Bethel Merriday

XXX

During the holiday week, between Davenport and Kansas City, Bethel was not certain whether Mrs. Boyle had consciously joined the conspiracy of failure. But she was certain enough that Mrs. Boyle was drinking too much. She arrived at the theatre sober and soreheaded; by the beginning of the last act, she was superb; but she left the theatre benign and domestic-looking and quite drunk.

Night on night (Andy was frank enough with Bethel now) they were losing money, and neither of them knew quite what to do about it. If the malcontents were not acting so well, it showed only in the slowness and lacklustre of the play.

Bethel's one blow was in Doc Keezer, Mabel, Purvis, and Charlotte. Very mysterious, feeling herself a fixer and a diplomat, practically a female Basil Zaharoff, she got these four into the Purvises' room at Omaha, after their morning arrival. She felt confident. When she had been waiting her turn for a taxicab that morning, on arrival, the December day had been so fresh and brave and sunlit; from the plaza before the Union Station she had looked down on the tracks and on locomotives casting up a coil of bright smoke into bright air.

She fussily got her four statesmen seated on the bed, gave them cigarettes, and said enthusiastically, 'Look: this is a public meeting. I want us all to do something big--get together and see if we can't save the Romeo tour. I know we all love Andy--'

Harry Purvis yawned, 'Not enough to work miracles for him, and only a miracle will save this tour. I give it four more weeks.'

'You honestly think so?' wailed Bethel.

'Well, maybe three,' said Charlotte happily.

'Or two,' smiled Doc Keezer.

'But don't any of you care?' demanded Bethel.

'Why?' wondered Doc. 'It's just another flop. I've been in dozens of 'em. Andy's a good guy, but why all the fuss? We'll hustle back to New York and get busy looking for another job--'

'And that's that,' said Mabel Staghorn, comfortably.

'You don't see something special about this production--making Romeo and Juliet real and important?' said Bethel.

'It's just another show,' said Doc.

'Just another show,' said Mabel.

'I'd like to hear Toscanini in New York,' said Purvis.

'My baby shall,' purred Charlotte.

And then did Bethel disgrace herself, and blow up with a wail of 'Oh, I hate you, all of you! I hate you!'

What they said then, lengthily and affectionately, can be summed up as There there, you're a dear child, never mind, we'll all have dinner together when we blessedly get back to New York.

She bounced off to her own room, flaming, but she didn't even unpack, or wash her face. She telephoned down for the number of Mr. Zed Wintergeist's room. She would go there, right now, and keep her promise to Andy, and eloquently win Zed over to righteousness.

But she stopped in front of the blank grained pine of his door.

No. She couldn't do it: she was being a busybody, intrusively busy about good works, and she hated women who were like that. And you didn't go lightly into Zed's room. Mahala and Iris and she popped innocently enough and frequently into Andy's apartment, and no one thought anything of seeing him wandering down every corridor in pyjamas. But the intense Zed was not like that. No.

She turned away, and in her room she cried a little.

That afternoon Andy summoned her. 'Well, kit, you were right. I've just had a talk with Mrs. Boyle. She'd like to break her run-of-the-play contract. I wouldn't do it. She didn't say much, but she was pretty bleak. So I saw Hoy and Murphy--I'm leaving Zed to you, you know.'

'Uh-yes,' said Bethel, uncomfortably.

'And they both--they didn't exactly give me a two weeks' notice, but they both admitted that they think the tour's going to blow up and they don't much care, and I'm a parlour player. Swine!

to keep their jobs going, to keep the play going, and they won't even gamble with me for a few weeks.'

'We'll beat them yet!' cried Bethel.

'Ye-es,' said Andy.

She marched now relentlessly to Zed's room. He was in. She found him lying on his bed, like a jack-knife, his legs up against the wall, reading Coriolanus aloud, gently waving one foot in time to the beat of the lines. He went on a moment after he had shouted 'C'm in' and she had entered. Then he looked up at her, amused.

It was just a little odd, standing back of him, seeing his face thus, upside down. Faces upside down are disconcerting and not altogether endearing. She let him have it. It was Coriolanus who spoke, as much as she:

'I just dropped in to tell you that you are a coward and a traitor, and that you are willing to ruin an honest theatrical experiment to butter your own vanity.'

He whirled around all in one piece, like a top, and came to, sitting on the edge of the bed, glaring at her. 'I'm a what?'

'You're an amateur actor!'

'Whatever you can call me, that's the one thing I won't stand!'

'You can't even endure discipline. You're the typical ham. You're willing to ruin the whole play if you don't get what you think you want.'

'My good Merriday, when you come out of this dramatic scene you're throwing, I imagine I'll find you're referring to the fact that I think our presentation of Romeo and Juliet has been atrociously misdirected and mismanaged from the beginning, and that I'm quite willing to see it terminated, even to the considerable disadvantage of my own pocket-book, and if you call that being an amateur, why--why--you're crazy!'

She didn't remember ever being asked to sit down, but she was sitting on a straight chair, looking at him sitting on the side of a reproduction mahogany colonial bed. The room was small, tight, but neat as a candy box, and the wall was a temperate grey. She felt that for years now she had been talking to people who sat on the edges of brass beds, maple beds, mahogany beds, iron beds, Pullman berths. Had the whole world turned to sitting on the edges of beds and being querulous? Had chairs gone out? Did anyone anywhere still lie under the shade of trees and seem human?

'So you think it's all misdirected?' she was saying. 'And just how would you direct it?'

'I'd make it really modern. What do the clothes matter, if Andy keeps the whole feeling phony and bookish--the whole reading of the lines? Youngsters to-day love just as passionately as any blasted Elizabethans, but they have humour, and a realization that everything in the world has double and triple meanings, and that if you tell a gal her face is a lotus flower, you'd better be wary about your metaphor or it may fly up and trip you, for God knows what the lotus flower may mean to Freud! I'd have Romeo throw away a line like "Yon grey is not the morning's eye, 'tis but the pale reflex of Cynthia's brow"--say it lightly, and not croon it like the prayer-book, the way Andy does. He reads like an elocutionist. Orson Welles and Co. made Julius Caesar sound like human beings really being sore and scared. And Maurice Evans's Hamlet--remember what a glorious female fool Mady Christians made of the Queen? No, of course you don't remember it! The only real play you've ever seen in your life was some tryout in Hartford. You're a pure little college girl from a fine old farmhouse o'erlooking the Connecticut River, and you think that a Saint Francis in tweed pants like Andy Deacon, that holds the record for chinning himself in the Y.M.C.A., is the hope of a newer and nobler drama with a moral lesson--'

'Zed! You've done a better job than you have any idea. You started making fun of Andy. You've ended by ruining him.'

'He's ruined himself, by not having any dramatic sense.'

'He's done something, while you just sit back and grouch.'

'You sound like the wife of a popular publicity-grabbing clergyman, defending him.'

'Whatever you think of Andy, he's put every cent and every ounce of energy he has into this tour, and now that you've made him ridiculous, you've enabled Mrs. Boyle, that queen of the cats--'

'She sure is!'

'--to show her proper contempt for all of us--poor American amateurs--and kill her contract by ruining the whole show. She won't have to do much. You and that great comedian Tony Murphy have sneered at all of us so effectively that everybody's self-conscious and afraid to cut loose and do some vivid acting, and the show's flat as ditch-water, thanks to you--'

'Thanks to me?!'

'--and so now your fellow-conspirator, Mrs. Boyle, has only to step in and do a few sloppy performances and we're finished. Yes, you didn't like Andy. So you betrayed him for the great Mrs. Aurelia Lumley Boyle!'

'Now by God I won't stand your--Even if you are a girl--'

'Yes, I'll go back to the pure old homestead by the Connecticut. You bet I will! I came on this tour terribly fond of Andy, for his sweetness, as I still am, but feeling that it was an opportunity to work with a really creative actor like you, and you prove to be another smart amateur that hasn't the temperament to be a serious actor, that's just playing at it before he goes off to his proper hideaway in Hollywood.'

'I'm going to choke you--I really am going to choke you to death, Merriday. Nobody can insult me like that and live.'

'To think that I once admired you more than anybody on earth!'

'You certainly never showed any signs of it! I could have gone for you big. I think maybe you have some of the real fire, under your layers of women's college and butterscotch sundae.'

They were not sitting now; he had sprung up, lifted her to her feet; and his soul was no longer lying on its back and waving its spiritual feet. He was frantically earnest and young:

'I liked you, but you were such a baby, and I didn't want to make a fool of myself--funny, isn't it?--much safer to be naive and longing with a wise woman of forty than with an airy brat of twenty! But you really did believe in me?'

'Yes.'

'And you really think I let you down?'

'Yes. You did let me down, Zed.'

He was, after all, only a year older than she, this embryo dictator, and she realized, as he put his arm about her with an embrace too trembling to be anything but sincere, that he was near to bawling like a baby.

'Oh, I never thought I could do that, pet. Tell me, oh, tell me honestly, darling, no kidding, do you really mean that the Boyle is trying to bust the tour, and I was her stooge?'

'Yes.'

'That old witch! When I come to think of it, I hate her more than anybody else I know, because she can act, and doesn't care. She can simply lure your heart out, when she gives that slow, scared half-turn and says, "Trust me, gentleman, I'll prove more true than those that have more cunning to be strange"--she's twice as young as you are, then! Yet she'd give it up for a country-house comedy. She's a traitor. Oh, we'll squash her! Come. Let's go see Andy. He and you and I will put this tour over, Beth! Come on!'

'Now I love you, Zed!'

He stopped, on the way to the door. He said sharply, 'How literally do you mean that?'

'W-why?' was her answer.

'You knew I began to fall for you, after I got over being a fool about Iris?'

'I don't think you really fell.'

'Why do you hold back so with me?'

'You haven't one tiniest little bit of kindness for women. You order them around like waiters.'

'Of course I do. Every epicure orders waiters around and bawls 'em out--just because he cares for his food. It's only the thick-ear that'd just as soon have pork chop as grouse that calls the waiter "George" and asks about his health instead of about his sauces . . . Are you going to fall in love with me?'

'No.'

'Not even to save this tour?'

'Don't be so conceited again! How do you know you can save it?'

'I'll show you. I'll do it. And then I may discourse with thee sweet numbers, pet, of love. Come on!'

They hastened, hand in hand, to Andy's room. Between his own door and Andy's, three floors above, the nimble Zed had evolved a plan.

Andy's room was, again, the cheapest in the house; cheaper than Zed's, with an aspen instead of an iron bed. When they knocked, he gave them 'Come in', but when they entered he was telephoning . . . long-distance telephoning.

The worst vice of Mr. Andrew Deacon was telephoning, preferably to as distant a spot at as expensive a rate as was possible. When in doubt, he reached for a receiver. He was one of a whole new race of executives who take out their escapism not in liquor or South Seas or war, but by instantly transporting themselves across the continent. They may economize on salaries and socks, they may be stay-at-homes, but they will rise up at three a.m. and leap at a telephone instrument and call up some poor unfortunate girl downily asleep in her own decent bed in a city a thousand miles away.

They will have no time to write letters, no, not so much as a postcard with a picture of the Empire State Building, but they will with complaisance spend three hours tracking some distant quarry from home to office to restaurant to theatre to places where he decidedly ought not to be.

And of these telephoniacs, Andy was a chronic case. He telephoned greetings to actors on their opening nights, thereby forcing them to go out to the box office and almost miss their first entrances; he telephoned filial greetings to his mother when she was at crises in bridge games; he telephoned to sick friends in the hospital, just at the times in their lives when they most wanted to be left alone. But to-day he had more apparent reason for telephoning.

As Bethel unavoidably listened to the end of the call he was making, she guessed that he was trying to get more backing for the show from some friend in the East . . . and that he had been making this effort often and recently.

'. . . oh yes, it's picking up. I get reports of a swell advance sale all through Kansas . . . Why of course, I expect to run at a loss for some time yet, till the country gets sold on a novelty . . . No, I can't guarantee a thing. I won't fool you about that. But all I can say is, I'm putting in all I got . . . Well, think it over and I'll phone you again to-morrow.'

He looked up from the telephone as brightly as though he had just heard that the Daughters of Israel had taken a block of two hundred seats.

Zed struck quickly. He stalked to Andy holding out his hand.

'Listen, boss; Bethel has been jumping my neck, and I guess she's right. I'm opposed to you on some of your theories of production. I've never concealed that. But I never realized that my criticism had played into the hands of a gang like Tony and Jeff, that are natural sourballs, and I certainly never realized it could give aid and comfort to mankind's natural enemy, Aurelia Boyle.'

(As Zed continues with his surrender to the beaming Andy, who pats his sleeve in gratitude, it should be noted that Bethel is so remarkable a linguist that she perfectly understands, though she cannot fluently speak it, the astoning new language of Zed, Andy and Lyle, whose vocabulary contains such words of unknown etymology as phony, stooge, blow, flop, wow, bust, and okay.)

'So here's my idea, Andy,' Zed was finishing. 'You've worked the radio and interviews and hens' luncheons pretty hard, and some of the colleges, but we haven't touched the high schools and normal schools, and there's where the cash customers for Shakespeare ought to be. If you want, and if Bethel will back me up and Tertius will get me the dates, I'll make some spirited addresses in high-school auditoriums. God knows I'll hate it, but I swear, I'll coo you as gently as I can, and maybe it'll help.'

'Oh, that's swell, Zed. I certainly appreciate it. I think it's a swell idea. It's too late for this and next week, but I'll wire--no, I better telephone--and get you dates for our seventh and eighth and ninth weeks--Missouri and Kansas and Colorado. I can't tell you how this touches me, Zed.'

They made a family portrait--Andy with his arms about his two children, Zed and Bethel.