She forced herself to get up, pat her face with witch hazel, go downstairs past the elevator girls, the pages, the clerks, who, she fancied, were suspicious of her idleness, and walk ten blocks to a Chinese restaurant, where for thirty cents you could dine lavishly on chow mein and rice and tea and spicy fruits floating in pale syrup. But she fled back to the refuge of her bright lone room.
Thrice a week she went to the Class in Acting conducted by that lanky Polish demon, Sol Gadto; an echo of the Group Theatre discipline, with memories of Stanislavski. The students had most of them been inconspicuously on the stage already; they were afire with the purpose of great acting; they looked down on the Olde Roanoke loafers almost as much as the Olde Roanoke free souls looked down on their father and brothers.
The class cost five dollars a week. Bethel could not have afforded it, but Mr. Gadto, a theatrical fanatic who lived on brandy, hope and rich widows, told her with jeers and objurgations that she could pay him when she had her first engagement.
Gadto had assigned to her the part of Laura, the girl in Men in White who could not keep her lover. Bethel went through the lines with spirit, trying to reveal Laura--spoiled, a good sort, demanding, filled with a plain decent honesty. Bethel was rather proud of the gestures she had devised to illustrate the character: the airy circles with her cigarette holder when at heart she was agonized; the mouth upturned in luring.
That red-eyed buzzard Sol Gadto, as he listened to her, curled in his chair in their bare rehearsal hall, with both elbows against his belly, as though it ached, moving only to tap his teeth with a lax right hand in which drooped a cigarette.
When she was finished, he droned:
'That's a little better. But you're getting into a lot of fancy little movements that decorate action--oh yes, they decorate it, all right, and make it interesting--if you tied a pink ribbon on an archbishop's nose, it would make him interesting enough.
'How often have I got to tell you that every single movement of your whole body has got to grow out of your realization of what the character is feeling and thinking at that moment, and not for the sake of doing something? Now I want you to go and sit down and do what's sometimes called "sense memory". Put yourself back in some moment when you wanted to keep some boy and you felt at once sore and like a fool. Quit trying to act for the next ten minutes and put yourself in charge of that emotion. And sit still while you do it.'
Bethel could not recall any incident in which she had been a lady left and lorn. She had been rather glad when Charley Hatch had blithely turned her down for a girl with teeth. She thought of Fletcher Hewitt; she realized that she had not answered, for a week now, a letter in which Fletcher had told of painting their dilapidated inn, building bookcases, putting in plumbing. It was idiotic that she couldn't adore Fletcher, the while she worshipped at the shining feet of an Andrew Deacon who considered her merely a little chit to be kind to. In six weeks now he would have forgotten her name.
Andy . . . His small-boy grin. His rigid, President Coolidge insistence that Roscoe Valentine pay the theatre bills and answer all the letters. His bellow as he swam out through the tide rips, the sun-stroked hair on his arms like golden mail. His patience with that gilded shrew, Mahala. His beautiful coarseness in Fumed Oak and his beautiful gallantry in Tovarich. And she had never heard from him--there was no reason why she ever should hear from him--if she could just once see him at a restaurant. . . .
Gadto was calling her out of her trance, 'Let's try it again.'
She trotted up on the small platform, and it was no stage character, composed of paper and typewriter ink, that she was playing this time, but a muted, suffering woman who would have given anything to blow up in hysteria, to throw inkwells at the admirable young doctor, to yell, to tear out somebody's eyes . . . maybe Mahala's.
The director said 'Good', and for Mr. Sol Gadto, that was practically raving.
Mr. Gadto lived in the 'Village', and she returned uptown--to the Olympian groves of theatrical managers' offices and bus stations and Italian restaurants and hand laundries and grimy hotels--by subway. She was fascinated by the medley of people in the car: old Negro women with bundles, well-dressed, intelligent-looking young Negro women of the new urban colonies, old men mumbling into beards, resentful boys.
It tormented her that she could never know them, find out what they were like; that this young woman across the car, with her shocked, staring eyes, would in three minutes be leaving the car and be shut off from her for ever by the iron doors and the relentless speed of the departing subway train. If she could better understand that woman, she could act all unhappy women, for ever.
Here was a whole maddening city of people that she wanted to act--whom maybe she really could act--if she could ever get up on any stage to act anybody at all.
She lunched at a Coffee Pot Restaurant, where the only guest suggesting the theatrical profession was a sandwich man. In defiance of her budget she had bought an afternoon paper and, having been deprived of stage gossip for an entire four hours now, she turned feverishly to the 'News of the Theatres' column.
Heading the column was the announcement, written with typical New York contempt for all places outside Manhattan:
Andrew Deacon, who last winter was the leading man and co-director in The Best of Times, is organizing a touring company to play Romeo and Juliet in modern dress. This is believed to be the first time that the play has been thus costumed. Mr. D. indicates that he is going to use a number of his last summer's associates in the Grampion straw-hat aggregation of which he was co-producer. He is uninformative as to when he will attack Broadway, but he has definite bookings in a score of culture depots in the mail-order territory.
With a comic vision of Iris Pentire losing her Mona Lisa calm and Mahala her Ritz dignity and Tudor Blackwall his sleek superiority as, like herself, they dashed for bus and taxi, to reach Andy Deacon, Bethel left her steak sandwich unfinished and galloped to her hotel and to her telephone.
XIX
She telephoned to the small hotel of Marian Croy. No answer. She scrabbled through memoranda, found Iris Pentire's address, telephoned again, and again no answer. For weeks she had kept from going near Walter Rolf and the small office of the small producer for whom he was reading very small playscripts, lest Walter think she was asking him to help her, but now she threw away her delicacy.
Walter was very kind; on the telephone he even said something--something you couldn't quite pin down--about their having dinner together; but he didn't know where Andy Deacon was. Reckless then, she telephoned to Variety, and the telephone girl answered, as though she had given the same answer many times that day, 'He's at the Hotel Picardy, Park Avenue'.
She kept herself from the frenzy of taking a taxicab, but she almost ran across to Park Avenue, skimming a block out of her way to an old-book shop, where she primly bought a second-hand copy of the Tudor Romeo and Juliet.
She had realized that Andy represented wealth, but she was so acquainted with him as a khaki-trousered beachcomber that she was shy when she encountered him as a bustling Man of Affairs. In the ducal Hotel Picardy he had two suites: his own duplex apartment and a smaller extra one across the hall as a concentration camp for inquiring actors. It was to this secondary, overflow suite that Bethel was directed at the hotel desk.