Carl grinned and started up-town. He walked into four restaurants. At noon, in white jacket, he was bustling about as waiter in the dining-room of the Waskahominie Hotel, which had "white service" as a feature.
Within two days he was boon companion of a guest of the Waskahominie—Parker Heye, an actor famous from Cape Charles to Shockeysville, now playing heavies at Roanoke in the Great Riley Tent Show, Presenting a Popular Repertoire of Famous Melodramas under Canvas, Rain or Shine, Admittance Twenty-five Cents, Section Reserved for Colored People, the Best Show under Canvas, This Week Only.
When Parker Heye returned from the theater Carl sat with him in a room which had calico-like wall-paper, a sunken bed with a comforter out of which oozed a bit of its soiled cotton entrails, a cracked water-pitcher on a staggering wash-stand, and a beautiful new cuspidor of white china hand-painted with pink moss-roses tied with narrow blue ribbon.
Carl listened credulously to Heye's confidences as to how jealous was Riley, the actor-manager, of Heye's art, how Heye had "knocked them all down" in a stock company at Newport News, and what E. H. Sothern had said to him when they met in Richmond as guests of the Seven Pines Club.
"Say," rasped Heye, "you're a smart young fellow, good-looking, ejucated. Why don't you try to get an engagement? I'll knock you down to Riley. The second juvenile 's going to leave on Saturday, and there ain't hardly time to get anybody from Norfolk."
"Golly! that 'd be great!" cried Carl, who, like every human being since Eden, with the possible exceptions of Calvin and Richard Mansfield, had a secret belief that he could be a powerful actor.
"Well, I'll see what I can do for you," said Heye, at parting, alternately snapping his suspenders and scratching his head. Though he was in his stocking-feet and coat-less, though the back of his neck was a scraggle of hair, Parker Heye was preferable to the three Swiss waiters snoring in the hot room under the eaves, with its door half open, opposite the half-open door of the room where negro chambermaids tumbled and snorted in uncouth slumber. Carl's nose wrinkled with bitter fastidiousness as he pulled off his clothes, sticky with heat, and glared at the swathed forms of the waiters. He was the aristocrat among proletarians, going back to His Own People—of the Great Riley Tent Show.
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.