Reserved for the Cat

This was a very desirable venue for most performers; a six-week engagement at minimum meant it was possible to relax, unpack, mend things, take in the local sights. It was, after all, the audience that changed during the season in Blackpool; virtually a new audience twice a week. Nigel usually had far more acts auditioning than he had slots for them.

But now . . . first Harrigan, who had fallen into a hole that his wife swore literally “opened up in front of them” and broken both his legs. It was a good thing for both of them that Nigel knew a doctor who was also an Elemental magician, though not a master. He did not care to think of what a butcher’s job an ordinary doctor would make of such a patient. So Harrigan was now splinted and resting comfortably surrounded by wife and dogs, a stone’s throw from the doctor’s office. Nigel was keeping him on wages, partly because it seemed the right thing to do, and partly because he wanted the Hounds for the big show, and when Harrigan was well again, he would certainly feel a debt of gratitude to Nigel.

But the next day brought another unpleasant surprise.

Three of the acts just . . . quit, with four more weeks to run on their contracts. They wouldn’t tell him why, nor would their agents, but he suspected that a rumored Australian impresario with a supposed “golden tour” was to blame. On the one hand, he viciously wished all of them to perdition. On the other... he knew how most of these things turned out—with performers stranded in the middle of nowhere with no money and no prospects of getting any, sick with heat and tropical disease and bitterly regretting the decision that had brought them to that pass. He had already made up his mind that he was not going to ask these acts to stick for the big show, but still, he needed them now. He was not going to ask Nina to put in another turn, and anyway, she could hardly make up for half the show missing.

As it happened, though, Nigel was the rare sort who always assumed some disaster was going to overtake his shows, his theater, or the season, and planned accordingly.

He regularly made forays into the countryside and as far as Liverpool, looking for people with talent who had not yet “caught on.” Two fast trips in his motorcar yielded him a perky little singer with a genuine gift for comic timing and a “novelty” juggler and his partner, a fellow who impersonated a drunken “toff” with an impertinent maid who kept piling things into his arms when he came home after a night on the tiles. He rushed them to the theater in time for a quick rehearsal; to fill the last slot, Jonathon put in an act he seldom performed anymore, a Hindoo fire- eater. It was all real magic, of course, and as such it was something of a risk. If there was an untrained Elemental mage in the audience, Jonathon’s performance might “wake him up.” And there were those who hunted Masters as well, though usually feuds were of a personal nature.

Jonathon, however, swore that there were precautions he could take, shields he could set up. Nigel was disposed to believe him, but he wanted the act safely tucked away as soon as possible. He simply did not want to take any chances when there might be someone hunting for Nina—why give a hunter an opening for an attack?

So a morning on the phone and running back and forth from the telegraph office to London netted him a brother and sister “minstrel” act from America; the idea of a woman in blackface playing a banjo and tap dancing seemed to have put some booking agents off. But on the basis of an enthusiastic report from one of his scouts, which he trusted, he pursued the lead. He learned they were starving in London; he engaged them on the spot and arranged for the agent to advance them money so that they could buy train tickets to Blackpool.

All three of the new acts were enthusiastic and terribly grateful for the opportunity to play in one of the “big” halls. All of the acts were solid, if not brilliant. By the weekend, the programme was full again, and Jonathon and Nina were able to drop their extra turns, and not a moment too soon. It was clear that the extra work had just begun to wear on them.

Nigel watched the two of them from the wings as they ran smoothly through the “evil magician” turn, feeling unspeakably grateful that they had both come through without a murmur of complaint. No matter what else could be said about this Russian girl, there was no doubt in his mind that she was willing to work, and work hard. She was an imitator rather than an original, but no one on holiday in Blackpool and spending time in a music hall was likely to have seen the originals, and the girl gave you a good show for your money. Who did it harm, that she borrowed Loie Fuller’s serpentine skirt dance without a blush of shame? How did it matter than she turned Pavlova’s “California Poppy” into her own “Water-lily”? Was Pavlova losing money by it? Had Pavlova ever even heard of Blackpool? Would Fuller ever set foot in this city? Since the answer to all of these questions was “no,” Nigel didn’t see that anyone could have any quarrel with the girl. In fact, he thought she ought to be commended. She was probably the first ballet dancer most of these people had ever seen. And having seen, the holiday-makers might choose to have a look-in on a real ballet corps. Who could tell? They might even become regulars at the theater.

It wasn’t as if she was claiming to be Pavlova, after all. In the theater, nothing was new, and the only people that ever successfully kept the secrets of how they did things were magicians.

He watched her with the eye of a critic rather than a showman as she went through her paces in Jonathon’s act. She was certainly graceful, but that went with being a dancer. She wasn’t much of an actress, but then, she wouldn’t have studied acting. Nigel didn’t know much about ballet, but he had the vague notion that the dancers were far too busy keeping track of their steps to do much acting. She didn’t have to be much of an actress anyway; the audience for Music Halls was not one for subtle nuances. They liked showy tricks, melodrama; they wanted to be thrilled and amazed; they wanted to laugh and be dazzled. The Divine Sarah and Eleanor Duse had no place in the music hall. Little Tich, however, dancing in boots that were as long as he was tall . . . that was what they wanted.

He continued to watch. She was good. The audience liked her. Part of that was her youth, part her apparent fragility, part the romance of her rescue these several weeks ago. She connected with the audience too, she had an instinct for that. Performers had been a success on that alone.

One thing he didn’t get from her was that . . . spark, that something special, that he felt from people that really were geniuses. He was hardly an ignoramus; he made a point of going to London when he could, to see what the world considered great. And there was a magic, a special something, in those for whom the stage was a kind of home, that the rest of theatrical humanity just did not possess. Ellen Terry, Henry Irving, they had it, and the audience reveled in seeing it displayed. He’d gone to ballets as well as the theater; he had seen Nijinsky, Pavlova, and Isadora Duncan too. They had it, they had it and made the stage sing beneath their feet. Eleanor Duse. The Divine Sarah, dear God, she had it, she could make you believe she was anything she chose to be, and you would completely forget that she was not fourteen years old as she spoke tremulously from her balcony to Romeo, that she was not the courtesan Marguerite Gautier and dying of consumption, that she was not even a woman, as she donned the breeches of Hamlet.

Nina Tchereslavsky did not have that gift. She had another, a gift for evoking emotion, and for giving it back, and she was good. She would never be immortal.

On the other hand, the people who had that spark often didn’t do well in life. It was almost as if having been granted this enormous gift, the Fates decided that you had to make up for it in other ways. Those who had it seldom prospered in love; those who had it often drank to excess, or dosed themselves with morphia or hashish or some other drug. Those that had it knew that their gift was a jealous mistress and would tolerate no others.

Besides the people that came to music halls didn’t want to see genius. Genius wasn’t comfortable, it didn’t actually care about what an audience wanted. Genius didn’t set out to entertain you; if you were entertained by genius, that was incidental. Genius burned, and if you weren’t careful, you burned with it. Genius didn’t want you to forget your troubles, make you laugh, make you gasp. Genius wanted to take your troubles and make art out of them, which was all very well, but made it cursed uncomfortable to live around genius.

No, for his purposes, he didn’t want genius, he didn’t want art, and he certainly didn’t want artists. He wanted entertainers. He wanted people who lived for the sound of applause and would turn themselves inside out to get it. People like that tended to be troupers, and when something bad happened, they pulled together to make sure the show went on. Genius regarded an audience as a sometimes-inconvenient thing that insisted it should be the judge of what it was shown. Genius only wanted to show the audience something that would make it go away and try very hard to think. Of course, people who lived for audience approval could be trouble too, craving that approval to the exclusion of everything else, making a dreadful pother about themselves offstage and hogging the limelight when on. In fact, there didn’t ever really seem to be an offstage for them. They played to the people around them as if they were always in front of an audience. In their own way, they were going to always be lonely, for there was no room in that place for anyone who was not audience.