Bethel Merriday

XIX

She telephoned to the small hotel of Marian Croy. No answer. She scrabbled through memoranda, found Iris Pentire's address, telephoned again, and again no answer. For weeks she had kept from going near Walter Rolf and the small office of the small producer for whom he was reading very small playscripts, lest Walter think she was asking him to help her, but now she threw away her delicacy.

Walter was very kind; on the telephone he even said something--something you couldn't quite pin down--about their having dinner together; but he didn't know where Andy Deacon was. Reckless then, she telephoned to Variety, and the telephone girl answered, as though she had given the same answer many times that day, 'He's at the Hotel Picardy, Park Avenue'.

She kept herself from the frenzy of taking a taxicab, but she almost ran across to Park Avenue, skimming a block out of her way to an old-book shop, where she primly bought a second-hand copy of the Tudor Romeo and Juliet.

She had realized that Andy represented wealth, but she was so acquainted with him as a khaki-trousered beachcomber that she was shy when she encountered him as a bustling Man of Affairs. In the ducal Hotel Picardy he had two suites: his own duplex apartment and a smaller extra one across the hall as a concentration camp for inquiring actors. It was to this secondary, overflow suite that Bethel was directed at the hotel desk.

She entered a plum-coloured drawing-room richly filled with every sort of overstuffed furniture that a sensible person could not possibly want. Facing the door, at an incongruous metal desk, was a Miss Sally Carpet, a young woman made entirely of glass, typing so rapidly that it looked vicious.

'Yes?' said the glass lady.

She had clipped some of the normal sounds out of even that inextensive word, and pretty well got it down to 'ys'.

'I'd like to see Mr. Andrew Deacon, please.'

'Nappointment?'

'No, I'm a friend of his.'

'Snamepls?'

'Bethel Merriday.'

'Wastabout casting?'

'Yes, please.'

'Spearance?' (Bethel concluded that this meant 'Have you had any experience?' but it may have signified 'Do you expect me to approve of your appearance?' or 'Do you spear your aunts?')

'I was with Mr. Deacon at Grampion last summer.'

'Oh. Another one! Well, I suppose he'll want to see you. Excuse me if I'm a crank, dearie, but nine-tenths of the babies that come in here either were playing in The Women or Our Town last year--under the stage name of Marlene Dietrich, I guess--or they got soused once with one of Andy's sisters.'

'Oh. Has he sisters?'

'Has he? Ask me!' With which mystifying demand, Miss Sally Carpet went across the hall to announce her. Days later, Bethel found that Andy decidedly had no sisters.

Andy himself met her in the entryway of the main apartment--yet was this Andy, this Hollywood creation in double-breasted blue suit, light blue shirt, dark blue tie, spats, sleeked hair, and a titanic seal ring with what she supposed to be armorial bearings?

He shouted, 'This is wonderful that you've come, darling! You're just the girl I've been looking for! I want you to meet the greatest director in the world--Adrian Satori . . . Adrian, this is one of my discoveries! Bethel--Bethel--oh, damn it, sweet, what is your last name?'

To meet Adrian Satori was, for Bethel, like being introduced to the Archangel Uriel at a cocktail party; Satori who had shepherded Molnar and Pirandello in New York, who had reintroduced Chekhov, and who was reputed to have been so impertinent to George Bernard Shaw that Shaw had respected him as a fellow-dictator.

For no clear reason Bethel had expected the great Satori to be either gaunt like Jerome O'Toole and Sol Gadto, or plump and pixie like Roscoe Valentine. But, gaping at him, she was overwhelmed to find that he looked like a pipe smoker, a golfer and a commuter. He shook her hand with a paw like a boxer's.

'Come join us, Bethel,' he said, a dryly as though he were ordering ginger ale. 'You may have some interesting new form of insanity that hasn't occurred to us yet.'

He was looking at her with bold dark Mediterranean eyes. She felt that he already knew her better than Andy did, and liked her more.

The living-room of Andy's apartment was tall, it was very tall, it was taller than the great hall of the Grand Central Terminal, with a studio window on one side so tremendous that it should have framed a view of the entire range of the Himalayas. Across the room was a Gothic stone fireplace composed of an entire castle transported from Normandy. On either side of the fireplace were couches for giantesses, and somewhere far up in the smoky heights hung a balcony, with a collection of all the tapestries in the world dangling over the rail. Apparently there were a bedroom or two up on this airy, healthful mesa, and a kitchen and dining-room under it.

The living-room was full of practically everything: brocade-covered couches, marble-topped tables, harewood glass-topped tables, Spanish thrones, footstools, a grand piano, or it may have been two grand pianos, a portable bar displaying whisky, brandy, gin, Grand Marnier, Benedictine, vodka, arrack and Chinese rice wine, vulgar typewriter desks, eddies of punched playscript paper, delightful cardboard models of scenery, half-unpacked suitcases, typed estimates, lost vanity cases, variorum editions of Romeo and Juliet, phonograph records, copies of The Billboard and Variety and Theatre Arts Monthly, arm-chairs deep as bathtubs . . . and people. And the telephone rang without ceasing, in the subsidiary suite across the hall, and Miss Carpet could be heard being noisily frigid in answer.

And people. They were plastered over the expensive furnishings. Tudor Blackwall, wearing a checked grey flannel vest, dashed up to Bethel glowing, 'Darling, don't worry about finishing my script. I know where I could get it accepted, but I'm going out with Andy in Romeo and Juliet as Paris.'

Doc Keezer, of Grampion, was there, looking like a well-contented chicken farmer. He was to play both Montague and Friar Laurence. Seeing Doc was to Bethel like seeing Sladesbury. And, considerably less soothingly and home-comingly, Iris Pentire was on hand, being cryptic to a piano stool.

She was chastely clad in a black loose-woven wool skirt up to her bosom, a Nile-green chiffon blouse with black sleeves down to her knuckles, and a patent-leather hat like a newly polished stove lid. She had already been chosen page to Paris and understudy to the Nurse and to Lady Montague. She confided to Bethel that she was so rare a hand at makeup that she could conceal her extreme youth and beauty and be a hag of a nurse like--as she herself put it--'like nobody's business'.

The throng made exits and entrances with dizzying swiftness and meaninglessness. Bethel would not have been surprised to see Eddie Cantor and President Roosevelt enter, arm in arm, followed by a milk-white antelope with a starry crown. But through all the walk-ons persisted the voice of none other than Mahala Vale, very handsome in a blue suit with a chinchilla fur and a hussar cap, shrieking at Andy and Satori that she ought to be cast as Juliet, instead of as Lady Capulet, and that for Mrs. Boyle to play Juliet was as sensible as to cast Madame Flagstad as Little Eva.

Boyle? Bethel wondered if this could be Mrs. Lumley Boyle, the famous, beautiful and shockingly bad-tempered Aurelia Boyle. For Juliet?

Mrs. Boyle was one of the highly competent English actors who, after working up a hatred for everything British, including fish and chips and the royal family, had come over to America chiefly because they could hate everything in these gangster-infested jungles even more. She was of the age called 'not so young now'. Perhaps forty. And she was really distinguished . . . Bethel felt that socially she was now going a step even higher than Uriel.

She begged of Andy, 'You're so busy; when may I come back and ask about a job--maybe understudy?' and he clamoured, 'No, no, no, no--don't you go, kitten--you stay--I need you', and she sneaked off to the security of a small pale arm-chair.

While Mahala bravely went right on denouncing her civil wrongs, and Andy cajoled, and Satori laughed and helped himself to a Scotch and soda, hundreds of thousands of other people popped in and, after having a free drink, sloughed away. Sally Carpet flashed in with telephone messages from press agents and company managers and juvenile actors who were 'at liberty', and from agents who had complete assortments of Shakespearian casts ready to deliver.

Seven feverishly competent young women came in to present the merits of as many dressmakers and, as it had definitely been announced that this Romeo and Juliet production was to be in modern dress, they all brought drawings of Elizabethan costumes in velvet. There was a rush of dealers in rapiers, floodlights, cosmetics, printing. There was even a live process server.

In the House of Merriday, in Sladesbury, to be served with a summons for an unpaid bill ranked with divorce for adultery or the use of cocaine. But when Miss Carpet quacked from the door, 'Process server here from Mintz, Dolce & Carr, Mist' Deacon,' the hero laughed: 'Shoot him in . . . How are you, comrade? This the document? Thanks. Have a drink?'

'My . . . God! You bet I will!' yelled the tipstaff.

And all the while, through all charges and retreats, Mahala's golden voice pealed on:

Boyle's too old and too conventional. She dates about Beerbohm Tree. Are you going to have J. Wilkes Booth for Mercutio? Why, this child Beth Merriday could play Juliet better than that old--'

From the door, Miss Carpet jeered, 'Mrs. Lumley Boyle to see Mr. Deacon.'

'--devil!' Mahala finished, and looked haughty.

A small, slight woman, all eyes, walked in. They were black eyes, full of life and anger; like the eyes of Bethel and of Adrian Satori, only more so. She wore a coat of which you could never remember anything except that it was old but had once been very expensive. She stood turning the eyes on Mahala, whose knees grew feeble and her voice puling as she intoned, 'Oh, how do you do, Mrs. Boyle? Raw day, isn't it? I've got to be running on, Andy--Mr. Satori--Bethel. See you all soon. That's a wonderful picture of you in Stage, Mrs. Boyle. Good-bye, all--goo-oo-ood-bye!'

Bethel slipped up to Andy to whisper, 'Shall I go now?'

'No, no! Now least of all, dear. Adrian and I need somebody with sense in these troublous times that are about to occur right now.'

But Mrs. Boyle didn't really want many things--what she did want, she wanted earnestly and eloquently, but they did not go beyond:

A run-of-the-play contract, whereby she could not be discharged except for barratry, treason or miscegenation.

Billing--not at all on her own behalf, but for dear Andy's sake, to sell the play--as follows:

MRS. LUMLEY BOYLE

The world's most distinguished tragedienne

in

Romeo and Juliet

with Andrew Deacon, Mahala Vale,

Mabel Staghorn, Hugh Challis, and cast

of famous New York and London actors.

Dressing rooms A and B, both, in all theatres--B for her maid, her shoes and her dog.

Pullman drawing-room for herself and section for her maid, on all overnight jumps.

And to be present at all interviews, to tell the reporters--since her modesty prevented her doing it herself--what Sir Johnston Forbes-Robertson had said to her.

No cuts in any of her speeches, no matter what cuts there might be in the lines of the groundlings.

Johnnie Walker whisky--black label, not red, remember, black label--provided and paid for by the management, to be present in all her dressing-rooms, hotel suites and train drawing-rooms.

But, as she was an old trouper, just an old trouper, just one of the cast and as democratic as a streetwalker, that was all she wanted.

When Mrs. Boyle was gone, Andy and Satori stretched in chairs, their legs thrust out far before them, and were wan and silent.

Bethel was inspired to bring them whisky-sodas. 'Poor darling!' she murmured to Andy.

'Oh, bless you, of course I remember now, it's Merriday,' said Andy.

But he said nothing about a job for her. And she would have been so willing to go along on the tour, even without Johnnie Walker, black label.

The designer of sets and costumes was a Mr. William Schnable, a businesslike person with a red moustache and eight-sided spectacle lenses. He marched in with a portfolio of scene drawings. The play was to have a unit set, with Romanesque mock-plaster portals and a number of balcony, archway and window units which could be shuffled for quick changes. Bethel wondered why, in a modern-costume Romeo, they should use the old, bogus, Shaftesbury Avenue-Italian for the sets, but, unbidden, feeling that she belonged here now, she brought Mr. Schnable a drink and handsomely sat back and shut up.

Andy, Satori and Schnable showed that there was life in this stage venture by immediately falling into a derogatory argument about costumes. Schnable was for having Romeo wear a contemporary Italian army officer's uniform. Andy yelled that this would look like Fascist propaganda. Schnable said that anything else would look like Communist propaganda. Satori said, with what seemed like considerable reasonableness, that they were both crazy, and that Romeo should be the most elegant young clubman that could be turned out by the best Fifth Avenue tailors, and wear a dinner jacket and an opera hat for the balcony scene. Andy announced that he would be double-damned if he'd recite 'Oh that I were a glove upon that hand, that I might touch that cheek' in a boiled shirt and a natty gent's bow tie. Romeo was so great an aristocrat that he could wear whatever he liked. He was going to wander through the play in grey flannel bags, with a tweed jacket and a soft shirt; maybe he'd change his tie from act to act, but he wasn't so sure about even that, and . . .

And weapons. The three stage maniacs came almost to the use of weapons themselves as they debated what should be used in place of rapiers, which would be absurd with modern costumes. Revolvers--blackjacks--brass knuckles--stray bottles and brickbats? And then stilettos; yes, Tybalt would kill Mercutio with a stiletto. But the first fight between Tybalt and Benvolio should be with plain hearty fists.

They were still denouncing one another at seven o'clock, when Miss Carpet indicated that she had to go home, that she had had the telephone calls switched on to Mr. Deacon's suite, and that there still were three young actors waiting across the hall, to read for the role of Mercutio.

I've taken a look at them. No good. No good at all. Why don't you chase 'em away?' said Satori.

'Oh, the poor devils, let's give 'em a chance, anyway,' insisted Andy. 'Besides! How do you know they're no good, just glancing at 'em? The psychic Satori! Come on, let's read 'em now--Bill Schnable and Bethel and you and I.'

'Oh, please no! It wouldn't be fair for me to listen to them reading,' Bethel protested.

'You'll have a good fresh point of view,' said Andy. 'You may beat Adrian and me all hollow. And can't you stay and have dinner with me?'

'I'd lovetobut,' said Bethel dutifully.

'So you think this batch are no good?' Andy sighed to Satori. 'Tempot, the agent, swore they were all three of 'em better than Gielgud. We've got to have a Mercutio, right away. Look, Adrian! I've got a brain wave. Let's see if Zed Wintergeist is engaged. Know his work?'

'Yes. I directed him in a Shaw festival. He's a clever actor, lots of power, intelligent, but he's a sea lawyer. He criticizes everybody and everything. He's a mutineer.'

'I know. I played with him in The Light Goes Out. But he's not effeminate, and he can act--anything from King Lear to David, the Shepherd Boy. I'm going to give him a call, anyway. Bethel, sweet! Will you please find Wintergeist's address--remember him?--the angelic roughneck that came out of the rain at Grampion and invited himself to our party? His address is in my little red book there on the piano--no, I guess it's upstairs on the bureau in my room--no, I think I saw it last in the phonograph--well, anyway, darling, find it and get him on the phone for me, while I bring in the boys for the reading.'

She did--chasing the little red book to Miss Carpet's desk across the hall, and then chasing Zed from his cheap-sounding address far over in the West Forties to the Tavern Restaurant to backstage at Pins and Needles to a small select dinner party of two hundred people in Sol Gadto's one-room-and-toilet apartment.

Yes. Zed would condescend to come and see Mr. Andrew Deacon. When? Oh, nineish--if he was still sober.

Schnable had reasonably escaped, but Andy, Satori, and Bethel dragged three deep chairs into line, as an audience, tried to look profound, and listened to three several actors trying in turn to read the most unreadable lines of Mercutio.

Inasmuch as you can tell nothing whatever about an actor by looking at him, and still less by listening to his first reading of lines, and inasmuch as these two are the only ways of choosing an actor, it is probable that nobody has ever yet been chosen for any role in any play.

Bethel and all the Olde Roanoke pilgrims had resented the fact that so few managers would ever give an unknown the chance to read, to be heard and seen. 'It's their duty to give every kid that much chance, anyway,' they had raged. Now she wondered if it wasn't less cruel to refuse even to see a job hunter than to let him go on reading, out of courtesy, when you were certain from the first sentence that he would not do.

She found the whole business of listening to the reading horrible. Two of the young men were too soft--they made Mercutio into a teashop proprietress; the third, though he looked like a young white-browed angel, was too tough. He made Mercutio into a battling longshoreman.

But to all three of them the three judges listened with glazed politeness. They were arbiters of life and wages and glory--and Bethel didn't like that at all. She suffered with the defendants, and wanted to help them, and didn't know how.

Through the ordeal by fire, the telephone kept ringing, relentlessly, contemptuously, and Bethel, cursing the name of Alexander Graham Bell, took over the answering . . . Could Mr. Deacon see a fourteen-year-old prodigy who would make the greatest Juliet in history? Would Mr. Deacon be interested in buying, for two hundred dollars, a playbill of Salvini in Macbeth from a dear old lady with a mortgage? Would Mr. Deacon see--right away, this minute--a dear old friend of Mr. Deacon's, who hadn't ever exactly met him, but who had been at Grampion for two weeks, three years ago, and who was now generously waiting down in the lobby?

In all her life Bethel had never learned so much about practical perjury.

The young men finished reading. To each of them, in turn, Andy said with wretched politeness, 'We'll let you know in just a few days. Will you please leave your name and telephone number with my secretary, Miss Merriday, here?'

And with equally phony hopefulness and gratitude each of the three young men bowed out--condemned again to a death of dreary waiting.

Satori had gone. Andy seemed not to remember anything about the promised dinner, and Beth could have used a good dinner just then. She had not had one for ten days.

Andy and she were going over and over the satin outrageousness of Mrs. Boyle and the huge demerits and few virtues of the three candidates, when Zed Wintergeist exploded into the room, without ringing, except as he was in himself a clamorously ringing bell.

But he was low to-night. Bethel had remembered him as a combination of Jed Harris, Orson Welles, Richard Whorf, Jack London, Tarzan, and Percy Bysshe Shelley, but to-night he was just a strong young man, broad-shouldered but not very tall, in need of a comb, sulky and rather pale; a plebeian who was inconceivable as Mercutio, the cavalier.

'Hello, Andy,' he croaked. He stared at Bethel, scratched his chin, then snapped his fingers at her, infuriatingly, and shouted, 'Wait---wait, I tell you! Don't prompt me!'

Indignantly, 'I don't intend to.'

'Hush! Oh, I've got it, Grampion. The nosy character in Stage Door. Beth Merriday! Greetings, pet . . . What can I do for you, Andy?'

'I'm organizing a Romeo and Juliet company--'

'Why not Uncle Tomeo's Cabin?'

'I wouldn't mind . . . We're going on the road for I don't know how long, and then come into New York if we're any good. I think you might possibly do Mercutio, if you're interested.'

'I'm not. Romeo and Juliet was a good play once--hell-raising youth, cockeyed, funny, romantic, swell. Now it belongs with these knitting shops you see in old fishing shacks all along the New England coast. It's pure and noble and phony.'

'But we're going to do it in modern dress--first time Romeo's ever been done that way, far as we can find out. That ought to be experimental enough for even you, Zed.'

'Look here. I don't think a play's necessarily good because it's experimental. Maybe I did once--two years ago--two thousand years ago. Not now. Any provincial Little Theatre that's run as an adjunct to the golf club, and that plays Liliom in front of a muslin cyc, does more experimentation in six months than the whole Abbey Theatre in six years. Still . . . It could be interesting. Who's directing?'

'Satori.'

'Mm. He knows his business. He's even heard of Lope de Vega and of jackknife stages. Of course he's completely cynical and dishonest.'

Bethel was foaming with indignation. This creature Zed, who had crawled out of the woodpile, to pick and chatter at the Sun God's proffered gift!

Andy was gentle as he hinted, 'There may be a lot to what you say, Zed. What are you doing?'

'Starving.'

'No plans?'

'Same answer: starving! I was out on the road for two whole weeks with that awful flop, The Soul Clinic. We didn't even bring it into town. But I did well financially. Two hundred and fifty a week! Two-fifty for two weeks makes five hundred bucks, and five hundred bucks divided by fifty gives me ten dollars a week for the whole year round, and you can live on that--in fact you can live on even less than that, in jail, I suppose--'

'Zed!'

'Huh?'

'You know you're coming with us! Make Mercutio contemporary. He's a good deal like you, anyway--crazy, poetic and bad-tempered.'

'Well--'

'You know you're going to do it, Zed, if you can get enough salary out of me, so why waste time in all this unpaid performing? Mercutio in uniform--no illusions about immortality--sore because he's going to die. Heh?'

'Well,' said Zed.

Andy took him into the entryway to whisper about salary--that was artistico-commercial etiquette, not to talk openly about money--and Zed returned to shake Bethel's hand and shout, 'Good! Let's go! Streamlined Shakespeare with gyroscopic control! See you on the stage, pet.'

Bethel painfully did not tell him that she wasn't of the company at all.

She was cross with Andy, though she felt petty in view of the fact that she had seen him patting two or three banknotes into Zed's gritty hand.

It was ten by the rock-crystal electric clock on the balcony railing. Andy, spreadeagled on a couch beside the fireplace, wailed, 'I'm completely exhausted', and in a completely unexhausted voice started what promised to be an hour's commentary:

'I'm glad we've got Zed. If Adrian will just beat him to death at the first rehearsal--'

He was interrupted by a very small voice.

'Please?'

'What is it, darling?'

'Dinner?'

'What?'

'Please? Dinner?'

'My Lord, what a sarcophagus I am, what a zany, what a gaby, what a doodle, what a dizzard, what a hoddy-doddy, what a tom-noddy, what a dunderpate, what a jobber-nowl, what a gowk! I didn't have lunch till four. I forgot people do get hungry. My poor drowned kitten! You shall have champagne and caviare and the sound of flutes.'

She did, too--the flutes provided by the electric phonograph. He even cut off the telephone and, though once every quarter-hour a page would knock with a sheaf of telephone memoranda, they dined in almost matrimonial peace and drowsiness.

With a script of Romeo and Juliet by his plate, Andy droned about cuts for their acting version. He seemed to take her as his equal--his sister, his old trouping companion--she who was wondering if by direct interposition of Heaven she might get a chance to broadcast two lines four weeks from now as an Apache squaw in the 'St. Clair of San Antone' radio serial.

Andy was happily fussing. 'In his Globe Theatre version, Thomas Wood Stevens cuts out Romeo's "They pray, grant thou lest faith turn to despair". That spoils the sestet. That first duet of Romeo and Juliet's a sonnet, you know. . . . Oh, you didn't? Well, neither did I, till yesterday. Well, what do you think, darling? I value your judgment so much--'

'So much that--Look, Andy, please! I guess I've got to be a bold wench. You know--like Juliet. I want a job. Won't you please give me a reading, too? For anything from the Prince to the wardrobe mistress!'

'Darling! I'm so ashamed! As a matter of fact I was going to talk with you about that, but it slipped my mind, what with the telephone calls from classmates and creditors and cousins and all the nasty words beginning with C. I thought last summer that you were the only student that had much possibility. You need training. But then, so do I, and we'll hope to get it, on one-night stands with Romeo and friends. The play's mostly cast, now that we've got Zed: there's only Benvolio, and a triple of the Apothecary and Sampson and Second Watchman for some poor overworked ham, and Juliet's understudy--who'll also play Mercutio's page. I've read about a dozen ravishing young maidens for that last part, but I haven't decided and--Yes. Read Juliet. And you better be good!'

The waiter had taken out the table. The room, in the thirty-seventh story of the Hotel Picardy Tower, was quiet. Andy thrust the Romeo script into her nervous hands, switched on an electric hearth fire vastly more real than clumsily burning wood, and flopped out on the couch in beefy elegance.

She got herself a small coffee table and a straight chair, laid out the script, leaned over it with her cheeks in her hands and began to read. She became fairly calm. This was not a manager considering her for a job; it was her friend, almost her worshipped idol, Andy Deacon.

She was calm enough to forget him entirely as she read, 'O gentle Romeo, if thou dost love, pronounce it faithfully'. Her reading had no particular 'modernity', no discernible link with Freud and Adler. It was as old as cypress groves and little rivers and the young moon, and if there was anything contemporary about it, for contribution to the Deacon Theatrical Experiment, it was that to her, just now, Romeo was not smouldered in an antique tomb, but alive and here, ducally lolling on the couch, his eyes (she peeped to see) tight-closed in the closeness of his attention--

And she realized that he had fallen asleep.

She was not angry long. Asleep, his face was so youthful, so weary. She sighed for herself and her lost opportunity, and then she sighed for him. 'Poor Andy! Poor dear!' She softly drew a cover over him, tiptoed to find her hat and jacket, and tiptoed out into the hotel corridor, crying.

The telephone by her bed terrified her out of sleep. She was entirely convinced that she had murdered someone and that this was the police after her. Her breath coming harshly, she turned on the light and saw her little old bedside clock. It was three o'clock.

'Y-yes?' she said quaveringly, into the hateful black maw of the telephone.

It was Andy--blast him! And he sounded as fresh and busy as at noon.

'Beth? You thought I fell asleep?'

'Yes, I did sort of think so.'

('You know you fell asleep, you producer, you capitalist, you face-grinder, you spats-wearer.')

'Maybe I did. I'd been going hard since seven in the morning--or anyway since eight or eight-thirty. But I heard enough of your reading before I popped off. If I remember rightly, you have good legs, haven't you?'

'What?'

'You heard me! As Mercutio's page, you have to wear tights.'

'Yes, I have!'

'All right. You're elected. You understudy Juliet and say the prologue and play the page.'

'Oh, Andy!'

'You get forty a week, Equity minimum. Okay?'

'Oh yes, quite okay!'

'You're not an Equity member yet.'

'No, I couldn't join till I had a producer's contract.'

'Come around to the Picardy sometime this afternoon and I'll give you a contract. Rehearsals start Monday, October thirty-first, five days from now. We open in Belluca, Indiana, for a week's run, on November 28th. Look, Beth, what do you think of keeping the two pages in tights, as I said? It don't jibe with the modern costumes, but then, we haven't got anything corresponding to a gent's private page to-day anyway. I've been thinking about it--I tried to get Adrian and Bill Schnable on the phone just now to talk it over, but the dirty dogs have both cut off their telephones for the night, fine theatrical men they are, sleeping like commuters, and--what do you think?'

Twenty minutes later they were still talking, with Bethel pleased to believe that she could keep her voice steady and practical.

She did not go back to sleep. She read an act of Romeo and Juliet--sitting up in bed, solemnly sucking a candy bar, looking about ten years old in her pink-and-white knitted bed jacket. At dawn she had a shower, dressed, slipped through the hotel corridor, while the aged male night clerk frowned. She had coffee and corn flakes at the counter--of pine scrubbed down till the knots and the grain stood out like a relief map--of an old, cheap restaurant that was lined with pressed tin, so that she felt as if she were cooped in an old tin packing case.

As she sipped the coffee, which managed to be at once weak and bitter, she was still hotly reading Romeo and Juliet.