Bethel Merriday

XXII

There were excursions that made Bethel feel gratifyingly professional: the election of the company's Equity deputy, when for a quarter-hour they ceased being artists and vigorously became labour-union members who had jobs and wages to protect. Wyndham Nooks diaconally offered to serve and to guard them all like little lambs; so Doc Keezer was elected. As a junior member of Equity, Bethel had no vote. She just prayed for Doc's election.

And the first professional photographs: individual ones to be exhibited in the frames in the theatre lobbies. They were photographed in a rapid-fire theatrical studio in a shaky old building over an orangeade stand on that shockingly decayed Rialto, Broadway.

The photographer, a black-haired young Pole who wore a beret and a checked business suit, glared at Bethel, announced, 'You've got a nice, sensitive face for Hollywood, young lady, when you can get out of this damn-fool stage business', and before she could protest that she was an Artist, he was yelling at her, 'Look Up! Look down! Now look up here where I'd be saying "Look at the canary", if you were about two years younger. Swell! Scram! Next!'

She was rather unausterely pleased when the proofs of her photographs made her seem alive and exciting, all living dark eyes, while the pictures of the lovely lily Iris revealed her as a little washed-out and plebeian. She told herself that she oughtn't to think things like that . . . she told herself.

The last ten days out of the four weeks of rehearsals accelerated like a car without brakes running down a mountain road.

For days it did not seem probable that there ever would be a performance. Half the time the old troupers like Doc Keezer and Hugh Challis and Mabel Staghorn saved their voices and dismayed Bethel by stingily talking only to themselves. Sometimes she was impressed by the dignity and noble pity of the prosaic Doc Keezer as Friar Laurence.

His whole face seemed larger; his forehead wider; his tranquil gestures more priestly. Then he would shrink again into peddling his gestures dully across a counter. Andy was always awake and romantic. Mrs. Boyle was for an accidental moment, now and then, transformed into the passionate girl. Her voice was living music, and an inner glow seemed to make her whole body rosy as in divine tenderness she cried:

And five minutes later Mrs. Boyle would be breaking the spell, and infuriating Romeo, by sweetly crooning, 'Oh, Mr. Deacon, I am so sorry to interrupt but, Mr. Satori, did you say you thought I ought to lay my hand on the nurse's shoulder just before I say "O what a beast was I to chide at him", or just afterwards?'

And when even the rock-bound Satori blew up with, 'Oh, for God's sake, Aurelia, do it just the way you've been doing it ever since you played it with Charles Kean in 1855!' then Mrs. Boyle smiled demurely.

Zed Wintergeist referred to Mrs. Boyle as the 'six-minute egg'.

By sheer torture Satori got old Wyndham Nooks not to say his line as Sampson, 'I strike quickly, being moved', as though he were about to be sick. Most of the time most of the cast floundered and forgot their lines and spoke them like sulky schoolboys and forgot fifty times over just when they were to turn and when to walk; and to the anxious Bethel, the whole thing was a straw pile.

It was on Tuesday afternoon, in the last week of rehearsals, that the miracle happened, and suddenly they were playing--they were not school children doing exercises but trained actors playing, and then not actors at all, but real people, suffering, loving, fighting. She cried a little, and she saw Satori breathe deep, as line came smoothly after line like water flowing.

Incredibly, the rehearsal time was almost over, and they were preparing for their journey that would take them out to Iowa, Kansas, perhaps to Colorado and California, that might last a year and might end up in New York or Australia--or in Palooka Junction.

They were all buying wardrobes and baggage, and all talking about it. Mahala was going to have a new evening frock of silver lamé--she would be going to elegant parties with Andy, she sniffed. Iris, at the celebrated 'little dressmaker on a side street, so cheap, and just as good as Bergdorf', was having made an evening frock that had a jet black front and tight long sleeves but, economically, no back at all.

Bethel's father, always so amazingly understanding of things that he couldn't possibly have understood or imagined, had sent her a hundred dollars, with a note ending, 'I guess I can get along without this for a while and you will want to buy trunk & etc. & be as well dressed as all the other girls in Show, guess to do that would cost three four hundred, afraid can't quite afford that but hope enclosed will help a little'.

She tenderly sent back ten dollars, and spent the rest on underclothes and a sweater and a trunk. She was suddenly sharply impatient with the swank of Mahala and Iris. If she bought anything, it would be out of her savings along the road after she had paid Sol Gadto for his lessons--and if the others sniffed at her shabbiness, why, she'd just have to get along with being as badly dressed, off-stage, as Mrs. Lumley Boyle!

But she excitedly shopped for a second-hand trunk. She calmly drove a number of Third Avenue Jewish dealers in such baggage, dealers esteemed in the profession for their shrewdness and persistence, to frothing madness by picking at the corners of wardrobe-trunk drawers and counting the number of clotheshangers and refusing to be moved by broken-hinged coffers with lovely flowery chintz lining.

No newly made knight had more satisfaction than did Bethel when the new old trunk arrived in her room--necessitating her standing on the bed when she was dressing--and she beamed at its lordly inscription:

She read timetables. She looked at maps in the library. She mugged up on such exotic knowledge as the origin of the names Des Moines and Milwaukee. And she was somewhat terrified all the while, because the longest journey she had ever made had been from Sladesbury to Bar Harbour, by motor car, and she had never spent a night on a Pullman car in her life--to her generation, aeroplanes were more familiar than trains. And she was sure, up to the moment when their train left for Belluca, Indiana, that this grown-up company of real actors would never actually pay her train fare and take her along.

Andy Deacon had a rich cousin, one Romer Ingalls, in the plumbing-supply-manufacture and Sons of the American Revolution line in Belluca, and no professional play had opened there for years. With these two advantages, they were bound to succeed, and to all of the company, even Doc Keezer and Mrs. Boyle, Belluca suddenly took on the aspect of Bethlehem.

Rather numbly, as on the morning before execution, Bethel realized that at seven p.m., this very Saturday, November 26th, 1938, she would be starting, with the company for Belluca. She packed her trunk and three bags, made sure that her purple lining pencil and mascara were in her makeup box, paid her final hotel bill, sent down her baggage, and sat on her bed in the vacated, horribly empty, horribly quiet and utterly strange room, in a panic.

Volitionless, dream-walking, she coaxed herself downstairs and into a taxicab to the Pennsylvania Station.

With a feeling that the flow of passengers would stop and rush up to her, begging for her autograph, if they knew who she really was--i.e., a woman explorer starting for Greenland--she gave her suitcase to an unimpressed redcap.

The whole company were surging in circles or standing patiently at the train gate. She did not know them, for they wore not the familiar, rather back-attic clothes in which they had rehearsed, but their best winter overcoats. How familiar she would become with those overcoats in the next months!--Andy's dark grey herringbone, Zed's loose and cloaklike camel's-hair with the high collar, Iris's vain lilac garment, with two huge purple buttons on the back of the waist (and one tiny grease spot, later to spread by parthenogenesis, on the front hem), Doc Keezer's gloomy, heavy grey worsted which (he told you) he had bought in Wheeling, West Virginia, for thirty-two dollars three years ago.

As she recognized them, her timidity was gone in the joy of this, her family. They were so welcoming, so gay. Everyone's smile said that they loved her and that they were going forth to conquer.

But Andy was edging away by himself, walking up and down the shed, head bent, his hands behind him. Doubtfully she followed him and begged, 'Anything the matter?'

He held her by both arms and burst out, 'Kitten, I suddenly feel so responsible, taking all of you out on this gamble, and a lot of you with dependants--kids and mothers. Real actors, not semi-amateurs like me, trusting their whole lives to an enterprise like this. It scares me! Darling, I want you to kneel in your berth to-night and pray, "God make me a good actress and help me to help Andy put this crazy adventure over"!'

For the first time, she was not shy with him. As he held her shoulders, she put her light hands affectionately about his waist and cried, 'You've been an angel to all of us. And we do appreciate it, though I guess we've all been too stupid to thank you. And we will succeed. We will!'

'Thanks, Beth.' He looked at her with a curious, bright sensitiveness, unlike his complacent bulk, patted her shoulders and hurried away to buy mounds of magazines.

The train gate was open. The company were a ship's complement, shouting farewell to land, anchors aweigh for Ultima Thule, where summer and winter the golden globes shine on the trees and in the street lie pieces of eight. Antonio Murphy, the solemnly comic Peter, was kissing a surprisingly pretty young wife good-bye; so was Geoffrey Hoy, the Benvolio; Mabel Staghorn was crying on the shoulder of a thin, painfully reasonable little man; and Wyndham Nooks kissing the hand of a faded and ageing wife, faded yellow hair and faded pink cheeks and faded pink summery hat, who had been his companion in rackety medicine-show days and who looked at her lion-maned Henry Irving so adoringly, with such loneliness, that Bethel pinched herself for having ever made fun of Nooks.

And they all stamped down the stairs and on to the Pullmans.

They had one and a half Pullmans reserved for them. In the half-car, the Adults' Car, to which were assigned such nobles as Hugh Challis, and Mabel Staghorn, Mrs. Boyle had the drawing-room, which is the sign and privilege of a star; in the other, the frivolous Young People's Caravan, the drawing-room was Andy's, but to-night it was shared by Director Satori, who was going out to Belluca to stay with the show the first week. And on the whole journey it was jammed less with Andy than with blown newspapers, the girls of the company, bridge games, Wyndham Nooks rumbling, portable radios yawping, and everybody's excess luggage, rubbers and troubles. It was as private and honorific as the vestibule.

Before the train started, Andy summoned everybody into the Young People's Car for an announcement. Beth long remembered those twenty-eight people, plus Sally Carpet, come down to the train with the final telegrams for Andy, standing thick in the car aisle, their faces, carven in high planes and shadows by the car lights, uplifted to Andy as he stood up on a pile of suitcases and shouted:

'Ladies and gentlemen of the company! We are about to assault and capture the West. West where the West begins. Where the handclasps are a little warmer and we hope the box offices are a little busier.'

Bethel sharply remembered that, however Andy might joke, she, who had never been more than ten miles west of the Hudson, really was Going West: California sands and yellow rivers and desert and the peaks of Colorado; covered wagons, and John Brown riding, and young men singing on ranches with the moon enormous across the plains. She was almost dancing as he went on:

'So to start us off on our mission--of making a fairly honest living--I want to tell you that I have just received a wire from Belluca that we shall go clean on Monday night, opening night, and that there is a very good chance of our being sold out for all the rest of the week. We're a hit already, boys and girls. Skip, Sally; the train's going.'

Everybody cheered. Miss Carpet darted off, to the tune of that twilight wail, 'All-ll-ll abo-oo-ooard!' from the platform, and the train was moving.

The car was littered with baggage like the debris of a hurricane. Bethel was to know the company's belongings as well as she knew the owners: Doc Keezer's portable radio, canvas-covered with a band of red and yellow, which he played very softly in his berth on the long, train-shaking nights when he couldn't sleep; Mahala's extravagant four bags, in blue morocco so expensive and so easily scratched that she kept them protected by a variety of little dog blankets, so that you never could see the fine leather at all; the two-volume set of Karl Marx which Charlotte Levison always had with her, in train seat and hotel and dressing-room, and which she was never seen to read for more than five minutes at a time; the whole series of plays and books on stage design which Zed Wintergeist and Douglas Fry did read and trade back and forth; Henry W. Purvis's private flask, and Henry W. Purvis's folding pocket chessboard, which he shared with Douglas, Hugh Challis and Mabel Staghorn; and, most conspicuous, most horrible of all the impedimenta, Mrs. Lumley Boyle's hell-born and heaven-hated Pekinese dog, named Pluto.

These objects Bethel came to know better than any piece of furniture in the house in Sladesbury--even the ancient folding card table on which she had done her homework and had drawn hearts and flowers. At home things did get put away in closets now and then, while here you stumbled over Mahala's imperial blue bags, and cracked your shins on them, on the train, in hotel corridors and in front of her dressing-room, all day long.

It was a travelling circus; it was an army with paper banners. There seemed to be no end to the people Bethel met as her new family. On the train she first really talked with the company manager and wet nurse, the Yankee Tertius Tully, and first saw the master carpenter, the electrician and the property man, who would manage local theatre crews: Gene Doric, Wilson Kinloch, and Phil Schoenberg. They were all middle-aged, all hopelessly married, all given toblack sateen shirts. Gene and Phil became her amiable and loyal friends; Bethel felt more at home with them than ever with Victor Swenson or Tudor Blackwall.

But Wilson Kinloch proved that a man may be a member of a labour union, in good standing, and still be rather less than a saint. Kinloch hated, roughly in this order: Andy's wealth, Andy's acting, Gene Doric's not altogether guileless habit of dropping hammers on his (Wilson's) toes, William Green president of the American Federation of Labour, J. Pierpont Morgan, Zed Wintergeist's jeering, Iris Pentire's softness, and Pluto, the dog of Boyle. And he hated them so heartily and industriously that, before the tour was over, he became rather of a sympathetic character to a Bethel getting fed up with balconies, moonlight effects and genius.

She now met first the final members of the excursion: Hilda Donnersberg, Mrs. Boyle's maid, a wild strained Austrian who was convinced that everybody but Mrs. Boyle was a fool; and Ernie Smith, the boy who came along to sell the illustrated programmes in the lobbies and who loved nothing so much as giving Iris and Bethel his opinion of the acting of Francine Larrimore and Katharine Hepburn and Pauline Lord. It seems that all of these ladies had frequently called him to their dressing-rooms for technical advice, and had benefited gratifyingly. Miss Larrimore had said to him--asserted Ernie--'I consider you the smartest critic of acting in New York. You got it all over George Jean Nathan, Ernie. It's an injustice, Ernie, that you aren't up here on the stage yourself, instead of out in that lobby wasting your voice selling programmes.'

'I see!' said Bethel.

They would be much quieter later, but perhaps the company were a little loud, this first evening in the diner. Lyle Johnson and Charlotte Levison sang 'Frankie and Johnnie'. Zed and Douglas Fry rehearsed Waiting for Lefty. Iris rather loudly told Victor Swenson her theories of make-up. When they settled down in the sleeper again, it was already beginning to be home.

Three bridge games started, with suitcases, supported on knees, for tables. Miss Staghorn was knitting. Charlotte returned to not reading some more Marx. Hugh Challis, who belonged in the bleak correctitude of the other car, was telling Gene Doric, the master carpenter, about the trick Larry Lewis, the music-hall comedian, had played on Billy Bush, the expert on playing Mayfair butlers, at the golf club in Little Pimple, Surrey, at or about three in the afternoon on September 16th, though it may have been the 17th, 1903.

In the drawing-room, their legs rather cramped with suitcases, Andy and Satori and Tertius Tully and Eldred, the stage manager, were wearily scribbling on papers--papers--papers. If Andy was a Romeo belated, he had also heard about the need of bookkeeping.

Only Zed and Douglas and Bethel were reading, and she was too restless to keep her attention even on Noel Coward's Present Indicative. She raised the blind, pressed her forehead against the cold glass, stared out on the dark farm lands that passed her. Oh, she was going to see and grasp every state in the vast Union!

In each lone light that raced past her, she saw a farmhouse, saw the family--the father, the old aunt, the ambitious son with his manual of automotive engineering, the wild, dangerous daughter listening. She wanted to know them; she wanted by playing them to give them to the world.

She had never been so content.

And that night, unsleeping but happily drowsy in her berth, she listened to the train whistle--that familiar magic summons to be up and wandering--from the engine on her very own train.