Andy was happily fussing. 'In his Globe Theatre version, Thomas Wood Stevens cuts out Romeo's "They pray, grant thou lest faith turn to despair". That spoils the sestet. That first duet of Romeo and Juliet's a sonnet, you know. . . . Oh, you didn't? Well, neither did I, till yesterday. Well, what do you think, darling? I value your judgment so much--'
'So much that--Look, Andy, please! I guess I've got to be a bold wench. You know--like Juliet. I want a job. Won't you please give me a reading, too? For anything from the Prince to the wardrobe mistress!'
'Darling! I'm so ashamed! As a matter of fact I was going to talk with you about that, but it slipped my mind, what with the telephone calls from classmates and creditors and cousins and all the nasty words beginning with C. I thought last summer that you were the only student that had much possibility. You need training. But then, so do I, and we'll hope to get it, on one-night stands with Romeo and friends. The play's mostly cast, now that we've got Zed: there's only Benvolio, and a triple of the Apothecary and Sampson and Second Watchman for some poor overworked ham, and Juliet's understudy--who'll also play Mercutio's page. I've read about a dozen ravishing young maidens for that last part, but I haven't decided and--Yes. Read Juliet. And you better be good!'
The waiter had taken out the table. The room, in the thirty-seventh story of the Hotel Picardy Tower, was quiet. Andy thrust the Romeo script into her nervous hands, switched on an electric hearth fire vastly more real than clumsily burning wood, and flopped out on the couch in beefy elegance.
She got herself a small coffee table and a straight chair, laid out the script, leaned over it with her cheeks in her hands and began to read. She became fairly calm. This was not a manager considering her for a job; it was her friend, almost her worshipped idol, Andy Deacon.
She was calm enough to forget him entirely as she read, 'O gentle Romeo, if thou dost love, pronounce it faithfully'. Her reading had no particular 'modernity', no discernible link with Freud and Adler. It was as old as cypress groves and little rivers and the young moon, and if there was anything contemporary about it, for contribution to the Deacon Theatrical Experiment, it was that to her, just now, Romeo was not smouldered in an antique tomb, but alive and here, ducally lolling on the couch, his eyes (she peeped to see) tight-closed in the closeness of his attention--
And she realized that he had fallen asleep.
She was not angry long. Asleep, his face was so youthful, so weary. She sighed for herself and her lost opportunity, and then she sighed for him. 'Poor Andy! Poor dear!' She softly drew a cover over him, tiptoed to find her hat and jacket, and tiptoed out into the hotel corridor, crying.
The telephone by her bed terrified her out of sleep. She was entirely convinced that she had murdered someone and that this was the police after her. Her breath coming harshly, she turned on the light and saw her little old bedside clock. It was three o'clock.
'Y-yes?' she said quaveringly, into the hateful black maw of the telephone.
It was Andy--blast him! And he sounded as fresh and busy as at noon.
'Beth? You thought I fell asleep?'
'Yes, I did sort of think so.'
('You know you fell asleep, you producer, you capitalist, you face-grinder, you spats-wearer.')
'Maybe I did. I'd been going hard since seven in the morning--or anyway since eight or eight-thirty. But I heard enough of your reading before I popped off. If I remember rightly, you have good legs, haven't you?'
'What?'
'You heard me! As Mercutio's page, you have to wear tights.'
'Yes, I have!'
'All right. You're elected. You understudy Juliet and say the prologue and play the page.'
'Oh, Andy!'
'You get forty a week, Equity minimum. Okay?'
'Oh yes, quite okay!'
'You're not an Equity member yet.'
'No, I couldn't join till I had a producer's contract.'
'Come around to the Picardy sometime this afternoon and I'll give you a contract. Rehearsals start Monday, October thirty-first, five days from now. We open in Belluca, Indiana, for a week's run, on November 28th. Look, Beth, what do you think of keeping the two pages in tights, as I said? It don't jibe with the modern costumes, but then, we haven't got anything corresponding to a gent's private page to-day anyway. I've been thinking about it--I tried to get Adrian and Bill Schnable on the phone just now to talk it over, but the dirty dogs have both cut off their telephones for the night, fine theatrical men they are, sleeping like commuters, and--what do you think?'
Twenty minutes later they were still talking, with Bethel pleased to believe that she could keep her voice steady and practical.
She did not go back to sleep. She read an act of Romeo and Juliet--sitting up in bed, solemnly sucking a candy bar, looking about ten years old in her pink-and-white knitted bed jacket. At dawn she had a shower, dressed, slipped through the hotel corridor, while the aged male night clerk frowned. She had coffee and corn flakes at the counter--of pine scrubbed down till the knots and the grain stood out like a relief map--of an old, cheap restaurant that was lined with pressed tin, so that she felt as if she were cooped in an old tin packing case.
As she sipped the coffee, which managed to be at once weak and bitter, she was still hotly reading Romeo and Juliet.
XX
For five days of waiting before rehearsals, Andy's apartment was her home, her temple. He seemed to like having her about; occasionally he kissed her cheek, though in an entirely absent-minded way and usually during a discussion, explosively carried on with from two to a dozen persons, as to whether Romeo, the blighter, should ever carry a tennis racket.
Regularly he insisted that she stay for lunch and dinner, at which you met a cross section of New York, London and Central Europe, none of them particularly invited to stay but none of them ever disinvited.
With no very definite arrangement, she became assistant secretary to Miss Sally Carpet, and by a judicious combination of her small shorthand and her large memory, she was able to take fifty letters a day--most of which began, 'Dear Joe, When I arrive in Palace City with my show--oh hell, Beth, never mind; I'll phone him, long-distance, this evening.'
Miss Carpet accompanied her when, with the grandeur of a real theatrical contract in her pocket, she went to join the Actors' Equity Association . . . The secretary at Equity seemed perfectly calm about it.
The apartment became hourly more disordered and insane. On the grand piano was a heap of scenery sketches, letters, script pages, theatrical pages torn out of newspapers, and proofs of advertisements. At any moment you saw Andy emerging from his bedroom in a maroon dressing-gown over crimson silk pyjamas; Zed Wintergeist sitting up on the rail of the balcony, legs dangling over the abyss, eating two ice-cream cones in succession; a completely strange man in morning coat and striped trousers, sitting vacantly hour on hour, holding his derby hat and seemingly having no purpose in life except to hold derbies; and Adrian Satori asleep five feet away from a poker game conducted by Andy, Zed, Tudor, Mahala and the stage manager--a competent standard-sized person named Nathan Eldred.
There were long conferences with a professor from Swarthmore, changing the names of Shakespeare's weapons, so that Benvolio's 'put up thy sword' became 'put down your fists', and old Capulet cried not for his 'long sword' but for his 'oak stick'. During these solemnities Bethel and her typewriter retreated farther and farther, until one afternoon she quite happily put in two hours typing with the machine resting on a chair up in Andy's bathroom, while Iris Pentire was being helpful by sitting on the edge of the bathtub and repowdering her nose.