Bethel Merriday

XXIII

Belluca, Indiana, pop. 277,000; on the Wabusha River; site state aviation sch.; Belluca Univ., Littlefield Art Museum cont. a Fra Angelico, an El Greco; mfrs. plumbing supplies, sewer pipe, machine tools, watches, gloves, glass.

As they all peered out of the car widows, in Belluca, at eleven in the morning, everything was as it should be: reporters on the platform, photographers with flashlights, and Andy's great rich cousin, Mr. Romer Ingalls, escorted by cousinlets and a uniformed chauffeur.

Whether it was because of Mr. Ingals's patronage, or because no Eastern professional play had opened in Belluca for twenty years, or because, in ten years now, no play except WPA productions had been announced for more than a three-night run, or because of a pure love of the Bard and Mrs. Lumley Boyle, the whole city of Belluca--that is, the section of it that considered the drama as important as ice-cream sodas--was prepared to take the Deacon Romeo & Juliet Production to its friendly Midwestern heart.

Each of the three newspapers had sent at least two reporters--the drama editor and a society chronicler. Behind them and the light-flashing photographers were a medley of horrible little girls with autograph albums; little girls who would delightedly have interrupted Romeo just as he was climbing the balcony but who would much rather have had the sacred totem of the gangster in the film Stick 'Em Up. But they made a very pretty crush to excite Bethel and Iris.

All but one of the reporters packed in about Mrs. Boyle. That one was a baby-faced, eager-faced young man, who grabbed the arms of the two girls, crowing, 'You Iris Pentire and Beth Merriday? I'm Carl Frazee of the News. Look at the sacred white journalistic cows mooing at the Boyle woman--and see her smile at them. Not very strong on smiling privately, is she?'

Bethel giggled. Iris said indignantly, 'She never smiles, in rehearsal, except when she thinks it'll make somebody mad.'

'Lookit, kids. I'll be in and buy you a drink, soon as you get settled in your hotel. I suppose you'll go to the Buckingham-Bradley.'

With dignity, an actress listening to the nobler call, Bethel stated, 'I'm sorry but we have to Be In The Theatre all day. We're Rehearsing All Afternoon, and Dress Rehearsal This Evening. Mr. Satori decided to hold it here instead of New York. But perhaps we'll see you some time this week. You are a reporter?'

'No. He's a college boy!' sniffed Iris. 'Aren't you now, Carl?'

'Ye-es. Well. I was. University of Michigan B.A. Oxford M.A. Licentiate of the Sorbonne. And I'll do the review of your show for the News to-morrow night.'

But of the two girls, one did have sense enough to know how much she had been put in her place, and, from twenty-nine cheerful words, to learn a great deal about Indiana, about the Middle West, about the whole sprawling United States.

'See you soon, kids. Don't take any wooden money,' said Carl Frazee.

They heard Andy's cousin, Romer Ingalls--a thick man with a cigar and an improbable Legion of Honour ribbon--shouting, 'Course you're going to stay with us, Andy, but do you think Mrs. Boyle would like to come, too?'

Andy looked horrified. 'No! I'm going to stay with My Company!'

And, loving him, Bethel knew that Andrew Deacon was as young as she, and as armourless against a cynical world.

Reluctantly, but agreeing because it would save money, Bethel had promised to share hotel rooms with Iris on the tour, and they drove off together in a taxicab.

Iris (before she had seen any of the city) sneered that Belluca was a 'miserable little dump', compared with New York, which was her native city only by very recent absorption, the vital statistics accrediting her to a side street in Wheeling, West Virginia. To Bethel this new city seemed huge and surprising. She looked through the rear window of the taxi at the white limestone façade of the Union Station, with its white tower five hundred feet high; she looked around at the station plaza, with its fountains and sycamore alleys; and she felt that she had come, with her fellow-adventurers in cap and bells, on festivity to Rome.

The taxi sped out of the plaza, round a corner, and she saw their first playbills:

MRS LUMLEY BOYLE

(in person)

in

The world's first production of

the world's greatest love story

ROMEO AND JULIET

in MODERN clothes

with Andrew Deacon and an all-star

Broadway cast

World Premier in Belluca

AMERICAN THEATRE

Nov. 28--Dec. 3

Before they drove up to the Hotel Buckingham-Bradley (1000 rooms, 1000 baths, your home-town newspaper at your door in the morning), Iris and the squealing Bethel had seen nine more posters. The girls were innocent. They did not know the benevolent deception of what is known as 'depot billing', whereby the company's advance man and the local theatre manager make sure that whether the local citizens ever learn that the show is coming or not, at least the producer, arriving in town in a state of exaltation, doubt and suspicion, will have plenty to gladden him on the way to the hotel section.

Their room in the Buckingham-Bradley seemed to Bethel ten times as large as her den in New York and--she had known so few towns: Sladesbury, Point Royal, Grampion, New York--it looked out over enchantingly different streets: a very fine structure in the way of a granite jail, and a circular park with a statue of General Nelson A. Miles.

But Iris was wallowing in the local Sunday newspapers, the News, the American and the Daily Republican, bought on the way up.

'Look! Look! Beth, look! Here's both our pictures, and stories about us.'

Bethel squatted on the floor with Iris and stared at a group picture of herself, Iris, Charlotte and Vera Cross (Lady Capulet's understudy), all adoringly surrounding Mrs. Boyle. The advance man had done honour to his profession as press agent. In the News Bethel read a spirited account of herself (some inches below the rhetorical splendours devoted to Mrs. Boyle) and learned that--

in college, at a certain famous old institution for women on the banks of the historic Hudson River, she was president of the dramatic club, star in many elaborate college productions. After college her ability was immediately recognized, and she has had such an extensive training in stock as falls to the lot of but few young actresses.

Bethel moaned, 'But they might have put in my studies in the Alva Prindle School of Garage Acting.'

Radio Station WXXW, owned by the Belluca Daily Republican and the most influential fount of wisdom and of jazz in all that section of Indiana, was turning over a whole half-hour of time--magic like to Jehovah's, that can own and turn over Time!--to an interview with the Romeo Company by no less a local prophet than the Indiana Walter Winchell, Mr. Ted Gronitz, mention in whose daily column 'Hot on the Spot' was more sought by Belluca debutantes, prize fighters and pulpit orators than was sleep or raiment. Andy, Mahala and Mrs. Boyle were to broadcast, of course. But at lunchtime--a dozen of the youngsters of the company at three tables down in the Buckingham-Bradley Coffee Shop, being very professional and stagy over Ham and Eggs, Country Style--Bethel was summoned by a bell-boy to report at Andy's suite, to be ready to broadcast.

'Me . . . broadcast?' squeaked Bethel.

'Sure, I done it once. I'm a swell crooner,' said the bellboy.

In Andy's suite--a Louis Seize apartment with the useful additions of a Dinette, and a purple-and-black-tiled Kitchenette, with an electric refrigerator--Bethel found Mr. Ted Gronitz, their broadcaster, pacing and shrieking. He was a squat, bristly haired little man who had been a featherweight boxer, a county fair spieler and a financial reporter. He was a dream in brown--brown suit, brown handkerchief at his breast, autumn-leaf-brown tie, cigar-brown shirt and cigar-brown cigar. He yelled amiably at her:

'Bethel? Listen, kid, I got nidea. Of course I'm going to interview these stuffed shirts here--Andy and Mahally and the Boyle--but how about getting the impressions of an understudy? How do you like having to sit back and listen to the old champ play Juliet when you know you could wipe her out? Ever want to bump her off?'

Mrs. Boyle, listening, looked pained.

Not waiting for Bethel's answer, Ted Gronitz exulted, 'That'll be fine. That'll give the old girls sitting home by the radio something to talk about. One in ten thousand might even go to your show. Now, Andy, I want you to keep off dramatic subjects--you're not so hot on those--and talk about High Sassiety in Newport. Didn't your Old Lady entertain an English Lord there last year? Swell! That's the stuff.'

In panic Bethel had fled to the sheltering side of Andy and was whispering, 'Oh, do I have to do this? I've never talked on a mike. And he seems so--crude.'

'No, kitten, of course you don't have to. But it would help me a lot. We've got to put the show over in this one town, anyway. Can you stand it?'

'Oh, of course, Andy!' she glowed . . . To be able to 'help a lot', to help Andy Deacon! For that she had been born!

The Daily Republican building was an aged pile of pasty-faced yellow brick, and the corridors were inky and lathy, but as the delegation of five from the Romeo Company, headed by Ted Gronitz and Tertius Tully, stepped from the elevator into the top story, devoted to Station WXXW, they were in a set from the Follies. The vestibule, lined with fawn-coloured leather, was filled with 'modernistic' chairs with scarlet-and-yellow leather seats and nickel arms and legs and had, at the end, a tall desk, beneath which stood the chorus: slim girls in uniforms as military as Bethel's on stage, with cocky pill-box caps.

'Peg, go in and tell the old man the Shakespeare and Barnum and Bailey Circus has arrived,' yelled Gronitz, and one seraph darted away. She returned with Andy's cousin, Ingalls, and six eyeglassed men, as portly and solemn as canons. Bethel never did find out just who they all were, but they all looked like observers at an execution as, in terror, seizing Andy's arm, she marched down the cork-floored gallows walk to Studio No. 3.

The broadcasting room itself was cheery enough, and a little on the littered side: a long room managing to contain two grand pianos, a row of nickel-and-ebony folding chairs--immediately occupied by the observers--a harp, a bust of Beethoven, a plaster Tudor fireplace with electric logs, and a directors' table. But in the centre was a thin standard on which was a double-faced microphone, like a double-ended wedge. From the side it resembled the stiffly upreared head of a boa constrictor; from the front, an electric toaster.

Bethel quaked with the thought of the millions about to listen to her, in city homes and automobiles and those farmhouses always designated in radio accounts as 'far-flung'. Far-flung farmhouses with gimlet-eyed, terrier-eared, far-flung farm wives listening to Bethel Merriday!

In a coop shut off from the studio by a glass-window wall was an engineer at a gigantic control board. Would he, maybe, cut her off the air if she wasn't at once very reverent and very witty? He was such a dry, stern, green-eyeshaded engineer, not likely to be tender to dewy young actresses.

She was trembling.

Of course there was no proof whatever that millions were going to listen to her, or ever did listen to her. In fact with the two or three broadcasts every week which she was going to do on the rest of the tour, she had no proof that anybody ever did hear her. Perhaps no one did.

Mr. Ted Gronitz was capering with not the slightest awe. As the red second hand on the clock on the wall reached the exact half-hour, Ted pulled the microphone stand toward him as though it were a lively sweetheart and chuckled, softly, rapidly:

'Hot spots on the air! Ted Gronitz speaking from the Belluca Daily Republican offices. I've got a real hot culturureal hot spot for you this afternoon, boys and girls, but I can't get going before I whet my whistle with a bottle of Corn-Cola, the new thirst quencher and taste tickler. Yum, yum, yum, maybe that wasn't good.'

He didn't really have a bottle of Corn-Cola there, you know. He was pretending. And Bethel was moaning inwardly, 'What has all this got to do with playing Shakespeare?'

'YESSIR, folks, that goes right to the spot. Don't forget: at your druggist's or grocer's, five cents the throw, CORN-COLA, and you'll thank me for the tip.

'Now who do you think we've got with us this afternoon, folks? None other than Romeo and Juliet themselves, the most famous lovers in history, and you'd better look sharp, all you young folks, and get on to how the professionals do their love-making. YESSIR, for the first time in a quarter of a century, Belluca is being honoured by the world premeer . . .'

He said that Mrs. Lumley Boyle was too great an actress and too good a sport to mind a little kidding, and so would Mrs. Boyle tell them how many English counts and lords and kings and barons and all those she had kissed?

A number, it seemed, by her modest account.

And now would Andrew Deacon--once known as Ole Andy Deacon, the Pride of the Yale Gridiron--tell the boys and girls how he would win a Juliet if he met her off-stage?

Bethel saw his Adam's apple bobbing and his eyes turning inside out with fear as Andy tried to be witty and then, earnestly, boyishly (sweetly, she thought, and pretty badly) switched into an account of what he was trying to do: pour into the immortal body of Shakespeare the life blood of to-day.

Suddenly Andy had drooped away from the microphone and had sunk in one of the line of folding chairs, mopping his head, while she wanted to run over and kiss him and tell him how good he was. It was presumably Mahala's turn to be pixie. But, horribly, it was at herself that Ted was grinning, while he chatted to his audience:

'Now we'll get away from the big guns of the stage and turn the mike over to a darling kid, Bethel Merriday, Mrs. Boyle's understudy, who if you could see her, as I do now, all you youngsters would rush in and try to date her up for the next ten years. Here you are, Beth. Attagirl!'

Certainly by no volition of her own she had got from her chair to the other side of the standard from Ted and was facing that mocking small grid, her knees and stomach failing her, as Ted piped, 'Now tell us, baby, what's your chief ambition?' And by no will of her own, Bethel was answering--instantly, briskly, 'To be as good an actress as Mrs. Boyle some day'.

She smiled over at the star, who beamed back, eyes like black glass. Bethel never had any trouble with Mrs. Boyle after that day--no violent trouble.

'Why do you want to go on the stage, Belli, pretty kid like you?'

'Because I believe that if an actress can do it--if she can--she'll be something bigger than her own self, when she's playing great roles.'

Bethel realized that she could snap back answers instantly; that Andy and Tertius Tully were nodding to each other, as who should say that she was good.

'The great tradition, eh? That's the stuff. But wouldn't you rather marry a handsome fellow with lots of money?'

'I would not!'

'What's your advice to the girls that would like to get on the stage?'

'Work and wait, I guess.'

As she went on--on--on--four prodigious minutes, Bethel hated everything she was saying more and more. She was being banal. She was being smirkingly good-natured. It wasn't good enough!

And still she went on, while Ted smiled gratitude for her quickness. What choked and stopped her at last was not disgust with her own glibness but a panicky feeling that the blank microphone before her was not connected. It never applauded. It never changed. She was talking into a cold hole in the air, and that contemptuous coldness defeated her.

At the end she heard them all praising her. Andy cried, 'Darling, you're going to be one of our biggest roper-inners.'

Then she saw Zed Wintergeist--heaven knows when or why he had got into the room--standing by the door, smiling bitterly, and she was very sick.

And was Ted Gronitz, in the derisive secret refuges of his heart, as vulgar and half literate as he seemed? He had used Hugh Challis's favourite war cry, 'The great tradition'. She was frightened.

But in the dress rehearsal she forgot all that.

They had held two scenery rehearsals in New York, but this, their first complete dress rehearsal, began at five o'clock Sunday afternoon and staggered to something like an ending at five o'clock next morning.

As they walked from their hotel for the rehearsal, Iris insisted that they enter by way of the theatre lobby, to see the frames with their photographs. 'Nosir!' Bethel said stoutly. 'I'm going back to the stage entrance. That's where an actor belongs, and only an actor has any real right to enter there. Lobby? Frames? The laity can have those. Huh! The carriage trade!'

(But it is true, however, that she had already seen a frame, in the hotel lobby!)

Like a priestess, alone privileged to enter the sanctuary by the low sacred door, Bethel skipped along a cobble-paved alley, between the side of a steam laundry and the back of the old American Theatre of Belluca. She chattered to Iris, but she chattered to keep from crying, for she was remembering the Crystal Theatre of Sladesbury, and Caryl McDermid and frail Elsie Krall, and the first time she had dared go back to watch their glory-trailing appearance at the stage door. The rough, dark red brick side wall of the alley seemed to her beautiful; something out of Dickens, or an enchantment that belonged to Garrick and Mrs. Siddons and Eleonora Duse.

Except for Grampion and the temporary refuges for rehearsals in New York, this was her first theatre; it really was hers; it belonged to her, and she served it. Looking down from the ivory, cloud-hung thrones of the seraphim, she listened to the doorman--satisfactorily old and moustached and wrinkled--when he snapped, 'You girls in the cast?' They smiled at him, entered his narrow coop, and, having left New York a whole twenty-two hours ago, both Iris and she looked carefully through the letters in the box below the call-board.

Bethel stole away from Iris, to be alone in her first moment of coming out on a professional stage.

Andy and Satori were yelling; Zed Wintergeist was yelling in his dressing-room and simultaneously playing an unexplained violin; the company stagehands were yelling at the local stage crew; Douglas Fry was going quietly about with a floor plan in front of his nose; pillars of plywood and stone walls of canvas were leaning over threateningly as they were moved into place. But the curtain was up, and as Bethel slipped through an entrance and stood down on the apron of the stage, looking into the enormous unpeopled auditorium, this, her cathedral, was quiet as midnight, awesome as the still tombs in the cathedral crypt.

The American Theatre of Belluca, which remembered the chariot race in Ben Hur, was a handsome, portly old house, with three balconies, terminating in the perilous mountain shelf of the old-fashioned 'nigger heaven'. The ceiling, in dark wooden panels divided by smoke-darkened ridges of gold, was painted with the twisted Richard III, with Lear raving to the breakers, with soft-sighing Rosalind. The boxes were gilded sea shells. The seats were in faded red plush upholstery; the sharply raked aisles carpeted in maroon. It was in dolorous taste, but it was a real theatre, not a movie shop with neat walls of tan-tinted celotex.

All of the sixteen hundred seats that she could see climbing up in front of her looked like flat-chested people, quiet, polite-faced, waiting for her to begin to act. And she was not afraid of them as she had been of the silent cynicism on the porous face of the microphone. She wanted to begin.

She was to share a dressing-room with Charlotte Levison, Vera Gross and Mabel Staghorn, the character woman who belaboured the part of the Nurse on stage and belaboured sweetness off. As they dressed for this final rehearsal--Charlotte as Rue-de-la-Paix Lady Montague--Bethel was envious of their make-ups. Charlotte, that handsome countess of Communism, with touches of blue-grey along the sides of her nose, became high-well-born, and Miss Staghorn, in her own person a mirror of the Ladies' Foreign Missionary Society of Augusta, Maine, became red-nosed and ribald and toothless.

Proudly they took themselves out on the damp cement basement floor, bordering which were the coops of their dressing-rooms. All the company, so long familiar, were exclaiming over one another's metamorphoses. Only Andy, in the tweed jacket and grey bags which he intended to wear as a gay and easy-going Romeo, seemed the same kind self.

Zed, Henry Purvis, Geoffrey Hoy and Tudor Blackwall--Mercutio, Tybalt, Benvolio and Paris--they were in the uniforms of Italian officers. No, worse than that: they were suddenly professional actors, and our Bethel felt herself entirely out of it, wanted to blow her little amateur nose and run home crying.

It was Zed who most overwhelmed her. That tousled young rebel, with the frayed ties and the wrinkled soft shirt collars, was an incredibly elegant young nobleman now, a fencer and polo player and aviator, with his oiled hair, his tall peaked uniform cap cockily tilted, his wide shoulders, his thin knees in riding breeches, his scornfully shining boots. Bethel would have told you, earnestly and honestly, that she loathed war and hated Fascism, but when Captain Zed Mercutio-Montague stalked toward her with the gay hard grin of the warrior, when he shouted, 'Well, pet, how do you like your totalitarian hero?' when he squeezed her shoulder--superior, reckless, probably cruel--she was faint, and from no democratic ideology.

When Charlotte saw the uniforms, she clasped her hands like Modjeska and wailed, 'But I hate everything Fascist! I can't stay on in this show!' Harry Purvis (Ph.D., but sober now), flaunted, 'So do I hate it. But don't tie the party line around the end of your nose, my comrade and my particular darling. Who's ever going to connect Tybalt with the Duce? Let's go argue about it.' Charlotte went.

Then the curtain was down, and in front of it Bethel was quavering her prologue. As she came off, Satori grunted at her, 'Okay. Just remember three things: keep your head up, so the gallery can see and hear you. Enunciate--let's hear your r's and t's and m's. And if your foot slips in a line, don't ever go back and correct it. Okay. Take her up!'

They took her up--her being the curtain--and the theory was that, on its rising, Sampson Nooks and Peter Antonio Murphy would gaily be clumping out, ready for a street row. They weren't. They had, that second, appallingly found that one of them had gold buttons on his livery coat and the other silver.

That meant a conference of Satori, Andy, Nooks, Murphy and Mrs. Golly, the wardrobe mistress, who finally relieved them all by the inspired suggestion of keeping the buttons as they were--the audience would think it was intentional. Once, under canvas, Mrs. Golly had played moonshiners' beautiful daughters, then moonshiners' loyal wives, and finally moonshiners' comic grandmothers; and she had played Juliet for two nights in Cheyenne, Wyoming, in 1906.

For twelve blasphemous hours, when everybody slumped on chairs and looked glassy-eyed above limp cigarettes, they carried on what Satori afterward called a fine, satisfactory dress rehearsal.

Over Act I, Scene V--Romeo's first glimpse of Juliet, at Capulet's party--there was an hour of shrieking conference. None of the walk-ons, which included all the young people in the company, agreed with any other on just which cue they were to come gambolling in as maskers. Half the batteries in their electric torches would not work. There was a loud ideological and commercial argument with the union musician who was running the phonograph producing guaranteed genuine old Italian dance music, off-stage, and at this moment of painful class struggle Zed pleased everybody by piping up with what nobody had thought of till now: they ought, with modern clothes, to have modern tango music.

'Oh, shut up!' said Andy to Zed.

'Okay,' said Zed.

There was battle over the ad libs of the entering Bacchantes at the Capulet party. Iris, in character, kept saying, 'Oh, isn't this a lovely party, I think it's just dandy' and Lyle Johnson (as a Cinquescento Veronese) kept growling, 'What's the idea we can't smoke in this show; it would be twice as natural; modern costume--nuts!' And first they were too loud, then Satori couldn't hear them at all, then they were too loud again.

And a completely serious debate as to whether Tybalt-Purvis ought to carry brass knuckles (benevolently replacing the wicked ancient rapier) in the pocket of his white evening waistcoat. . . .

And a half-hour's wait while Satori, Andy, Stage Manager Eldred and Kinloch, the electrician, turned lights off and on, and apparently got none of the effects they wanted, and apparently didn't care much. Hoy and Lyle and Harry Purvis sat on the floor meantime, lighting cigarettes and smearily crushing out the butts, and yawned, 'What the hell's holding us up now? Why the hell don't they get on with it? How the hell do they expect us to give a show tomorrow night? Who the hell is running this amateur benefit? The hell!'

But Zed was surprisingly patient. Given a rehearsal, he seemed to have none of the nerves and muscles and stomach that in all the others were quivering with shaky weariness. This was his sport. He only grinned when, listening to Andy's fervent, 'Oh, she doth teach the torches to burn bright . . . beauty too rich for use, for earth too dear!' Tony Murphy snarled, 'Zed, I don't know how long I can stand here and listen to that student emote!'

All of Bethel's curiosity and her eagerness chilled as she heard this. She did not know whether it was more for love of Andy or her own pride as a judge of acting . . . She had been moved again by Andy's warmth and richness and clear nobility . . . Was she perhaps wrong--was he perhaps bad? . . .

Whatever went wrong--even Lyle Johnson's insertions of a filling-station 'Yuh!' in emendation of the Bard, and the failure of the stage manager's off-stage revolver, with which he had to give voice to Romeo's and Tybalt's pistols, to make any sound but a flat click--the immediate criminal invariably said, 'Oh, that'll be all right to-morrow', and that seemed to repair everything. It was all magic and madness.

Every two hours Andy had coffee and sandwiches brought in. The rehearsal halted, and the comparative silence of homicidal arguments about direction gave way to a crash of joyous babbling, and they all, except perhaps Tony Murphy, loved one another. Hugh Challis murmured, 'In forty-five years on the stage, Bethel, I've occasionally known producers who served coffee once during a dress rehearsal. And I've occasionally known producers who borrowed the money from the actors to go out and get coffee for themselves. But I've none too often heard of one who thought that actors could take to eating as a regular accomplishment. This Andy is a very sweet lad. You're fond of him, I take it.'

'W-why--y-yes--Yes, I am! Very!'

'Splendid. And I rather think, my good girl, that one of these days he'll have time to take a look at our Mahala and see what a tuppeny-ha'penny young woman she is, and turn to you.'

'Me? I don't think there is much of a Me yet, Mr. Challis.'

'No? Perhaps not. Perhaps not. There will be, I fancy, when our company is a great success. Oh yes, we shall be. Can't afford not to be.'

'No!'

Toward three a.m., when even Satori and Zed and Andy were worn down and Mrs. Boyle began to vanish backstage and to smell, though faintly, of whisky, then that old Player King, that Vincent Crummles of the purple sage, Wyndham Nooks, rose to his own.

By the time they had reached the chief of Mr. Nooks's three roles, that of the Apothecary, no one else cared what he did with it. But Mr. Nooks cared. He was convinced that he could 'steal the show' with his enactment of the meagre and inhibited bootlegger, and now he gave his all. In New York he had read the Apothecary's line, 'My poverty, but not my will, consents', inoffensively. But he chose the dress rehearsal to pause after 'my poverty', to raise his chin, look up to God, hold it for three agonizing seconds, then hurl 'but not my will' into the teeth of destiny.

Satori, watching from the tenth row of the orchestra, held up his hand. 'Mr. Nooks! What are you doing?'

'I don't understand, Mr. Director.'

'You are giving rather an exaggerated characterization to the unfortunate Apothecary.'

'I've always thought he was a real cameo of a character picture, and nobody has ever done enough with him. I'm trying to show how the Apothecary is the victim of awful bad luck, and poor fellow, he has to do this awful thing--'

'Quite, Mr. Nooks. Yes. A cameo. But I don't want it to be such a big cameo and get dropped on Romeo's head. I think I'd just play it down.'

Nooks breathed with the joy of being, for the first time, the centre of a Kulturkampf. Ignoring Satori's impatient fingers on the orchestra seat in front of him, Nooks droned, 'Well now, I'll tell you, Mr. Director, I acted it that way when I was with Otto Knippler's company, and Otto said it was real good; he said it was different. And while we're discussing it, Mr. Director, if you don't mind a suggestion from an old actor, I think when Romeo enters, in this scene, and sees me--you know he says, "I see that thou art poor"--he ought to pause and look me over more carefully. I know you're trying to get tempo and all that modern stuff, but when I was with Theodate Thuriber, in 1907, she said--'

'Mr. Nooks!' Satori's voice was rather high. 'This is the dress rehearsal! We'll dispense with all ancient history--all of it!'

'But Mr. Director--'

'You heard what I said!'

Bethel was hurt by the drop of Nooks's seamed old jaw and the glaze in his eyes.

But, an hour later, Nooks was trying to tell a testy Victor Swenson, Prince of Verona, how to return the curtsy of his awed subjects, and she perceived that not time nor tide nor fate's unkindest slam can dull the smiling smugness of the ham.

The last skirmish across the barricades, at a quarter to five on that icy November morning, was the schedule of curtain calls.

Mrs. Boyle suggested, brightly, 'Wouldn't this save a lot of time, Mr. Satori? Not bring the minor members of the cast on at all? I'm sure they'll all be very competent some day--if they ever learn to act. But just now, I don't really see why the Public should be interested in them. I think it would be an interesting and quite original way to have me take my calls, first with Romeo, then with Mercutio, then with the two Capulets, then with the Nurse, then with Tybalt, then with Friar Laurence, then with Paris, and just forget the others.'

Now Bethel knew why Satori was a good director. Debonair, blithe--at 4.47 a.m. and 37⁰ above--he trilled, 'I think it would be original and sensible. But what can you and I do against the selfishness and conceit of actors, Mrs. Boyle? I'm afraid we'll have to let them be seen.'

And at the end he said to Andy, to the peppery-eyed Bethel's admiration and dumbfounding, 'Let's go out and find a drink. It's been a first-rate dress rehearsal--very easy and satisfactory. Worked like a clock, didn't it?'