And it was one of her queer, secret, sensitized days when she saw everything with intolerable acuteness.
When she awoke, that Saturday in May, the morning was bewitched with fog.
She had, proudly, a room of her own, with a candlewick cover on a spool bed of 1860. Benny, the worshipper of new machinery, laughed at the bed as old-fashioned, but she prized it as somehow connected with Pilgrims who shot wild turkeys with blunderbusses on Thanksgiving Day, and came home to drink hot toddies in the company of grey ladies in poke bonnets.
She also had a shaky white-painted desk of her own, with a bookshelf on which were a complete Shakespeare, an Edgar Wallace novel, a Mary Roberts Rinehart novel, a ragged volume of Keats, a manual of tennis, and No. 1567 in the Haldeman-Julius Little Blue Books, namely, Making Men Happy with Jams and Jellies. The wallpaper was canary yellow, with small scarlet birds; the rug was blue. She loved her secure retreat and its friendly brightness.
But this morning of mist was forlorn to her as she crawled out, in her blue-and-white-striped pyjamas, her bobbed hair, which was very black, flickering above her charming shoulders, which were very white. She was afraid, or pretended that she was afraid, to look out of the window--and then looked. The Hatch house, next door, had alarmingly vanished in the fog. The elms were hard pillars, their foliage unseen; the silver birch was chilly as winter.
On such a day, even at her mature age of fourteen years and eleven months, she could again convince herself that she was the foundling child of wicked gipsies.
She knew that all this was quite insane. But there was a good, efficient, earthy Bethel who always guarded the mad Bethel, and who now insisted that being a gipsy was no crazier than her father's love for assaulting golf balls, or her mother's stated belief that anyone born in New Hampshire was handsomer and healthier than any Vermonter.
As Bethel wriggled and rubbed herself under the shower bath--oh yes, the Merridays were as modern as all that--and drew on her bloomers, her rolled stockings, her flowery cotton dress, she was prim and a little stern, that she might not betray her Crazy Ideas.
Things were not right, downstairs.
The house was only ten years old, and the living-room was still of suitable modernness, with interior decorations correct by the highest standards of the women's magazines: a large, frameless mirror over the white fireplace, reflecting two marble vases; a glass-topped nickelled coffee table in front of the convertible davenport; on the wall, a travel souvenir in the way of a 'Ye Motor Mappe of Ye Quaint Olde Cape Codde', depicting whales and Pilgrims; an enormous combination radio and phonograph, shining like syrup; and no books whatever. But to the revolutionary Bethel, this morning, the room was as oppressive as too hot a bath.
She apologized to herself that her father and her mother and her house were really very nice. But a little smug . . .?
Then she first really discovered ash trays; then she found that ash trays can be fascinating but horrible. On the coffee table was a still unemptied tray; a half-sphere of rock crystal, which should have been spotless, shining as a handful of upper air, but was smeared now with black ash stains and filled with dead paper matches and cigarette stubs like the twisted dead white arms of babies. The whole thing, she shuddered, was a shell pit, only smaller.
But she seized herself and pushed herself on into the dining-room, with a reproving, 'You're imagining things!'
'Good morning, Beth. That's doing pretty well. Only ten minutes late. You look as if you slept pretty well,' said her father.
'Foggy enough for you to-day?' said Gwendolyn, the hired girl.
'Hya, Toots. Hya, handsome,' said her brother.
'Good morning, dear. You look cheerful, this morning,' said her mother.
(She didn't feel cheerful, and she was hanged if she'd be cheerful, not all day long, she reflected. But if they thought she looked so, she must be doing some good acting.)
She studied her corn flakes, and found that corn flakes are as fastastically [sic] improbable as ash trays, once your eyes were open. They certainly didn't look like food. Food was lamb chops and chop suey and corn on the cob and apple pie à la mode; these things were twists of brown paper, with minute bubbles on their speckled surfaces. What a thing to eat!
She did eat them, and enjoyed them very much, but now she was at the fascinated vexation of studying just how they all ate. Her father sturdily opened his lips up and down like a pair of trap doors, showing his teeth. Her mother nibbled like a rabbit, her faded pink lips (she would not use her lipstick till she went to the bridge club this afternoon) trembled a little and hid her teeth. And Brother Ben twisted his mouth sidewise, with the right corner of it scornfully elevated.
She tried to imitate them all.
'What are you daydreaming about, dear?' said her father.
'Eat your nice hot muffins, Beth,' said her mother.
'I hope you'll know me the next time you see me,' said her brother.
'What makes it foggy to-day?' said Bethel.
'The fog,' said Ben.
For two hours, that schoolless Saturday morning, she worked in her father's store, polishing tables and radio cabinets. Her hands were swift, and she liked seeing the sleek grain of the wood emerge from dullness. But as this was, she luxuriously sighed, one of her poetic days, she would spend all afternoon in Brewster Park. It had a grove of thick Japanese walnuts with a tiny stream, and there, on a small pad of the best linen correspondence paper, she would write a poem about the Grecian city hall . . . She was much given to writing poetry, except that she never had been able to write more than a dozen lines of it.
But into the store bounced her friend Alva Prindle, to demand that she come to the North Side Tennis Club that afternoon.
Alva Prindle was a big, beautiful, bouncing blonde. She was born that way; she was spiritually like that; she would have been a big, beautiful, bouncing blonde even if she had been as dark and delicately made as Bethel. It was Alva whom the high-school girls had nominated as a future Queen of Hollywood.
Bethel did play tennis that afternoon, and she played well enough, and she hated it. She felt that there must be something complicated and wrong in herself, for while just that morning she had been able to see herself as Lady Macbeth, satisfyingly murderous and flamboyant before an audience of two thousand, this afternoon, showing off her rapid, accurate, nervous little serve before an audience of not more than a dozen musical young gentlemen aged sixteen, she was terrified; she was embarrassed every time Alva answered the gallery's 'Good work, beautiful', with a merry: 'Go climb a tree'. (Alva varied it by retorting, 'Go lay an egg' or 'Go jump in the lake'.)
The North Side Tennis Club was founded by the medium-successful retail merchants, the minor doctors and lawyers and insurance agents and real-estate sellers of Sladesbury, to give their children something of the social glory of the private en-tout-cas courts of the bank vice-presidents and the factory owners. Its club house was a one-room shack with a counter at which were sold Coca-Cola, orangeade, cigarettes, chewing-gum and stale sweet crackers, but this counter was to Bethel what Twenty-One and El Morocco and the Stork Club and the like New York exhibits of elegance and celebrity were some day to seem.