Bethel Merriday

'A what? No, no, I don't believe you are. Well, I--gotta be getting along. I'll be seein' you!'

Bethel heard him shouting under Toni's window. 'Hey, come on down and let's go summers and get a drink. I need one!'

She smiled, even as she sat among the ruins hearing her mother say, 'Bethel Merriday, I'm sur-prised!'

But in the darkness she remembered Fletcher Hewitt's sermon about the children's crusade of the summer theatre. She thought of the hundreds of other young people who were this moment dreaming of the theatre, by the sea, in the cool hills, in the rustling woods, under the stars--boys and girls from factories and colleges and farms, from disapproving New England mansions and flats in the East Side ghetto, exhibitionists and sound workers, Communists and Tories and plain bored at home--an army of Gay Contemptibles.

How absurd must once have seemed the butcher's son from Stratford, piping on his penny whistle as he trudged to London, under the stars.

IX

On Saturday, her second day at Grampion, Bethel could not see what the tasks which Roscoe Valentine and Fletcher Hewitt and Cynthia Aleshire gave her had to do with acting. She helped the coloured maid set the table in the dormitory. She answered the telephone in the box office for an hour. She sewed at heavy red curtains for the courtroom scene in Night of January 16th till her fingers trembled. She stitched and hung a new chintz curtain in the star's dressing-room, to honour their greatest guest star, the famous Nile Sanderac (she ranked almost with Ina Claire in playing elegant young married women), who would be coming in a week now, to enact Candida.

Bethel's most theatrical duty was to drive the old Ford station wagon into Grampion Centre and borrow, for the Petrified Forest set, a cash register and a couple of round tables from Mr. Butch Stevens, proprietor and maître d'hôtel of the Lobster Pot Dance Hall and Dinery. Mr. Valentine did not 'believe' in buying such accessories or in renting them. It was a serious matter of principle. He loved a nickel with the same spirited and devoted passion that he devoted to God and Bernard Shaw.

'B-but suppose Mr. Butch doesn't want to lend them?' protested Bethel.

Roscoe almost screamed: 'Don't take any nonsense from him! You tell him I say he gets half his customers from my theatre, and he won't need this stuff--second-hand junk; I know; I've used 'em before!--till mid-July, when the summer season's in full swing. Don't let him bluff you!'

Across the lunch counter of the Lobster Pot, Bethel smiled on the lumpish Butch Stevens and said briskly, 'Hello!'

'Hya.'

'I'm glad there's such a nice place to eat at in Grampion. I suspect I'll be coming here a lot this summer, with my bunch.'

'You one of the theatre girls?'

'Yes.'

'Huh! None of you kids ever buy anything more than a malted milk.'

'Oh, my bunch will. I'll see to it they do. Now Mr. Stevens, I can see--'

'You can call me Butch.'

'--I can tell from the way you look at me that you know I want to ask you a favour. You're the kind that can't be fooled.'

'So what do you want to borrow for the theatre this time? Summer 'fore last, they took all my Coca-Cola posters and brought 'em back torn. But last summer, one time I was away, damn' if Valentine didn't send some of the kids in here to "borrow" four ham sandwiches!--and the girl let 'em have 'em, and that's the last time I ever see any of them sandwiches, and when I tackled Valentine about paying for 'em, he said he didn't know anything about it, and asked me which girls it was borrowed 'em, and Lord, I can't tell none of you actresses apart--you all look alike to me--all bare-nekkid legs and sweaters and a lay-off-roe look. So what do I get stung for this time? . . . Just some tables and a cash register? Does there have to be money in the cash register? Because I suppose if Valentine wanted it, I'd have to give it to him, or else these codfish-eating Yankees here would say I didn't have any public spirit.'

'Aren't you a Yankee?'

'Me? No, thank God! I'm a foreigner . . . from New Jersey.'

She returned to the theatre, at noon, to find newly arrived four members of the permanent stock company: Tudor Blackwall, the second juvenile, sleek and doe-eyed and just faintly effeminate; Clara Ribbons and George Keezer (incomprehensibly but always known as Doc Keezer), who were both middle-aged veterans technically classed as 'wise old troupers'; and, at last, the baby of the stock company, Iris Pentire, who was to be Bethel's own twin.

And she knew instantly that she would never know Iris.

That other twenty-year-old, Toni, the plump and pretty, had been unhesitatingly friendly, but Iris, moving silkily about the room she was to share with Bethel, putting away salmon-coloured silk pyjamas and maribou-edged silver bed jacket and scarlet pumps with gold heels high as obelisks, cautiously smiling and musically murmuring, 'Thank you for letting me come in with you', was hidden with cloudy veils. She was a Mystery.

And Miss Iris Pentire saw to it that she should continue to be a Mystery.

The most nearly convincing stories about Iris that Bethel was ever to hear were that she was the daughter of an Irish nobleman, reared in a nunnery, still piously virginal and viewing her stage career as a means of portraying the austere beauties of virtue; and that she was shanty Irish, from Wheeling, West Virginia, and had had only twelve words, headed by 'Okay', in her vocabulary until, at the age of sixteen, she had become the sweetheart of Clum Weslick, the distinguished director, who had provided her with tutors and chiropodists.

Slender, fragile, with hair not golden but colour of sunset gold reflected on a silver box, sweet eyes, and mouth that appeared sweet unless you saw it twisted in anger; silent, defenceless and slim as the child Elsie Krall; silent and sweet and never quite saying what she meant; silent and soft-moving; that was Iris Pentire; and one moment Bethel thought she was a statuette of gold and ivory, a charm to wonder at; and the next, a voodoo priestess.

'I--I don't suppose you care much for swimming?' said Bethel.

'No, I'm afraid I don't care much for swimming,' smiled Iris.

'I hope you'll like it here,' said Bethel--the Old Resident at Grampion.

Saturday noon, a young man who looked like a research scientist, and who may actually have been so but was now employed as one of the Deacon chauffeurs, flashed into the theatre grounds and left Mr. Andrew Deacon's favourite car, an English Rolls-Royce with a convertible coupé body, to await Mr. Deacon's arrival as male lead in the Nutmeg company. It seemed that Mr. Deacon's mother would be driving him down from Newport in a day or two.

All the apprentices, whether they came from Fond du Lac or New York's East Side, were expert and blasé about automobiles. But even their youthful American cocksureness was shaken now.

'Gosh, this Andy Deacon must be some actor. I bet if he chased Juliet in that buggy, he'd get her,' said Toni Titmus, in a tone of vesper prayer.

Bethel wondered if Roscoe Valentine overmuch loved his partner, for, looking at the car, Roscoe muttered--even to her, the outsider, the raw recruit, 'Huh! Andy doesn't hide his wealth much, does he--our theatrical playboy! But the fact is, all the money is his mother's, not his at all--and does the dear old dowager let him know it!'

Roscoe interrupted her stippling of canvas flats, for the adobe walls of the Black Mesa Bar-B-Q in The Petrified Forest, Saturday afternoon, and sent her on the illustrious mission of meeting Mahala Vale, the leading lady--she who had done so well, the past two seasons on Broadway, as a featured player in Betty, Be Quick, which lasted four months, and the sensational share-cropper play You Cannot Dispossess Our Souls, which had lasted four nights and one matinée--the second play having been a favourite of labour-union publications and the first play of labour-union members.