Everything conceivable to the genius of American gadgetry was here, but reduced below tolerable human size, and fitted together without six square inches of the waste space that could be used only for walking, relaxing, dreaming or any other merely human need: bed, reading lamp and bedside table, upholstered arm-chair, combination bookcase and desk and radio and bureau, and a dressing-table so elegant that in the advertisements it would be referred to as 'milady's'. And a bathroom. It was nearly possible to sit in the tub and reach out and write a letter, open the hall door, open the window or answer the telephone.
It was Modern enough for any Merriday. Only, daily, Bethel was becoming less Modern and more insistent about getting an old-fashioned job on some old-fashioned stage.
She was daily more timid about her dream, phonograph-engendered, of appearing not in the bare, pine-platform simplicity of Grampion, but on a great stage, jewel-lighted, lofty as Canterbury, with Noel Coward and Yvonne Printempts. Now she wanted any stage, with anyone.
Her timidity and tiredness won over her undoubted common sense, and for the third time in ten days she did not go out to dinner at all but, after nibbling at a chocolate bar and drinking a glass of water from the tap in the tile-and-nickel bathroom, she sat down to type the script of Tudor Blackwall's play--and that script typing was the nearest she had yet come in New York to being associated with anything theatrical.
At Grampion, Tudor Blackwall, second leading man, had never paid her any attention beyond murmuring, 'How are you, blessed?' and borrowing a match. But he was the first of the Nutmeg Players that she encountered in New York. She ran into him at lunch at the Olde Roanoke Drug Store, at Broadway and Forty-sixth Street, which is the chief club, restaurant, news bureau and matrimonial agency of all young actors looking for jobs.
He invited her to his flat for dinner. She had heard about the horrors of going alone to a man's flat, but Tudor seemed to her extraordinarily safe, and she took a chance.
He cooked dinner for her--a very good dinner, and very well cooked: onion soup and kidney stew and profiterolles with chocolate sauce. She discovered that he, who looked twenty-five and prosperous, with his sleek waistcoats and shoes fitting like gloves, was thirty-five and very hard up indeed, and that a part of his lovely glass-smooth black hair was a toupee.
He laughed about it all, and told her how unsuccessful he was, as though they were two girls together, and admitted that the silky superciliousness with which he had treated the apprentices at Grampion had been to keep these innocents from discovering that he was sickeningly uncomfortable with all strangers, and that his average yearly earning was two thousand dollars.
And he didn't borrow money.
She knew enough now to be prepared for that; she had even done hasty calculations indicating that five dollars was all she could afford. But he did read her a play he had just finished--he finished it every year at about this time--and he begged her to copy it for him.
It was a good play. It always has been, and when it is written by Noel Coward, S. N. Behrman, Philip Barry, or Samson Raphaelson, it even gets produced, to considerable glory. The hero was Cecil Gisthorpe, and he was a playwright, and he was witty, and he didn't really care a hoot when his girl was taken from him by a flannel-mouthed radical--but also witty--named Steve Grimston. There were cocktails and cigarettes in it, and an eccentric maid--also witty.
Bethel thought it was 'simply lovely', and said so, and Tudor said she was the nicest kid he had met for years and they would be great friends, and she said yes, and he bowed over her hand, and she took the script back to her hotel to copy it. That was a week ago, and she had almost finished. One of the few things on which her father had ever insisted in high school was that she should learn typing, and by the touch system. She blessed him now--though that was nothing sensational, for she usually did bless him. She was aware, after these six weeks of job hunting in New York, that she might not find any theatrical job whatever this year; that if she did get one, it would be an accident; and that she could not endure her family's going on stinting themselves in order to send her twenty-five dollars a week.
Probably she would have to be a stenographer till her dramatic miracle happened . . . though by now she was beginning to see that the employers of stenographers, too, were not excited by the chance of hiring young ladies with B.A. degrees, nice ankles and modest manners.
If she was going to get an office job, she told herself, she had to be good (not meaning it, apparently, in any moral sense, but only in reference to words-per-minute, a memory for telephone numbers, and such unpoetic slave virtues). Very well, she would be good!
Her typing was already tolerable, and her vocabulary was unusual, she concluded, after talking in employment bureaus and the anterooms of offices with candidates for stenography who seemed rather proud of themselves as exhibits of the renowned American free public school system if they could type anything so flawless as 'We acknowledge yours of the 5th instant and wourd asure you that we are shiping yours consinement at once to Niajerrer Falls'.
An hour a week, she was taking shorthand lessons with her one lone hometown acquaintance in urban wilds--her mother's cousin, a spinster secretary from Sladesbury, who was always parched with longing to hear from Bethel the details of the glamorous, naughty parties to which, as an actress, she must be going. And to practise the black art of shorthand, Bethel took down the free lectures in the schools, and sermons and political speeches on the radio.
Her back stung at last from typing, and she arose from the aphorisms of Tudor Blackwall's script and achingly undressed and crawled into the narrow sheath of her bed.
She was, normally, a cheerful person, and no hermit. She told herself, as she twitched into shallow sleep, that she must look up the other Grampionites here. She had not looked them up; she didn't want to impose on them. She had had one letter from Pete and Toni, now married in Zanesville and married to Zanesville. Toni talked airily of 'hitting the Big Town in a big way this winter', but she also wrote so familiarly of 'her' riding master and of the country-club dances that Bethel felt that all of Toni's dramatic genius, all that talent for dancing the rumba and the Lambeth Walk (the favourite mumbo rite of late 1938), all that ability to remain awake at three a.m. even after eight highballs, all that emotion-coloured memory which enabled her to recognize Franchot Tone and Loretta Young and Jessie Royce Landis and W. C. Fields on the street and to recall at what hour Edgar Bergen could be heard on WEAF, those uncommon glories of smooth knees and rounded breast, were lost to the artistic world for ever, and what was Broadway's tragedy was Zanesville's delighted gain.
Once Bethel had talked to Marian Croy on the telephone and, hesitatingly, had refused to share a room with her.
Bethel had a formless, confused notion that it would be better to read plays (borrowed from the Fifty-seventh Street Branch Library, the young actor's British Museum) than to listen to a boiling of Marian's friends chattering all evening about: 'I got it straight from a man that knows John Mason Brown personally, and he says Jed Harris is going to put on a radical revue, and they'll be hiring forty-two girls for bits and walk-ons right away.'
Once, in the Olde Roanoke's mammoth basement restaurant, Bethel had seen Iris Pentire, alone, delicately nibbling at Blue Plate Luncheon No. 5 (chilled tomato stuffed with egg salad, garnish of whole olives and radishes, rolls, butter, and beverage, 45 c.), and waiting to ignore some young male as soon as one should notice her enough for her to ignore him.