by Kaz Cooke
For a theatrical man, if anything, court cases were a badge of honour or good publicity – or a smallish nuisance. But gossip and scandal always hurt a lady. In fact being a woman of the theatre, your very existence was a reproach to some. Even poor Lizzie was tarnished momentarily by the rumours about me, through no fault of her own.
Poor Lizzie never asked for more. Loyal to her parents, she stayed with them. And then when she did have a moment of romance, her heart was broken into thousands of smithers by that New Zealand devil Edmund Montague. What an idiot I was through all that time, wrapped up in my own concerns. I failed her terribly. And yet she forgave me all my failures. And beautiful Cissie, no longer with us. I’m not ready to tell you about that.
I’ll tell you a funny story instead. Better to gather happy thoughts even though I’m stuck here. I remember what it was like to be outside with the wind in my hair, belting along on a bicycle. Oh yes, I was a champion rider – the first lady to ride in many Australian towns. We girls would take the bikes out of the baggage car as soon as we arrived in town, and ride about gathering crowds and telling them about the show. A man in Cooma fell off his horse when he saw me riding a bicycle in his main street. That was 1896. Later that year we girls hurtled round the inside bicycle salon on the third floor of George’s Department Store in Melbourne. That was a very good place to meet sailors.
Another time I was unseated in the street at Mount Morgan. I insisted on being ladylike and always riding in skirts, you see – it’s what the reporters always wanted to know: ‘Do you favour a bifurcated garment for cycling exercise, Miss Delroy?’ ‘Oh, perish the thought,’ I’d say. ‘I am a lady, and skirts are good enough for me.’ Of course that meant I ended up upside down in the gutter in the main street of Mount Morgan with my skirts frothing over my head and my legs waving in the air covered with nothing but dust. There’s ladylike for you. I was so dazed I just lay there while hordes of miners rushed at me and dug me out. Meanwhile Jim and Lizzie and Cissie had wheeled off into the distance without even knowing they were a man down.
We had some marvellous times, and I don’t want to grumble, but the last ten years have been awfully hard to bear. Everything began to go wrong on that New Zealand tour, in 1901. What went wrong? What didn’t, dearie-oh? I was sick and exhausted and Alice had found Jim getting something out of my eye in the paint room and flew into a rage, and said we were making a fool of her. It was awful. I had to have two doctors backstage in Wanganui and couldn’t go on. That was where the coughing started, too.
Poor Lizzie had to take over the Serpentine with a moment’s notice – which brought her to the attention of our producer, the baritone trifler and travelling bioscope showman and rogue, Edmund Montague.
Monty the Murderable assured her of his decent intentions, shepherded her away to show her his music collection (we thought), kissed her eyelids, made tender promises, and cautioned against revealing them to her family due to ‘professionalism’. After years of lukewarm reviews for her xylophone solo of the Zampa overture, the Ohinemuri Gazette called it ‘exquisite’ and her ‘pretty’ and she was shiny with happiness. Then, as our tour took us away from Montgomery’s Entertainers, came the weeks of no letters, and then the news a few weeks after Christmas that Edmund Montague was newly affianced to his company’s soprano, Ettie Harwood. I’ll never forget the look on Lizzie’s face when somebody blithely mentioned it.
Everything is inspected these days – the milk for tuberculosis and the bread for plaster of Paris, and between the toes of fevered children for smallpox blisters. But how do you inspect a man for his character, especially if you’re always on the move and he lies through his teeth? Let me know when you work it out.
Our beloved New Zealand wasn’t good to us that year. That was when the Oriental Hotel went up in Wellington – Charley boy so badly hurt Jim didn’t recognise him in the street afterwards, dark all over like a burlesque of blackface with his leg all pointing the wrong way – he’d jumped from an upper floor through the teeth of the flames. He was only twenty-two. We lost a trunk of costumes and a case of spare lantern slides and everything of Charles’s. I can’t decide whether Charley is lucky or unlucky. Do you remember that time in Portland when he plummeted out of the ceiling above the stage putting in a light? Forty feet he fell, and then apologised for smashing the light. You probably don’t – I forgot you weren’t there. Where you see a glamorous caravan of jaunty travelling theatricals, Horrie, others might see a rather tired troupe dragging about their old acts and being tempted to throw a clog into the workings of the shiny new moving-picture machines.
Years came and went in an interminable circular blur of railway sleeper carriages, steamer ships, horse-drawn omnibuses and large carriages drawn by two or three pairs of horses. No fete days or holidays. Stony roads and scrub. Too cold or too hot. Never stopping anywhere long enough to get the rhythm of the seasons. Getting the advance programming wrong so we had three winters in a row. Torturous traipsing around the Bijou-est halls in even Bijou-er towns. It’s supposed to mean ‘gem’, bijou, but it really means too small for words.
I don’t mind telling you that in the last few years I began to despise the road, with its summer dirt and dust and its winter bogs that sucked wheels in shanks-deep, and the bush pushing in against it from all directions. I tried to be an Australian republican nationalist and see the beauty in the bush, but try as I might I couldn’t see the point of it. No shade, no lovely emerald-green glades, and the same drab look all year round. Not to mention bark that hangs down like shreds of clothing: most ghost-gum trees are very vulgar: half of them look like Pansy Montague going on stage.
Imagine this, Horrie, rather than lounging about your front parlour reading an improving novel. Travel all day. Arrive in town, put the stage gear and luggage into the station baggage room. Take the smaller, lockable boxes and personal bags to the digs booked by the advance man, a borading house or pub. Fall into bed after whatever attempt at supper the landlady chose.
Up early, get the trunks and wicker baskets from a station lock-up, bump in to the dressing-rooms, roll out and hang the scenery, rehearsals, rig the lights, check, mend, sponge, iron, air, and set the costumes in place.
Write up the set list, programme the next few weeks, buy train or steamer tickets and arrange porters, schedules and correspondence with the advance man, errands, school the children. Reconstruct the bioscope projector and limelights, rewind the films, add the chemicals or check the electrics, put the slides in order.
Are you bored yet?
Get dressed up and linger on town verandahs, talk up the show, visit the ticket seller, collect and check the paperwork and the money, check the commission. Try to get laundry washed and dried.
Is the romance of the stage eluding you, at all, Horrie?
Open doors early to encourage entry, take money. Instruct local firemen, set buckets of sand and water, learn the curtain if there is one, get easel onto stage and put placards for each act in right order, set up bioscope projector.
Perform from half-past seven until half-past ten or so, help everyone else with their act, pack everything, clean and make safe lights and all apparatus, meeting for notes on performances and travel instructions for morning, put takings in neck pouches, walk to lodgings with coshes at the ready. Light supper, fall insensible, wake up, go again.
All right, I’ll stop. Sometimes I felt like Moto Girl – did you never see her act? Lovely girl from Geelong, pretended to be an automaton. Saying it won’t make it any worse, so I’ll tell you that somewhere in all of that, Alice upped and died. And of course she went thinking I’d betrayed her, and Jim had betrayed her, and that Lizzie, who was with us, must have known and didn’t tell her.
This is where Madam Marzella really did her worst. You see, directly after that dread New Zealand tour Alice had retired to Melbourne to look after Under-the-Table Walter, who’d arrived from England, and his children (one of them was called Ada, how’s that for peculiar seeing as he won
’t speak a word to me). And that’s when Alice had a letter from Madam Marzella, saying that Jim and I had a baby in Adelaide and we left it there with a family. Oh, why does it matter what year it was, Horace, you said you’re not a damned copper, excuse the French. Poor old Alice finally got to put down her Mahatma blindfold as well as her skipping rope, but she couldn’t enjoy it because of that poisoned pen letter.
I don’t really want to remember the order in which things happened, it’s too painful. The wifty-wafty medicine helps. Any road, I do remember when the telegram arrived saying Alice had died. Oh, we were wretched. She didn’t die alone but she would have wanted the girls there, or Jim, despite everything.
I find it very difficult to talk about that. And certain other things. You ask me where Cissie is, Horace, and I don’t want to tell you. But let’s get it over with.
Let me go back a little bit, so it’s easier. The passing of Alice and Marzella’s nastiness squashed our mood terribly as we trundled about the continent in the years that followed. We had a fillip when one of Harry’s schemes worked like an Austrian clock. He’d suggested Cissie join Madame Abomah the Giantess’s travelling show as the pianist, and after a few months Cissie wrote to say she’d fallen in love with young Doc Rowe, Abomah’s resident magician. Cissie wrote that half an hour after they was introduced Doc offered to poke anyone on the snoot if they was ever rude to her, and although when I met him I didn’t think him capable of boxing a snapdragon, Cissie was very touched and decided to call him William as his mother had. They was married within the year and came to join us in the Ada Delroy Company, so we set off for Tasmania feeling it was a new leaf, with a new company all ready for fun. Our spirits were lighter than they’d been in years.
But we soon stopped expecting sunshine. It’s a ghastly feeling when only twenty-six people turn up to see the Ada Delroy Company and you’re the Ada Delroy that the rest of them haven’t come to see. We knew it was scrabble for everyone, and nobody blamed me or said out loud any old Trixie, Dixie or Harriet could do my act. But still, you feel it. It was me and Jim and Lizzie at the core of it, and Cissie and Doc, with Zeno and Hall, and Matt Northcote, the shadowgrapher. The truth is, we’d already been to each town at least twice before and Gertie McLeod and her now unfathomable tartan sword-jumping act just wasn’t enough to make the difference.
And that’s where we lost Cissie. An affliction got hold of her on the boat to Hobart. We never really understood what it was. I suppose it doesn’t matter what, any more. We’d all gone ahead, and left her in a private hospital in Hobart for her brain fever to come down. The hospital matron said it was better to be cautious, though no need for alarm. Doc, her adoring new husband, was to fetch her up to Launceston as soon as she was ready. But it went to a brain fever and the telegram said something else altogether. Cissie was gone. Still our darling girl, twenty-three years old, newly married with shiny eyes full of mischief who’d describe an acrobat as the bendiest compendiest, and put her head on your shoulder just to say hello. It broke us all into tiny little pieces.
I remember after getting the news, driving over frozen puddles on the road the next day to another engagement, or we’d have nothing to pay for the funeral and lodgings back in Hobart. It was hand to mouth and don’t get the shakes. All of us sobbing in the coach. At a roadside stop, I traipsed off into the bush to relieve myself. I thought, wildly, that I could keep walking forward through the trees until I was lost and could lie down and die myself. In that cold it surely wouldn’t take more than a day or so. I didn’t, though. I just squatted down and piddled on an ant for spite.
I stood up, stepped away, breathed in as deeply as I could to steady myself. Cold air smacked the inside of my mouth, and I felt a catch in my chest. I couldn’t quite seem to fill my lungs, the dratted cough had been going on, and off, for years. This time though, I began to cough, and cough, doubled over with it, and couldn’t seem to get any air in between the coughs. My eyes seemed to be crying of their own accord and I felt a stab of terror, fighting to breathe. I felt something come up from within and I spat it out. Glistening red on the green leaves and ferns. I kept coughing, tears streaming down my face, and waved my search bell until Jim and Zeno found me and helped me back to the road, leaning on tree trunks all the way.
I know there’s something terrible wrong with my lungs but I think the heavy feeling I’ve had in my chest since then, as heavy as a cannonball, that’s my heart.
Poor old Doc Rowe. Imagine being a widower at twenty-six, poor lamb. But he’s on his feet again. Came round the other day with his new wife – yet another Alice, would you believe it. She’s going Mahatma-ing with him, doing the clairvoyancing as Mystic Mora. He’s had the okay from Baldwin in a letter from his assistant, Shadow, to the world rights aside from the Americas. It’s good to know it’s still in the family business. Doc’s going to call his company Baldwin’s, for extra authenticity.
Those hard-yard years meant we didn’t make a lot of time to talk about what – and who – we’d lost. But all of us thought about it, I would reckon, every day. There was no point in complaining and not one of us who wanted to be seen as the complainer. I suppose the more you once had, the more you feel the loss. So in a way, a big loss is only possible if you’ve had a big achievement, or you loved somebody immoderately. Wouldn’t you say? It’s one way to look at it. To go from being a headline act to performing at a country hall attended by only enough people to fill a drawing room is hard. But it beats dragging yourself to one mill or the other with cotton-dust lung in Lancashire. Damned lungs. They’ll get you coming or going.
And if your lungs are playing up, don’t take them to Tasmania in the winter. Tasmanian winter. Have I told you the Lancashire words for the rain? Oh, I have. Tasmanian rain, rain, rain, drumming on tin roofs to deafen you.
And yet we had to go on. Without Alice, without Cissie. No rest, no money. Doing the same thing every night in two hundred places a year.
We were up to dolly’s wax with bad news and worn down like public-library stairs already so that I think what happened to us in Walhalla was just one too many disasters. Somehow when you’re young a fire on a train or being hurled out of a carriage by a bolting horse is an exciting setback with a good story rather than a calamity that stops you in your tracks.
Two years ago Walhalla was one of those Australian mining towns at the far end of a railway line – although in this instance they were still building the railway line. Ravaged hillsides, a cemetery full of babies, the sort of mining town where every blade of grass has been sacrificed for the dig, every tree taken for firewood, every rock pulverised until it gave up its gold, or tin, or zinc.
The road through thick bush into Walhalla had always been frightful. It was a craggy, hard-packed dirt track set with random piercings of quartz and granite rocks that might be, as they say of icebergs, much bigger under the surface, going down all the way to the middle of the earth. The surface was rutted with a crazed pattern of wheel tracks and grooves of varied widths, and it threw up a storm of dust from any leading vehicle. The road cut into the side of the hills, winding its way through the hairpin bends. The luggage coach was going first with most of us following in another carriage, choking all the way. We were nearing Walhalla for a one-night turn, after hours of an awful hot journey, in the middle of a week-long heatwave that broke all the records. We could hear the relentless rhythmic whump of the quartz crusher so we knew it was only an hour or so to get down the winding road into town.
Zeno and Mattie Northcote were sitting up with the driver of the luggage coach, coming down the hill when the team of five horses shied at the sight of a brown snake lolling on the track. Just as the driver was calming the team, a wheel rim expanded in the heat, came off and tipped the lot over, most of the heavy luggage on top sliding off towards the lip of the road, at the edge of a sharp drop into a deep gully. As we drew up behind, the driver, Zeno and Matt scrambled to jump clear. Relieved of its balancing weight of men, the falling luggage c
arriage teetered sideways for an instant and then plunged over the edge, dragging the five horses with it.
I’ll never hear another noise like that, please God. Shouts and screams, and ghastly whinnying and the groaning and splintering, rending, and thudding as the timber shafts and seats and the animals, hooves and manes tumbled together in the air. The bursting metal and wicker trunks and wooden cases and hatboxes smashing and somersaulting down through gum trees and grass trees and dry bracken, rolling over in a terrible cacophony until there was a horrible silence broken by snorts and oaths.
Our coachman retrieved a handful of bullets from a box under his seat, took his rifle and climbed down into the carnage in his shirt sleeves. He shot all five horses, sliding and scrabbling over debris between them. Back up on the road, he cleared his throat, took off his ancient cabbage-tree hat and walked a little way down the road, away from the company, and squatted down on his haunches. He wiped his face with a rag from his pocket, and flagged down a gig coming up from Walhalla. He sent the driver of the smashed carriage on with it, with orders to send a relief coach and another driver to take us to Warragul.
I didn’t want to look over the edge, but I did. Far down the slope was a grotesque scene of twisted horse legs and necks, broken wood and wheels. We’d lost every backdrop, the magic lantern projector, the costumes except the spare in my small valise that was with me on the second carriage, every lantern slide, the bioscope projector and films and all my bottles of tincture and the miracle cough elixir the doctor had sent me from Boston. In the valise I had my hairbrush, a change of pantaloons, a belt and some rags, a book, a little mending bag and sewing, my last sliver of rose soap, letters, and the scrapbook you’re holding. Jim had our money in a bag round his neck and his two notebooks – accounts and ideas – in his inside jacket pocket in the overhead netting of the carriage. And the clothes he stood up in.