She entered a plum-coloured drawing-room richly filled with every sort of overstuffed furniture that a sensible person could not possibly want. Facing the door, at an incongruous metal desk, was a Miss Sally Carpet, a young woman made entirely of glass, typing so rapidly that it looked vicious.
'Yes?' said the glass lady.
She had clipped some of the normal sounds out of even that inextensive word, and pretty well got it down to 'ys'.
'I'd like to see Mr. Andrew Deacon, please.'
'Nappointment?'
'No, I'm a friend of his.'
'Snamepls?'
'Bethel Merriday.'
'Wastabout casting?'
'Yes, please.'
'Spearance?' (Bethel concluded that this meant 'Have you had any experience?' but it may have signified 'Do you expect me to approve of your appearance?' or 'Do you spear your aunts?')
'I was with Mr. Deacon at Grampion last summer.'
'Oh. Another one! Well, I suppose he'll want to see you. Excuse me if I'm a crank, dearie, but nine-tenths of the babies that come in here either were playing in The Women or Our Town last year--under the stage name of Marlene Dietrich, I guess--or they got soused once with one of Andy's sisters.'
'Oh. Has he sisters?'
'Has he? Ask me!' With which mystifying demand, Miss Sally Carpet went across the hall to announce her. Days later, Bethel found that Andy decidedly had no sisters.
Andy himself met her in the entryway of the main apartment--yet was this Andy, this Hollywood creation in double-breasted blue suit, light blue shirt, dark blue tie, spats, sleeked hair, and a titanic seal ring with what she supposed to be armorial bearings?
He shouted, 'This is wonderful that you've come, darling! You're just the girl I've been looking for! I want you to meet the greatest director in the world--Adrian Satori . . . Adrian, this is one of my discoveries! Bethel--Bethel--oh, damn it, sweet, what is your last name?'
To meet Adrian Satori was, for Bethel, like being introduced to the Archangel Uriel at a cocktail party; Satori who had shepherded Molnar and Pirandello in New York, who had reintroduced Chekhov, and who was reputed to have been so impertinent to George Bernard Shaw that Shaw had respected him as a fellow-dictator.
For no clear reason Bethel had expected the great Satori to be either gaunt like Jerome O'Toole and Sol Gadto, or plump and pixie like Roscoe Valentine. But, gaping at him, she was overwhelmed to find that he looked like a pipe smoker, a golfer and a commuter. He shook her hand with a paw like a boxer's.
'Come join us, Bethel,' he said, a dryly as though he were ordering ginger ale. 'You may have some interesting new form of insanity that hasn't occurred to us yet.'
He was looking at her with bold dark Mediterranean eyes. She felt that he already knew her better than Andy did, and liked her more.
The living-room of Andy's apartment was tall, it was very tall, it was taller than the great hall of the Grand Central Terminal, with a studio window on one side so tremendous that it should have framed a view of the entire range of the Himalayas. Across the room was a Gothic stone fireplace composed of an entire castle transported from Normandy. On either side of the fireplace were couches for giantesses, and somewhere far up in the smoky heights hung a balcony, with a collection of all the tapestries in the world dangling over the rail. Apparently there were a bedroom or two up on this airy, healthful mesa, and a kitchen and dining-room under it.
The living-room was full of practically everything: brocade-covered couches, marble-topped tables, harewood glass-topped tables, Spanish thrones, footstools, a grand piano, or it may have been two grand pianos, a portable bar displaying whisky, brandy, gin, Grand Marnier, Benedictine, vodka, arrack and Chinese rice wine, vulgar typewriter desks, eddies of punched playscript paper, delightful cardboard models of scenery, half-unpacked suitcases, typed estimates, lost vanity cases, variorum editions of Romeo and Juliet, phonograph records, copies of The Billboard and Variety and Theatre Arts Monthly, arm-chairs deep as bathtubs . . . and people. And the telephone rang without ceasing, in the subsidiary suite across the hall, and Miss Carpet could be heard being noisily frigid in answer.
And people. They were plastered over the expensive furnishings. Tudor Blackwall, wearing a checked grey flannel vest, dashed up to Bethel glowing, 'Darling, don't worry about finishing my script. I know where I could get it accepted, but I'm going out with Andy in Romeo and Juliet as Paris.'
Doc Keezer, of Grampion, was there, looking like a well-contented chicken farmer. He was to play both Montague and Friar Laurence. Seeing Doc was to Bethel like seeing Sladesbury. And, considerably less soothingly and home-comingly, Iris Pentire was on hand, being cryptic to a piano stool.
She was chastely clad in a black loose-woven wool skirt up to her bosom, a Nile-green chiffon blouse with black sleeves down to her knuckles, and a patent-leather hat like a newly polished stove lid. She had already been chosen page to Paris and understudy to the Nurse and to Lady Montague. She confided to Bethel that she was so rare a hand at makeup that she could conceal her extreme youth and beauty and be a hag of a nurse like--as she herself put it--'like nobody's business'.
The throng made exits and entrances with dizzying swiftness and meaninglessness. Bethel would not have been surprised to see Eddie Cantor and President Roosevelt enter, arm in arm, followed by a milk-white antelope with a starry crown. But through all the walk-ons persisted the voice of none other than Mahala Vale, very handsome in a blue suit with a chinchilla fur and a hussar cap, shrieking at Andy and Satori that she ought to be cast as Juliet, instead of as Lady Capulet, and that for Mrs. Boyle to play Juliet was as sensible as to cast Madame Flagstad as Little Eva.
Boyle? Bethel wondered if this could be Mrs. Lumley Boyle, the famous, beautiful and shockingly bad-tempered Aurelia Boyle. For Juliet?
Mrs. Boyle was one of the highly competent English actors who, after working up a hatred for everything British, including fish and chips and the royal family, had come over to America chiefly because they could hate everything in these gangster-infested jungles even more. She was of the age called 'not so young now'. Perhaps forty. And she was really distinguished . . . Bethel felt that socially she was now going a step even higher than Uriel.
She begged of Andy, 'You're so busy; when may I come back and ask about a job--maybe understudy?' and he clamoured, 'No, no, no, no--don't you go, kitten--you stay--I need you', and she sneaked off to the security of a small pale arm-chair.
While Mahala bravely went right on denouncing her civil wrongs, and Andy cajoled, and Satori laughed and helped himself to a Scotch and soda, hundreds of thousands of other people popped in and, after having a free drink, sloughed away. Sally Carpet flashed in with telephone messages from press agents and company managers and juvenile actors who were 'at liberty', and from agents who had complete assortments of Shakespearian casts ready to deliver.
Seven feverishly competent young women came in to present the merits of as many dressmakers and, as it had definitely been announced that this Romeo and Juliet production was to be in modern dress, they all brought drawings of Elizabethan costumes in velvet. There was a rush of dealers in rapiers, floodlights, cosmetics, printing. There was even a live process server.
In the House of Merriday, in Sladesbury, to be served with a summons for an unpaid bill ranked with divorce for adultery or the use of cocaine. But when Miss Carpet quacked from the door, 'Process server here from Mintz, Dolce & Carr, Mist' Deacon,' the hero laughed: 'Shoot him in . . . How are you, comrade? This the document? Thanks. Have a drink?'