'But I told you, we'll try to make a summer theatre. Maybe we'll even do some exciting experimental things. I know you and I are the kind that could--and you'd be surprised how sound Mammy's advice is--she's the best sport--of course you are, too.'
'No! I want training. Professional training. The hardest kind. I mustn't fool myself. In the theatre I'm of the mental age of three. I want to have some real hard-boiled director give me the devil. I want to do one-night stands. I want to act twenty different roles in a year.'
'Well, judging from the number of shows that close in four days, now, you'll have a chance to. And then maybe you'll be willing to come back to hometown boy, that'll be waiting. I've never once kissed you. I'm going to!'
He did. She was rather astonished.
As the older actors began to make home-going motions of yawning and kicking at the sand, Roscoe Valentine chased Iris off her beer-barrel throne, climbed on it, and spoke:
'Boys and girls, this is our last feast of unreason together till next summer. I now descend from my temporary grandeur as director and become an eccentric old gentleman toying with an arty magazine and gilded theateria in Boston. But I want to tell all of you, all of you, that if I have ever seemed to ride you, if I have ever been temperamental or unreasonable, it's only been because I love you, and love the theatre, and have wanted to wed these twain and--God bless you all!'
Maggie Sample, standing beside Bethel, muttered, 'Wouldn't you know he'd manage to get the curtain? I wish I'd thought of that. Anyway, Merriday, here's your chance at me. I'm no longer your loving teacher, and you can get back at me for all my grouches. Shoot.'
It is possibly a little sad, but Bethel didn't even hear her. She was looking at the passing Andy, with firelight in his hair. Andrew the Anvil King, Andy the Grail Hound, Andy the Paladin.
Everybody drifted away. Bethel, in her dormitory room, now light with dawn, listened to Iris snorting that she was sure she didn't want Pete Chew hanging around her and Toni could have him, for all she cared.
Bethel decided that she couldn't sleep. She crept downstairs, stole a horrible cold griddle cake and wolfed it, and slipped out to the beach again. And there, solitary, looking out to the dreary dishwater of morning sea, his back to her, squatted with hands on knees, was Andy.
She came up to him cautiously. He looked up and snorted, 'Hello, kitten. What you doing up?'
'I couldn't get to sleep.'
'Neither could I.'
'Andy! What's trouble? You look unhappy.'
'Hell, I am! I'm sick of running around with garlands in my hair yelping that I'm artistic and happy. It's all a mess.'
'People?'
'Eh? Oh, I don't mean my lady-loves. Mahala and Joan are good girls--though I do sometimes wish that they could take out their undoubted powers in work, as apparently you can, Beth, instead of in getting their little feelings hurt. But it's not that. It's career. Work. Art. Ambition. Purpose. Looking at the apprentices to-night, I've been thinking: nice bunch of kids, but what have they got out of this summer? Picnickers, that's what they are--that's what I am. What have Roscoe and I done? Good plays, but not one new one in try-out--not even one unusual one, not one profound characterization in the acting, mine or anybody's. I've been doing my parts on my head. That Zed Wintergeist that came up here from Dory Playhouse said we were Boy Scouts. He was right. The genial Mr. Andy Deacon! Why does he waste his time so, Bethel? Why does he?'
She patted his hand, and together they looked out as a young rosy light quivered on the slaty waves.
'Andy, I've learned to relax here, and feel at home on the stage, and I learned it from watching you, so sure and so easy, and not from listening to Roscoe shrieking.'
'Maybe both you and I need more shrieking at. But--You really have enjoyed it?'
'Incredibly.'
'I'm glad.'
And already, with the rising flood of light, the spirits of the mercurial Andy were rising. He rose, lifting her up, and cried, 'We have left undone the things we ought to have done, but this coming season, we'll be swell! On to New York, kitten! We'll have our names in electric lights there before spring! Absolutely!'
She wanted to wail, 'But I'll never see you, once you get to New York.' Violently she kept herself from it, as he chanted on:
'You saw Our Town, didn't you? Remember the end:
'"Everybody's resting in Grover's Corners. To-morrow's going to be another day. You get a good rest, too. Good night."'
XVIII
Red--the colour of revolution, the colour of anger, of angry eyes, of vigorous dawn and wild sunsets, of battle smoke, of rubies on the breast of courtesans--red, acid red, carmine, crimson, scarlet, madder, vermilion, flaunting rose.
From the window of her minute room, high in a hotel-for-women in the East Fifties in Manhattan, Bethel saw the whole welter of city turn red as the evening rain began. In the country the wet lonely night would have dissolved in shifting grey, but New York, in the late-October rain, was the pit of a volcano, and more insistent, and more dreadful.
Atop the white mountainous cliff of the R.C.A. Building, in Radio City, a crimson aeroplane-beacon was rotating, crossing a white shaft of light that shot straight up to the illimitable heavens, to be lost in the orbit of the farthest star. The sloping top of the General Electric Building (not of the De Medicis or Plantagenets or Barbarossas were these high castles, but of the lords of radio and electric heating), like a jewel casket of the giants, turned from alternate crimson to pallid gold.
Backing these prickly towers, the light from Broadway was a dome of writhing fire, until, unwarning, a menacing billow of fog enveloped the burning sky, and the fantastic sanguine spire of the distant Empire State Building was wiped clean out. In the streets below her the red glare still pierced the melancholy rain. On the wet pavement the motors whirred more loudly, the tail-lights mimicked the scarlet of the stop lights, and when Bethel looked to the left, to Lexington Avenue, she was uneasy at the flaming neon signs aggressively thrust out above shop windows.
Ten thousand cherry-lighted windows piled up in tier on tier in office buildings, and behind them were a hundred thousand windows unlit, and weary with memory of the day's toil. It was a mighty, proud and terrifying city, an Orient city in red lacquer lit with red lights, a crimson barbaric city, and it was all hers--to conquer or be crushed.
It was after ten; she had napped for three hours of the evening, and she was hungry in a thin, petulant way, and her head ached, her legs felt shaky from want of food. But she sat on by the window unmoving.
She couldn't rouse the energy to go all the long way down the hotel corridor, down in the elevator, whose cheery young woman pilot would with depressing inevitability remark, 'Pretty wet to-night', out through a lobby explosive with young women being emptily merry with dreary male visitors, down the soaking street to a fish-stinking hole of a cheap restaurant. She was afraid to go out. She couldn't, not again to-day, face the heartless, anonymous, moving human detritus on the sidewalks. She was lonely, up here in this bright coop, but she was less lonely than scared.
Her little room was a miracle of compression. It must have been planned by an architect trained in designing prison cells, folding picnic baskets, and combination vanity sets and cigarette cases. To enable it to offer what was known in the circle of girl job seekers as 'a good respectable address on the East Side, just off Park Avenue', at only ten dollars a week (without food; jobless girls didn't need food; just addresses and silk stockings and a kind word), the builders had imaginatively got the furnishings of a two-room apartment into the space of a hall bedroom.