Bethel Merriday

XXVIII

Two weeks more of one-night stands.

Station platforms and cues and shirred eggs with little farm sausages and No. 17 purple lining salve and the 7.47 a.m. and the rumba on a revolving floor under lights changing from green to fog to crocus and handkerchiefs washed in the bowl and plastered on the side of a bathtub and looking at the name of the newspaper to recall in which town you were and the line 'See what a scourge is laid upon your hate' and a Van Gogh print on a hotel bedroom wall and brown powder that never quite got out of your ears and Doc's organ voice as Friar Laurence and chewing gum and the white mark your hand left on a dusty day-coach seat when you slapped it and telegraph poles scurrying back and borrowing Kleenex from Mabel and a world-long rim of pale scarlet along the horizon at dusk beyond cold December prairies and pots and pots of coffee and Zed's sad hazel eyes as he brooded over a volume of Rupert Brooke by a frosted car window and Exit UR and moonlight lamps staring down pale blue from the borderlights and giggling at a film along with Vera and Charlotte and street crossings of packed snow in corduroy rows glistening under the lights between you and the theatre and here it was almost the half-hour call already and across the way 'Romeo and Juliet' exciting in electric lights on the theatre marquee and bath towels long as yourself and acting beside Zed and small boxes of individual orders of corn flakes and the cross-word puzzle in the morning paper with which you tried to keep awake when your eyes looked red and felt red and your lungs were tickling with train dust and unexpectedly kindly applause and fried oyster sandwiches and Mrs. Boyle heartbreaking in 'It was the nightingale and not the lark'.

Down and across the mighty prairies of the Mississippi Valley: Iowa and South Dakota and Nebraska where, through to-day's cornfields and cement roads, move the ghosts of Mormon pioneers.

The fourth and fifth weeks of the tour. Waterloo and Mason City and Sioux Falls and Sioux City and Des Moines, Cedar Rapids and Davenport and Burlington and two nights in Omaha, and on New Year's Eve, St. Joseph, only it's really 'St. Joe', with its bright hills above the Missouri River that are shrines to Jesse James, who was the Hitler of his day, with gold watches for his Vienna and Prague and Warsaw.

When she reached Nebraska, the Bethel who had been coddled in Connecticut as in cotton batting was certain that she was already practically in California, and only a step more from Hawaii and China and Australia--yes, and perhaps really going there.

Andy was beginning to hint about their touring Australia. He whispered to Bethel that she need worry no more about the tour's closing; yes, he was still losing money, but not so much, and in the metropolises of Kansas City and St. Louis, so justly proud of their auditoriums, their Little Theatres, their symphony orchestras, he would 'make a pile--enough to carry them till the luck changed and they began to coin money'.

So they went on, descendants of the Covered Wagon, with portable radios instead of the slim columns of signal smoke seen across the sun-drowsing plains. And so she discovered America.

The stretch of plains was so unpunctuated. All morning long, from the train window, the snow and sky had been confused in one slope of empty grey, and Bethel was weighed down by the sky's heaviness. She was homesick for the New England stone walls, lively with squirrels and thrushes that had invited her girlhood outings. But here the farmhouses, cruelly far from one another, crouched with their barns and grim cement silos in little nests of cottonwood trees; as alone and individual and strange as a shepherd's cot in the Highlands.

An hour before they came to their next stand, the sun was through, and the morning of creation was miraculously renewed. Suddenly the sky was tremendous, glorious with unsoiled blue; the snow was a silver mantle; and she saw how many of the houses, along with lean and grey-streaked prairie poverty, were new-painted bungalows, with solid, hip-roofed barns, jauntily bearing bright galvanized-iron ventilating cowls. The silos were towers, now, brave as the old, sea-facing watchtowers she had seen in pictures of southern France.

Their city, when they came to it, was gay with sun, young and eager. The station had miles of leather-and-chromium chairs in the waiting-room, and the attendants were like collegians, very friendly with young actresses. The hotel was new, and her room, all in maple, with a Navajo bedspread, was on the thirtieth floor. She looked out on the medley of Old West and New Pan-America that is characteristic of all that land: skyscrapers and a marble Art Institute and a luxurious-looking Georgian brick Town Hall Club among a Shanghai sprawling of tin-roofed one-story shacks plastered with signs advertising beer and candy bars.

Then her nap, curled snugly on that heavenly bed. (The mattress was astonishingly named the Slumber Coaxie, and had, it seems, been Scientifically Constructed in accordance with the findings of a Conference of Forty Professors, Housewives and Social Leaders. But it really was a good mattress, once you got to sleep and forgot the lush poetry.)

She awoke to sunset.

She had not known such extravagant sunsets as these of the plains. In Connecticut sunsets were usually frail, tranquil, pretty affairs, that economically afforded you a couple of strips of pale crimson, and one of old gold, with a good effort in the way of an apple-green sky beneath. They were the crisp bacons of sunsets. But these displays in Iowa and Nebraska were Ninth Symphonies, battle pieces, insanities of flame and gold.

She discovered a curious rule: A truly great sunset will always be in this form: it portrays a seabound land of burning lava, through which winds a golden river to the bright bays and inlets of a glowing sea.

When they had crossed the Missouri River, she decided that she was no longer in the prosperous Middle West but in the real West that, with its myths and true memories of cow-punchers and John Brown and the Santa Fe Trail and the Gold Rush and Indian braves, of frontier saloons and railroad builders and two-gun sheriffs, of mountains and ranches and deserts, is one of the five or six romantic districts of the whole world.

She loved her tight New England as much as ever; she was not parrot enough to echo, 'New York isn't America'. But she had had a bath of greatness, and she came out of all this not a Yankee but an American.

And an American who, born in 1916, might live to see the fabulous Great Land of the year 2000.

All the time that she was thus tasting greatness, she was entirely surrounded by love, and none of it was hers, and she didn't like the idea at all.

The corporation of Mahala and Andy Deacon, an institution engaged in dancing together, expensively dining together, and squabbling together, went on like tired matrimony, with none of the advantages. Bethel suspected that Mahala would never give up Andy so long as she rather thought he was a good actor and decisively thought that he was a good athlete and very rich; and that Andy stuck only because he was expected to. Bethel was irritated by Andy's unimaginative humbleness. His good-night kisses of Mahala in hotel lobbies were like porridge without cream. And in the fifth week Mahala began writing many letters; began receiving, from New York, many letters, air-mailed, all in the same masculine script.

Bethel could tell exactly the day on which Mahala must have learned that Andy was (if possibly still quite as athletic) not so rich as he had been. It was on December 23rd, in Des Moines. That evening she came gushing into Bethel's dressing-room, which normally Mahala would as soon have thought of entering as she would a lecture-room on foreign affairs. She was an angel in a voluminous white linen dressing-gown with blue ribbons. She gurgled, 'My, you've got such a sweet dressing-room! An arm-chair! Well, you deserve it, Beth. I was just saying to Hugh Challis last night that you have the real, sure-enough Old Vic touch in your--what d'you call it?--prologue.'

'Did you?'

'Oh yes! And he agreed with me. Uh--Beth! Have you heard rumours about Andy not being able to get any more backing, and being busted? I know we're not making any money but--'

'I don't know a thing about it,' lied Bethel.

Afterward she wondered why, since she was going to lie anyway, she hadn't done a really good, crooked, malicious lie and told Mahala that Andy was sneaking off early mornings and pawning his silver-backed brushes and his silver brandy flask and his sapphire-studded (and rather pretentious) cigarette lighter. Then Mahala might have chucked him; then Andy might have stooped fondly down to her, the adoring peasant girl.

But would she have cared now?

Oh yes! Andy was so much kindlier than Zed, so much younger than Doc Keezer, so much wilder and warmer than Doug Fry, so much more desirous of a shining future than Fletcher Hewitt and so much her own good tutelary god.

She saw Andy, now, taking Mahala to cheaper restaurants and buying sherry instead of champagne cocktails; she saw that Mahala was complaining; but seemingly it did not occur to Andy to complain of her complaining.

With all the fury that he gave to rehearsals, to learning a part, or to being rude to people he considered bogus, Zed had dived into books. He was as out of the arena of love as Bethel herself. He was reading--really reading, and not talking about it, like Challis or Mahala or Charlotte: marching through the novels of Hemingway, Dos Passos, Steinbeck, James Farrell.

And Iris had become intellectual--that is, for Iris. As there seemed to be no one more lucrative available, she had cleaved to Douglas Fry, and she listened to his talk about cycloramas and gelatins with a sweet, sedate vacuousness . . . and out of it she did at least have, as a pledge of Douglas's low-pressure ardour, a new trinket bracelet, on which she hung miniature elephants, locomotives, giant pandas, Charlie McCarthy and orchids.

But the torch of the caravan was the somewhat argumentative passion of Henry W. L. Purvis, Ph.D., and Charlotte Levison.

Harry Purvis could make dirty puns in Greek, Italian and Chaucerian English. Even when they were in Greek, which naturally you did not understand as well as you did Chaucer, you knew they sounded dirty.

Harry was born in Gooversville, Georgia. Eight years ago he had graduated from William and Mary College, where he had majored in tennis and drinking and been the life of a small, rebellious dramatic society that put on plays ridiculing the Old South. He had taken his doctorate in English and Philosophy at Chicago, just barely cum laude; had gone to teaching in Hotchkiss School, and after six months of it, been enthusiastically fired.

Various reasons have been alleged: that he had been too obliging about lending Rabelais to students; that he had got drunk at Torrington with three students and, on the way home, not liking the diction of one of them, a young gentleman from Brooklyn, had chased him out of the car, removed his trousers, and left him beside the road; and that he knew more than all the rest of the faculty put together and mocked their learning. Being cheerful and handsome and completely penniless, he had been accepted by the Federal Theatre, and had played a Rich Young Man so pleasantly that the audiences cheered every night when he was killed off by a sturdy striker.

He had been in the theatre for four years now, and he was the most devoted trouper in the whole Romeo company. He even liked one-night stands, except that fourteen hours seemed to him too long to stay in any town that served highballs with the whisky in one glass and soda in another. He was never drunk before eleven-thirty p.m., and never sober between that hour and three a.m., and in all states of inebriety he quoted Ernest Dowson, Artemus Ward and Albert Jay Nock.

He looked like a young Velasquez cavalier.

At just what crisis he had been married, no one was certain, but his wife was tucked away on Morningside Heights. He did not speak of her often, but apparently she had been the youthful error of a lonely young man in a Chicago boarding-house, and apparently she was named Amarette (with an a).

Rehearsals had not gone on four days, back in New York, before the Don from Gooversville and the Gainsborough Duchess from Grand Street, Charlotte Levison, had begun dining together, and before the company left Belluca, the relationship seemed almost legal. Purvis and Charlotte sat up till three a.m., drinking and talking about stopping drinking, and arguing about the folly of arguing about Communism.

No Bible-kiver-to-kiver Southern Fundamentalist Baptist could have taken her Gospel, her Party Line, more seriously and more credulously than Charlotte. Whenever the Moscow government was shocked to discover that the highly placed and trusted Admiral Asky group were traitors and saboteurs, and re-educated them with pistols in the backs of their necks, and replaced them with the long known and loyal set of General Bsky, and then, with naive yelps, found that the Bsky scoundrels were even worse and had, without Stalin's noticing it, been sending notes to the English from his own back office when all the while he had thought they were sitting there playing solitaire, and he defended the rights of humanity by slaughtering them, too, and put in the incorruptible cohorts of Commissar Csky--who turned pale and hastily made their wills--then the kind Charlotte, who secretly loved Peter Pan better than she did Gorky and who wouldn't step on a backstage cockroach, not even a Trotskyist cockroach, just smiled and carelessly explained to Purvis that it was all for purity.

Sitting in a grill with Purvis, she liked to tell of her father's escape from a burning Jewish village in Russia, after seeing his father disembowelled before him, and then add brightly that no immigrant to America and particularly no Jew has a chance in this wickedest of all capitalisms, and that 78 per cent of these immigrants are lying out under the Brooklyn Bridge and rapidly starving to death--and have been for years.

Purvis, equally loving her and exasperated by her bland dogmatism, always snarled back that if he were a Communist, he would be out of this in five minutes and go live in a factory tenement; certainly not use an airy Communism as a means of being fashionable, and sit beside a tiled swimming pool, like the famous and fashionable Hollywood fellow-travellers, and condone slaughter over a mint julep. But it was the fate of this Tybalt to play whirligig through all his romance.

The moment he had done a passionate job of denouncing Charlotte, they would be joined by such reactionaries as Hugh Challis or Tertius Tully, and instantly, ranging up beside Charlotte, Purvis would be heard announcing that in Russia all actors are cared for by the government like pet rabbits and that any peasant just off the seat of a tractor can act with more disciplined technique than Noel Coward and design scenery more artfully than Oenslager or Bel Geddes.

Then, in Mason City, at a party given to the company by the citizens, Harry Purvis announced that Charlotte and he were going to be married.

The members of the company sat with dumb mouths. Purvis was already married! What about poor Amarette (with an a)? Had she gone to Reno?

In a pleased way he explained that there wasn't any Amarette. Ever a cautious drunk, Harry had invented her because otherwise he might never have known to whom he would find himself married some morning.

Charlotte was one of the people who were surprised and somewhat gratified by the announcements that Harry was unwed and that she was going to marry him. Oh well, said her ducal and matronly smile, you just never could tell what her bad boy would be up to next.

They were married after the show, in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and the wedding party was held on the train. Andy had provided champagne and canned alligator pears. But a few of the merry rout drank nothing at all--Bethel, Vera Cross, Mabel Staghorn, Douglas Fry and Dr. Henry W. L. Purvis.

In a long speech with footnotes Harry explained that he was now a teetotaller and a working Communist, and that as soon as the tour was ended, he was going to do something (vague but powerful) for the Cause.

His wife smiled on him sleepily and murmured, 'That's swell. But let's see if we can't save up for a month in Bermuda first, Harry, and rent a cottage. I've always longed so for a house of my own, where you can go up and downstairs.'

'Well, okay, then, dearie,' said that scholarly, that fierily crusading, that passionately romantic Tybalt, Comrade Purvis.

But the catastrophe to Bethel was the desertion of her heart's guardian, Doc Keezer. And it was actually to Mabel Staghorn that she lost him, and all along of Miss Staghorn's new kitten, a soft but in no way remarkable kitten, vilely named Pippy.

Miss Staghorn, who off-stage was Mrs. Wallace Tibby, wife of the esteemed taxidermist, was the kindliest and the friendliest person in the company, and much the worst nuisance. Anyone who did not dodge quickly, she would assault with loving greetings just at the edgy moment before he made an entrance on stage. Not for her the quick pat on the back and the cheery 'Good luck!' of the ordinary trouper. Just when Doc Keezer was trying to remember whether his entrance line, as Friar Laurence, was 'Romeo, come forth; come forth, thou fearful man', or 'Come forth, thou fearful man, come, Romeo', or 'Romeo, thou fearful man, come forth, come forth', or what the devil it was that came forth, Mabel Staghorn would maternally pat him, and gurgle, 'Now I just know you're not going to slip again on that line'. And so he would enter and slip.

On trains and at restaurants, Mabel took the trouble to go from seat toseat, conveying what she frequently called 'little bluebird greetings to keep everybody happy'. She always, on such occasions, cried cheerily to the men, 'Now don't stand up', and, if they didn't stand up, looked pained.

If the theories of scrambled time are correct, to this moment there stand all over the Middle West annoyed groups of male actors, holding their napkins and watching their minute steaks grow cold, while Miss Staghorn vocally caresses them in liquids like a brook at eventide:

'Now don't let me disturb you--I just wanted to see if you were all comfortable--is there anything I can do for anybody?--oh, did you notice how slow Andy was on his cues to-night?--I'm sure he's worried--my, I do hope we're making money this week. . . .'

Mabel believed in all the stage superstitions. Stronger even than her faith in a rabbit's foot for powder brush was her certainty that you mustn't whistle in the dressing-room--perhaps she wouldn't have asserted that the San Francisco earthquake was due to some noodle's whistling in his dressing-room, but she would have looked into it.

At a rehearsal you should never give the tag line--that finished off the show, didn't it? You mustn't open an umbrella on the stage (and this even after the cast had opened umbrellas all over the stage in Our Town), or put shoes on your dressing-table or pass anyone on the stairs on the way to your dressing-room, or have yellow in the room, or sing 'Home, Sweet Home' on the stage; and in your hotel room, to lay a hat on the bed was to affront God himself.

Doc Keezer didn't exactly believe in any of these voodoos. He just didn't take a chance on them. He grunted, 'Why the devil does Zed have to whistle in his dressing-room? I'm not superstitious about it. But it makes a such row. Why can't he just sing?'

Mabel Staghorn had an infallible taste for banalities. Having been on the stage since she was eleven, and reared on Shakespeare, Molière, Sheridan and Variety--whose renowned headline, 'Stix Nix Hix Pix', is but an example of its contribution to a living American Language--Mabel never said anything whatever that would have been unexpected in Mrs. George F. Babbitt. When Jeff Hoy observed that Mabel turned Shakespeare's Nurse into a Red Cross nurse, Mabel sighed, 'I never pay any attention to him; I just consider the source'.

She thought it all over and said profoundly to Zed, 'I do think people ought to make some little effort and try and be on time for rehearsals, don't you?' When he blandly answered, 'But don't you think that might cramp their individualities?' she fretted, 'Now I'm sure you don't mean that--a real, earnest young man like you--my gracious, I thought you were one of the young actors who realized that an actor's career is just one long devotion to duty'.

Mabel's dressing-table, in the theatre, was as domestic as Grover's Corners. She did not carry a steel make-up box, but a litter of salves and pencils and powders and brushes in a pansy-embroidered linen bag--once white, now stained with every shade of faded carmine--which she spread out on the shelf, with a little ivory Egyptian cat-god, her mascot, and a photograph of her nephew, who was 'doing very well' as accountant in the South Tallahassee Power and Lighting Corporation.

She had, to some degree, a husband, but she had no children. She spoke well and often of children, to whom she invariably referred as the 'dear little ones' or as the 'chickabiddies'. But personally she had no children. She had cats.

She had, she explained to everyone, seven cats, reluctantly left to the unfeeling care of her husband in the flat in New York. The husband meant well but, it seems, he never could remember that Frou-Frou had to have liver ground, not mashed, and Kittenkatz (aged nine) required three drops of cod-liver oil in her liquor, which had to be two-thirds milk and one-third cream.

'That woman's got cat blood,' said Zed, as he heard Mabel explain to Charlotte that 'kittens are just as knowing as children--the way they look up at you with their sweet little eyes--like forget-me-nots--and they're so much more sympathetic. You can get just as fond of them as of children.'

Said Zed, 'Yeah, but there's not much fun planning future careers for cats, Mabel.'

Doc Keezer, tolerant as sunshine, had always been amused by Mabel where the others were itched. And not even in Tertius Tully did Doc find so much of the ardent recollection of unimportant gossip that keeps the true trouper happy.

When he yawned at Mabel, 'Say, which of the Trout sisters was it that played Agnes on tour with Ambrose Gillyflower in The Brave Die but Once, in 1906?' she did not flee. She rubbed her nose, and looked eager, and sighed, 'Now, isn't that funny?--I guess I'm losing my memory--oh well, we all grow old--I often say, "It don't matter what you forget if you can still learn your parts"--but isn't it funny?--oh yes--now I remember--it was Tacoma Trout--Cheyenne Trout was in burlyque that season and Albany Trout was singing the Duchess of Dantzig.'

In a café, between midnight and train time, Doc Keezer noticed a kitten, a small highwayman kitten, white with a black mask over one eye, sitting on the bar among the port and sherry bottles, washing its nose. Having had three quick gin-and-vermouths, Doc was certain that it winked at him with its masked eye. He thought sentimentally of Mabel's loneliness, bought the kitten for fifty cents, went, with the highly encouraging Tony Murphy, to awaken an infuriated veterinary surgeon, bought a cat basket, and on the train presented the treasure to Mabel Staghorn.

He had been slightly mocking, but Doc was touched when Mabel lifted the kitten out of the basket, curled it on her bosom, looked up at him (she seemed so old and tired, in a cotton nightgown, with gum of make-up still crusted on her weary eyelids) and began to cry.

'No one's ever been so sweet to me, Doc,' she wept. 'I didn't know I had any real, warm friends in this company. Now I know. And that makes me even happier than this dear kitty . . . We'll call it Pippy.' Very cheerfully: 'It'll make Mrs. Boyle and her Pekinese sore as crabs. Oh, I could just kiss you for this, Doc!'

Mrs. Aurelia Boyle, the permanent Juliet of the Anglo-American-Australian-South African stage, was reserved and County English; she was well bred and bad-tempered; she often informed Andy--one of the few people to whom she ever spoke, off-stage--that she demanded nothing of life, and indeed she did demand nothing much beyond top billing, a salary equal to half that of all the other nineteen actors put together, the box-office statement for every performance, delivered--without fail--in her dressing-room before the third act, the bridal suite in hotels (at half rates), a drawing-room on trains, a combination of never being bothered by reporters or photographers and of daily seeing extensive and reverent biographies of herself in the press, a daily supply of whisky, and vice-regal precedence for her snarly-faced Pekinese, Pluto.

Andy walked it, Hugh Challis fed it lamb chops, Charlotte, slightly shuddering, petted it, and (though she declined) Bethel was once invited to shelter it for the night in her upper berth, when poor Aurelia could obtain nothing but a compartment. Aloof though Mrs. Boyle might be, her mutt was full of a sinister friendliness. Happy bridge players of the company, planning to overbid in hearts, would feel a queer, ghostly presence about their lower legs and look down to see Pluto grinning at them and thinking about nipping their calves. Sleepers on daytime jumps would dream of seven-headed serpents and start awake to find Pluto dribbling on their bosoms.

Not a popular dog.

But to Mrs. Boyle, who often bemoaned her childlessness, in some forgetfulness of a son by her first marriage, a son who now lived in Maidstone Hill and had two children and played badminton, the hound Pluto was her child and her soul.

When she saw the cat Pippy, in her miserable basket, being carried on the train by Mabel Staghorn, she screamed. She really screamed. She wailed at Andy, 'As if I hadn't suffered enough having that Staghorn woman for Nurse! And now she has that mangy animal. I won't endure it! You may laugh, my good man, but I tell you Pluto is sensitive as Shelley. He'll be terrified by that alley tiger.'

For once Andy stood up to the prima donna and said, soundly, 'Oh, don't be silly'. But it was worse than Aurelia had expected.

Pluto was fascinated by Pippy at once, and then enamoured of her. He showed all the antics of a small boy in love. He stalked round and round the bored Pippy, while the company embarrassed him by giggling. He feebly smiled at her and invitingly paddled with his paws. He escaped from Mrs. Boyle's drawing-room on trains at night and sat lovingly before the berth in which reclined Miss Staghorn and Pippy, and from time to time he awakened everybody with a thin celestial howl, and when they popped out of berths and cursed him, he looked at them with an evil, aged, oriental guile and howled again.

And he almost broke the granite heart of Mrs. Boyle by desertion.

Meantime, Pippy brought those ageing innocents, Mabel Staghorn and Doc Keezer, together.

Being responsible for the cat, Doc went on, in duty to it, buying liver and catnip and cleaning its basket. He found something homelike in caring for a rather helpless woman and her feline child. Hour on hour the three of them, Doc, Mabel and Pippy, sat together in the plush seat of a day coach, relaxed in such warm and velvety communion as 'Well, I can remember when Walter Huston first decided to play in Desire Under the Elms. He says to me, "Doc," he says--of course him and me were old friends . . .'

It occurred to Bethel, a little wretched that she had never seen it, that Doc had overwhelmingly wanted someone who wanted him. He was exhilarated by having a friend who depended on him for small cold walks in unknown streets between matinée and evening, for getting a taxi, for finding the drugstore with the best ten-cent coffee.

His fondness for Bethel had cooled into an amiable 'How's tricks, child?'

Doc Keezer had come home, and she was the more homeless in it. A little frightened, she reached tentative hands out to Zed and Andy.

Zed invited her to attend the Pygmalion movie, and then forgot the engagement.

Andy was too busy quarrelling with Mahala to notice anybody else.

She was truly alone.

She had never in any moment loved Doc or Fletcher Hewitt. But had she ever loved Andy? Or had it been just gratitude and dazzle? Had she ever been on the verge of falling in love with Zed? Or had it just been stimulus and curiosity and the compliment he paid in bullying her?

She had supposed that, whatever complications and dizziness there might be once you were plunged into love, there was first a divine certainty about knowing that you were in love. She felt lost now, and insignificant. She felt like an understudy.

And understudies suffer not so much from cruelty as from invisibility.

It has been recorded that Bethel was naturally of the lonely type--of the loneliness that is the pain and penalty of being individualistic. In the gregariousness of rehearsals and the first credulity of the tour, she had seemed cured. But now she settled down, apparently for the rest of her life, to Steak Medium Rare with Tertius Tully, Hugh Challis, Jones Awkwright (Wyndham Nooks's successor, a pool-playing man) and occasionally Doc Keezer.

They never talked of anything but the stage.

Challis referred to 'the drama'. Doc Keezer said 'the theatre'. To Tertius Tully, it was always 'show business'. To all of them, it was all that was important and pleasant in life.

And so it was with Bethel Merriday as, lonely or no, she became a trouper.