?”

  “God save your ignorance, he’s not a Whig! You’re in America now, girl. You should know what goes on in the country.”

  “I dare say Mr. Finn will know about him.”

  Dennis scowled. “I’m not askin’ an opinion on the man. I was acquaintin’ you with my acquaintances.”

  Peg sighed. The only time she and Dennis could be truly friends was when she needed his help, or perhaps when he needed hers though she doubted the latter. “Aren’t the children up from their naps?” she said. “I’d like to see them before I go.” Little she cared about the children truly, but less about Fernandy Wood.