Gypsy - Lesley Pearse [124]
After a dinner of fried chicken and potatoes in a restaurant close by they walked down the main street of Gas Town.
As they understood it, Vancouver originated here. In 1867 it had been just a cluster of wooden shacks and warehouses by the wharves until John Deighton, known as Gassy Jack, arrived and opened the first saloon. The city dignitaries wanted to call the area Granville, but it had remained Gas Town to its residents.
After the sedate, quiet little towns they’d visited during the past months it was a delight to find Gas Town was buzzing with activity, noise and less pious pleasures.
People were spilling out of saloons on to the pavements with their drinks and there were stalls selling all kinds of food from baked potatoes and hot dogs to bowls of noodles. Music wafted out from a dozen different sources, and drunken sailors lurched along in groups, singing as they went.
There were touts trying to get the unwary into card games down back alleys, and whores lounging suggestively in doorways. Beggars, buskers, street entertainers and pedlars all added to the hurly-burly.
Jack stopped them at a very busy saloon on a street corner in Water Street. ‘Let’s make a nuisance of ourselves in here,’ he said with a grin. ‘There’s no music, so maybe we can persuade them they need some!’
Waiting by the door with Theo while Jack and Sam went to the bar to get drinks, Beth reflected on how the dynamics of their group had changed since they left Philadelphia. Theo had been their undisputed leader then, by force of personality and breeding and because he was the one who had the money. Sam was his right-hand man, and Jack’s role was almost that of servant.
Once in Montreal, with Theo prone to disappearing, Jack and Sam had begun to make decisions for themselves. Yet even then Theo only had to click his fingers and they fell in with his plans.
Once out of Montreal, everything changed; Theo and Sam were both too refined and citified to be in harmony with the tough, strong farmers, lumberjacks and construction men they met up with. But these men took to Jack, recognizing him as one of their own.
Suddenly it was Jack making the decisions, and he carried Sam and Theo with him. On some of the jobs they did, they wouldn’t have lasted a day without Jack helping them and covering up their inadequacies. Sam soon began to toughen up, and took a pride in learning new skills and keeping up with Jack and the other men. But Theo was like a fish out of water; he couldn’t adjust. He got by solely on his charm, and Beth often overheard men referring to him disparagingly as ‘the English gent’.
She wondered whether now they were here, in the kind of environment Theo was at home in, he’d push his way back to being group leader again.
Jack and Sam returned with the drinks and they were grinning broadly.
‘We asked the landlord if you could play,’ Sam said. ‘He said, “If you dare.“So do you dare, sis?’
Beth took her glass of rum, glanced around at the crowded bar, and knocked her drink back in one. ‘Try stopping me,’ she said with a wide smile. Theo handed her the fiddle case, and she opened it and took out the instrument.
‘How much of the money have we got to give the landlord?’ she asked.
‘He didn’t say,’ Jack said. ‘I guess he didn’t really believe there would be any. I’ll go round with the hat, we’d better offer him some of it at the end, and then maybe he’ll give you a permanent spot.’
Theo watched Beth as she slithered through the crowd to the back of the saloon, her fiddle held under one arm, the bow in her other hand. She looked like a slender flame in her red dress, and he could see by her straight back and the way she held her shoulders that she was determined to succeed tonight.
She disappeared from view and Theo felt a sudden pang of anxiety, but all at once he saw her rise up behind the burly men blocking his view, and he realized she was now standing on a table.
Tucking her fiddle under her chin, she drew the bow across