Bethel Merriday

XXVI

It seemed to Bethel that Romeo and Juliet was not merely a collection of amusing anachronisms, whereby 'modern' very sensibly meant 'commonplace', but also a vehemently human report of vehement human love. She had heard Andy and Satori argue as to what 'skains-mates' meant, and whether Quarto 4 with 'swashing' or Quarto 2 with 'washing' was correct, but she couldn't be much interested. She was too absorbed in seeing Juliet as a laughing, shattered girl of 1938--of 2038.

Let's see. She lived in a marble palace, with a prim garden edged with stone pines, and the murmur of gay, quarrelsome Verona was filtered through jasmine showering down before her window. Oh yes. Down the corridor, paved with marble in squares of soft old red and yellow, was an oriel window and beneath it an oak chest, carved with passion flowers and crescents interlaced, that her ancestor, the sailor-doge of Venice, had brought home from raids of Tartary (where was Tartary?). And here her father, testy old Lord Capulet, who could be so sweet to his little daughter when no one was here to watch him, would come with stories of boar hunting in the Apennines, come down the corridor, his scarlet-braided robe of silver damask swinging, and his old rapier hilt, crowned with polished agate--

Oh no! She was Juliet in modern dress!

No! It was not Verona and marble arches that she lived in, but--oh, let's see, let's see--maybe Hartford, Connecticut, and an old brick mansion out on Asylum Street. Her father was old Governor Capulet, rather like that grand old executive, Governor Wilbur Cross, who had become head of Connecticut after being dean of the Yale Graduate School. Only her father was not sweet-tempered like Dr. Cross.

Let's see. Yes, he'd have to be a Catholic--oh, maybe a very High Church Episcopalian--who had sent her to a strict church school, so that the only handsome young man she had ever known well was her cousin, Tybalt Capulet--he'd played polo in Yale and been chairman of the Prom. Her childhood intimates (since her mother was a social busybody, much concerned with the D.A.R. and the lecture committee of the Charter Oak Study Club) had been a comic small kitten, and her nurse--uh--uh--Mrs. O'Leary, widow of a bartender, a woman given to winking and to placid bawdiness, so that Juliet knew much more about the sound vulgarities than any of the Sisters in her school. And the Sisters had innocently let the girls read the Bible--apple-cheeked maidens beneath the apple trees, all in gingham aprons and black hair ribbons and disgusting cotton stockings, softly reading the Song of Solomon aloud, and giggling.

The best heroine of Juliet-Bethel was Ruth. Yes, she would gladly follow her lover and live with him amid the alien corn, if he was true to her and young and strong . . . and ambitious . . . and always true.

The girls in the school were often taken on long walks over the hills West of Hartford. On the hilltop, under the great sky, she had sat dreaming of a winged hero who

Her little window, high up in the whitewashed wall of Capulet Dormitory--her grandfather, the munitions maker, partner of old Jeremiah Deacon, had given it to the school--looked out on stars above and a valley filled with moving stars below, and once she had thought of an imaginary lover that, when he should die, the gods would

And she knew that even on her most finicking, fantastical days, the young Juliet loved to scrape the crystallized orange sugar from the inside of a marmalade jar, and lick the spoon.

She was studying the Juliet part all over again, for the second understudy rehearsal. But she would not let Iris cue her, nor did Iris ask to be cued.

She went over her part, marking her every error till the typed pages of the 'sides' looked like bird tracks. How Doc Keezer knew, she did not learn, but between acts on Friday evening he snorted, 'Studying Juliet hard? Want to come out and have a hamburger to-night? And I'll cue you.'

So he did, patiently, demandingly, not letting her off on one wrong 'a' or 'the'. They sat in a lunchroom, with hash and catsup and coffee and sides mixed up together on the wide arms of their chairs. Bethel, stooped and solemn, was staring down at a paper napkin, while Doc persisted, 'No. You hesitated on that. Do it again, dear,' and, to the mild horror of a refrigerator salesman in the row of chairs facing them, Bethel lifted her head, glared at him, blank-eyed, and yelled, 'Blister'd be thy tongue for such a wish! He was not born to shame'. The salesman grabbed his neat grey felt hat, picked up his check, dropped it, picked it up and fled.

Bethel did not see him. But she did hear, from behind them, in Iris's light jeering voice, 'Look, Zed. There's the happy young couple, billing and cuing.'

The ghost walked between the matinée and evening, on Saturday--Bethel's first ghost. Smiling like her father, patting her shoulder, Tertius Tully laid on the shelf of her dressing-table a fat little envelope with the first money she had ever earned in the theatre.

It was the first money she had ever earned anywhere, except for the suppositious pay for Saturday afternoons in her father's store, and a few awe-bringing quarters earned by digging dandelions for Mrs. Frank Ziffer, two doors down the block. She slit the envelope with a nail file and reverently took out the soiled bills and the silver.

It was a quaint sum--thirty-nine dollars and sixty cents--her weekly forty minus one per cent Government social security. She held it to her bosom. It was not money at all. It was a new car for her mother and father. It was a journey to Europe for herself, and the theatre in London and Paris and Moscow. It was Chekhov and Shaw and Molnar and Somerset Maugham . . . And it was a dressing-gown like Iris's.

Andy gave them another pep talk, just before that evening performance; it was a brief pep talk, but--well, it was a pep talk, and Tony Murphy snickered.

. . . The ladies and gentlemen of the company would be glad to know that they had put it over, this first week in Belluca. The reviews had been corking, and they had made money! Yes! Not very much money. Not what they were bound to make on one-night stands. But they had more than cleared expenses, and next week they would un-ques-tionably begin to pay back production expenses and be in the black--yessir, in the black--and pretty soon he would be able to think about raising everybody's salary. . . .

Everybody, thereupon, cheered. Including Hoy and Tony Murphy and Zed Wintergeist.

At two in the morning, after the Saturday night performance, they took Pullman for their three-night-stand in Treverton, Illinois (pop. 195,000; brewing and silos). There was no homeward-looking now, but gaiety and expectation and accustomed friendliness, as they pattered down the long cement platform, in the bowels of the Belluca station (celebrated murals of Lewis & Clark; portrait of James Whitcomb Riley in Italian mosaic) to their car.

Bethel felt important when the redcap, carrying her bags, asked, 'Do you belong to the Troupe?' and she came, in the lofty train shed, in a glare of arclights on steel and cement, to their own cars, with the sign:

Mrs. Lumley Boyle

ROMEO & JULIET IN MODERN DRESS

She was again aware of the importance of Zed's loose camel's-hair coat, of Doc Keezer's portable radio--from which he evoked the far-off incantations of a jazz orchestra in Cincinnati as soon as he had set it in his berth--of Mahala's snooty blue suitcases, and Mrs. Boyle's damned dog.

The family loyalty of Andy's rich cousin was not strong enough to bring him to the station at two a.m., but the faithful Carl Frazee saw them off--and Carl alone. To Bethel and Doc Keezer he mourned, 'Gee, I'm going to miss you people. The only fun I get is when a troupe like you come to town and let me tag along. Don't forget that even if the papers should pan you sometimes, you are sure-enough missionaries to lonely cranks like me. I love you both! And you will be married! Don't forget to send me a bid to your wedding, you two!' And Carl hesitated, sighed and bolted.

The train was off, to a chorus of 'My Heart Belongs to Daddy' in young voices, and one of 'Oh, shut up and go to bed' in older ones, but Bethel, still dressed, sat in her berth, hands clasping knees, rocking unhappily to the roll of the train. She would miss Carl Frazee. She would probably forget him, after a dozen other towns, a dozen other Carls, but she had never had such pure and kindly affection, nor been so encouraged to believe in her own career.

Could he be right? Was she anything but another girl to the busy Andy, to Zed, to the Douglas Fry who had stage diagrams for veins? She had so often been lonely; she could be lonely again in this travelling village; only Doc Keezer was always there--her Gibraltar.

The singing stopped, and through the train's bumbling she was conscious of Zed and Iris talking, not very discreetly, sitting on the edge of Iris's berth just across the aisle.

'You were leering at him.' (That was Zed.)

'I was not leering at him.'

'I didn't mind even that so much, Iris. Lyle Johnson reaches for a girl the way I do for a Camel. A girl like you, that's simply all one fever of vanity--'

'I am not!'

'--would leer at him. But what I minded was your fatuousness. So proud that you could win Lyle's attentions--which is just about as difficult as winning the influenza. I don't know's I'm much interested any longer, but I hate to see even you acting like a comic strip.'

'You can't talk to me like that!'

'I am talking to you like that, ain't I?'

And silence, and Bethel peeped between the weighty green curtains to see Iris alone, framed by the curtains, slowly weeping. Bethel loved her then, and was her sister, and hated Zed for his contempt of foolish, soft girls whom simpering men had begged, all these years, to be feminine and foolish and soft.

She bounced out from her berth like a small, earnest schoolma'am going after the local bully, and came on Zed, standing alone, stoop-shouldered and unhappy, in the vestibule of the fast train, with the thick canvas of the bellows pulsing, and the grey steel plates, arching over to make a passageway from car to car, lifting and dropping and clanking . . . a place of grime and steel and snow-streaked glass and ceaseless clamour . . . after midnight, pounding through the snow-smeared darkness of the unknown prairie.

He glared at her and said, 'Women!'

'Yes?'

'I've always thought the most naive thing you could do was to make generalizations about women, but it's true. Women are all alike.'

'Zed! I've been listening to you and Iris--'

'Just couldn't help overhearing it, eh!'

'Certainly I could. I didn't want to. And you were beastly to that poor, pretentious little guttersnipe.'

'You see? One girl praising another. "Guttersnipe".'

'You listen to me! She's vain, but she's gay and sweet. And you talked to her like Lyle Johnson. Like a bartender. A cheap, smirking bartender in a cheap hotel. Beating a butterfly, to show how strong you are!'

'Oh, pet, I know it! She's a wild rose. I could kick myself. I got sore at her because she was flirting with Lyle a little. And here I'd gone and built up a real understanding with her. Poor kid, she's got a tough nut of a brother that's in trouble, and she's desperate about raising some money to send him, and here she'd finally promised to let me lend her some--'

'How much?'

'Oh, fifty bucks or so.'

'Have you got it--if you pay any of your debts out of this week's salary?'

'No, not exactly, but I can prob'ly get it from Andy.'

'And you had to coax her to let you "help" her?'

'How do you mean?'

'So that when she does take it, and plenty more after it, you won't feel she's under any obligation to you--it'll be she who's done the favour? I couldn't've believed it. Honestly, I couldn't've believed it. You're so intelligent about scripts and acting, so right, and then about girls, you're just another green young man. Emotionally, you're aged thirteen.'

'Hey, what the--'

'Your Iris is a gold digger of the first water. You ought to know. She trapped you into buying her that mangy new fur.'

'How did you know about--Look! It wasn't mangy! It was a very nice fur . . . It ought to be! How did you know I bought it?'

'I watched her leading you up to it. You child!'

'Imagine our little Beth trying to be superior!'

'I am. Though I didn't know it till now.'

'Oh, I know all about it. You've been panning me to Iris. You told her I was crude. You said my acting technique was all ham. And you even said I didn't make up my nose right!'

'I never said anything of the kind. Don't you know that Iris is a congenital liar? Don't you? Don't you?'

'And you just defending her!'

'She never even talks honestly to herself. Don't you know it?'

'Yes, I suppose I do, if I think about her with my brain, instead of my heart. But why are you so keen about showing her up, all of a sudden?'

She stumbled in replying; she could not answer his 'Why?'

'I'm not keen about it. I've kept myself from telling you anything about her for days now, I just hate to see anybody in this company getting hurt--oh, by his own generosity,' she said.

'Well, I'm not going to be. I know Iris is a liar, all right--though I'm not such a small boy that I needed to have you tell me, pet! I'm going to cut her out. I'm going to cut out all the women in this company. You're all a bunch of spiritual grafters. You all want admiration. And you're the worst of the lot.'

'Oh, Zed, please don't.'

'Yes! You wouldn't take presents from me, but you feel you're the only true devoted actor in the whole bunch! You're the saviour of the stage! You're the only one that's always on time at rehearsals! You're the only one that's read clear through Gene O'Neill! You think you're as devoted as Francine Larrimore. But you're nothing but Andy Deacon's stooge!'

'I--'

'You're the Teacher's Pet in this company! The good little girl that scrubs her face and tattles to teacher!'

At this point she left him, with rapidity.

As she passed the open slanting door of Andy's drawing-room, he called out to her, 'Beth! Just who I was looking for! C'm in here!'

He was slouched on the green divan, tucked in among the impedimenta of the company--mostly, Mahala's blue bags. He was wearing a vile tan sweater and discouraged grey trousers and wrinkled Pullman slippers, like black gloves for his feet.

'What is it?' she worried.

'Here!' He absent-mindedly threw two of Mahala's bags out into the aisle. 'Sit down. I just want to look at you. I'm all in.'

'Oh, not after our grand week in Belluca!'

'It was swell, wasn't it! I knew we'd be a success. But there's been a lot of work--broadcasting and luncheon spiels, and you know, I don't act easily. I'm not a natural actor. I can't relax. I'm always afraid that I'll go up higher than a kite.'

'Honestly? I never knew that.' He had always seemed exasperatingly confident on the stage.

'Yep. I'm the eternal amateur, as your friend Zed would say.'

'Oh--him!'

'So sometimes, to try and relax, I like to just sit down and look at someone who's cool and sweet and good, like you.'

She hooted. 'And I've just this minute been engaged in pulling hair.'

'With who? I'll fire her--or him.'

'Oh no. It's all over. It's just one of those silly self-deceptions, I guess.'

'Kitten! You look tired, too. Skip to bed, then. Bless you!'

She was surprised. She had expected Zed to go childishly back to Iris, but he kept his word, which is a noteworthy phenomenon among young men who are professionally in love. He did, sharply, 'cut out all the women in this company'. He took dinner with none of them, nor supper after the show; and on the train he talked to none except Mrs. Boyle, whom he admired and hated. His chief childishness was in being noticeably merry with cigar-stand girls whenever members of the company were in an hotel lobby to watch him.

He was always seen lunching with Jeff Hoy and Tony Murphy, the three of them leaning over the table to mutter secretly, looking about with supercilious brightness, and then stooping over the table again to mutter humour and conspiracy.

Iris was aflutter at Zed's inattention. The good girl had accepted his statement that he wasn't much interested in her any longer in what she supposed to be the spirit in which it was meant--that is, as meaning nothing at all. She hovered over him, bleating, 'Ze-ed, aren't you going to take me out to supper to-night?' He answered, 'I am not!' so bleakly, so emotionlessly, that Iris quivered, and Bethel hated the young man for his cruelty . . . and was afraid of him.