Bethel Merriday

IV

'You know Gale Amory--she's such a grand girl, you'd never expect to find her in a hen college. Well, she was to play the husband's part in Doll's House, you know, Ibsen, it was the senior-class play, and she came to rehearsal all made up like a man, I mean, double-breasted blue suit of her brother's, and she's so feminine, everybody laughed their head off. So, of course, they all began to cut up and laugh and kid their lines, and the girl who played Dr. Rank, she ran out and came back with a burnt-cork moustache, and of course, I mean that simply convulsed them, and she said in a deep voice, I mean, it was a serious line from the play, but she burlesqued it and she said, "At the next masquerade, I shall be invisible", and everybody simply howled! And then Gale goes out and puts on a moustache, too!

'Why, even Miss Bickling--Professor Bickling, who teaches Drama, Poetry, and the Novel and that coaches the plays--of course I mean she's deadly serious about art and culture and she's so fat and respectable and eyeglassy, but she got to laughing as hard as anybody, and it was terribly hard to go on with the rehearsal, but then it was such fun and after all, wasn't that the real reason for doing the play--to have fun, the last few weeks of those long four years of college?

'In fact the only person that beefed about it was Bethel Merriday; she was playing Nora, so probably she felt like a star or a prima donna or something. Beth is a sweet girl, even if she does get so daydreamy, and she's not a grind, and she certainly does share her candy and introduce her dates around. But for some reason or other, she takes plays so doggone seriously. And she turned on Gale and she had a regular fit of temperament and she screamed, "Will you take off that fool moustache and quit trying to play Room Service? You haven't got the slightest idea yet whether, as the husband, you're supposed to be a stupid, decent book-keeper, or a sadistic stuffed shirt, or what, and here dress rehearsal is only a week away!"

'Well! You did have to admire Bethel, mostly so quiet, like a sparrow, standing up to that big Gale Amory, but still--

'Poor Miss Bickling looked so uncomfortable. Of course she was supposed to be coaching the play, but all she ever said to any of the actors was, "I don't know--maybe if it feels awkward to stand there so long, you better move around a little, and make some gestures--that's it: try to think up some gestures that will look interesting", or "Maybe you better speak a little louder". So when Bethel butted in like this, Miss Bickling was embarrassed as the dickens. She was kind of fond of Bethel, because she always read poetry aloud so lovely, but of course she couldn't stand a tantrum like this, and she said, "Bethel, dear, I know you're very interested in drama, but after all, this is college, and we want to act like ladies and not like paid actresses, don't we!"

'"No, I don't," Bethel said.

'Imagine!'

It was seven years--or seven excited moments--since Bethel had talked to the Caryl McDermids. The time was May 19th, 1938; twelve days before she would become twenty-two, three and a half weeks before she would graduate from Point Royal College for Women, in Connecticut. To-night she would be starring in A Doll's House, but this afternoon, at the panicky, hastily called extra rehearsal, it did not look as though there would be any senior-class play whatever.

The dress rehearsal, last night, had lasted till two a.m., and it had been scandalous. Miss Gale Amory, as Torvald Helmer, did not know her part, and whenever the prompt girl--a terrified and outlawed freshman, crouched on a chair, almost hanging her head inside the window in the right wall--was able to find her place in the script and to throw the line to Miss Amory in an edgy whisper, Miss Amory screamed, 'Please! I can't hear you'. Nils Krogstad did know her, or his, part, but she wasn't sure whether she was a comic villain who ought to close one eye and tap her nose, or a Russian victim of fate who talked deep down and inaudibly. She tried it both ways.

The amateur stagehands had dropped one of the flats for the rear wall and torn a gash, and not till the dress rehearsal had anyone discovered that the music of the third-act tarantella, conveyed by an aged phonograph, could not be heard in the second row.

Bethel was better than that. She did know her part, and she could be heard, and she had some notion that Nora was an amiable little housewife who had never been trained by responsibility. Whether she shouted too loud and wrung her hands too much is a matter of opinion, but just now the appalled Professor Miss Bickling looked on Bethel as a combination of Nazimova and Max Reinhardt, and it may be that our Bethel, just for the day, felt that way herself.

This afternoon, five hours before the performance, they were, with glue and frenzy, repairing the irreparable. Six people were cuing Miss Amory all at once. Miss Bickling was urging Krogstad to take it easy, and Bethel was begging Krogstad to take it hard.

The rest of the time, Bethel was standing absent-eyed in corners, muttering 'Noyesterdayitwasparticularlynoticeableyouseepausehesuffersfromadreadfulillness'. The college engineer--a male, and no artist--was patching the ripped canvas of the flat, and one of the girl musicians was practising a Spanish dance on a hastily imported piano, so placed behind scenes that no one could reach the dressing-rooms without banging her legs on the keyboard. The pianist, though she would not be seen by the audience at all, already had such stage fright that her music sounded like terrified teeth.

In the midst of this merriment Miss Bickling received a message, beamed, and called Bethel aside, with 'What are your plans for the summer, Beth?'

'I guess I'll just stay home.'

'But you still want to try and go on the stage, in the fall?'

'Yes. Anyway, I'll tackle all the managers on Broadway. They might give me a chance as walk-on.'

'What's a walk-on?'

'It's where you walk--on.'

'I see. Well, of course I think being a librarian or getting married or going to Switzerland is more educated than being an actress, but still--You'd like to act in one of the summer theatres, wouldn't you?'

'Oh yes, but I wouldn't have a chance.'

'You know, I tell all my girls that I look after their careers just as much as I do their conjunctions, and I've used all my "pull", as you girls call it, and to-night, right in the audience, will be two ve-ry celebrated proprietors of summer theatres in southern Connecticut--Mr. Roscoe Valentine and Mr. Jerome Jordan O'Toole.'

'Oh dear!' said Bethel.

At dinner in Bemis Hall, before the play, it was dismaying to Bethel that none of the girls were nervous and taut like herself; six hundred hearty young women, gulping chicken hash, clattering their forks, yawning, shrieking about biology and the boys, and making up their lips; carefree and pink and scornful. How could she make them believe in Nora to-night?

She ate her pudding (cornstarch pudding with canned raspberries) as slowly as possible, to put off the terrifying hour of going to Assembly Hall, their temporary theatre. She tried to smile cordially while the girl beside her related with vulgar cheerfulness her experiences with a canoe, a portable radio and a C.C.N.Y. man. They were precisely such experiences as the girl's mother had had with a canoe, a banjo and a Princeton man, and to Bethel they seemed antiquated compared with the woes of the Nora who had first slammed her door sixty years ago.

She wanted to escape from these chatterers, but as she slipped out of Bemis Hall, a LaSalle drove up, and in it were her father and mother and brother and Charley Hatch.

'We thought we'd drive down and surprise you and see you act!' cried each of the four, in turn--so smiling, so sweet, so devastating.

'Oh, that's dandy! I'll see you right after the show. Come backstage!' she chirruped, while she was quaking that it was going to be bad enough to forget her lines and make herself ridiculous before the jeering students and two summer-theatre managers, without giving herself away to her trusting family.

She cried for a good two minutes in her dressing-room, which until one hour ago had been the consultation room of the Professor of Pedagogy and Vocational Psychology; she rolled her head on her dressing-table, which had been the professor's desk, covered with graphs about the relationship of coffee drinking at lunch to the three-p.m. sale of (a) automobile tyres, (b) Dopey Dolls, (c) advertising-column-inches in trade journals. She did not belong with graphs or anything else that was new and brisk and important in A.D. 1938.

She was pale enough always; now she felt herself funereal; and as she shakily started to make up, she plastered her cheeks with a vermilion base and felt better and braver about it. She knew nothing about make-up, but then, neither did the college theatrical dictator, Miss Bickling, who would have felt it rather low to let Ophelia associate with blue lining salve. The one thing Bethel was convinced of was that you always use heavy grease paint and always extend your eyebrows with burnt cork (which you don't). She was proud of slapping her face with powder and getting the powder all over a huge apron she had borrowed from the Bemis Hall kitchen.

While she made up, she stared now and then, like a solemn child, at the portrait of Professor Maria Martin Mitz being vocationally psychological in cap and gown.

When Bethel was done, she looked like an extravagantly painted doll, with very red cheeks, very long black brows, and a very white little nose absurd in the middle of the sunset. Later to-night, on the stage, the effect would not be improved by lighting that was a ferocious illumination by spots, with no gelatins to soften the glare. But nobody minded. The college dramatic enthusiasts--if they were going to have make-up, they wanted it made up, and no nonsense.

To Bethel and the other members of the cast, Professor Miss Bickling was of the greatest help. She came in every two minutes and patted their shoulders and cooed, 'I know you're going to be just wonderful, dear, and be sure now and don't forget your lines'. This was a mild form of what was known in Point Royal College as a 'pep talk', and it had, on writhing amateur actresses, the effect of so irritating them that they were sure now and did forget their lines.

Despite this balk, Bethel was much clearer than at dress rehearsal as to how she saw Nora's shrill little character. She had asked Miss Bickling about it all, and the benevolent professor, who kept culture as she would have kept a tearoom, had purred, 'You mean you want to break down the character? Oh, leave all that psychological fussing to the left-wing theatre. It hasn't anything to do with Art. Just be careful to say the lines as the author wrote them--only, you must say them beautifully, of course--lines like "Never to see the children again--oh, that black icy water"--and then you can't go wrong.'

But, in rebellion, Bethel had tried to think out by herself what Nora really was; what she herself was, as Nora; and having heard the whole cast and Miss Bickling agree that Nora was a very nice young married woman who suffered from an unimaginative husband, Bethel was agitated to find that she considered Nora a fool, in expecting a banker husband to regard forgery as just a little joke between friends, and none too kindhearted a fool, in boasting of her domestic security to the desolate Christina.

If this was true, fretted Bethel, wouldn't it be much more explosive if, in the last act, Nora were more aware of her own childishness than of her husband's stuffiness?

'I'll do her that way!' exulted Bethel. 'It'll be tremendous.'

But she had the grace to jeer, 'Of course there is the little matter of your being such an amateur that the audience won't know whether you see Nora as a gun-moll or an abbess!'

The cast took turns, feeling ever so professional, in peeping out through a hole in the curtain at the audience, which was brutally cheerful in not having to remember lines: cynical fellow-students in bright sweaters, officially cheerful professors, timid parents. Bethel could not find her own family, and felt abandoned, and she could not make out any two men who might be the fate-laden summer-theatre directors, Messrs. Valentine and O'Toole . . . Oh, what of it, what of it, what of it! They'd laugh at her feeble Nora anyway, and she'd have to go home . . . maybe marry Charley Hatch . . . no, she wouldn't . . . oh, why not?

She stood outside the double-door entrance, ready to go on at the beginning of the play. She was a small, resigned figure in a bobtailed Victorian jacket, a small bustle, a skinny fur and a prim little hat. For a moment, in panic, certain to be jeered by the audience out there, the fiendish demanding Audience, the AUDIENCE, she had been certain that she couldn't remember a single line. Now she was too numb to care. If the curtain would just go up, so she could get it over! Did the student orchestra have to go on showing off all evening? She hated the sour and trailing air of 'Weis' du wie gut'. She concentrated on the wheat-coloured canvas and the flimsy crossbar of the backstage side of the double doors. She wondered in what previous play they had been used; what the stencilled DL7 on the canvas meant.

Then she was jarred almost into screaming by Miss Bickling's loving and altogether devastating pat on her shoulder. Then silence from in front--no music, no rustle of audience. Something gone wrong? Then the stage manager's confident voice, 'Curtain's going up, Beth', and instantly, propelled by a power not her own, Bethel-Nora was scampering on the stage and saying cheerfully, her voice as steady as her hands were jittery, 'Hide the Christmas tree carefully, Ellen'.

She was Nora; she was an actress; she was born.