What the feline Iris would do with her plump boy-mouse, Bethel did not know. Perhaps Iris herself did not know. Perhaps Iris merely enjoyed waiting and stretching her claws and feeling the quickness in them.
Gravely tearing a lobster claw to pieces, at the Lobster Pot, where the Nutmeg apprentices swarmed after the evening show to drink beer and coffee and to play that monstrous form of charades called 'The Game', Fletcher Hewitt studied Bethel, and said slowly:
'Pete--Iris--Mahala--all those amateurs--they spend too much time working up an artificial sex stimulation. It takes up the energy they ought to give to acting. I think you're free of it.'
'So are you,' said Bethel.
'Me? Huh! I have to be. I have my mother to support--bless her. Beth! Are you falling for Andy Deacon?'
'How ridiculous!'
'Why are you?'
'Oh, you know. He's so lovely and childish and beaming.'
'He's a nice fellow, Andy, for a rich young man, and he might be a fair actor if he ever got any training. But you better duck under shelter when he turns on that golden smile of his. All you kids fall for it. But it's no use.'
'I know, Fletcher.'
'In fact some day, Beth, when you and I have been sufficiently licked in this insane gamble of the theatre, we'll retire and get married and go keep a summer hotel. That'll give us enough people to fool with. Okay?'
'Yes, okay, Fletcher.'
She wasn't sure but that both of them half meant it.
Between them, Bethel and Cynthia Aleshire made much of the Bernice Niemeyer costumes, and Bethel was so excited by them that she forgot her meals . . . well, she forgot one meal. Bernice was to flaunt sleazy satin frocks and to paint her face like a gasoline pump.
When, at the dress rehearsal on Sunday evening, Bethel stood up from the desk to reveal herself in an apricot-coloured tea gown, with purple panels, slightly torn, with a chain of carved imitation-ivory beads, a chain of crimson glass beads, a chain of coins, a souvenir bracelet hung with small silver animals, and a broad chased bracelet of plated silver, with her lips widened and (under Cynthia's tutorship) her temples and cheeks hollowed, she received a tiny hand of applause from the Grampion theatre sponsors, and she heard Roscoe whimper to Cynthia, 'Why, she looks the part pretty well'.
Ah, that was heavenly praise! Ah, that was praise enough for Bernhardt! Dear youth!
XV
Bethel was shy enough; in any mob of more than five people she was so uneasy that she chattered, and hated herself for chattering. Yet exposed before the four hundred and seventeen people at the first night of Stage Door--and that was a large audience for the Nutmeg Theatre--she was, after the agony and trembling of waiting for the curtain to go up, as placid as a bishop. For she was not Bethel Merriday at all; she was Bernice Niemeyer; and very intrusive.
In her dressing-room, between scenes, she felt sure of herself. It was a real dressing-room to which she had now climbed. Though it was a large, jammed, low-ceiled den, which she shared with three other apprentices, and with Iris, Clara Ribbons and Maggie Sample, it had real dressing-room shelf-tables, narrow enough so that she could study her make-up in a mirror enchantingly rimmed with lights.
At the final curtain line-up, she got a reasonable share of the hands, and knew that if she had not been brilliant, she had not been bad. Fletcher Hewitt cried, afterward, 'You were magnificent, baby'; Andy Deacon beamed, 'Nice work, Miss M-Merriday'; Roscoe Valentine so far extended himself as to croak, 'You were all right, I guess'; Iris Pentire, as they undressed (no elaborate task in the days of three-piece robing) caroled, 'Just be careful and don't jump cues, dear'; and Mr. Black Bart wrote, in the New London Era:
As it is probable that off-stage she is a very charming sloe-eyed young woman, a new friend, Miss Bethel Merriday, is all the more to be praised for having made Bernice so objectionable and flashy that she made you itch, and yet so pathetic when she busted down that you changed your mind and decided to just shoot her instead of boiling her in hair oil.
That review is on page seven of Beth's scrapbook, just after her dance programmes, the programme of a Universalist Church cantata in which she sang two lines, the stub of her ticket to her first basketball game at Point Royal College, and the programme of A Doll's House. And just before it appears the first opening-night telegram that she ever received; it came from Charley Hatch, Alva Prindle and Ben Merriday, and read 'All wish you thousand good wishes to-night good luck wish were there'. That had made her homesick, on first night, for at least two minutes.
Through the week, all the evenings after the strained first night, it was pleasant to slip out of doors between acts for one of her few cigarettes.
You could do that, in a summer theatre, under the trees--though also you had to endure the inquisitive spectators, city brokers feeling superior on vacation--millionaires for sixteen days a year--who sneaked around back of the theatre to stare at the actors as at a zoo. Some of them even had the bad manners to ask for autographs between acts, but this did not annoy Bethel--she was not yet notorious enough to be dunned, or to hate the whole tribe of autograph hunters, the thick-skinned devotees of the one hobby in the world which consists in turning into brazen beggars and annoying innocent strangers, preferably by interrupting their talk with friends just at the moment when they are most weary and relaxed. To Bethel the theatre-goers were still heavenly visitors who, out of pure benevolence, were permitting her to act.
Through the week while she was playing Stage Door, Bethel was rehearsing all day long for her second role, that of the maid in George and Margaret. Iris should have had this lively bit, but Iris was to take part in a broadcast in New York on an evening this next week--a fact which made Bethel, who had come to consider Iris as a pink papier mâché sphinx, to hold her again in awe. Was Iris not one of the magicians who could make twenty million modern Americans listen to such bodiless beauty, such skylark melody as the shoplifter in a radio drama lilting to her mate, 'Grab your rod and scram--it's de G-men'?
Now, first, Bethel knew something of the labour of the real theatre--a toil which was already persuading Anita Hill and Harry Mihick to talk of Roscoe Valentine as a slave driver and of doing the stage an irreparable injury by renouncing it. She was working violently, sixteen hours out of the twenty-four. All day she rehearsed in George and Margaret, in the brown, stuffy, spicy heat of the theatre, which she loved above the sea foam and sea gulls and silver-channelled sea outside. All evening, and at Wednesday matinée, she played Stage Door. Till two o'clock she sat up studying her new lines and helping make her costume as maid. She was afraid of mixing up the two plays, so that as the bounding Bernice from the Bronx--standing out there, helpless, fanning the air for her line--she would be able to say nothing to her fellow-job-hunters beyond 'Very good, moddom'.
She was always a little dazed, always surprised to find that she had, without having for a second heard her own voice, got clear through an evening of Stage Door without making a fool of herself. Roscoe was wearing down, and beginning to shriek all through rehearsals, but Bethel was too numb now to resent it.
Then, on Saturday morning, the spell was broken, and Roscoe became her enemy.
Roscoe had become edgier every day through the week, and last night he had fully attended a Chianti party among the artists at Old Lyme.