For two months, they travel and perform.
Montreal. Toronto. Into the United States.
New York. The Wow-Wows. (“Chaplin will do but the company amounts to little.”)
Back to Toronto. Chicago. A Night in a London Club. (“Chaplin has come to be recognized as the leading comedy character of the Karno offerings.”)
Cincinnati. Mumming Birds. Chicago again. Milwaukee. Duluth and Minneapolis, split weeks. (“The company is not especially strong.”)
Winnipeg.
Butte.
Spokane.
Seattle.
Vancouver.
Victoria.
Tacoma.
Portland.
They share rooms for a dollar apiece, including meals, but only while working. When they travel, they do so at their own expense. To save money, they sleep at stations and on trains. They spend no more than a nickel on a meal, and then only once a day.
They are tired.
They are not the stars. Chaplin is the star.
They are not a company. Chaplin is the company.
And when Chaplin leaves, as Chaplin must surely do, what then?
He and Chaplin often room together. He prides himself on his neatness while Chaplin oscillates between dishevelment and elegance according to mood and sexual appetite. While he learns his lines, Chaplin practices his Greek. While he studies the theatrical pages, Chaplin ponders Schopenhauer. When money is at its scarcest, he fries spoiled chops over a naked flame while Chaplin plays the violin to hide the sound of sizzling, a blanket jammed beneath the door so the smell does not leak out, as of two suicides trapping gas.
So they eat the same meals, and sleep in the same beds, and darn the holes in their clothing from the same ball of yarn, but they are not the same. Chaplin watches all, but not to learn, because Chaplin has nothing to learn.
Chaplin gathers, Chaplin accrues.
Routines, gags, bits of business.
Women.
They fall to their knees before Chaplin on the dusty floors of boarding houses.
They fill their mouths with him, the young and the old.
Mostly, the young.
It is all that he has ever wanted, but it is not how he wanted it to be. He cannot live this way. He leaves the company in Colorado Springs, Arthur Dando, a fellow malcontent, by his side, and travels back to the East Coast. The Lusitania carries them home. In 1915, when a U-boat blows up the Lusitania, he recalls the Cairnrona and thinks that, well, at least he was consistent.