Bethel Merriday

XVIII

Red--the colour of revolution, the colour of anger, of angry eyes, of vigorous dawn and wild sunsets, of battle smoke, of rubies on the breast of courtesans--red, acid red, carmine, crimson, scarlet, madder, vermilion, flaunting rose.

From the window of her minute room, high in a hotel-for-women in the East Fifties in Manhattan, Bethel saw the whole welter of city turn red as the evening rain began. In the country the wet lonely night would have dissolved in shifting grey, but New York, in the late-October rain, was the pit of a volcano, and more insistent, and more dreadful.

Atop the white mountainous cliff of the R.C.A. Building, in Radio City, a crimson aeroplane-beacon was rotating, crossing a white shaft of light that shot straight up to the illimitable heavens, to be lost in the orbit of the farthest star. The sloping top of the General Electric Building (not of the De Medicis or Plantagenets or Barbarossas were these high castles, but of the lords of radio and electric heating), like a jewel casket of the giants, turned from alternate crimson to pallid gold.

Backing these prickly towers, the light from Broadway was a dome of writhing fire, until, unwarning, a menacing billow of fog enveloped the burning sky, and the fantastic sanguine spire of the distant Empire State Building was wiped clean out. In the streets below her the red glare still pierced the melancholy rain. On the wet pavement the motors whirred more loudly, the tail-lights mimicked the scarlet of the stop lights, and when Bethel looked to the left, to Lexington Avenue, she was uneasy at the flaming neon signs aggressively thrust out above shop windows.

Ten thousand cherry-lighted windows piled up in tier on tier in office buildings, and behind them were a hundred thousand windows unlit, and weary with memory of the day's toil. It was a mighty, proud and terrifying city, an Orient city in red lacquer lit with red lights, a crimson barbaric city, and it was all hers--to conquer or be crushed.

It was after ten; she had napped for three hours of the evening, and she was hungry in a thin, petulant way, and her head ached, her legs felt shaky from want of food. But she sat on by the window unmoving.

She couldn't rouse the energy to go all the long way down the hotel corridor, down in the elevator, whose cheery young woman pilot would with depressing inevitability remark, 'Pretty wet to-night', out through a lobby explosive with young women being emptily merry with dreary male visitors, down the soaking street to a fish-stinking hole of a cheap restaurant. She was afraid to go out. She couldn't, not again to-day, face the heartless, anonymous, moving human detritus on the sidewalks. She was lonely, up here in this bright coop, but she was less lonely than scared.

Her little room was a miracle of compression. It must have been planned by an architect trained in designing prison cells, folding picnic baskets, and combination vanity sets and cigarette cases. To enable it to offer what was known in the circle of girl job seekers as 'a good respectable address on the East Side, just off Park Avenue', at only ten dollars a week (without food; jobless girls didn't need food; just addresses and silk stockings and a kind word), the builders had imaginatively got the furnishings of a two-room apartment into the space of a hall bedroom.

Everything conceivable to the genius of American gadgetry was here, but reduced below tolerable human size, and fitted together without six square inches of the waste space that could be used only for walking, relaxing, dreaming or any other merely human need: bed, reading lamp and bedside table, upholstered arm-chair, combination bookcase and desk and radio and bureau, and a dressing-table so elegant that in the advertisements it would be referred to as 'milady's'. And a bathroom. It was nearly possible to sit in the tub and reach out and write a letter, open the hall door, open the window or answer the telephone.

It was Modern enough for any Merriday. Only, daily, Bethel was becoming less Modern and more insistent about getting an old-fashioned job on some old-fashioned stage.

She was daily more timid about her dream, phonograph-engendered, of appearing not in the bare, pine-platform simplicity of Grampion, but on a great stage, jewel-lighted, lofty as Canterbury, with Noel Coward and Yvonne Printempts. Now she wanted any stage, with anyone.

Her timidity and tiredness won over her undoubted common sense, and for the third time in ten days she did not go out to dinner at all but, after nibbling at a chocolate bar and drinking a glass of water from the tap in the tile-and-nickel bathroom, she sat down to type the script of Tudor Blackwall's play--and that script typing was the nearest she had yet come in New York to being associated with anything theatrical.

At Grampion, Tudor Blackwall, second leading man, had never paid her any attention beyond murmuring, 'How are you, blessed?' and borrowing a match. But he was the first of the Nutmeg Players that she encountered in New York. She ran into him at lunch at the Olde Roanoke Drug Store, at Broadway and Forty-sixth Street, which is the chief club, restaurant, news bureau and matrimonial agency of all young actors looking for jobs.

He invited her to his flat for dinner. She had heard about the horrors of going alone to a man's flat, but Tudor seemed to her extraordinarily safe, and she took a chance.

He cooked dinner for her--a very good dinner, and very well cooked: onion soup and kidney stew and profiterolles with chocolate sauce. She discovered that he, who looked twenty-five and prosperous, with his sleek waistcoats and shoes fitting like gloves, was thirty-five and very hard up indeed, and that a part of his lovely glass-smooth black hair was a toupee.

He laughed about it all, and told her how unsuccessful he was, as though they were two girls together, and admitted that the silky superciliousness with which he had treated the apprentices at Grampion had been to keep these innocents from discovering that he was sickeningly uncomfortable with all strangers, and that his average yearly earning was two thousand dollars.

And he didn't borrow money.

She knew enough now to be prepared for that; she had even done hasty calculations indicating that five dollars was all she could afford. But he did read her a play he had just finished--he finished it every year at about this time--and he begged her to copy it for him.

It was a good play. It always has been, and when it is written by Noel Coward, S. N. Behrman, Philip Barry, or Samson Raphaelson, it even gets produced, to considerable glory. The hero was Cecil Gisthorpe, and he was a playwright, and he was witty, and he didn't really care a hoot when his girl was taken from him by a flannel-mouthed radical--but also witty--named Steve Grimston. There were cocktails and cigarettes in it, and an eccentric maid--also witty.

Bethel thought it was 'simply lovely', and said so, and Tudor said she was the nicest kid he had met for years and they would be great friends, and she said yes, and he bowed over her hand, and she took the script back to her hotel to copy it. That was a week ago, and she had almost finished. One of the few things on which her father had ever insisted in high school was that she should learn typing, and by the touch system. She blessed him now--though that was nothing sensational, for she usually did bless him. She was aware, after these six weeks of job hunting in New York, that she might not find any theatrical job whatever this year; that if she did get one, it would be an accident; and that she could not endure her family's going on stinting themselves in order to send her twenty-five dollars a week.

Probably she would have to be a stenographer till her dramatic miracle happened . . . though by now she was beginning to see that the employers of stenographers, too, were not excited by the chance of hiring young ladies with B.A. degrees, nice ankles and modest manners.

If she was going to get an office job, she told herself, she had to be good (not meaning it, apparently, in any moral sense, but only in reference to words-per-minute, a memory for telephone numbers, and such unpoetic slave virtues). Very well, she would be good!

Her typing was already tolerable, and her vocabulary was unusual, she concluded, after talking in employment bureaus and the anterooms of offices with candidates for stenography who seemed rather proud of themselves as exhibits of the renowned American free public school system if they could type anything so flawless as 'We acknowledge yours of the 5th instant and wourd asure you that we are shiping yours consinement at once to Niajerrer Falls'.

An hour a week, she was taking shorthand lessons with her one lone hometown acquaintance in urban wilds--her mother's cousin, a spinster secretary from Sladesbury, who was always parched with longing to hear from Bethel the details of the glamorous, naughty parties to which, as an actress, she must be going. And to practise the black art of shorthand, Bethel took down the free lectures in the schools, and sermons and political speeches on the radio.

Her back stung at last from typing, and she arose from the aphorisms of Tudor Blackwall's script and achingly undressed and crawled into the narrow sheath of her bed.

She was, normally, a cheerful person, and no hermit. She told herself, as she twitched into shallow sleep, that she must look up the other Grampionites here. She had not looked them up; she didn't want to impose on them. She had had one letter from Pete and Toni, now married in Zanesville and married to Zanesville. Toni talked airily of 'hitting the Big Town in a big way this winter', but she also wrote so familiarly of 'her' riding master and of the country-club dances that Bethel felt that all of Toni's dramatic genius, all that talent for dancing the rumba and the Lambeth Walk (the favourite mumbo rite of late 1938), all that ability to remain awake at three a.m. even after eight highballs, all that emotion-coloured memory which enabled her to recognize Franchot Tone and Loretta Young and Jessie Royce Landis and W. C. Fields on the street and to recall at what hour Edgar Bergen could be heard on WEAF, those uncommon glories of smooth knees and rounded breast, were lost to the artistic world for ever, and what was Broadway's tragedy was Zanesville's delighted gain.

Once Bethel had talked to Marian Croy on the telephone and, hesitatingly, had refused to share a room with her.

Bethel had a formless, confused notion that it would be better to read plays (borrowed from the Fifty-seventh Street Branch Library, the young actor's British Museum) than to listen to a boiling of Marian's friends chattering all evening about: 'I got it straight from a man that knows John Mason Brown personally, and he says Jed Harris is going to put on a radical revue, and they'll be hiring forty-two girls for bits and walk-ons right away.'

Once, in the Olde Roanoke's mammoth basement restaurant, Bethel had seen Iris Pentire, alone, delicately nibbling at Blue Plate Luncheon No. 5 (chilled tomato stuffed with egg salad, garnish of whole olives and radishes, rolls, butter, and beverage, 45 c.), and waiting to ignore some young male as soon as one should notice her enough for her to ignore him.

Of Mahala Vale and Doc Keezer and Maggie Sample, she had heard nothing whatever; of Andrew Deacon, nothing beyond a note, in Leonard Lyons's column in the New York Post, that Andy, with his mother and Miss Joan Hinterwald, had been staying at a Great Neck château, and telling some very funny stories about summer theatres.

Flushing as she lay there trying to sleep, Bethel hoped that none of the funny stories had been about her.

She was out on her gaggingly familiar round of job hunting at ten next morning, after the actress's toilet of bathing and powdering and manicuring and hairdressing, and choosing between the blue silk frock and the grey suit, and after saving ten cents by having only orange juice, toast and nice refreshing hot water for breakfast. (She was young rather than fundamentally imbecile.)

She walked to the office of Equity, the actors' organization, and, with a milling of other girl crusaders, studied the bulletin board with its notices of who was casting, who was organizing a road company.

She was not a member, and not supposed to intrude there, but as she couldn't join Equity till she had a contract, and as she probably never would get a contract till she was a member of Equity, such trespass as hers was tolerated. The paradox which ruled all young actresses was that you couldn't get a job if you hadn't the experience, and you certainly could not get experience till you had a job, and so you just weren't going to get a job.

Bethel started another day of high artistic hopes with the usual matutinal conclusion that there were no jobs left in the world.

She walked--every dainty young flower of the stage walks far enough every day to disable a hairy infantryman--to the palatial offices of Hochwohlgeboren & Schnitzel. In the outer room was a sign 'No casting', and a twitter of young ladies who were trying to ignore the sign. She walked to the offices of Sam & Rufus Kitz, and got no farther than a cold-hearted girl reception clerk who gabbled, 'Wha's name any-experience cnleaveyrtelephone number'. She walked to the offices of Thorncroft, Inc., where a graceful young man murmured 'Cast's all full for California Cavalcade except big rangy blondes, and that let's you out, darling'. She walked to the office of Cyril Sassoon Solobar, and found that Mr. Solobar was his own secretary and office boy. A round man, bald in layers, he sat hunched at a scarred desk, held her hand, pinched her side and whined, 'No, I haven't got the script of Towers of Teheran yet. The author's holding out on me. How's for lunch, babe?' She walked to the office of a new agent of whom a girl waiting at Kitz's had said that he took beginners and got them nice jobs.

He didn't.

And now, at one-thirty, she walked for her one comparatively substantial meal of the day to the Olde Roanoke Drug Store.

Forty years ago, two bustling pharmacists from Maine named Rowen and Oaks, opening a drugstore in the wilderness at Broadway and Forty-sixth, were moved to be facetious, to pretend that they were from the flower of what they called Ole Virginny, and to combine their names in the designation Ole Roanoke.

It is an urban version of the Rex Pharmacy of Sladesbury, and, even in alien New York, it is as American as flapjacks.

It still has a kingly trade in perfumes and soaps and face powder, and a small rush of prescriptions, but its glories are the lunch counter upstairs, where the least prosperous of would-be actors deceive their miserable stomachs with sandwiches and jumbo malted milks while they listen anxiously to the news over the theatrical grapevine, and, downstairs, the vast restaurant, which fills the basement floor, where, in daily hundreds, the not-quite-so-impoverished actors meet to look at each other, to show off their new costumes and makeups, to hear the labour-market news and subordinately to eat.

The basement room itself is of battleship grey, and the ceilings bristly with water pipes, but the proprietors have craftily covered the walls with mirrors, so that, as they talk, the young things can stare at their images, study their own experiments in the Arch Smile, the Appealing Smile, the Wistful Regret. They eat in booths along the wall, or at tables elbow to elbow out on the floor. The waitresses, showy in white-and-cherry uniforms with green berets, are hostesses, comforters, reconcilers, and free employment agents.

Alone, rather alarmingly filling up on the 'Hot Spot Special: Salisbury steak, julienne carrots, whipped potatoes, lemon chiffon pie, coffee, 40 c.' Bethel watched and, since they were at the next table and not at all shy about their humour, listened to one 'Bunk', a young man with grey, double-breasted jacket, green, purple, and brown chequed shirt, and red plaid handkerchief, 'Ally', a girl with a wolf jacket and a tall, cone-shaped lettuce-green hat with royal blue streamers setting off a chartreuse-coloured dress that disdained her knees, and 'Peg', a child of nineteen with yellow hair to her shoulders and a cartwheel straw hat hung with a black ribbon on the back of her neck.

Bethel, in grey suit and frilly jabot exquisitely ironed (by Bethel, in her bathroom), felt a cool and collegian superiority to these plush flowers until she remembered hearing a handsome girl in black, at the Roanoke, snarl, 'I'm a B.A. of Vassar and an M.A. of Columbia and I'd swap 'em both for a two-line bit in a show that opened in Cain's Warehouse.'

'Gee, you got a lovely tan, Bunk,' said Ally. 'Where you been? Steal somebody's Alpine lamp?'

'No, I'm an actor, b'God. Been stealing applause!'

'Quit it or I'll wake up.'

'Fact. I've been out on the Borsch circuit all summer. Nineteen dollars a week and coffee and cakes and a nice bed over the garage--three in the bed. We had a swell bill: the six dirtiest scenes from the six dirtiest plays in the last six years. Symbolism, heh? We played a seven-hotel circuit, one a night. I can't kick. I come back engaged to the daughter of the biggest kosher butcher in Schenectady--if I can find her address--and I got a swim every day.'

Bunk studied Ally in a bright, sexless, beaming way and jeered, 'I see you've got new lashes and a new mouth.'

'Yeah, my complexion's been bad, so I've been giving up make-up for a while and concentrating on my eyes and mouth. Maybe some producer will see me here and say, "I never knew Ally had a mouth like that. We ought to be able to use a mouth like that for something!"'

From Peggy, jeering, 'You know what he'll use the mouth for now that you've gone coy and got your hat out of the way of kissing.'

From Bunk to Peg, 'That'll be all from you, you heel. I swear to God, you like appearing with the Y.W.C.A. nonprofessional groups! Go on back home!'

From Peg, 'Not me! I was there all summer. In Elmira. God, was I bored! The folks had a fit if I wanted to sleep after ten. They wanted me to play tennis and marry a lawyer--calls hisself a lawyer!--he's a clerk in a law factory with six partners! So I come back looking for a job where I can prove what bums Kate Hepburn and Tallulah are. But I dunno. My big trouble is I'm too individual a type--a marked ingénue and yet sophisticated. My sister's got more sense than me. She's taken up Physical Ed. She's already got a job. She's safer than I am, in this lousy theatre racket. I dunno. Yesterday I got to see this bum Mack Pzister that calls himself a producer. He's new to the show business. I think he makes his dough out of some kind of mine promotion.'

'He's a heel. He's an exhibitionist,' said Ally. 'It peps up his dirty little snow-white personality to think he's a real the-at-ri-cal producer. He just lu-loves the dray-ma, and seeing he can't act and he can't direct and he can't write and he's too lazy and dumb to shift scenery, that makes him a producer, the sweet potato that puts up the money--only I understand Mack ain't got any money either. I know for a fact, six times in the last two years he's sent out a call for casting and interviewed about a thousand bright young things and kept 'em coming back, and nobody ever heard anything more about the show. Did he make a pass at you, Peg?'

'Huh? Don't be silly. And I could almost like Mack. He's got such a cute moustache. Of course he's got a wife and children. Maybe she's cold. I dunno. You been in summer stock, haven't you, Ally?'

'Yuh. Up at Whale Hollow, upstate, and did I get a raw deal! I knew that director, Carv Bledaud, was a heel. Oh, last spring, I was nuts about it. My first real job. Remember I came into the Roanoke here yelling "To-day is a very big day. To-day is a day that will go down in history. The history of the theatre will star this date along with the death of Joe Jefferson and the birth of Shirley Temple". But all the time my intuition told me it was the bunk. When my intuition tells me something, I always know it's right, but I'd do anything--except let a lot of screwballs make love to me--to get on the stage. Well, I got up there, and I found Bledaud was a washout. He never read clear through a script before he started 'directing', and there were only 278 seats in the house, and the stage is so small that when they put on a chariot race, they use carpet sweepers. Oh, I stuck it out, but I never had a part more'n six sides. I was disgusted. . . . Where you living, Bunk?'

'Three of us got a furnished room with a kitchenette, in the West Fifties.'

'I'm going to stick it out at the Y.W.C.A., though all the bosses there try to persuade you to go back home to your beautiful home in Scranton and marry the boy friend. My beautiful home's next to the Adventist Church--you can hear 'em singing all Saturday morning, when you want to sleep--and the boy friend is a grocer, but even if my folks lived in a penthouse, I'd stick it out here. Nobody can keep me from succeeding on the stage! If I get just a little more busted, maybe I can get on the Federal Theatre Project. They don't take you there for how well you can act but for had badly you can earn a living. But anyway, I'll stick it if it takes ten years.'

Bunk half rose. 'I got to get out and chase a job. I'm an actor. As beautiful as you two dolls are, I'll never make a dime here.'

Said Peg, 'Don't take all the jobs to-day. Keep a few for another day. You coming back from the Borsch circuit with all that dough saved up! I knew you were in the chips the minute I saw you. You had your face washed and your hair combed.'

Bunk settled down again and ordered a coffee. 'Saved up? Listen! The minute my old man found I had a job, he started panhandling . . .'

Bethel knew that the three would stay here all afternoon, talking of nothing but the stage--nothing but their particular chances of positions on the stage; that they would be back here at their café of futility to-morrow and the next day, next year and the year after, till they vanished into that undiscoverable limbo where, dead or still living, float all the young actors and novelists and prize fighters and promoters of billion-dollar sun-power plants whose exhibitionism was too great for their talent and whose talent was too great for farming.

Bethel had been reared to the solid American Protestant belief in the glory and efficacy of human will power. If anyone wanted enough to do anything, he would unquestionably do it, and his resoluteness was somehow very beautiful, even if his ambition was to devour the moon or become the Queen of Sheba.

Every minute, among the young things seated in rows in managers' waiting-rooms, Bethel heard them bravely and just a bit noisily vowing, 'I will make good on the stage, and nothing can stop me'.

That was inspiring. That was how we built the Union Pacific.

But she saw that a number of those who were most courageously willing to give-up-everything for their careers believed that the giving-up-everything automatically extended to their families and friends, and that it was the natural duty of their fathers to go on sending them funds and of their barest acquaintances to go on 'lending' them money, while, year on year, they sat in restaurants and enjoyed their artistic martyrdom.

This was all very confusing to Bethel. Was she a real worker, or just another soft little faker in a funny hat? Um. Well, she'd prove herself. She wouldn't for ever let her father go on supporting her. She'd type or wait on table or model or something. Meanwhile it depressed her to see that there were hundreds of authentic, nonboasting aspirants who seemed to be as good as she. If she ever did have her chance on the stage, it would be mostly by accident.

A horrible dislocation, this present theatrical situation. No wonder the young Communists at the Olde Roanoke were able to be eloquent! For every actual stage job, there were ten brilliant young actors being considered, a hundred who ought to be considered, and a thousand heartbroken youngsters, ranging from good to atrocious, who thought they ought to be. And when someone out of the thousand, anyone, finally was signed for the role, all the other nine hundred and ninety-nine wailed that this was the blackest example of favouritism, incompetence and sickening bad taste in all the history of the arts.

Why, she sharply asked herself, did she go on being huddled in this herd, as just one of the thousand?

As she paid her check and wearily climbed up from the basement, Bethel decided that she would never go to the Olde Roanoke again.

There was a standard debate among the job hunters as to whether it was better to try to see the producers in the morning or in the afternoon. Bethel did both. This afternoon she knocked at the granite portals of two more theatrical tombs, then turned to that new heaven and high ambition, that putative new bed and bread and butter of the young actor, the radio.

To apply for tests for broadcasting, that ethereal art whereby the sweetness of the human voice is wafted to the listening seraphim ten trillion light-years away, she went not to a star-capped and venerable master of the air waves but to young men, in advertising agency offices, who would--just possibly--tell older men in the agency that, look, here's a kid that prob'ly she's no good but we might let her have a test.

She sat across a desk from a young man with eyeglasses and premature baldness.

'Come back in about a week. There might be something doing on the Cadgbury Health Salts Hour. How about coming out for a little dinner with me some night, Miss Dairyvale?' said the young man.

By now there was less pious horror than ritual boredom in her refusal.

She could not afford to, but at six she stopped in at a chain restaurant, where doughnuts were served on Medici tessellation, to have tea and toast, and to ask her waitress about a restaurant job.

'You got to have experience, and there's a long waiting list, anyway,' said the young woman.

Back home in her hotel, Bethel asked of the girl elevator runner, 'How do you go about getting a job like yours?'

'Busted, dearie? Then you better go home. No chance on the elevators. There's only a few buildings in town use girls--mostly hospitals and medical buildings--and when a girl leaves, she usually gets the job handed on to her lady friend. And of course you got to have experience before you can run an elevator,' said the operator, as the floors slipped downward past them.

'How do you get experience running an elevator if you don't get a chance to run an elevator?' sighed Bethel.

The young woman looked at her with dark suspicion. 'I don't know. But that's the rule.'

She was safely home again. She wasn't sure what had happened to her artistic integrity this day, but she did know that her feet were sore.

Again she slept till after nine in the evening.

She woke up and sat waiting for the telephone to ring. She imagined Walter Rolf, Marian Croy, even Iris Pentire calling her up, inviting her to some vague, exciting theatrical party; she imagined Pete and Toni, unexpectedly arrived in town, demanding that she come to Twenty-One or Sardi's. She was so lonely that she was frightened. The sound of the city blurred in one relentless mumbling.

She forced herself to get up, pat her face with witch hazel, go downstairs past the elevator girls, the pages, the clerks, who, she fancied, were suspicious of her idleness, and walk ten blocks to a Chinese restaurant, where for thirty cents you could dine lavishly on chow mein and rice and tea and spicy fruits floating in pale syrup. But she fled back to the refuge of her bright lone room.

Thrice a week she went to the Class in Acting conducted by that lanky Polish demon, Sol Gadto; an echo of the Group Theatre discipline, with memories of Stanislavski. The students had most of them been inconspicuously on the stage already; they were afire with the purpose of great acting; they looked down on the Olde Roanoke loafers almost as much as the Olde Roanoke free souls looked down on their father and brothers.

The class cost five dollars a week. Bethel could not have afforded it, but Mr. Gadto, a theatrical fanatic who lived on brandy, hope and rich widows, told her with jeers and objurgations that she could pay him when she had her first engagement.

Gadto had assigned to her the part of Laura, the girl in Men in White who could not keep her lover. Bethel went through the lines with spirit, trying to reveal Laura--spoiled, a good sort, demanding, filled with a plain decent honesty. Bethel was rather proud of the gestures she had devised to illustrate the character: the airy circles with her cigarette holder when at heart she was agonized; the mouth upturned in luring.

That red-eyed buzzard Sol Gadto, as he listened to her, curled in his chair in their bare rehearsal hall, with both elbows against his belly, as though it ached, moving only to tap his teeth with a lax right hand in which drooped a cigarette.

When she was finished, he droned:

'That's a little better. But you're getting into a lot of fancy little movements that decorate action--oh yes, they decorate it, all right, and make it interesting--if you tied a pink ribbon on an archbishop's nose, it would make him interesting enough.

'How often have I got to tell you that every single movement of your whole body has got to grow out of your realization of what the character is feeling and thinking at that moment, and not for the sake of doing something? Now I want you to go and sit down and do what's sometimes called "sense memory". Put yourself back in some moment when you wanted to keep some boy and you felt at once sore and like a fool. Quit trying to act for the next ten minutes and put yourself in charge of that emotion. And sit still while you do it.'

Bethel could not recall any incident in which she had been a lady left and lorn. She had been rather glad when Charley Hatch had blithely turned her down for a girl with teeth. She thought of Fletcher Hewitt; she realized that she had not answered, for a week now, a letter in which Fletcher had told of painting their dilapidated inn, building bookcases, putting in plumbing. It was idiotic that she couldn't adore Fletcher, the while she worshipped at the shining feet of an Andrew Deacon who considered her merely a little chit to be kind to. In six weeks now he would have forgotten her name.

Andy . . . His small-boy grin. His rigid, President Coolidge insistence that Roscoe Valentine pay the theatre bills and answer all the letters. His bellow as he swam out through the tide rips, the sun-stroked hair on his arms like golden mail. His patience with that gilded shrew, Mahala. His beautiful coarseness in Fumed Oak and his beautiful gallantry in Tovarich. And she had never heard from him--there was no reason why she ever should hear from him--if she could just once see him at a restaurant. . . .

Gadto was calling her out of her trance, 'Let's try it again.'

She trotted up on the small platform, and it was no stage character, composed of paper and typewriter ink, that she was playing this time, but a muted, suffering woman who would have given anything to blow up in hysteria, to throw inkwells at the admirable young doctor, to yell, to tear out somebody's eyes . . . maybe Mahala's.

The director said 'Good', and for Mr. Sol Gadto, that was practically raving.

Mr. Gadto lived in the 'Village', and she returned uptown--to the Olympian groves of theatrical managers' offices and bus stations and Italian restaurants and hand laundries and grimy hotels--by subway. She was fascinated by the medley of people in the car: old Negro women with bundles, well-dressed, intelligent-looking young Negro women of the new urban colonies, old men mumbling into beards, resentful boys.

It tormented her that she could never know them, find out what they were like; that this young woman across the car, with her shocked, staring eyes, would in three minutes be leaving the car and be shut off from her for ever by the iron doors and the relentless speed of the departing subway train. If she could better understand that woman, she could act all unhappy women, for ever.

Here was a whole maddening city of people that she wanted to act--whom maybe she really could act--if she could ever get up on any stage to act anybody at all.

She lunched at a Coffee Pot Restaurant, where the only guest suggesting the theatrical profession was a sandwich man. In defiance of her budget she had bought an afternoon paper and, having been deprived of stage gossip for an entire four hours now, she turned feverishly to the 'News of the Theatres' column.

Heading the column was the announcement, written with typical New York contempt for all places outside Manhattan:

Andrew Deacon, who last winter was the leading man and co-director in The Best of Times, is organizing a touring company to play Romeo and Juliet in modern dress. This is believed to be the first time that the play has been thus costumed. Mr. D. indicates that he is going to use a number of his last summer's associates in the Grampion straw-hat aggregation of which he was co-producer. He is uninformative as to when he will attack Broadway, but he has definite bookings in a score of culture depots in the mail-order territory.

With a comic vision of Iris Pentire losing her Mona Lisa calm and Mahala her Ritz dignity and Tudor Blackwall his sleek superiority as, like herself, they dashed for bus and taxi, to reach Andy Deacon, Bethel left her steak sandwich unfinished and galloped to her hotel and to her telephone.