"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 ingénue, 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."