Bethel Merriday

IX

On Saturday, her second day at Grampion, Bethel could not see what the tasks which Roscoe Valentine and Fletcher Hewitt and Cynthia Aleshire gave her had to do with acting. She helped the coloured maid set the table in the dormitory. She answered the telephone in the box office for an hour. She sewed at heavy red curtains for the courtroom scene in Night of January 16th till her fingers trembled. She stitched and hung a new chintz curtain in the star's dressing-room, to honour their greatest guest star, the famous Nile Sanderac (she ranked almost with Ina Claire in playing elegant young married women), who would be coming in a week now, to enact Candida.

Bethel's most theatrical duty was to drive the old Ford station wagon into Grampion Centre and borrow, for the Petrified Forest set, a cash register and a couple of round tables from Mr. Butch Stevens, proprietor and maître d'hôtel of the Lobster Pot Dance Hall and Dinery. Mr. Valentine did not 'believe' in buying such accessories or in renting them. It was a serious matter of principle. He loved a nickel with the same spirited and devoted passion that he devoted to God and Bernard Shaw.

'B-but suppose Mr. Butch doesn't want to lend them?' protested Bethel.

Roscoe almost screamed: 'Don't take any nonsense from him! You tell him I say he gets half his customers from my theatre, and he won't need this stuff--second-hand junk; I know; I've used 'em before!--till mid-July, when the summer season's in full swing. Don't let him bluff you!'

Across the lunch counter of the Lobster Pot, Bethel smiled on the lumpish Butch Stevens and said briskly, 'Hello!'

'Hya.'

'I'm glad there's such a nice place to eat at in Grampion. I suspect I'll be coming here a lot this summer, with my bunch.'

'You one of the theatre girls?'

'Yes.'

'Huh! None of you kids ever buy anything more than a malted milk.'

'Oh, my bunch will. I'll see to it they do. Now Mr. Stevens, I can see--'

'You can call me Butch.'

'--I can tell from the way you look at me that you know I want to ask you a favour. You're the kind that can't be fooled.'

'So what do you want to borrow for the theatre this time? Summer 'fore last, they took all my Coca-Cola posters and brought 'em back torn. But last summer, one time I was away, damn' if Valentine didn't send some of the kids in here to "borrow" four ham sandwiches!--and the girl let 'em have 'em, and that's the last time I ever see any of them sandwiches, and when I tackled Valentine about paying for 'em, he said he didn't know anything about it, and asked me which girls it was borrowed 'em, and Lord, I can't tell none of you actresses apart--you all look alike to me--all bare-nekkid legs and sweaters and a lay-off-roe look. So what do I get stung for this time? . . . Just some tables and a cash register? Does there have to be money in the cash register? Because I suppose if Valentine wanted it, I'd have to give it to him, or else these codfish-eating Yankees here would say I didn't have any public spirit.'

'Aren't you a Yankee?'

'Me? No, thank God! I'm a foreigner . . . from New Jersey.'

She returned to the theatre, at noon, to find newly arrived four members of the permanent stock company: Tudor Blackwall, the second juvenile, sleek and doe-eyed and just faintly effeminate; Clara Ribbons and George Keezer (incomprehensibly but always known as Doc Keezer), who were both middle-aged veterans technically classed as 'wise old troupers'; and, at last, the baby of the stock company, Iris Pentire, who was to be Bethel's own twin.

And she knew instantly that she would never know Iris.

That other twenty-year-old, Toni, the plump and pretty, had been unhesitatingly friendly, but Iris, moving silkily about the room she was to share with Bethel, putting away salmon-coloured silk pyjamas and maribou-edged silver bed jacket and scarlet pumps with gold heels high as obelisks, cautiously smiling and musically murmuring, 'Thank you for letting me come in with you', was hidden with cloudy veils. She was a Mystery.

And Miss Iris Pentire saw to it that she should continue to be a Mystery.

The most nearly convincing stories about Iris that Bethel was ever to hear were that she was the daughter of an Irish nobleman, reared in a nunnery, still piously virginal and viewing her stage career as a means of portraying the austere beauties of virtue; and that she was shanty Irish, from Wheeling, West Virginia, and had had only twelve words, headed by 'Okay', in her vocabulary until, at the age of sixteen, she had become the sweetheart of Clum Weslick, the distinguished director, who had provided her with tutors and chiropodists.

Slender, fragile, with hair not golden but colour of sunset gold reflected on a silver box, sweet eyes, and mouth that appeared sweet unless you saw it twisted in anger; silent, defenceless and slim as the child Elsie Krall; silent and sweet and never quite saying what she meant; silent and soft-moving; that was Iris Pentire; and one moment Bethel thought she was a statuette of gold and ivory, a charm to wonder at; and the next, a voodoo priestess.

'I--I don't suppose you care much for swimming?' said Bethel.

'No, I'm afraid I don't care much for swimming,' smiled Iris.

'I hope you'll like it here,' said Bethel--the Old Resident at Grampion.

Saturday noon, a young man who looked like a research scientist, and who may actually have been so but was now employed as one of the Deacon chauffeurs, flashed into the theatre grounds and left Mr. Andrew Deacon's favourite car, an English Rolls-Royce with a convertible coupé body, to await Mr. Deacon's arrival as male lead in the Nutmeg company. It seemed that Mr. Deacon's mother would be driving him down from Newport in a day or two.

All the apprentices, whether they came from Fond du Lac or New York's East Side, were expert and blasé about automobiles. But even their youthful American cocksureness was shaken now.

'Gosh, this Andy Deacon must be some actor. I bet if he chased Juliet in that buggy, he'd get her,' said Toni Titmus, in a tone of vesper prayer.

Bethel wondered if Roscoe Valentine overmuch loved his partner, for, looking at the car, Roscoe muttered--even to her, the outsider, the raw recruit, 'Huh! Andy doesn't hide his wealth much, does he--our theatrical playboy! But the fact is, all the money is his mother's, not his at all--and does the dear old dowager let him know it!'

Roscoe interrupted her stippling of canvas flats, for the adobe walls of the Black Mesa Bar-B-Q in The Petrified Forest, Saturday afternoon, and sent her on the illustrious mission of meeting Mahala Vale, the leading lady--she who had done so well, the past two seasons on Broadway, as a featured player in Betty, Be Quick, which lasted four months, and the sensational share-cropper play You Cannot Dispossess Our Souls, which had lasted four nights and one matinée--the second play having been a favourite of labour-union publications and the first play of labour-union members.

Mahala Vale descended from the dusty local train like a leading woman determined to be pleasant, and with a high handshake she caroled, 'It was so sweet of you to meet me, Miss Merriday'.

Mahala could not have been over twenty-five or -six, but she looked like a young woman who knew her job; carrying herself with authority, on the tall side, wide-browed, chestnut-haired, the true goddess; beautiful in a standard way where Iris was pretty in an exciting, perplexing way, and Bethel was either insignificant, or as tantalizing as music.

'A station wagon? How very exciting! Shall I sit up beside you? It smells of fish, doesn't it!' said Mahala.

Bethel was hereafter to hear her say a great many things in her 'cello voice, and never to know whether Mahala meant any of them, or what she was thinking, or whether she was thinking at all. If Iris Pentire was openly mysterious, Mahala Vale was mysteriously open; if Iris bewildered the frank heart of Bethel by her silence, Mahala baffled her by easy and indecipherable chatter.

All sixteen of the apprentices and most of the stock company had arrived by Saturday evening, and they sat all over the rocks by the shore, as vocal as a flock of blackbirds. Bethel again felt like a freshman--like a freshbird. She was an approachable fledgeling, but a lone one, never quite willing to belong completely to the rule of any bevy.

She looked at the bumptious Pete Chew and the enterprising Toni Titmus snickering together--and sometimes, she felt uncomfortably, glancing over at her. She looked at Iris Pentire, alone, posed as a lone sweet goddess (small-sized) awaiting the mystery of the moon. She looked at Mahala Vale, being gracious and countess-like on behalf of a circle composed of the handsome Tudor Blackwall, Doc Keezer, the trouper, Walter Rolf, and the rustic Harry Mihick; telling them what she had said to George Jean Nathan--though with a considerable avoidance of what George Jean Nathan had said to her. She looked at the honest Fletcher Hewitt being respectful--God knows why!--to Roscoe Valentine and to Cynthia Aleshire, the scene designer. Suddenly she preferred the honest guttersnipes, Pete and Toni, to all of them, and felt elated when she saw Pete (to-night incomparable in a cream Palm Beach suit with a white silk shirt and a crocus-yellow sash about his globular middle) rolling toward her.

'Look, Beth,' Pete whispered hoarsely, 'don't worry about you telling me about your Past.'

'What are you talking about? I haven't got a Past!'

'You can trust me, Beth. I'm like the grave. I haven't told a soul.'

'Except Toni!'

'Huh? Oh. Her. Well. Yes. Maybe. She don't count. How about you and me going to Clinton to the dance tonight?'

'Aren't you afraid to go with me?'

'Well, I think a fellow ought to have experience, if he's going to be a star. In school I didn't hardly have a chance to see any life.'

'How about that little waitress?'

Now Bethel knew nothing whatever regarding the relationship of Pete Chew to any waitress. Something inside her had told her to say that; and she was as astonished as Pete, who gasped like a carp, and begged:

'How the dickens did you ever--Honestly, that didn't mean anything at all. I fixed it all up. Oh, sure! I learned about women from her. But Beth, you got to remember, you got to remember that I've always been kept down by a whole slew of rich relatives and profs. You got to teach me. Golly, you and me could be such friends. Would you like a snake-skin belt?'

'I would not!'

'I know where I can get an elegant one for you, cheap. I mean I want to give it to you. I mean a present. You know. I mean just as a present.'

'No, thank you, Pete.'

'And you won't go to the dance with me?'

That intrusive inner voice was again speaking: 'Don't be such a blasted prig to this poor Bronxville Casanova. He's an amateur even at that. Even with the best tutors and the best champagne, he'll never be a good flirt--not a real specialist.' Thus warned, she said almost tenderly:

'Not now, Pete. Maybe some time.'

'And could I give you a box of candy? Two pounds!'

'If you'd like.'

'I'll drive right into the Centre and buy it.'

It was the first of the assaults on her virtue which, as an actress, she had the right to expect, in tribute to her charm and beauty, and she was alarmed to find that she felt rather proud of it.

Pete gone, Bethel saw Toni Titmus scampering toward her. If Toni was not as fat as Pete Chew, there was no reason why she mightn't become so. Bethel could see them, forty years from now, as an admirable old married couple, devoted to food, the theatre, and the rights of immorality.

Toni said cautiously, 'Well, how do you like it here, Beth?'

'Oh, fine.'

'Well . . . I guess you find it pretty tame, though.'

With huge gratification, Bethel saw that someone was in awe of her. She felt beautiful, languorous, and a little weary of strange sins. All of that she put into her line: 'Oh, it's good to get away to the quiet country for a change.'

'Tell me, Beth--honestly, I've never had a chance to ask any girl that knew: Do you think it's better, when you've had a row with the boy friend and you're in wrong but of course you don't want to admit it--should you call him up or wait for him to phone?'

This fundamental social problem--one that Bethel had, actually, never encountered--she solved airily: 'My experience is, you better wait and keep him guessing. If he doesn't phone, then you haven't really got him captured anyway, and so you're safely out of it. These men! You have to be brutal with 'em.'

'Are you brutal with 'em, Beth?'

'Oh, always!'

'Are you really, sure enough?'

'Certainly. Anyone with experience is.'

'How do you handle 'em if a boy comes home with you and makes a pass at you--one that you don't want to have make a pass at you, I mean.'

'Just look at 'em and smile sort of cynically.'

'Cynically?'

'Yes, sure--cynically.'

'Well, I don't know. Of course I haven't been much persecuted by really dangerous men yet.' She sighed. 'Oh, there's plenty of boys that chase you in the university, and back home in Fond du Lac, but that don't get far if you're living home or with a lot of girls. Of course when I get to New York and take a job on the stage, I guess I'll have a little apartment to myself--of course just a little one, not very big--and then I guess I'll have to cope with some pretty unscrupulous fellows, producers and playwrights and like that, old unscrupulous ones, forty or so, and I'll just have to cope with 'em!' She looked much brighter.

Swept by Toni's narrative powers, seeing her own self facing a vicious old seducer of forty or so in the stilly perils of a one-room apartment, Bethel panted, forgot the theme of her own role, and stated with indignant virtue, 'A man like that, you just look him square in the eye and say, "Now don't be silly! I'm not your sort and you better know it right now. Don't you try--"'

She stopped, realizing that Toni was staring at her, meditative, then derisive; and after a pause was jeering, 'Look here now, Bethel Merriday! My Lord, and you fooled wise old rounders like Pete and me! But I'll bet you're nothing at all but a Good Girl!'

Bethel looked stricken.

'Isn't that true? Huh? Huh? Isn't it?'

'I'm afraid it is--more or less,' whimpered Bethel.

Toni was triumphant, then forgiving: 'Gee, I don't blame you for fooling a dumbbell like Pete. He's asking for it. Oh, he's had experience, all right, but just with waitresses and heiresses and screwballs like that. He don't understand educated artists, like you and I! And--God knows if this got known around it would ruin me--but the truth is I'm still a Good Girl myself! Ain't that the limit!'

But they agreed that Iris Pentire, still sitting by herself and smiling mysteriously, couldn't be anything so commonplace as a Good Girl.

They were the more certain of it as slowly Iris attracted Pete Chew, Fletcher Hewitt, the blundering Harry Mihick, and two newly come apprentices: Cy Fickerty, a curly-headed, screaming, village clown, and Bruce Pasture, a too-sensitive-looking boy from St. Stephen's College.

The elegant Iris (who was Toni's own age and two years younger than Bethel), was quavering to her pages with faint, fragile dignity, 'I said to him, "It's vulgar of you to remind me that I was once a chorus girl. I would stoop to even that kind of work to get the training necessary for my career, but now," I said, "I won't consider anything but the poetic drama or a good part in a George Abbott play," I said, "and it's about time that you agents learned to appreciate sensitiveness," I told him.'

Toni whispered to Bethel, 'Oh, nuts!'

'You said it,' remarked an entirely new version of Bethel.

'Let's grab off Pete and Cy Fickerty and go to that dance. That okay by you?'

'Okay,' said Bethel.