Bethel Merriday

XXXIII

This time, in Topeka, she had been too busy all day to let her imagination work up the sick suspense that had broken her down as Juliet, back in Kansas City. She had just time to make up and take her place; she went on and played Lady Capulet with only a shaky qualm or two, a quiver or two as lines came slowly to her. But they came.

She was a clove-sweet, slim little old lady, unexpectedly comic, a husband-ridden aristocrat who was afraid of the babbling old nurse who dominated the house, and awed, just a bit, by the splendour of her daughter.

Mahala was too weighty and too stately for Juliet, but she was not offensive. There was dignity in her role, and some skill. Never had the company been more heartily applauded than at the curtain calls, and Andy shouted, 'The miracle's happened! The closing notice will come down on Thursday, and the tour will go over!'

To Mahala, this probably meant no more than the fact that she was now nightly queen of Dressing Room 1--the star's dressing-room. It is doubtful if it ever occurred to her that any other star would ever have the impudence to come along and occupy it later. If she had been so profoundly imaginative as to think about it at all, she would have seen those few cubic feet of air known sacredly forever after, through all history, as 'Miss Mahala Vale's Dressing-room'. She really was wrong, though. Four days later a celebrated lady strip-teaser who had never heard of Mahala was treating the room as exclusively hers.

Monday morning, slightly sweating in the zero cold as they drove up to the great high-school building, stage-frightened as he had never been on the stage, Zed addressed a high school at assembly hour.

Bethel sat in the very back of the auditorium and adored him, and watched the teachers, in the row of seats beside her, being astonished by him. That strong face, not ironed out by spiritual massage like most Americans to-day, that face of a strong workman, became the glowing face of a poet, the profound face of a scholar, as he told them, with simple confession, that to him the theatre was both scrupulous priesthood and eager adventure.

And after the performance, Monday night, before they went to the Pullman which they had engaged for the whole week, it was Zed who gave them a party. A rather simple party: beer and tomato-and-bacon sandwiches, at Mike's Le Bon Louvre Lunchroom, but friendly.

Tony Murphy, the Trotsky of the party, arose with a toast:

'Andy, if we get many audiences as good as to-night, the tour will go on. And if it does, I want to get in under the line, and not have you think I'm turning decent just because I'm sure of the cakes. I'm afraid I've done a little crabbing. I swear I didn't mean to. I guess it's just a bad habit I've got. And now that the Boyle--of whom I may say that I fell for her like a ton of brick--has gone, and we're all a roughneck bunch of American troupers--including you, Hugh, who have practically lived down London and have gotten converted to liking ice water--I think we'll do something. But of course the big idea of this toast is that all of us now get up and tell Mahala and Bethel they did a perfectly magnificent job to-night, and they got a lot of swell poetry and a grand quick tempo into their performances, and we're proud of them as hell. Skoal!'

And so they were all very happy, even if Bethel did hear Mahala croak to Jeff Hoy, as they settled down on the train, 'Andy cheerful? He ought to be! He's saving a thousand bucks a week on the Boyle's salary, and if maybe I'm not as good as she is, I haven't played it for a quarter of a century!'

The tour had begun to drain Bethel's secure youthfulness, and, for almost the first time in her life, she could not sleep. She lay in her rocking berth, listening to the car wheels till the strain rose to an intolerable wakefulness. She tried to read herself to sleep, but she read herself awake. She turned off the bed-head light in this tiny, low-ceiled rolling home of hers, raised the curtain and watched the specks of light streak by.

Who were they out there, awake in isolated farmhouses so late, cold wind in cottonwood groves and the cold timbers crackling? . . . She saw herself as the young farmwife, with her first baby coming, lying in a spool bed--what memory was that?--with the doctor watching. But he was not the doctor of the chromos, whiskered and weighty; he was young and fiery, as rough and scolding as Zed.

But the young husband who stood back in the shadows had the solicitous kindness of Andy Deacon.

And Bethel was asleep, while the lone lights hurried by.

She had been alive and competent as Lady Capulet; no amateurishness and no languishing. She had merited the good hand at the curtain call. But she never would know that the 'spontaneous applause' on her first exit had been about as spontaneous as a department-store Santa Claus.

Doc Keezer, as he had done a hundred times on half a hundred tours, had been kneeling way down left, just behind the tormentor, and at her exit had given one mighty smack of his hands. That had started the clapping of the innocent audience for the innocent Bethel, and everybody had been very happy about it, including Doc.

The Andy who vowed to Bethel that he had become so economical that he was washing his own socks in his hotel bathroom had had the Topeka morning-paper review telegraphed ahead, and it greeted them at their hotel in Wichita:

One of the most significant theatrical events with which Topeka has been favoured in years, equal to seeing Our Helen in Victoria Regina, was the performance last evening of the 'Romeo and Juliet in Modern Dress' company, starring Andrew Deacon and Mahala Vale. Their performance, brought up to date, made the famous old love story seem as real as the boy and girl next door. We understand that Miss Vale, who turned out a first-rate performance full of beauty and wearing clothes that made the hearts of all feminine auditors go pit-a-pat, and Miss Bethel Merriday, who turned Mrs. Capulet from the ordinary stuffed shirt of hackneyed theatrical tradition into a darling, fussy old lady, are new to their roles. We wish them every success, and predict for them a great future. Who can be pessimistic about the Theatre of To-morrow when he sees lovely young ladies like these give such skill and devotion?

'Swell! This tour's just begun!' said Andy.

'Maybe it was my being scared and not my skill at playing fussiness,' said Bethel.

'What a lousy review! My first chance at Juliet, and all that reporter could find to talk about was my clothes--and they just some rags we picked up in St. Louis,' said Mahala.

Andy had another rich cousin in Wichita--Andy had other rich cousins almost everywhere, but the Wichita example was a particularly luscious widow, with a Renaissance house containing the interior of a beech-panelled room from a dismantled château in Touraine. She invited the cast, entire, for an after-theatre rout.

Zed descended on Bethel. 'Going to the party?'

'Oh, I don't know; I haven't anything to wear.'

Zed took a fifty-cent piece out of his left-hand lower vest pocket and put it in the right.

'Eh?'

'I just bet myself on what you'd say. You know, pet, you're just the opposite to Iris. You need bringing out. You need to be pushed into grabbing your own kingdom. You'll probably become a competent actress, and then a theatrical miser, like Doc or Mabel; you'll save everything, including your ability, and so land up in a two-room cottage and spend your declining years reading your Iowa clippings. You could be beautiful, in a timid sort of way, but you let yourself look like the housemaid. Come on, I'm going to take you out now, before I make my high-school speech, and make you buy a swell party dress. There's a good department store here.'

'No, no, no!' wailed Bethel. 'I've paid all my debts, and now I want something to make me secure while I find my next job.'

'I'll buy you one.'

'You will not!'

'Why not?'

'I don't like you well enough.'

'"A whining mammet, in her fortune's tender, to answer"--"I'll not let you be my friend, and blow me to a single decent dress." Okay. Hell with you!'

Zed slammed on his disreputable hat and walked out of the hotel lobby, and she could not tell whether his pickle-ish aspect was from real dislike or a sour approbation of her remarkable virtue.

So she went in her habitual blue taffeta to the noise and milling and rum punch at the Rich Cousin's Château, but Zed's jeering had given her what actors call a 'mental hazard'--the blind spot in the mind whereby, for some reason obscure and absurd, you never can remember one certain word in a speech. Andy seemed desirous of bringing her out, of making his cousin understand that here was his pride and his darling, but Bethel flinched and turned silent, and the unquenchable Mahala--that longer-legged Iris--stepped in.

Apparently, with the success at Topeka and a good house to-night in Wichita and with this view of a new and richer cousin, Mahala again saw Andy as a most estimable young artist. She danced with him and wriggled at him . . . And the amiable Andy fell, and Bethel stood back in an indecisive rage at Andy's indecisiveness.

Before the party there had been the inevitable trunk-packing in her dressing-room that had always been her worst chore, except for dragging your own bags across the waiting-room and heaving them up to a train platform, in towns where there were too few redcaps and the train halted only three minutes. Now that she was Lady Capulet, she had twice as much to pack, and this back-breaking stooping, this fussy patting of frocks on hangers, this trying to force shut a trunk that was too full, was enough to soil the glory of acting.

She went so far as to yelp at Doc, in the next dressing-room, 'Oh, for one week when we could leave everything hung up in the dressing-room!' Appalled at her own sharp voice, she went to Doc's door and implored him, 'I'm sorry. I didn't think I'd ever be the kind of actress that kicks all the time.'

He laughed at her.

'My dear, if you never kicked, I'd know that you were just another amateur that only takes one tour, and finds everything just lovely--even railway-stations, beans and no water in the dressing-room--and raves so much about it that it makes the rest of us low, beefing, vulgar troupers sick, and then goes home and never tours again. Darned if I know which is the real mark of the professional--not to kick at the right things or always to kick at the wrong ones. You're a trouper now!'

It considerably increased Bethel's dislike of packing that Mahala now had her own maid.

This was a pretty young coloured girl whom they had acquired in St. Louis. Mahala, herself long a nightly kicker about the horrors of packing, could now sit in ecstasy, before the after-theatre party, and watch her dresser do the work. And into every conversation she could, and did, lug a reference to 'her dresser'.

And as she packed to-night, remembering Zed's admonition to be gaudier, Bethel noticed how all her small sacred possessions were becoming shabby. Her Lady Capulet gowns too, made over from Mahala's, were shabby. She realized that all the costumes of the company now shamelessly showed red stains at the neck from grease paint, and two or three of the men were becoming slack about make-up. Tony Murphy, who at the beginning had always been in his dressing-room three-quarters of an hour before curtain rise, now rushed in, smelling of beer, just at the fifteen-minute call, and sometimes he went on still wearing his street shoes.

All this frightened her about the fate of the tour even more than Andy's whisper that, for all the size and enthusiasm of the audiences in Topeka and Wichita, they hadn't quite met expenses.

Topeka and Wichita were metropolises, with 66,000 and 115,000 population. But Dalesburg, Kansas, in which they awoke on Wednesday morning, was not so mammoth. It had 27,000 population, and the theatre was a motion-picture house, with too large an auditorium, an almost total lack of acoustics, and an audience trained to believe that seventy-five cents should be the top for all theatre seats. Even Zed's passionate exposition, at the high school in the afternoon, of the superior emotional orgies of the living stage did not move Dalesburg.

Four hundred and twenty people huddled protectively together in the centre of an auditorium meant for thirteen hundred. They felt naked to the cold prairie winds, and were afraid to laugh or to give that sighing shiver which tells the actors that a love scene is 'going over'.

It is a fable that the 'fourth wall' of the stage is empty. There, massed, are the most influential part of the cast: the audience. On their acting, their timing, their professional training, depends the contributory vividness of the rest of the cast. And audiences differ, from night to night, at least as much as individual actors. An untrained audience is as uncomfortable a collaborator as an untrained surgeon or an untrained lover.

To-night's audience, at Dalesburg, was the clammiest the company had ever encountered, and it was not entirely the fault of Mr. Andrew Deacon & Associates if they played Romeo and Juliet like the last week of a lawsuit. It wasn't merely that they dropped lines; they didn't know whether they dropped them or not.

To-night, after the show, instead of his usual benedictory 'Another day, another dollar', Doc Keezer grunted, 'Well, got the chores done again, and the cattle are all safe for the night. Ain't this a hell of a way to earn a living!'

With exasperating innocence Andy went on supposing that it was a good notion to escort Bethel and Mahala to the train together. To-night, at Dalesburg, the three of them came out of the theatre into a world blind with snow, a half-gale that felt uneasy and threatening, like the gasping pause before a thunderstorm.

Dalesburg was almost taxiless. The citizens felt as suspicious about a stranger who wasn't driving his own private car as their cattle-herding grandfathers had about a stranger with no visible horse.

The three tired and unromantic workers, idle singers of an idle day in a town where idleness was discreditable, wavered through snow and blast, holding together, skidding across ice-scurfed street crossings. They saw the lights of the bleak station as heaven, and crawled silently into their berths on the Pullman.

The journey from Dalesburg to their next stand, Alhambra, was supposed to take two hours and a quarter--their Pullman to be picked up by the three-a.m. Westbound, to arrive at a quarter past five and lie in the yards till seven. But when Bethel shivered awake at eight in the morning and pulled up her window shade, she saw, through an unnatural grey night, that they were somewhere out in the country, in a confusion of cruelly charging snow. She dressed hastily . . . On tour, washing and powdering become rapid and none too delicate . . . Andy, invariably the first of the caravan to awaken and be disgustingly cheerful, was typing at a portable machine in his drawing-room.

'Yump. Full blizzard. We may be stuck here all day, and late for the show to-night,' he chanted. 'Sit down, darling. I've got some coffee coming.'

And all day long everybody drank coffee from the diner on the stranded train, and played cards, and tried to do charades, and talked about exactly three things: the blizzard, 1 per cent; Hitler and Stalin, 1 ¹/₂ per cent; and the theatre, 97 ¹/₂ per cent. They were gay, they sang, but all of them except such veteran troupers as Doc and Challis and Mabel felt apprehensively that they would starve here, or here, in nameless frozen farm lands, they would freeze to death. Every time they looked out of the windows the smother of snow seemed, beyond all mathematics, to be twice as thick. And though the train heating system, hitched to the great Western locomotive, did its best, outside it was five above zero, and the Pullman grew steadily colder, so that you beheld Juliet wearing her pink bathrobe over her furs, and Lord Capulet with a blanket around his shoulders.

The dining-car supplies were, by two in the afternoon, reduced to coffee and griddle cakes.

The train moved now and then, perhaps a mile; and everybody jumped up and laughed and said that in Alhambra they would have a 'lovely great, big, juicy steak, in a warm dining-room'. They now saw Alhambra as a combination of Simpson's Chop House and a beach in Samoa.

By five in the afternoon the storm had thinned to a nasty grey fog. The train moved on, slowly, and at eight in the evening they arrived in Alhambra.

The actors could have dined and been made up and have started the show by eight-thirty, but the scenery had to be trucked to the theatre, through the tail of the blizzard. Everybody hoped that there would be no show, but Andy hurried to the theatre and back and announced that a few hardy lovers of the Bard were already seated, and he hoped to have the curtain up by nine-thirty. They all sat down to dinner in the Alhambra House, which still has vinegar cruets, and there was no question any longer about the steak being lovely, great, big or juicy. There wasn't any steak.

Now Alhambra was not so mammoth as Dalesburg. It had nine thousand population, and the theatre wasn't a theatre--it was the auditorium of the high school.

At eight-thirty, Andy commanded them, 'Take your time and eat. I'm going to the shop and try to keep the customers amused. Zed, I want you to come with me. You can talk better than I can. You wouldn't do some ventriloquist tricks for them, would you?'

'I would not!' yelped the outraged Zed, but he went along.

At nine-fifteen, word came to them from Zed that they hoped to have the curtain up at ten, that sixty-seven patrons were waiting, and that his ventriloquism had gone over big.

Not even Tony Murphy or Jeff Hoy suggested that it was foolish to give the play at all. Whatever lamentable crimes they might conceal, they were troupers.

As they ran along the streets, the town, with its warm lights shut away from them behind frost-glittering windows, seemed dug-in and unfriendly to vagabonds.

The dressing-rooms were classrooms, and Bethel was so taken back to Point Royal College and A Doll's House that she giggled as she sat in a row with Mahala, Mabel, Charlotte, Iris and Vera, their small mirrors on school desks and their rouge and mascara staining the virgin maple slabs dedicated to Evangeline and the square of X.

And that night, before sixty-seven patrons, they played well.

For the sixty-seven, feeling as heroic as the actors themselves, were a good audience who were willing to enjoy themselves, and the whole show had the gay insanity of a Christmas party in snowbound mountains.

But to-night was Thursday, and to-night the closing notice did not come down.

The call board was hung in the school corridor, and the closing notice was still on it. Bethel thought of A Tale of Two Cities and the aristocrats awaiting the morning's list of the condemned. The company sneaked to it, one by one, and stood in a shaky group, re-re-reading it.

'It would come during a blizzard,' sighed Tudor Blackwall.

'Say, Andy couldn't just possibly have forgotten to take it down?' hoped Harry Purvis.

But Andy came by, glanced at the notice, regretfully patted Hugh Challis's shoulder and passed on.

Between acts Andy called Bethel into his star dressing-room--which was the office of the high-school principal. Not speaking, he held her to him. He was shaking; he seemed to be weeping without tears.

'The tour's really over, then?' she said.

'Yes. Finish on Saturday. I wish I could say something in excuse, Beth.'

'I wish I could say something in comfort!'

'Your being here comforts me. You're the only one, baby, that I want to see . . . I think that the latest bulletin, as of five minutes ago, is that Mahala again considers me a poor young man.'

It was inconceivable that she should be so intimate with this king whom she had seen red-gold on his red-gold throne six months ago; but it was doubly and tragically inconceivable that she shouldn't very much care, and that the touch of his hand should be only the amiable contact of a passing friend.

He explained to her the deadly financial aspect of the closing--and after that not even all her fancy could give her hope.

They needed about six thousand dollars a week barely to pay expenses, and on one-night stands, with only six performances a week, that meant a gross of a thousand dollars a performance. In Topeka they had grossed $856.50; in Wichita, $922.70; in Dalesburg, $368.75; but to-night, with the blizzard, they hadn't done quite so well--they had just $99.65 in the box office.

'And so,' said Andy, quite cheerful now that he had pencil in hand, 'that means an average loss of about four hundred dollars a day, spread over the past four days--and all I have in the world is enough to finish up this week and take us back to New York. I'll be paying these debts for the next ten years. Well, it's been worth it. The Forty-niners never had so much fun as a theatrical tour--with Hugh and Zed and Mabel and you!'

After the play the younger members of the company left the two available taxicabs, which were Ford sedans, to the seniors and ran to the station, Zed and Lyle dragging Bethel through the cold hell of wind that bit her nose, through the great sculptured snowdrifts that were golden with purple shadows under the street lights. And then, since their Pullman would not have heat till it was connected with a locomotive, they waited for the train in a small station waiting-room stinking with cheap tobacco, overheated from a sheet-iron box stove whose sides turned cherry. Douglas Fry brought out a Temple Hamlet, and they passed it from hand to hand, reading aloud. Zed made the astonished station agent, in his coop, seem to be saying, 'This is the brightest night I've had since Edwin Booth was here when he was out with Tobacco Road'.

Doc Keezer forgot the sanctified, the basic rule of all trouping, which is, 'I love you, dearie, but carry your own suitcase', and dragged across the street to a decayed boarding-house and brought back a gallon of coffee. The train came in, and they panted to lift their bags aboard before it should contemptuously pull off without them, and, half undressed, they fell into a dense sleep, and awoke to tranquil sunshine on the snow in the vastly greater town of New Prague . . . population 16,000!

They still had to get through to the fatal Saturday night.

In New Prague, Friday night, they were so successful, their take was so large, that Andy lost only about two hundred and fifty dollars that beautiful starry evening.

And so they came to Pike City and to the end.

Pike City had seven thousand population; it was much the smallest town in which they had played, and the most barren. The New York booking office, which controlled their fate with all of Providence's indifference to results, had sent them there because in Pike City was the Santa Fe Trail Opera House, the grand old theatre in which four thousand people, cowmen and gamblers and ladies of a certain fashion, had once listened to Melba and Patti. Pike City had been larger then and more famous than Dodge City, and its saloons more crimson. There was still a reckless, friendly, pioneer blood in the people, but the Romeo Company had no chance to encounter this. All they saw was one long street, open at either end to the hungry ferocity of the winter plains, unprotected and most unprotective of the tender arts, and on either side of it, streets that after a scattering of small wooden houses wandered off discouraged and were lost on the prairie.

'This,' said Andy, at the frame hotel where he would send his final telegrams, make his final gay long-distance calls, 'is really the jumping-off place'.

Before an audience next in smallness to the blizzard-blown huddle at Alhambra, they gave, as their last performance, the best they had ever done. They played like a May breeze; there was a lightness to Mahala's pedestrian Juliet; Andy was so manly and incurably young that Bethel, glowing from the wings, fell in love with him all over again; Zed was a newly polished blade; and Bethel, Lady Capulet, had an inner light.

She had youthfully imagined that at the end they would all sing 'Auld Lang Syne', or else that all the feuds of Tony and Zed and Jeff against Andy would break out in unconcealed brawling, now that school was over. But everybody packed mechanically, as on an ordinary night. Doc Keezer could be heard calmly arguing that Raymond Massey had played Shakespeare, and the Tony who had always planned to have a three-day drunk when the run was over was gurgling bottled orangeade in his dressing-room.

Mr. Andrew Deacon was responsible for transporting all of them back to New York. As far as Chicago they would occupy the Pullman which, since St. Louis, had been their home. It would be hitched on an eastbound train that left Pike City just after midnight, so there was no time for parties, for regrets, and they hastened direct from theatre to train.

Bethel saw that Andy was innocent of baggage. 'Where is your stuff?' she wondered. Then he admitted it:

'I'm not going with you to New York. I'll follow in a few days, but I have to stay here in Pike City, and, uh, finish up some bills and things. I'll come soon, and then we'll talk about our next theatrical venture, kitten.'

This story he told to half a dozen. They all accepted it; they were busy admiring the bunch of roses for each of the women that he had conjured out of Pike City. Mahala said that they must dine together next week. But Bethel noted that Andy got out of the Pullman, still on a siding, needlessly early, and as he stood on the cinder-lined ground looking up at it, there was a youthful desperation about him . . . It would not be impossible that, left alone here, in a spasm of loneliness and depression and humiliation, he might--

She busied herself with quietly moving her bags one by one to the farther vestibule platform of the Pullman; then, in the darkness, lifting them down to the ground and carrying them to the station platform. She rejoined the bustling, home-going exiles in the Pullman; she talked of the beauties of New York, but as the Pullman was attached to the train, she slipped out to the vestibule again.

She looked back, perhaps for the last time, at her beloved family: kind Doc and Mabel, already playing pinochle, handsome old Hugh Challis and--

She could not endure looking long at him, but her whole vision was flooded with the sight of Zed Wintergeist as he wedged himself in a seat between piles of books. His shoulders were relaxing, strong shoulders on which she would never rest her forehead. If she was to go, if for loyalty she was to give up Zed, it must be quickly.

She scuttled down from the vestibule to the platform, on the dark side of the train, just before the porter closed the vestibule doors.

When the train moved away, with Andy running beside it and waving . . . and crying . . . she was watching from the station waiting-room.

Andy tramped away, up Main Street. She left her bags with the friendly night operator at the station and followed him.

He entered Pete's Lunch--one of the scores of Pete's Lunches they had known since New York. He sat at the end of a long marble-topped table and ordered a hamburger and coffee . . . Two nights ago she had been taken back to the memory of dressing for A Doll's House; now, in the spiral of life, she was taken back seven years further, to Caryl McDermid and Elsie Krall at a beanery table in Sladesbury.

She sat two chairs away from him; she ordered coffee in a half-whisper. Andy did not see her for two minutes. Then he raised his head, stared at her, dropped his eyes, looked at her again yes, a 'double take', right out of farce technique--and said, as inevitably he must say, 'What are you doing here? Did the train stop?'

'No. I did. I was worried about you.'

'I couldn't stand seeing any of them again, except you, and I didn't see how I could detach you from the others. I'm glad you did the detaching.'

'What are you going to do, Andy?'

'Before I finish this hamburger sandwich, I'm going to decide whether I'll take my estimable place in Uncle Alex Pilchard's bank, or start writing to the theatre managers--the real managers!--for a job. And I suppose that decision will govern the rest of my life.'

'But aren't you broke? You shouldn't have bought us roses. And listen, Andy, if you are broke--please let me!--I've saved up a little--'

'Darling! I can wire home for enough to get back to New York--though as my faithful secretary you know that's all I can get, now!'

'But you'll come back to the stage.'

'You bet I will!'

With one of the complete changes she had often seen in Andy, he was suddenly confident.

'And I won't just go on acting, either. I'll be producing again, in a couple of years. Maybe as early as this year, I'll have a summer theatre again--and not with Roscoe Valentine--I don't like the way he gyps the students. I know where I can get one for almost nothing. And I have plans: A big Shaw festival in summer, like the musical festival at Stockbridge! A New York stock company! I can do it now. I've learned my lesson on this tour. Better casting and stricter discipline. Oh, a thousand things I want to do. . . .'

He raved on, while Bethel was glad to hear the youth in his assured voice. He ended abruptly with:

'And that's why I want you to marry me, kitten!'

'Eh?'

'Sort of funny, isn't it!--proposing to you at Pete's Lunch, in Pike City, Kansas, with the counterman trying to hear what we're saying! But it wasn't till I thought you'd gone off on the train and I was left flat that I realized how for months I've depended on your affection and loyalty and good sense--and your eyes--always such a gay light in them. Oh, my Beth, I do long to:

'seize On the white wonder of dear--Bethel's--hand And steal immortal blessing from her lips.'

He was holding her hand so tenderly, his smile was so expectant, that only by compulsion could she make herself speak:

'Andy, you don't love me the least bit--really love--just all out--nothing held back.'

'Why of course I do!'

'No.'

'But anyway, Beth, you love me a little?'

'I don't think so. You're my dearest friend, but you don't make me into any kind of a glorious fool!'

At that moment Zed Wintergeist walked into the lunchroom and came up to them, observing without any punctuation:

'It's a damn good thing that train stops at a junction two miles out I managed to get a fellow to drive me here he stung me five dollars to drive me here the dirty hound Bethel come here and stop this nonsense you know we love each other and stop this nonsense hello Andy.'

Andy spoke. Bethel didn't hear too much of it because her face was against Zed's coat, which seemed to have grown enormous and enveloping. But the end of Andy's oration, presented with reason and a good deal of manly indignation, was:

'. . . I've stood a lot of impertinence from you, Zed, but when it comes to your trying to rush my girl off her feet by your backwoods tactics, I'm--I'm not going to stand it!'

Zed answered cheerfully, 'Sorry, old man, I really am, but this seems to have been settled for us.'

'Will you kindly sit down and give me a chance to talk?'

'Okay. I'm hungry.'

Zed casually dropped her into a chair, yanked out a chair for himself, ordered Western sandwiches all around, and commanded Andy, 'Shoot!'

But it was at Bethel that Andy scolded:

'I can understand your being fascinated by Zed. But he'll make you horribly unhappy. He'll be cruel. And he'll never be true to you.'

Zed cried, with none of his mockery, 'That's a lie! I will be true to her. I've grown up that much, these last few weeks. Beth, please believe that!'

Andy was going on--to Bethel:

'Never. And he'll ignore you. He'll scoff at your dearest beliefs. He represents the return of barbarism to the theatre, the revolt against civilization: lights and sound tracks and trick stages instead of beauty and dignity. He belongs with a Wild West Show. He's one of the young men who get credit for genius by wearing flannel shirts and never getting their hair cut. You can't see him in a gracious New England farmhouse!'

Quite cheerfully this time, Zed interrupted again: 'I don't know about that. The guy's a good actor. Maybe he could learn to feed clover to a polo pony--is that what you feed polo ponies?'

Zed had stopped gobbling his sandwich long enough to hold Bethel's hand. The back of her hand felt cold against the marble top of the table.

From Andy:

'I won't say anything about your rudeness, Zed. Or your letch for power over everybody around you. Or your contempt for the gentler drama, like Barrie. You are a good actor. You have power and a love of life, and that's what we chiefly need in the theatre. But I think it's time to speak of myself a little! Before you charged in, I was telling Beth of some of my future plans. I'm not sure that, without her help, I can tackle them. I need her more than ever, now that I'm completely broke--'

Zed snarled, 'What does a scion like you mean by "completely broke"? Only got a hundred thousand dollars left?'

Andy counted the bills in his fold, the change in his pockets.

'It means that I have, in the whole world, exactly seventeen dollars and forty-three cents--plus a promise from my mother that I shall not get one cent more from her, beyond car-fare to New York, until she dies. Maybe I really do need a little coddling.'

Zed stood up abruptly; he spoke earnestly; he looked worn.

'Yes. You do need her, Andy. And when you need her so much, she won't desert you. This is the one thing that could lick me. And so: good-bye and bless you both.'

He had started for the door. Bethel flew after him, tugged at his sleeve. 'Don't! Zed! I won't give you up again! I won't!'

Zed turned with a smile like heaven.

'Not even for what you think is your duty? You love me enough to give up your baby, your Andy?'

'Oh, Zed, I don't know how much I love you, but I love you!'

That was late at night on Saturday, January 21st, in Pike City, Kansas.

They were married in Pike City on Monday the 23rd, and Andy, the best man, wasn't too insultingly cheerful about it, and Zed lent him the money for his fare back to New York.

On Thursday, February 16th, Bethel awoke in their 'one-room apartment' in the Hotel Mountbatten, on West Forty-eighth Street, and smiled at the sleeping Zed, who was sternly clutching his pillow, with nothing much of him to be seen but his thick hair.

In dressing-gown and mules, she cooked their breakfast of fried eggs and toast and coffee. Their kitchen was a percolator, a two-burner electric stove, and a pint-sized electric icebox in the bathroom, and their dining-room did not for the moment exist, since it was a folding card-table stowed under the bed.

She was singing, minutely, happily.

She went over to kiss his ear and cry, 'Breakfast! Wake up, stupid, or we'll be late for rehearsal.'

She gave her lord and master the morning paper.

'Looks like war in Europe before 1939 is over,' he yawned. 'If America gets into it, I'll be just right for cannon fodder--strong young gent with no dependants but a smart wife who can support herself by high-class refined work on the stage.'

'Will you go in?' fretted Bethel.

'That's like asking somebody if he'll go into an earthquake if it comes along, or just ignore it. My only propaganda is against these apologetic actors who say that their work seems insignificant compared with the big events abroad. Now's just the time when every artist has got to take even his tiniest job more seriously than ever, so that civilization may have a chance to go on. Come on, pet. Let's get going.'

They trotted, arm in arm, two blocks over to the Acanthus Theatre; entered it proudly not by the stage door but at the front.

In that dark Mammoth Cave, Bethel sighed like one happily at home. Only the stage was lighted. On it, Nathan Eldred the stage manager and Jerome Jordan O'Toole the director were moving chairs about, to outline an imaginary set that would represent a New York penthouse.

It was the first rehearsal of Alas in Arcady, a comedy about a world-weary New Yorker who was smug about his cosmopolitan vices until he went for vacation to a New England village and, among the young jitterbugs, discovered that he was nothing but an old-fashioned Puritan.

Zed was to play a country beau, and Bethel his girl, whom the alarmed urbanite tried to reform.

'We may not have another chance to play together till we organize our own company--as we will!--so let's enjoy it, my rabbit,' said Zed.

O'Toole shook hands. 'Glad to see you children. Here's your parts. I'll give you an hour to look 'em over, and then we'll start right in walking the play.'

A man with silver hair but a face round and youngish marched out on the stage.

'Do you know Caryl McDermid?' said O'Toole. 'This is Mr. and Mrs. Zed Wintergeist--Beth Merriday.'

'I've never had the pleasure of seeing them before,' said McDermid, 'but I've heard a great deal about you, Zed. I hear you're our future Sacha Guitry. It'll be a pleasure to play with you.'

'Beth is to be your daughter, Caryl--on the stage, I mean,' said O'Toole.

'Off-stage too, I hope, when we get into the terrors of touring,' said McDermid. 'Have you done any touring, Miss Merriday?'

'Oh, sure--she's a veteran trouper--she's a real actress,' said Jerome Jordan O'Toole.

'You bet she is!' said Zed.

So Bethel had come home, and it was good.

THE END