Gladys the maid, who was Bethel, was supposed to enter in the third act of George and Margaret with a smartness befitting her new God-given station as the fiancée of the oldest son of the family. It was morning, and Bethel had slept, and she knew her lines, and at rehearsal she was one with the gods as she blithely tripped in, chirping 'I'm going now, Mrs. Garth-Bander'.
'Oh God, Bethel, don't you know anything about your part?' yelled Roscoe. 'This wench is supposed to be scared to death of the old hag. Try to act, even if God did make it impossible. Take that entrance again.'
Bethel looked at him silently, unhappily. She thought that Andy Deacon, perched on the back of a seat far back in the auditorium, seemed annoyed and smoked rapidly.
Again she came on, through an imaginary door between two chairs. She smiled wanly at Clara Ribbons, who was yawning as she tried to wake up enough to impersonate Mrs. Garth-Bander, and she said 'I'm going now' timidly.
Roscoe yelled again, and hysterically: 'I didn't tell you to play it like a funeral, you fool! Get some life into it, d'you hear me, d'you hear me, D'YOU HEAR ME?'
In the quiet after this shrieking, Andy came down the centre aisle, blank as a sleepwalker, and spoke to Roscoe, flatly, 'Don't talk that way. I do not like it. I do not like your screaming. Do not talk that way, Mr. Valentine!'
And clumped back to his seat.
Bethel had never before really seen anyone turn purple. Roscoe turned purple. He glanced for a second at Andy's broad back, he glanced at Fletcher and Doc Keezer and Clara, who had made their faces expressionless, he glanced at the trembling Bethel, with poison pouring out of his red eyes and loose mouth. He pushed forward his neck like a turtle. He spoke calmly enough.
'I am sorry, Miss Merriday, if I have been too enthusiastic in my directing, as Mr. Deacon seems to think. We will go on now. Try your entrance again. You come in gaily, but your courage begins to ooze when you see the old woman. All right.'
He never called her 'Bethel' again.
She appeared in one more play, in the tiny part of Eva Blake in Noel Coward's We Were Dancing, and in that Roscoe directed her with just as much interest as if he were winding a watch.
When they had sifted out for lunch, after this fatal rehearsal, Andy patted her back, grinned, said casually, 'I'm afraid I just made you the more uncomfortable by blowing up and bawling out poor old Roscoe. He'll forget it by to-night. You're doing swell work--uh--Bethel.'
This voice from Eden did not console her. She took Fletcher aside after lunch:
'What will I do? I've made an enemy of Mr. Valentine, and I didn't mean too. Honestly, it isn't because I'm scared about his keeping me from getting jobs and so on, but it makes me feel sick to think of him looking at me that way . . . as if I were a bedbug.'
Fletcher was cheerful. 'Beth, I'd be unhappy about your future if I didn't think the spiteful people are going to dislike you. That's one test of success. And--I'm afraid I know better now why girls adore Andy. He didn't jump on Roscoe just because he can afford to. He would have jumped just the same if he'd been a walk-on with holes in his soles. While I sat back and didn't say anything. Sorry.'
Fletcher turned away quickly.
The Nutmeg Players were going to hold their first party this Saturday evening, the end of the run of Stage Door, and Bethel felt high.
Rain was threatening, and they would have the party in the dormitory instead of on the beach. In the dining-room Japanese lanterns were so blossoming by supper-time that the place looked more like a Baptist lawn festival in Sladesbury than like a temple of Chekhov.
As Bethel crossed to the theatre, before evening performance, she was excited by the omens of the storm. It was unnaturally dark, and incessant distant lightning revealed whitecaps and shaken sailboats out on the Sound and turned the sedge grass to a poison green, while the whole shifting air was filled with uneasiness and the brave last fireflies were menacing points of flame.
The audience was small, and it breathed hard at the occasional thunder, yet it was a good audience, quick to laugh, quick to be stilled in sympathy. Already Bethel had learned to be conscious of audiences; not to fawn to them, but to feel them. To-night she was playing well enough--or it may have been badly enough--so that she didn't care whether anybody else thought she was playing well or ill.
She was annoyed, from the wings, at Iris's mourning and handclasping as the suicidal Kaye; she felt somehow responsible for her room-mate. But at the end, when the audience stopped even in reaching for raincoats and rubbers to applaud and scream 'Bravo' as the cast assembled for curtain call, Bethel felt ten feet tall, in golden armour, and ran into the communal dressing-room emitting happiness like a cloud of steam.
If Roscoe pettishly stayed away from them, Andy looked in to shout, 'You were all on your toes to-night, kids. You're all Margaret Sullavans, the whole lot of you.'
They were all stripped to dressing-gowns, rubbing cold-creamed faces with wads of tissue, when an unknown voice, like that of a young Scotti, rumbled at the door, 'May I come in?'
The owner of the voice ploughed in without waiting.
He was a belligerent-looking, square young man, with tousled brown hair and a face, healthy and slightly rough of skin, that turned instantly from impish impertinence to sorrow and back again. He might have been a butcher, a Communist poet, a fundamentalist evangelist, a prize fighter or a researcher in physics. His bare head, his thick brown sweater, his khaki trousers dripped rain.
'Hello, girls,' he said. He stopped beside Toni Titmus (she had played the Hollywood hussy) and grunted, 'You weren't too bad--you had some hint of oomph, sister.'
'Whadya mean "sister". I never saw you before,' bristled Toni.
'You will. Plenty. On Broadway. With Maurice Evans and the Theatre Group, some day. I'm Zed Wintergeist, of the Dory Playhouse--Jerry O'Toole's select summer sisterhood down the coast. Not playing this week. Took the night off to give your masterpiece the once-over . . . God, most of you were bad! I should come out in the rain to see you, sweetie!'
Young Mr. Zed Wintergeist had plodded over to Iris Pentire now and was looking down at her, amused, apparently not overcome by the sight of her delicate shoulders. 'It didn't look as though it was economic inequality that made you bump yourself off in the play, but just plain bellyache.'
'Really!' said Iris.
He proceeded to Bethel, dripping all the way. His glance, bold but good-humoured, impertinent yet honest, made her too uncertain for any Sladesburian retorts of outraged ladyhood.
'You were pretty fair, Bethel--I take it from the programme that that's your pious name. Lemme look at your eyes.'
'Really!' said Iris again: and Toni, 'Of all the nerve!' But in silence Bethel let the young bully jab his forefinger under her chin, tilt her back head and stare at her eyes. 'Yeah. I guess so. You got some perception. You got into Bernice's hide--made me understand how much that poor gutter pup longed for a chance to parade, and yet you didn't do much tear-jerking--you made her as intrusive and offensive--'
'As you are!' yelped Marian Croy.
'Exactly. That's what I was going to say!'
'I suppose you're casting us all for the play you're going to produce in 1968,' cried Iris. (It was the first time that Bethel had ever seen Iris yanked out of her frail aloofness, and for that she could have loved Zed Wintergeist.)
'Yes, sweetie, and maybe I am, at that. Be good, girls. See you all at the party. Don't let Mahala Vale put anything over on you. I saw her once, in an awful piece of tripe about share croppers. She was lousy. She peeled potatoes with kid gloves on. Andy Deacon doesn't know it yet, but he's going to invite me to your party. See you there, Bethel! Be good.'