'Dear Andy . . . I am so sleepy! . . . When I come in crying, as Gladys the maid--if I just stopped and stood with my mouth open, like an angry cat, not making any . . . I'll try that to-morrow evening. That ought to go over big.'
XVII
Five more weeks of summer theatre, and of school for Betheclass="underline" voice projection; building up a laugh; answering cues with not a tenth-of-a-second wait. In the last week, Miss Sample unwillingly hurled at her a laurel wreath: 'Well, you may have a chance. You better try New York once, before you give up. You never can tell. I read the other day that the Shuberts are giving tests to an Eskimo.'
And in odd hours she was sent back again to building scenery. Now that she had had to act before it, scenery was no longer a stupid mass of mechanism but a living part of the action.
Toni, Iris, Doc Keezer could not see why an actor should know anything about scenery. Even Walter Rolf grumbled, 'No more need of it than there is of an author's learning printing and binding'. But Bethel saw that the scene designer could ruin the actor--swamp him in flamboyant form and colours, or make a whole scene dreary by too drab a background--or help him by making it clear, as the curtain went up, just what sort of person he was, how rich or poor, how precise or slatternly.
And the actor could use the scenery; he could really look out of that window and see the Kentish downs there--though if he was not actor, he would behold, through the paneless windows, nothing but Toni Titmus, in dirty linen overalls, sitting on a kitchen chair in front of a melancholy pile of furniture all on end, humped up over the play script, and passionately attacking gum.
The actor could, if the script demanded it and Roscoe had screamed at him enough times, remember to shut the door when he went out, so that it wouldn't be standing open when Lord Blenkinsop was to be discovered standing behind it. And it made a difference whether the door was so situated that the actor could slip off the couch and out, or had to walk between the two violent lovers. Even technical details mattered, perceived Bethel. You couldn't be properly gloomy in a darkened room if a streak of light was shooting in between two badly fastened flats. And, useful or not, she was plain curious, like a squirrel, about everything in the theatre.
She learned how to make an entire flat; laying out the thin battens of white pine on the workbench (which, loving all technical terms and loving to be able to annoy Iris and Toni by using them, she was zealous to call a 'template'), fitting the battens together--stiles on each side, top and bottom rail, the enchantingly named 'toggle rail' in the centre, with butt joints reinforced by corner blocks and corrugated fasteners; turning it over, stretching canvas (which she had learned to fireproof, with borax, sal-ammoniac and water) across the frame, tacking it, gluing it, then on the back attaching the hardware, brace cleats, and lash cleats for joining flat to flat to make a complete wall.
She even learned to make mortise-and-tenon joints for the shutter of a doorframe unit, and that is the jewel-work, the higher metaphysics, of stage carpentry.
They did not make many new flats in a summer theatre, however; and Bethel was expert at washing off the glue-mixed paint from old flats and turning a section of a cottage wall into a satin panel for a château drawing-room.
She liked the smell of new pine; the honest workshop floor, rough, scurfy with dried paint in a hundred faded tones of red and green and grey.
To citizens like Charley Hatch, who pictured all actresses as lying, in scandalous negligées, on chaise-longues, to all the girls of her own age whose bibles were magazines about Hollywood, it would have been incomprehensible to see Bethel, in vile old basketball bloomers and a cardigan, with blue paint on the end of her nose, red paint on her knuckles, and a painful clot of glue in her tangled hair, noisily sawing a mitre joint, yet all the while whistling 'Old Man River', and looking up to see the dusk grow soft on the eel grass, the golden pools of water, at the edge of swamps across the bay.
Andy Deacon stopped by to wonder, 'Aren't you working overtime?'
'I didn't know.'
'Like it?'
'Lots.'
'But why the passion for carpentry?'
She plumped down on the template, stared at him--the late light shone through his coppery brush of hair--and thought aloud:
'I honestly don't know. I just want to be able to do anything in the theatre.'
'That's--that's swell!' said her poet hero. 'Maybe some day, pretty soon, I'll have a theatrical unit of my own, independent of the old-line producers, and if I do, you're the kind of kid I'll want.'
And he looked at her as though he might actually know her again a month from now.
The season wound up on Saturday night, September 3rd, with a gargantuan beach picnic: with hot dogs, roasted corn, tamales and beer, and an enormous mulligan of beef and veal and chicken and goose and oysters, that had been boiling on the shore all day long, attended by Pete Chew--the best theatrical activity he had found yet.
There was a quarter-moon, and quarter-music: Johnny Meddock, the grounds custodian, on the accordion, and Butch Stevens, of the Lobster Pot, on the mouth organ. They were, unfortunately, more successful than that fair-faced young apprentice, Bruce Pasture, with his violin. It was no night for Brahms. They rioted, and sang 'Coming Round the Mountain', and danced in long, wavering, hand-clasping lines along the sand, to conceal the melancholy of parting. They all confessed, to-night.
Harry Mihick and Anita Hill and four other apprentices were giving up the stage. (But they explained that it was only temporary.) Pete Chew was giving up and going to work for an uncle in Zanesville, Ohio, and Bruce Pasture was giving up and going to Paris (left-bank) for practically the same reason: Bruce because the Nutmeg Players spoke such primitive American that he couldn't stand it; and Pete because they spoke such pedantic Oxonian that he couldn't understand it. None of them, you understand, were giving up because they hadn't proved to be very good actors.
Marian was to try Broadway for one year, but in her eyes you could see a vision of a summer theatre back in the Nebraska cornfields. Toni Titmus was doubtful; she hinted that the Theatre Guild was begging her to come in and see them for a part in the Lunt-Fontanne tour, but also that an extremely rich aunt was imploring her to spend the winter in Santa Barbara and that there she would practically take charge of all the Little Theatre groups.
Five apprentices were definitely going to plunge into Broadway--they spoke, rather, as though they were enlisting in a revolution--and one of them, Walter Rolf, actually had a job . . . reading scripts in the office of a manager who had almost produced a musical show in 1932 and who still had a telephone number to prove that he was a manager.
As a surprise to them all--probably it was rather a surprise to her--Andy had invited his more-or-less fiancée, Joan Hinterwald, down from Newport. She appeared at a moment when they were particularly rackety. Three of the men, who had been having a moonlight swim, wore coats and old trousers over wet bathing suits; Anita Hill had dressed up as a woman of the French Revolution, and Doc Keezer as a clown, with red nose and flour cheeks; two girls were in evening clothes and two in voluminous white slacks; and all of them were dancing in a circle about Johnny Meddock, standing by the fire and playing 'Pop Goes the Weasel' on his accordion. The bonfire was painting them into pirates and their molls.
They were aroused from their private frenzy by the hortatory sound of a motor horn, and out of her pale green roadster, airy in a pale green knitted suit, tripped Miss Hinterwald, waving amiably; the princess amused by her peasants.
They froze. They all became, instantly, free strolling players, the honourable company of rogues and vagrants, resentful of secure and prosperous outsiders, whether nobility or dusty shopkeepers. They could admit the cynical Johnny Meddock, worthy journeyman of broom and dustpan, or Butch Stevens, oyster huckster, but not the too-well-bathed young lady from Newport. They forgot internal feuds; they became one harshly loyal company: Roscoe with Bethel, Mahala with the scornful Cynthia, Harry Mihick and Bruce Pasture, Iris Pentire and Maggie Sample. Arm in arm, they froze and stared at Joan--for whom Bethel was sorry, as she watched Joan freeze, too, and her white-kid cheeks become stiff and her eyes turn hostile.