Bethel felt that she was acting an actress in the dressing-room rather competently--the pleased modesty, the clinging smile. In the midst of people she could make out her family, and see Charley Hatch looking at her as wistfully as a lost lone dog, Miss Bickling coming down from her synthetic ivory tower to say firmly, 'You did splendidly, and I was very angry with Gale for clowning, and I'm going in and tell her so', and a whole puppy-rollick of classmates, mocking, 'You certainly showed up the husbands, Beth!'
Miss Bickling cleared them all out. Mr. O'Toole of the Dory Playhouse was waiting; Mr. O'Toole had to get back to New York that night.
So, in glory, Bethel met her first producer.
Mr. Jerome Jordan O'Toole, at forty-five, had directed seven Broadway plays--two of them surprisingly successful--and for twenty years before that had acted chauffeurs, tramps, detectives and such other examples of what playwrights, peering out of their clubs, regard as the Common People. He was Yankee-Irish, from Bangor. He was tall and dry and sunken-cheeked; hard and exact and honest. In summer he was managing director of the Dory Playhouse, at Hardscrabble Beach, Connecticut, which was classed as one of the dozen summer theatres that were competent and professional.
Bethel, heart fluttering, didn't know whether to sit still, as a confident actress, doing something or other with cold cream and Kleenex, or to stand humbly in the presence of power, and before she had time to figure out the interpretation of her role, Jerry O'Toole was in the doorway, like Abraham Lincoln in tennis costume, and she had popped to her feet and stood blushing.
Miss Bickling crowed, 'This is our lovely little heroine, Miss Merriday.'
O'Toole shook Bethel's hand with a croaking 'The performance was very interesting' that was more completely a nothing than anything Bethel had ever heard.
'Was I as bad as that?' she begged.
'No. You weren't bad. Of course the others were all of them excellent--splendid.'
'Oh-uh!' of bliss from Miss Bickling, and a diminutive 'Oh' of chagrin from Bethel.
'They weren't trying to act at all, and they did that very well. They managed to turn Ibsen into a farce, and I guess that requires a college education--I never had one. But you, my dear--' He held Bethel's hand in his long wide brown hand, which felt comforting. 'You were trying to act, so I'll compliment you by applying professional standards, and by them, you were pretty bad. You showed that someday you may be able to act, if you ever get any training. But you were pretty bad! You overplayed everything. You made Nora sound like a kitchen mechanic scrapping with the iceman. But you were alive.'
'But--' She did not know that she was copying his hitching style. 'Then I guess there's no chance for me to get into your summer theatre this season?'
He gave what seemed to her a curious answer: 'Not till you've been lucky enough to fail a few times. Then come see me, my dear. Good luck!'
He was gone; a broad-shouldered, gaunt man who moved easily.
Miss Bickling had scarce got through protesting to Bethel that she was disappointed, that Mr. O'Toole had proved to be nothing but a Broadway Commercialist and a Heartless Algonquin Wit, when they were interrupted by the pleasant exuberance of Mr. Roscoe Valentine, who always carried his own private sun.
Mr. Jerome O'Toole's summer stock company, the Dory Playhouse, and the Nutmeg Players, conducted by Mr. Roscoe Valentine at Point Grampion, Connecticut, were both on the shore between New Haven and New London, twenty miles apart, and the feeling between them was that of caviare for butterscotch sundae. Roscoe Valentine, aged fifty, was a man composed, except for his brains and his indignant red eyes, entirely of powder puffs. In winter he was a Bostonian and a scholar, editor of a magazine of the arts called The Spiral, and director of The Spiral Theatre, where Back Bay met the backwoods in one-act glorifications of a proletariat that they actually hated and misunderstood.
Bethel had never seen a man like this: so squashy, so giggling, so spiteful, yet so calmly understanding of everything a woman thought before she finished thinking it. His hand felt like a cold wet piece of oiled silk, as he held hers and bubbled:
'Splendid, my dear! You gave an entirely new conception of the role of Nora.'
'Do you hear that?' said Miss Bickling.
'Oh, thank you!' said Bethel.
'Yes--oh, indeed yes,' said Mr. Valentine.
'Mr. Jerome O'Toole told Bethel that she overacted,' said Miss Bickling.
'Jerry O'Toole must have been reading a book again. It always takes him that way. One time, he was quite a good stage manager. He knows all about carpentry, but don't you think, my dears, it's just on the too-too side when he talks about the social drama? No, my poppet, don't you worry. You did Nora with real éclat. So beautifully fallible.'
Bethel didn't know what it was all about. She never would be adept at doing word tricks. She looked at Valentine like a shivering kitten, and Miss Bickling carried on for her.
'That's so kind of you. I'm sure Bethel and I appreciate it a lot.' (Bethel wasn't at all sure.) 'Now she feels that she has a calling to the stage, and after to-night I'm sure she has, and we're wondering if you could make a place for her in your summer theatre?'
'Why, I think perhaps I could.'
'Oh, how gorgeous!' said Miss Bickling.
'Oh!' said Bethel.
Valentine sat down facing the back of a wooden chair. And that was the first time, outside of the movies, that Bethel had ever seen this posture, and she noted and put away the fact that it made his fat knees prominent and very silly.
He spoke youthfully:
'Now as we're just three girls together, let's let our hair down and be frank. You know there's no box office at all in the summer theatres. Even a roundneck like O'Toole can't make it pay--in fact, if you want to know, I make more than he does! But even so--And for the apprentices, such as you'll be, Miss Merriday, I have simply splendid teachers, with practical lessons in voice and eurythmics, and the chance to appear in my plays with famous actors. So I'm compelled to charge each student actor two hundred and seventy-five dollars for the ten-week season, and fifteen dollars a week for room and board--really below cost. Do you think you could dig up all that fabulous wealth--four hundred and twenty-five dollars?'
And to Bethel it was fabulous wealth. 'I don't know. I'll try to. I'll try so hard.'
'When can you find out?'
'My family are waiting outside. I'll see them now.'
The senior Merridays and Charley looked small and rustic in the stretches of the Assembly Hall stage, gazing distrustfully at a red-headed co-ed in shorts who was moving scenery. Bethel flew up to them, her dress three-quarters buttoned, her hair uncombed.
'What is it--what is it, dear?' urged her mother.
'Anything gone wrong?' her brother demanded, rather gladly, as though he were going to have a chance to hit someone and restore his own superiority in this over-feminine maze.
'Oh no, it's just--Daddy, I can be in a summer theatre this summer, with real actors, and then be ready for a job on the stage this fall, in New York, if you can let me have four hundred and twenty-five dollars for the lessons. But honestly, I'll pay it all back, as soon as I get a job--'
Her father fretted, 'Well, finances are pretty tight, just now, and I had hoped you'd begin bringing in a little before long. And I guess I don't understand girls now. When I was young, girls were glad to stay home and marry some nice fellow, but now seems like they all want to go off some place and be actresses or fly to Australia. No, I don't understand it but--Yes. We'll fix it somehow. My girl's going to have her chance!'