Bethel Merriday

XXV

In the enterprising city of Belluca, the 'morning' papers appeared at ten-thirty the night before, the 'evening' papers at ten in the morning. The company had an informal invitation to be in Andy's suite in the Buckingham at ten on the morning after the opening, to see the reviews by Carl Frazee and Ted Gronitz in the Evening News and Daily Republican, and Tertius Tully had promised to wangle an advance proof from the Morning Herald, which would be of supreme importance (Tertius explained) because it would be by Professor Stanley Thrush, of the English Department of the University of Belluca.

Though of course (explained Tertius, to whom any company that he was managing, whether it was Sally Rand or the Lunts, was more important than the conquest of Europe and almost as important as the circuses that were his real boyhood love), each of the others was also of international importance, because Carl Frazee was a young genius, and Ted Gronitz, with his radio audience, remarkably like the President.

As she dressed, sleepily and by no means with a Sladesbury neatness, Bethel cried to the dozing Iris, 'Come on; we're due in Andy's apartment, to hear the death sentence.'

'E-uu-uu-uu-uu! I'm so sleepy. You skip along. I'm going to Zed's room, to read the reviews with him and Jeff Hoy and Tony Murphy,' yawned Iris.

In her voice there was to Bethel the sound of conspiracy.

Since when had Iris become so intimate with Geoffrey Hoy--Benvolio--that glass-haired, courteous, competent incognito-minded actor? With Antonio Murphy, that surly comedian?

Bethel felt troubled and incompetent as she trailed up to Andy's rooms, and to a litter of dressing-gowns, coffee, Mrs. Boyle, brocade mules, shaving lather, marmalade, proofs of advertisements, Wyndham Nooks talking about himself, Charlotte Levison insisting on lending the latest copy of the New Masses to Hugh Challis, sweaters and orange juice. Andy was, rather astonishingly, already dressed, fresh-looking in grey flannel; he beamed at her like one who rode the world, and began reading from the papers that a bellboy was bringing in as she arrived.

Mr Carl Frazee in the Belluca Evening News:

Will Shakespeare, who is, I understand, a country boy from Stratford, is the most promising young playwright in the theatre to-day. More plays by him are being seen on Broadway and out here, where the tall corn grows, than by Clifford Odets or Sidney Kingsley. And to the most important of Will's recent successes, to the Gielgud and Evans Hamlets, Orson Welles's Julius Caesar, and the little Globe Theatre at the Chicago World's Fair, and if you missed that you missed something good, must now be distinctly added the highly meritorious Andrew Deacon version of Romeo and Juliet in modern clothes, starring Mrs. Lumley Boyle, which honoured Belluca and honoured the renascent theatre in America, last evening, by holding its world premiere here, at our historic American Theatre, which in past days has seen so much of beauty and eloquence.

Belluca may well be proud of this recognition of its position as a first-class theatre town, and we welcome Mr. Deacon and Mrs. Boyle not only because of the favour to our home town but because they are putting out beyond any question an absolutely first-class show and stirring entertainment.

. . . magic of Mrs. Boyle who must certainly be only sixteen no matter what the reference books say . . . Deacon a charming and romantic Romeo bringing the sad old tale to an exciting rebirth and showing himself a fine actor . . . comedy well stressed in the characters of Peter and the Nurse by . . . first moment of shock you were glad to have them in recognizable latter-day clothes instead of the conventional tights, and as for the excellent scenery it is enough to say . . . in two girls Bethel Merriday and Iris Pentire, found real treasures from whom much will be heard in the future. Miss Merriday gave the prologue and epilogue in such a fresh, winning young voice. . . .

'That young man writes with a hoe,' said Mrs. Boyle.

'Ye'es, but he does like us,' said Andy.

'Means money in the box office,' said Tertius Tully, who had come in with the advance proof from the Herald.

Mr. Ted Gronitz, in the Daily Republican:

RIALTO RIPPLES

Rating:

No stars.

Mr. Shakespeare may not have turned over in his cement coffin yestdy eveng, but he certainly didn't feel so hot.

We're supposed to be all hot & bothered by gt honour bestowed on our poor hick bible-belt bivouac by having sure-nuff Bwy show open here, but your column reports we better still count on our watch-export & baseball record for Belluca's rep.

The bard's Romeo & Juliet was pulled off in soup & fish last night, at the American Theatre. Results: no hits, no runs, plenty errors.

Hokum in ice-cream pants looks just like hokum in the pink union suits that's the ham's idea of what they used to wear back in Queen Liz's England.

Mrs. Boyle, from dear ole Lunnon--quit now, I didn't say anything about her having known Queen Liz personally--is a pretty good Model T Juliet. Deacon, though this column will report that personally and at the bar he is a good guy, reads Romeo like he did back in freshman year in Yale.

The other boys and girls will be happier when they get back to the shoestore and the tea shoppe.

Except for a new Thesp named Zed Wintergeist, who is a wiz, and plays Mercutio like Hellzapoppin instead of like a Vassar daisy chain.

'Aurelia, with what sort of implement did you say the other young gentleman wrote?' said Hugh Challis to Mrs. Boyle.

'Shut up,' said Mrs. Boyle.

'That hurt--that hurt plenty,' said Andy.

Charlotte looked as though she were crying inside her eyes. Bethel was unable to be so restrained. Mahala and Lyle Johnson simultaneously said, 'The son--of--a--'

'But here! This one is swell,' said Tertius Tully, as he handed the proof sheet to Andy.

Professor Stanley Thrush (B.A., St. Stephen's College, Ph.D., University of Michigan), in the Morning Herald:

With an apprehension due less, perhaps, to conservatism in belles-lettres than to past observations of a too frequent confusion of artistic innovation with technical slovenliness, the more literate acolytes of the drama edged into the American Theatre, last evening, stoutly prepared for catastrophe in the spectacle of a presentation--announced as the first ever beheld--of Romeo and Juliet in contemporary costume. Their delight was, perhaps, the keener when they encountered a sound and beautiful production of the great romance . . . Mr. Deacon played Romeo not only as a gifted mime but as a gentleman . . . Boyle a lovely Juliet in the tradition of Julia Marlowe . . . studied naivety of Miss Merriday, our Prologue, with her eagerness and charm, gave a promise of an evening of youth and sentiment which was generously fulfilled. The only player to be gently castigated is a Mr. Zed Wintergeist, who doubtless means well but who depends less on subtlety than on brawling and blather and who made it grossly evident that he felt superior to the manly, graceful and sincere bearing of Mr. Andrew Deacon. In a word, we shall certainly go to this show again this week while we have the chance.

Andy kissed Mrs. Boyle, Mahala and Bethel.

Lyle Johnson kissed Charlotte and Vera Cross.

Doc Keezer kissed Bethel.

Bethel said, 'Shan't I phone down and order some waffles?' and everybody, amazed, cried, 'Oh yes, that would be a wonderful idea.'

Andy said, 'I hope Zed never sees Thrush's slam,' and Bethel loved him for his generosity. But he exploded then: 'No, I hope he does see it--plenty. It'll be good for that young man!' And so Bethel loved him for his attacks of humanness.

The house was nearly sold out every night that week, at both matinées there were 'standees', and the company felt virtuous and powerful. They stayed for half an hour after the play on Wednesday evening, sitting on prop trunks and segments of stairways and on the floor, while Adrian Satori, who for two days had been giving to all of them little copperplate last notes of criticism, said good-bye:

'Ladies and gentlemen, I feel that my job as director is done; I feel pretty well satisfied; I'm off for New York tonight; and I turn you over to Andy--and to yourselves. You're most of you pretty good--though there isn't one of you who can't improve if he, and especially she, will just sit down and try to think what the characters that you are playing are feeling and thinking. That's all, boys and girls. You go forth into the great world, standing with reluctant feet where the brook and river meet, and God keep you from the critics and the room clerks and the autograph fiends!'

Andy took over with a hearty and optimistic address to the company.

It was, felt Bethel, a real Yale pep talk. It smelled of the football-squad quarters, of sweat and childishness. He was so very sweet about it, and so affectionate, and she was embarrassed to the point of itching.

'Fellow troupers, I've really got nothing to say,' he explained, and went ahead and said it for ten minutes . . . while Bethel irritably watched Zed leer sidewise at Tony Murphy. 'Our prospects for a smash-hit tour are better than good. My advices from the next towns on our route, Treverton and Paddock and Milwaukee and Madison, look swell, especially in party bookings. Now all I want to say is that I'm here to help any of you any way I can, twenty-four hours a day.

'I know you're all of you right on your toes, rarin' to go, and while I won't say anything about what I think of the artistic merits of our production--I guess you can guess how I feel about that--I do want to say that I'm proud there's one company where the manager isn't going off to Europe but is going to stay right with the job and with you, and where we're all working together, cards on the table, and there isn't one single feud or clique. . . .'

And all the while Zed was maliciously smiling.

On Thursday morning, with Nathan Eldred, the stage manager, directing, there was held in the lobby the first understudy rehearsal. Bethel for the first time was Juliet; Iris was alternately the Nurse and Lady Montague; Vera Cross was Lady Capulet; Eldred himself was the older men, and Tom Wherry demonstrated that he was equally unsure of his lines as Romeo, Mercutio, Tybalt, Benvolio and Balthasar. It was, indeed, a fairly complete mess, and Bethel thudded abruptly from pride in herself as Prologue to terror about herself as Juliet.

She had been placidly sure that she knew every word, and perhaps she did, but when Wherry-Romeo threw a line at her (after agitatedly finding the right place in his typed part, and coughing, and scraping his right foot, and beginning with 'Uh-hh-hh'), she didn't know a word in answer.

There was nothing in her skull but a dun-coloured chaos. She discovered that learning lines and keeping them learned have no especial relationship. A long speech, like 'Thou know'st the mask of night is on my face'--oh, she started it ever so brightly, but the rest of the passage was blank. 'Else--else--' Oh, what did come after that? She sat hunched and agonized till Eldred, a little bored, gave her the line, grunting, 'Else would a maiden'. She rushed triumphantly on with 'blush bepaint my cheek'--and all she knew of the rest was a large dazzling nothing.

But when they had gone through the first act, it had all come back to her.

'You kids know this stuff all right, if you'd just let yourself. You're scared of being scared. Now relax,' mumbled Eldred.

They, the juveniles, the future hopes of the stage, had come into the lobby for the rehearsal high-stepping and babbling, ready to show up poor old Mrs. Boyle and Challis and Hoy. Now they hunched over on silly little gilt chairs and suffered.

It was all fine.

'Good first understudy rehearsal. Some of you know some of the lines. Call for next Thursday, same hour--that'll be in Paddock, Illinois.'

On Tuesday evening, as Bethel and she walked to the theatre, Iris stopped at a jeweller's window and pointed to an elaborate mechanism to be carried by ladies for the repair of an evening's ravages. It was in enamel, orange with streaks of black, and it combined a vanity case, a cigarette case, a lighter and a miniature clock, of which latter two it was improbable that they would work.

'Isn't that cute?' moaned Iris. 'Gee, I wish I had it.'

'You've already got all that junk--three compacts and two cigarette cases,' said the prosaic, provincial Bethel.

'But this is the newest thing there is.'

'Hm. Like Charlotte's newest thing in the Communist party line. I'm just getting surrounded by novelties.'

'I don't know what you mean. But this combination compact--' Iris chilled her elegant little nose against the shop window. 'Lookit! They call it the "Demoiselle's D-e-l-i-t-e"--"delight", I guess that must be. Oh, that's a cunning name, isn't it! So amusing. I bet it comes right straight from Paris. Think of finding it out here in the sticks!' marvelled the daughter of Wheeling. 'Oh, travel and learn, I always say. I just got to have this. It's so sweet and original. I noticed it yesterday afternoon, and I dreamed about it last night. When we were dancing last night, after the opening, oh, we had a swell time, I told Zed Wintergeist about it--'

Bethel winced.

'--but he didn't seem interested. I don't know what I'm going to do. And it only costs twenty-five dollars.'

'Well, buy it then, if you want it so much.'

'Me? I haven't a cent. And I've got to pay up some of my debts back in New York--people do get so mean about things like that. Oh dear. Well, come on! Do you want us to be late?'

Wednesday, walking to the matinée, Bethel saw Iris and Zed stop at that jewellery window, and as she passed them, heard Iris say indignantly to Zed, 'You know I've told you, I don't allow any gentlemen to give me presents, not even innocent ones like this--isn't it just too darling!'

After the matinée, Bethel saw Andy, after certain whisperings, hand over to Zed two bank notes.

That evening, when Iris and Bethel were dressing to go out to dinner--cross and touchy after the between-performances nap--a bellboy delivered a package for Iris. Anything wrapped in tissue paper excited Iris. Squealing, she scrabbled with the wrappings and took out the black-and-orange compact.

She hugged it to her breast, crooning, as though it were a baby. She took out the card, read its inscription, blushed, and looked at Bethel with sly triumph that changed--an excellent performance before an audience of only one--into indignant innocence.

And Bethel did not dare to speak.

Iris and Zed left the theatre together that evening, following Satori's farewell, and Iris did not come home till after three. Bethel awoke to cock an eye at her and, as Iris was obviously waiting for a scene, she had a small solid pleasure in not giving it to her. At breakfast, which Iris had tempted her into the wasteful luxury of having in their room, Bethel was inspired to attack.

'Iris!'

'Eh?'

'Why did you coax Zed into giving you that compact?'

'Who said he gave it to me?'

'Why did you coax him--tease him--gold-dig him, if you like it that way!'

'Why, I never heard of such an outrageous accusation in all my life! Me coax him? Me tease him? Me gold-dig anybody? Let me tell you, Beth Merriday, I've had rich men, oh, very rich, beg for the chance to give me--uh--jewels and French perfume and hatboxes and everything, and I always said, certainly not, no one can buy my favours, and they said, why no, of course not, they just wanted to show their appreciation of me, but even so, no, I told them, a beautiful girl in my position where you haven't got a father or a brother or anybody to defend you, you've just got to be beyond criticism, I told them, and my reputation was just as dear to me as it was to Helen Hayes or a banker or anybody--'

'Why did you make Zed buy that junk for you? You didn't need it!'

Iris was suddenly snarling. 'And why shouldn't he? He's the damnedest tightwad in the company! Oh, he wants everything he can get, all right, and when it's convenient to him, but you have to throw a fit to even get him to buy you a champagne cocktail!'

'Iris! Stop it! He hasn't much more money than we have. He isn't much older than we are. He's a baby. He seems grown up because he knows so much and is so conceited, but he's a mere baby. You might save your wiles--'

'My what?'

'Your wiles.'

'What do you mean, wiles?'

'I'll admit it's a bad word. It's rafained. Like you! Call it your gutter tricks, then.'

'I never in my life--'

'It's none of my business. I hardly know whether I hate Zed or love him. He's the measles. But he's good active measles, anyway. He really loves the theatre. He'll do something with it. And it makes me sick to see you hanging on to him--'

'I am not, and you know it!'

'--and to think that because I room with you, maybe Zed'll think--and Andy'll think and Hugh Challis--'

'Why don't you bring in your doddering boy friend Doc Keezer, too, while you're about it!'

'I do! I certainly do! Doc is the squarest, kindest man in the whole company, except maybe Andy! And I don't want him, or any of 'em, to think that I'm a sponge like you, just because I have to be with you a lot.'

'You don't have to, you know.'

'Yes, that was the idea I was working around to myself!'

She walked alone, that Thursday morning, to the understudy rehearsal which has already been recorded, and it was no comfort to her that Iris, trained in stock, should know her understudy lines. That afternoon she moved to a single room at the Buckingham. It was exhilarating to have her own clear, uncluttered place in which she could breathe, and after she had duly puzzled over whether she had been priggish with Iris, and brawled like a market woman, she asserted, 'I don't care', and felt lonely and happy.

She wanted to tell Zed of Iris's depths of calculated depravity--and expensiveness--but she was no informer, and she felt that that brash young man deserved what he got . . . and she suspected that he wouldn't listen to her. She said nothing about Iris when Zed and she were sent out to the Belluca University Theatre, on Friday afternoon.

Andy Deacon, backed by his weighty local cousin, was doing in Belluca all the brisk, desperate, publicity-cadging tricks which, in the Age of Rotogravure, were supposed to lure disciples to the sweets of the drama. Andy gave interviews, was photographed holding a pipe, holding a copy of Shakespeare, holding Mrs. Boyle; he talked daily on the radio--trying craftily to insinuate into a discourse on the Globe Theatre the fact that we may be seen right here in town to-night at the American Theatre, top two-eighty.

He was manly and athletic at luncheons of the Rotary Club and the Belluca Athletic Club; he was manly and boyish and romantic at the Women's Drama League tea and, with Bethel, Mahala and Charlotte supporting him, did not blench till the very end of a receiving line of one hundred and seventy-six women with whom he shook hands as they maternally murmured to him, 'I'm so glad you're Doing Shakespeare. My husband and I do hope we'll have time to run in and see you this week, though of course we're awfully busy and there's a bridge tournament on'.

Hugh Challis entertained the Drama League, the Tomawattis Club Monthly Literary Luncheon and the English-Speaking Union with anecdotes of Henry Irving, Disraeli's favourite horse and the Duke of Windsor. Lyle Johnson rushed over to the City Auditorium during a scene in which he did not appear and presented a silver cup to the winner of the Boy Scout Hurdle Contest--a stunt which Andy had approved, though Tertius Tully, the procurer of the other personal appearances, had fretted that the Boy Scouts and their doggone hurdling were nothing but Competition for the Show.

Henry Purvis resumed his Ph.D. and addressed the Geographic Club of St. Aloysius College on 'The History and Significance of the Oberammergau Passion Play', Jeff Hoy and Tony Murphy sang duets at a smoker of the Bathtub Executives' Club, Tudor Blackwall dedicated the new Swiss Knitwork Department in Burpling & Blum's Department Store, and Wyndham Nooks, entirely without Tertius Tully's sanction, was found to have given (gratis) a programme of 'Great Moments from Shakespeare' at a six-o'clock Get Together Supper of the Wisconsin Association--it was reported that, with a beard handy in his pocket, he turned himself from a Prince in the Tower to King Lear in ten seconds.

But Mrs. Boyle refused to go out soliciting at all. Between shows she slept, and wrote letters home to England, and encouraged Hilda Donnersberg, her maid, to tell her how bad Andy and Mahala and Charlotte and Mabel Staghorn were.

As part of this campaign, Tertius Tully sent the reluctant Zed and Bethel to represent Shakespeare at tea at the Belluca University Theatre, at five on Friday.

As they rode out on the East Philadelphia Avenue & University Heights bus, they were annoyed.

'It makes me tired, having to go out and be arty with a bunch of college actors that don't know a ground cloth from a grommet. I wanted to go to the St. Louis Symphony concert this afternoon and see the Chinese stuff in the Art Museum,' complained Zed, a tireless explorer of new towns. 'It'll be awful. They'll all ask us--they don't get a chance at real professional actors very often, and they'll ask us how they can get on the stage on Broadway, and Do we do our own make-up, and Don't we meet such interesting people in our dressing-rooms! The theatre will be a hall over the horse-doctoring laboratory, and we'll be expected to admire an eighteen-foot stage with a hand roll drop. To ask actors to do a thing like this! Artistic slumming! Andy Deacon is a travelling salesman for the drama.'

'He is not--but it will be dreadful,' said Bethel. 'I remember my own college plays. But maybe we'll meet some wide-awake young professors. I hear these Middle Western colleges are so progressive.'

'You think so, do you! You read our review in the Herald, didn't you, by Professor Stanley Thrush, of the university, the old songbird? There ought to be a law.'

'How old are you really, Zed?'

'Twenty-three. What's that got to do with it?'

'Baby!'

'I was more perceptive at six than old Thrush and the whole gang of Belluca profs are at sixty-six, which is probably their average age. Well, here we are at the business college. We'll probably be greeted by twenty-one rah-rah-rahs and the chief artistic nucleus of the university--the glee club, singing "Down on the Bingo Farm". And Thrush will be swanking around, looking benevolently amused. I hope I won't be rude to him--I don't really like to be so rude to stuffed shirts--not too rude.'

She had never made a quantitative analysis of the relationship of ivy to education, but from observation of Point Royal and Yale, she had concluded that it was direct. The Point Royal buildings were, perhaps, pretty ugly: of bumpy brown sandstone, and given to arched windows with clotted glass, but they dripped with ivy, and so that must be necessary. The Belluca University buildings, ivyless and of a correct and uninspired No. 32A Tudor, seemed to her like factories, and the trees were anaemic, the turf was scraggly.

Before they had time to ask for the way to the theatre, they came to a pillared, white-limestone structure with the inscription 'McCoggins Memorial Theatre' on the pediment. (A Mr. McCoggins, third-generation manufacturer of machinery, who had loved Maude Adams and William Gillette more than cream separators, had left to the new university a million dollars.)

'Have they got a whole building to themselves?' said Zed, uneasily.

In the formal, black-and-white marble lobby they asked for Professor Mattocks, the Director of Productions. They were shown into a too luxurious office, with tapestry chairs and a table of magazines with diagrams and coloured photographs.

'Professor Mattocks. Sounds like a funeral. Worse than Stanley Thrush,' grumbled Zed, turning his sodden brown felt hat.

In on them charged a man not over thirty, a man of Zed's own rough, driving, intellectual type, with the same pretentious simplicity, as exhibited in flannel shirt and wrinkled trousers, paint-spattered. He was a flaming sun of welcome. 'Miss Merriday? Mr. Wintergeist? We were terribly pleased when Mr. Tully said you might come. Tickled to death! I'm Bill Mattocks.'

'Fine!' Zed swiftly looked him over, then grinned and demanded, confidentially, as one alley pup to another, 'When do we meet Prof Thrush?'

'Cheer up. You don't. They keep him on ice, over in the English Department. His only connection with our theatre is to lecture to all the women's clubs in the state about how crude and subversive we are. We're all apologetic as hell to you for his review of Romeo. We thought you were a brilliant Mercutio, something fabulous, and we liked your prologue, Miss Merriday--we'll be waiting for you when you get a real part. Don't for God's sake blame Thrush on me! I've played and directed summer and winter stock, and I toured with Miss Cornell in Romeo and Miss Hayes in Victoria. We're theatre workers, not academic phonographs.'

They had coffee and cakes with a dozen university actors and directors and scene designers, in the green room, which was actually green, beneath the stage. Three of them were teachers, the rest students, but they could not easily be told apart.

The whole group seemed to Bethel to have one sharp, common characteristic: they were all akin to Zed and to Bill Mattocks (who were already first-naming each other as though they had been intimates for years) in being revolutionary and youthful.

Some of them, she thought, worked at their revolution a little too hard and a little too obviously. They felt it a duty to have their trousers and their khaki shirts very wrinkled and very spotty, their ties either greasy or orange-coloured, and one even displayed a horrid little canvas hat with autographs of his fellow souls penned on it. In hatred of the staleness of their homes, some of these children would jump into the hysterical, pseudo-artistic half-world. But that had always been the chromo-coloured fault of every Quartier Latin, and these experimentalists, she felt, unlike some of the quack doctors of dramaturgy whom she had met in left-wing theatrical circles in New York, had enough gaiety and salutary cynicism to inoculate them against cults.

And then they got beyond her entirely.

The proud professional Bethel, who had heard Sol Gadto talk about Stanislavski, and Adrian Satori tell how Lunt and Fontanne rehearsed, was stunned now by a babble about Meyerhold's productions in Moscow, and Nimerovitch-Danchenko's, about Louis Jouvet's pioneering in Paris, about the Gaston Baty version of Crime and Punishment at the Théâtre Montparnasse, about Piscator in the dead great days in Berlin.

It was an almost respectful young Mr. Wintergeist who, with Bethel, followed Mattocks on a tour of the theatre: huge stage, auditorium and lounge with murals by Grant Wood and Tom Benton, dressing-rooms with full-length mirrors surrounded with electric globes in every colour that stage lights could give; workshop with a paint frame, so that the scenic artist could stand up, instead of, like Bethel at Grampion, sitting on the floor, sitting on the canvas flat, or lying on it, while trying to do feather strokes with a ponderous paintbrush.

They sat, Zed and Bethel, on a bench on the campus.

Zed spoke with a curious meekness: 'Beth, do you realize that that university theatre is probably better equipped than any on Broadway? That it has a thirty-eight-foot revolving stage, and a plaster horizont that's actually portable, and a Pre-Selective Remote Control Board, the very latest Von Kleybourg model? You saw that?'

'Oh yes,' said Bethel, who hadn't.

'I tell you, those boys give me a new faith in the theatre. I do believe in Broadway. I don't believe the endowed stage is as real as one that has to fight for its life. But let me tell you that if Broadway closed up entirely, if the Fabulous Invalid finally kicks the bucket, there'll be a new theatre coming out of these universities. That's exciting. Universities actually creating something, and not just teaching boys to write advertising and sell bonds and hold patients' hands. But why not? That's what Oxford and Cambridge did, when the monks kept civilization alive. Oh, I've never been so hopeful of the living theatre, never been so proud of my profession and so glad I picked it out and stuck to it. Now I'm dead sure that not even Hollywood and the radio and an education formed by the comic strips can kill the drama--which is as old as religion. But--'

He took her hand, he held it tight, almost as though he were seeking protection, and he spoke humbly:

'But I certainly got mine. Beth. Pet. Do you mind kicking me, to-night, after the show, when we'll have plenty of time for it? I went in there feeling so superior. I thought those collitch boys would just be another bunch of rah-rah Andys or, at best, learned sots like Harry Purvis. But these kids really study. Isn't that something--to find learning in an institution of learning! Maybe America really is growing up . . . But it was hard on me! I've read a lot about Piscator, but I didn't know much about Baty and Jouvet. Not a thing. Was my face red!'

'I didn't know anything about 'em, either.'

'Yes, but you've never gone around being a bright new genius of the theatre, like Comrade Wintergeist, pet! Forgive me. No. There's no use. I'll be just as bumptious to-morrow.'

'You're never bumptious . . . really. You're just eager.'

'Am I? Well, maybe. Anyway, you were the perfect companion to see that stuff with to-day. Now you take Iris--'

Bethel flinched. She did not want to take Iris, particularly not just now.

'Don't jump so, darling,' he said. 'I know you think Iris is dumb. She isn't really. She doesn't know anything, not with her brains. But she has magic.'

'Has she?'

'Yes. She'd be ridiculous, with a bunch like that over there. She'd probably tell Bill Mattocks that she went to swimming classes with Jouvet, and taught Piscator how to play polo, and showed Mordecai Gorelik how to paint light.'

'And that Meyerhold insisted on giving her that new vanity case, because he admired her mastery of Russian!'

'Wait! Whoa! Let's look at you!' Zed dropped her hand, seized her shoulders, swung her halfway around, so that he could pierce her look. 'Iris was telling me you went and got pure on her, and even moved out on her, because I insisted on giving her a little token of affection.'

'Insisted?'

'Well--practically. Look here, pet. When I first met you, I told you I could get interested in you.'

She was adequately angry. 'Not really? Not the great Maestro Wintergeist? In a poor apprentice?'

'Yes, and maybe he is the great Maestro, too! I'll admit those university sharks know more than I do about the new European technique. And a fifty-foot plaster horizont is something handy to carry in your pocket. But I can act on a check-room counter, and play my own mouth-organ for incidental music.'

'You certainly can play your own--'

'That's not worthy of you! Listen, Beth. I know I'm conceited. I used to be ashamed of it. But I guess I always will be. Won't you try and stand it? It's too bad you let me get sidetracked on to Iris. Because I'll admit, to you, that that young ten-cent-store siren has got me. Magic, that's what she had--black magic. But yours is white. Come on, pet. There's our bus.'