Bethel Merriday

XXVII

Three nights each in Treverton, Paddock, and Milwaukee; one-night stands in Madison and La Crosse and--crossing the Mississippi, to the excitement of Bethel--in Dubuque.

Six fluttering arrivals, with reporters on the station platform and photographers' flashlights blasting the gloom. Six dashes to get taxis away from her beloved companions in the company. Six anxious inquiries of marble-fronted-hotel clerks about rates; and twice when she angrily made it plain that she couldn't afford it, and quit the caravanserai where Andy and Mahala and Mrs. Boyle were to loll in kitchenette-bedizened splendour and hunted up a smaller hotel that looked like a private house with obesity.

Six broadcasts--in four of which Bethel had a part--and six attempts on the radio to work in, among lively observations on the art of acting and the joy of being in the Middle West, the facts that they would be visible at the Blank Theatre that evening--hurry, hurry, hurry--and that they were a Real Troupe Just From Broadway, Appearing in Person, and not a movie. Six interviews in which Andy and Mrs. Boyle and Hugh Challis, with Mahala and Bethel and Iris and Charlotte sitting in an uncomfortable grinning row on a hotel settee for extra decoration, caroled that Shakespeare was a very fine article for the Middle West and the Middle West was fine for Shakespeare.

Six new banging Coffee Shops in hotel basements, with six new and ever fancier names for beef stew, and six and sixty overworked waitresses who merely looked cross-eyed and fled, if a Professional wailed, 'Look, honey, could you hustle my order? I got to get to the theatre.'

Six new after-theatre restaurants with dancing: The Jeunesse Dorée, with Billy Bagshot's Sunny South Saxophonists; the Hot Spot, with Tommy Trexler's Cowpuncher Chorus; the Covered Wagon, with Teddy Taormina's Yankee Yodlers; the Shanghai Divan, Chinese & American Specialities, with Sven Svenson and His Demon Accordion; the Petit Prunier, with Abe Garfinkle's Dress Suit Boys; and Gus's Lunch, with a radio.

And in every one of these Iris went dancing, with Lyle Johnson or Jeff Hoy or Douglas Fry, while Bethel solemnly sat at a table way back, with Doc Keezer and Tertius Tully, and ate hash while they went pretty thoroughly into the topic of comparative box-office receipts during the past sixteen years.

Six new walks to the theatre, each of them passing a jewellery shop and a beauty shop, into whose windows Iris looked passionately, and a brand-new Bank Building, full of architecture, up at which Douglas looked critically. Six theatres, ranging from an ancient structure rather like a Saratoga trunk to the Treverton auditorium.

This was so very new and mammoth and civically conscious an institution that it could hold six thousand people, and a record audience of twelve hundred people felt lost and forlorn in its leatherette wastes. The actors could be heard, like the horns of elfinland considerably out of tune, only through a Public Address System, and the more intimate love passages between Romeo and Juliet were played as from the balcony of the Grand Central Terminal just after the arrival of the Twentieth Century. On that vast stage, with an apron thirty feet deep, their sets looked like toy houses of cardboard.

And six new dressing-rooms in six different towns, and the speculation as to whether Bethel's next one would be a private suite, or a stall, without running water or ventilation but with a richness of steam pipes, which she would share with all the other women except Mrs. Boyle . . . Not that she speculated much, though. She was fairly sure which it would be.

And six first nights of terror in her stomach. But no matter what changed, and what remained, once she saw the familiar sets, she was at home--they were her home.

For a while she could remember the shifting cities by the dressing-rooms, by the hotel-rooms--whether they looked out on an alley or on a Motor Oil Building that was a reproduction of the Palazzo Vecchio--by the criticisms, which, in the very same town, might be either 'diverting, ingenious and brilliantly acted' or 'this presumptuous but slipshod effort to improve Henry Irving and E. H. Sothern', and by Andy's assurances that though maybe to-night's receipts weren't quite all he'd been led to expect, they would build by the end of the week, and anyway, they couldn't fail to make a ten-strike in this next town--'why, say, Kiss the Boys Goodbye just played it, and took ten thousand bucks out of town, so if we can't do twelve, I'll shoot myself'.

But presently she could remember the cities only by the banana royal that had made her sick, or by being charged twenty cents for coffee, or by the red rubber overshoes she had bought.

So went the second and third weeks of their gipsying, and Bethel became a trouper.

And to her the sensation of those weeks was the genteel murder of Wyndham Nooks.

In Belluca, with some awe of Adrian Satori still hanging about, Mr. Nooks had merely overplayed--'hoked' is the technical word--the role of the Apothecary, which is a pretty easy role for anyone to hoke, if he has been born an earnest, congenital ham.

But in Treverton, the next town, Nooks began to brighten up the normally disregarded role of First Watchman, in the final act. When he bounced on stage, in a New York policeman's uniform not too well fitting at the neck, his speech was, 'Lead boy; which way?' But for Nooks, Shakespeare unadorned was not enough. He had to have a lot of Nooks in his Shakespeare. He stopped after the word 'boy'; he peered about, long pale hand on the visor of his cap; his knees and elbows quivered; and he yelled out 'which way?' as one would yell a fire alarm.

As this all happened just before the death of Juliet, Mrs. Boyle was not pleased.

Andy spoke to Nooks about it every night after the show, in Treverton. But in the city of Paddock it was the resident manager of the theatre who spoke about it--and to Andy.

This manager was named Sam Lee Regis, and he was quite a pleasant old thug and loafer. The Paddock theatre was, in legal theory, owned by the estate of a defunct tin-can manufacturer, whose only chick, a spinster, lived in Vicenza and wasn't very bright about investments, or anything else except Italian primitives.

Mr. Regis's salary continued just the same, whether that handsome old black-walnut-and-crimson-velvet theatre, the Sherman Square, provided a new play every week or was dark the whole year through. The local Carl Frazee jabbered to Andy that Mr. Regis preferred the latter--it gave him less to do. He particularly disliked any unusual attraction, like Romeo in grey bags, that required attentive publicity, but his favourite phrase about almost every star was, 'He don't mean a dime in the box office'.

Thus, this season, Sir Cedric Hardwicke in Shadow and Substance, Cornelia Otis Skinner in Candida, Frank Craven in Our Town, they none of them to Sam Lee Regis meant 'a dime in the box office'. That gave the serene old gentleman--who had a large moustache, and yet chewed gum during the moments when he was not slumbering in his old leather chair in the theatre office--an excuse for spending almost nothing on advertising, a topic which Andy was discussing with him, warmly.

This expense the company and the theatre were supposed to share equally, but as Mr. Regis looked at it, it wasn't an expense at all, but just a bad idea.

Mr. Regis droned, 'Boyle don't mean a cent in the box office, and that old ham you got playing the Watchman and Apothecary, say, when he wriggled his nose--it's made of rubber, ain't it?--I had the first good laugh I've had since George Cohan was in town. Now there's a show that is something--singin' and dancin'. Why don't you get a show like that, Mr. Deacon? Shakespeare!'

The less Andy thought of Sam Lee Regis, the more he was irritated that Nooks should give Mr. Regis such an opening. But nothing happened in Paddock; nothing till Dubuque.

There Bethel was called to Andy's dressing-room before the evening performance.

Andy looked massive in his loose green silk dressing-gown (slightly spotty with brown face powder and cold cream), but he sounded feeble.

'Kitten, I need some advice bad. I've never been so scared. I've got to fire old Nooks--'

'Oh, you can't!'

'I'll have to, Beth.'

'But it'll kill him! He's so proud of his technique. He told me you were thinking of him for Capulet, if Challis ever quit. And he's showed me twice now the line in the Milwaukee Sentinel that said he was "a stalwart actor of the old school". And he's been sending money home--his wife has been paying the rent for the first time in a year, he told me, and he wants to start a rep theatre . . . and he bought me an ice-cream soda!'

'Don't I know it, kitten! It's murder. He's probably five years older than he claims to be. Maybe he'll never get another job. But if I don't do it, he'll murder the whole company, and our tour, and throw twenty-eight people out of work. Because he's getting worse, and he just won't change. But I don't know how to tell the poor gaffer. I wouldn't mind facing Lyle and Tony, but this--Nooks is like an old man crazy in love with a young girl.'

Then she knew.

Andy was inconceivably hoping that she would do his slaughtering for him. Between contempt for his weakness and pride in his sensitiveness and happiness in his turning to her not as the star to a baby understudy but as one trusty friend to another, she was dizzy.

She spoke anxiously. 'Can't you pension him off or something? Maybe money will help to heal the pride.'

'My Beth that's growing up so! You'll be doing Juliet and Boyle understudying you, before we hit Broadway, but--No, I can't even pension Nooks. Sweet, I'm going to tell you something that nobody knows except Tertius Tully and me. I'm nearly broke. If our business don't get better, we'll have to close in three-four more weeks.'

It was like telling a dancing passenger that the ship was afire and sinking. 'Oh no!' was all she could do.

'Don't tell anybody--and I mean that. Ever since our summer in Grampion, I've always sort of felt that you and I were confidants, even if we have had a whole mess of Mahalas and Zeds keeping us apart. And now--it's a comfort to confess to you. I spent a lot on the sets and costumes in the first place, and ever since we opened, I've spent more on advertising than usual, and I'm paying big salaries--most of the company are getting more than they ever did in their lives.

'About six thousand a week is the very least we can get along on, with railroad fares, and trucking the scenery, and what the union truck drivers and loaders charge us. Well, our first week, in Belluca, we did make expenses--with exactly ten cents over, which I sent to my mother, who's had it mounted in diamonds. But these last two weeks we've been losing. I thought that, with the one-night stands, we'd catch up. Everybody told me that all the farmers for sixty miles around would leap in their Fords and drive through blizzards to see Romeo Meets Juliet. Well, either they got sand in their carburettors or they preferred to stay home and listen to the radio, and maybe they're right. I can stand it a little while yet, but--And one thing you can help me with, darling. If we do pull through, I've got to have the most unwavering loyalty from every member of the company. Nobody can let down, on stage or off. I say this to you, kitten, because I know you're always loyal, and maybe you can influence the ones that aren't.'

And he looked at her. And she looked at him. And both waited. And at last she got out, 'Andy, would you like me to fire Nooks for you?'

'I don't think I could let you do that . . . I won't pretend it wouldn't be a big relief. Could you really stand doing it, chick?'

'Maybe it would be easier for me than for you, Andy. I'm not so much involved.'

'Maybe it would. I certainly'd appreciate it. Take him out and buy him a drink, before we go to the train to-night, and spring it gently--but I know you would. And tell him that besides his regular two weeks' notice, I'll give him two weeks' extra pay. And agree with him that I'm a bum and don't appreciate good acting when I see it.'

The prologue was rather shaky that night, and the epilogue a sob. She had invited Nooks out 'for a little supper'; he had accepted with such grandiloquent gratitude that she felt like a woman spy tempting a benign admiral.

With a hope that Andy would regard it as business expense and repay the fabulous cost, she took Mr. Nooks to the Kungsholm Swedish-American Restaurant, in Dubuque; which has coloured tablecoths, smörgåsbord, and waitresses in that colourful peasant costume which is apparently the same in Sweden, Hungary, Albania and Iceland. They had glasses of piercing aquavit and plates of sausages, and just as Bethel was trying to bring out the noose tactfully, Wyndham beamed and cried happily:

'I'm sorry that I've been too busy helping Andy get the company launched into a sound interpretation of Shakespeare to see much of you, my dear. I have noticed how pleasant you are to everybody, even to pompous old hams like Challis and Miss Staghorn, and I do hope that after this little fling at play-acting, you'll be able to settle down with a nice husband.

'It's a hard life, the drayma, and now that it's in the hands of the vicious commercial managers on the one hand, and on the other, upstarts like the Group Theatre and Cheryl Crawford and Antoinette Perry and Margaret Webster--women directing and managing--! I've known periods of despondency when I didn't think I would ever be appreciated again, and in a way I'm very grateful to our young friend Andy Deacon--no actor, poor lad, and a terrible interpreter of the wings of poetry, but he means so well, and I'm delighted to help him out.

'And I won't pretend to you, with your fresh young face looking at me, and I can't tell you how touched and gratified I am to have you blow me to supper this way and to find there are still a few young people who revere the technic and integrity of a Professional, and I won't deny that I've been very glad of this opportunity, however small, though perhaps it would have been better for the show if they had cast me as Capulet, instead of that Englishman, Challis, with his old-fashioned delivery, and so--

'But what has been especially gratifying--It doesn't matter about me. I'm a trouper. I can take it. I can put up with malodorous bedrooms and chop sooey and the dreadful embarrassment, to a man of my scholarly rearing, of having to consort with subway conductors instead of taking taxis. But my wife, Mrs. Nooks, is a woman of the utmost talent and delicacy. She's not as young as she was, but that little woman's ambitions recognize no bounds, as does her affection for my poor self.

'She has for years been longing to study French, but she has lacked both the means and, when I have been in Gotham, the time, since her chief preoccupation has been to give me the most incessant and tender care. But now at last I have been able to begin sending her enough, not only to begin paying up our debts, but for her to enter upon the study of the sparkling native tongue of the witty Gaels, or I suppose you would call them the Franks.

'She has found the most sympathetic teacher, a French lady, not so young any longer, but from a very high-placed aristocratic Parisian family, and Mrs. Nooks has written me, on a postcard which just arrived this morning, that after only one lesson she can say, "Send the head-waiter, I wish to order dinner in this restaurant".

'So I hope that to a dear child like you I shall not seem ridiculous if I confide to you that a lifelong ambition of Mrs. Nooks and myself has been to travel abroad and see with our own eyes the treasures of ancient culture. And now at last we shall be able to do so.

'Our Romeo tour and Broadway appearance are certain to continue for two years at a minimum--I hope so for Andy's sake as well as mine; he is an amateur at acting, but a very generous and loyal young friend--and I am sedulously saving my not over-excessive salary--which I trust that Andy will increase--and at the end of our run--think of it--our dream for years and years of boarding-houses and local trains--our dream that we've talked of till far into the night--Mimi and I will go to France!'

She tried.

She hinted that Andy had vulgar conceptions of the classics; that he was in the clutches of Mahala Vale, who wanted to turn the play into her private bridge to Hollywood.

Nooks did not hear a word. He was talking about his Conception of the Role of the Apothecary. There was a light of bliss upon his tumbling soft white hair, his ever-changing thick red face, and he felt himself a priest and a servant of mankind.

They were at the point where Nooks was booming, 'I know I'm too old to tackle Romeo, but I have some ideas that will surprise you about playing Macbeth', and Bethel was desperately wondering whether her purse and her sobriety would stand another Swedish punch, when she saw Andy fling into the restaurant, look about, look relieved, and shoulder towards them.

His eyes asked what had happened. She shook her head. His lips formed 'I'll do it', silently, and then aloud, very noisily and collegiately aloud, Andy greeted them: 'Well, I'll be darned! What're you two doing here? Buy you a drink? Do you mind if I sit down with you a minute?'

'My dear boy, it's a pleasure,' said Nooks. 'I think of you both as my children. I have just been telling little Bethel here that she mustn't let it worry her if the interpretation of Shakespeare is beyond her feminine powers. She is all the luckier to be born to blush unseen as some good man's wife. I was telling her . . .'

He did not stop for seven minutes.

Andy was able to convey to Bethel, 'Felt like a dog for asking you. I'll do it.' But he got no farther than, 'I'm a little disappointed in the critics' reception, Mr. Nooks. We may have to make some changes', when Nooks was off on the interesting theory that all critics are born of an especial brand of acrobats.

Bethel was less sorry now for him than for Andy, with twenty-eight people's livings to protect--the forlorn big Andy who looked beaten. She heard herself piping:

'Mr. Nooks! Please! Please listen a moment! No--listen! I think that you ought to know that Andy has been compelled to plan some changes. He may have to drop either Iris Pentire or myself--he hasn't decided which, and I hope it won't be me, but of course I'll submit without feeling a bit hurt, if it's necessary for the good of the show--which is what we're all after, isn't it?'

She got in a glance at Andy. He was astonished, he was grateful, he was almost adoring. (Well, he ought to be!)

'And in the same way--I happen to know that he's not satisfied with Zed Wintergeist, and may replace him with an actor who has more suavity.'

At this thundering lie poor Nooks looked delighted.

'And--you can blame it all on me--I'm afraid I've rather encouraged him to feel that just because you do so wonderfully represent one great classic school of acting, Mr. Nooks, you scarcely fit in with the crazy experimental way in which Andy and Satori have done this show, and so--'

Nooks abruptly turned from her to Andy. His mouth, with its wide loose pale lips, opened deeply. Bethel expected a roar. But it was very quietly that he said, 'Andy, do you want to give me my notice, sir?'

'Well--in a way--not exactly--but still--' said Andy.

Nooks slowly stood up, his great head back, his eyes closed for a moment, and his face was the face of a dead man. 'All right.' His eyes were wet. 'I have been very lonely for my wife, anyway. She hasn't many friends in New York. She'll be glad of my return. I'll leave as soon as my successor is ready to take over, sir. Good night to you both, and the greatest of successes.'

He walked out of the restaurant slowly, his shoulders back and his head up.

Bethel and Andy sat silently. Silently he pulled out a bank note and left it on the table for the waiter. Silently he walked with her to her hotel. Only at the door he said, 'I love you for what you've done for me. Good night.'