Bethel Merriday

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In Grampion Centre, Sabbath breakers had once been exposed in the stocks, and householders had warmed their cakes on Sunday only by their pastors' eloquence about hell-fire. But the Nutmeg Players, once their season had started, recognized Sunday only by the dress rehearsal of the coming week's play and by permitting all the apprentices to sleep till noon . . . after having spent all of Saturday night removing the scenery of last week's bill and setting up the new.

But with the first play not yet on, Bethel and her fellow-wights had on Sunday the one only day of leisure they were ever to know at Grampion. She slept till after lunch, following the rather aimless dance at Clinton, so unenterprising an event that Pete Chew had tried to kiss her only twice. She was too late to join the various motor expeditions and, after a sandwich and coffee which the grumbling Johnny Meddock dug up for her, sat on the sea-washed rocks, facing the sun.

She did not greatly mind being alone. She liked people, but people noisy in a mass embarrassed her. No matter, she told herself; no actress was ever called upon to play an entire mob!

Here, in the Y.M.C.A. of the arts, she had hoped to find a friend, a love, an idol to adore. But she regarded the youngsters like Toni Titmus as babies--and the seniors like Fletcher Hewitt considered her a baby. Well, she would just have to be alone again and like it.

The theatre grounds, so like the campus of a rustic college, were blankly peaceful; the water high coloured and the sails flying. She was content, she was a grown-up and busy actress--and suddenly she was an excited small girl again, as the great car, a limousine with chauffeur, rolled up in front of her, and a young god, sunburned and smiling, with cropped brazen hair and strong bronze neck, a tweed-bearing god of twenty-eight or -nine, slipped out of the car and addressed her.

'Hello, hello! Anybody around? Roscoe been transported to heaven yet?'

'I think he's only gone to New Haven.'

'Then God help Yale! And it was such a nice boys' school when I used to attend it!'

Andrew Deacon, the leading man and co-director and angel of the Nutmeg Players, may have depended on his decorativeness as a rather rich, rather handsome, very athletic young man, instead of on flexible skill as an actor. Perhaps he was too aggressively youthful and humorous, too relentlessly charming. He shouted his adoration of the theatre and his determination to revive it in every town in the land--shouted and chanted and smiled it, at rehearsals and late suppers, so constantly as to cause older workers in the vineyard to growl, 'Oh, curse the theatre! I'm going to save my salary and buy a chicken farm'.

But Bethel thought him the most magic person she had ever seen. She had found a diamond on the pavement. And unquestionably, the moment Andy Deacon arrived, the Nutmeg Players came alive and turned from a mob into a spirited army.

Things began to happen. Things--not necessarily sensible or commendable--would bountifully and rapidly happen whenever Andy was around. Everybody miraculously appeared from nowhere, greeting Andy the Sun God, the moment he stepped out of his Olympian mother's sixteen-cylinder Cadillac chariot. The old troupers, Doc Keezer and Clara Ribbons, arm in arm, rolled across the horizon, murmuring, 'Glad you're with us, Mr. Deacon'. Cynthia Aleshire popped out of a dormitory living-room that had certainly been empty three minutes before, crying, 'Oh, Andy, Roscoe won't let me try an expressionistic set for Candida, and I know I can just get the quality of that stuffy liberalism'. Tudor Blackwall and Bruce Pasture, the violin-playing apprentice, came caroling, 'Welcome, boss'. Pete Chew and Toni drove up with Pete's Lincoln practically rearing and neighing, and looked approvingly at Andy's dark blue flannel shirt with white tie.

In fact, the peasant chorus was entering, inaudibly chanting:

Then out of the limousine stepped the heavies--but they were too serious for so bright an operetta: Andy's mother, Mrs. J. Goddard Deacon of Worcester and Newport, that white-haired serenity who had done so well in keeping the late Mr. J. Goddard Deacon's munition millions (and she was in her own right a Pilchard of Plymouth, and as such entitled to sit on Plymouth Rock), and Andy's fiancée, the lovely Miss Joan Hinterwald, of the Fall River and Gastonia woollen millions. And suddenly appearing, facing these two women and not liking them in the least, was Miss Mahala Vale.

Andy kissed Mahala, crying, 'Hello, darling, so glad we're going to play together this summer. We'll show 'em love's young dream!'

'You must have acted with Mr. Deacon,' said Miss Hinterwald to Miss Vale, with a short sniff.

'Andy and I played opposite each other for four months in Grey Tide,' said Miss Vale, with a fairly good imitation of a sniff.

'I see,' said Miss Hinterwald.

Bethel perceived that the two young ladies, Joan and Mahala, were enough alike to indicate that this was Andy's fated pattern in the way of loves. Both were tall, broad-shouldered, light-footed, chestnut-haired, wide between the eyes and politely contemptuous. But while Miss Hinterwald was the real thing in the way of Long Island and Newport plutocracy, pleasantly snobbish to the entire world, including Andy, Miss Mahala Vale wasn't quite certain whether there weren't a few people, including Andy and Roscoe, to whom she'd better not be snobbish. Bethel had been developing a quite healthy small hatred for Mahala, but now she enlisted under her, hoped that she would take Andy away from the Hinterwald girl and marry him immediately--though she saw that this would mean that she herself would never have a chance at the young Sun God.

She was startled. For the first time Bethel knew that she was lorn and lost in love.

When Andy's mother had said, 'Don't be an idiot and work too hard at your playing, this summer' and had retired into the silken wolf cave of her limousine; when Joan had kissed him as though it were a habit and not a very good habit; when the chauffeur had turned the great car, looking scornfully at the grassy ruts, and it had slid away, in silence and disdain, then Andy woke up, and the Nutmeg Players woke.

He put his arm about Toni and Clara Ribbons, he patted Roscoe's back--Roscoe winced; he shook hands with Harry Mihick and Pete Chew and remembered their names for almost two minutes, and he shouted, 'To-morrow we go to work on Petrified Forest. Roscoe and God being willing, we shall rehearse twelve hours a day, and I expect to be a better Alan than Leslie Howard, and I know Mahala will beat Peggy Conklin all hollow as Gabby'.

'I don't suppose your Miss Hinterwald will be coming down from Newport to see us, though,' sniffed Mahala.

'Her? She will not! What's Newport? Ha' done with the tents of Shem, dear lass, we've seen the Newport seasons through, and it's time to turn on the old trail, the repertory trail, the strictly one-sixty-five-top trail, that is always new. Let's go!' And he kissed Mahala again--but this time as though he took a personal interest in it--and picked up his bags to carry them to the House.

'He's kind of coy, don't you think?' said Marian Croy.

'Oh no, just young,' said old Bethel.

And later, passing the open windows of the House living-room, Bethel heard Andy and Roscoe discussing the season's casting. Andy was talking now without whimsy, quickly, firmly, cajoling the querulous Roscoe but not bullying him--not quite bullying him.

She was convinced that of all the people she had known, this Andrew Deacon was the only one who was radiantly, unquestionably, good enough for earth and heaven.

Sitting alone on the rocks, brooding, that evening, and telling herself that she mustn't sit alone brooding--it was antisocial or something like that--she felt herself a small child, and rather silly in wishing that some day Andy Deacon would be interested in her, be able to identify her in the whole mess of apprentices. She would never have a chance against the luminous Mahala.

Oh, they were all pigs, these tall, demanding women like Joan and Mahala!

She was relieved when Pete Chew came bumbling up and told her that she was a remarkably intelligent woman, ever so much more Intellectual and Sympathetic than Toni Titmus. When Pete tried to kiss her good night at the dormitory door, she had no sensation about it whatever, not even anger.

She was excited to find that someone, if only a Pete Chew, considered her a woman. But was anyone ever going to consider her an actress?