Iris was not there so often, but her ways were simple and pleasing; she rather hoped to lure Andy away from Mahala, and she crisply intended to win Zed Wintergeist. And to Bethel's innocent astonishment, that hard-minded image breaker was easily beguiled by Iris's faint wise smile. Whenever Zed had denounced Andy for producing merely another pretty-pretty version of Romeo, he looked in relief to Iris's cool magic and invited her out for a drink.
But on Andy, Iris's designs were idiotic. Mahala had claimed him again. She paraded him, in chains of taffy, before all the new audience--Satori and Schnable and Zed and Mrs. Boyle--as her very own. So far as Bethel could tell, Andy was never so incautious as to mutter anything to Mahala about the gallows march to the altar. He merely said to Mahala that she was a greater actress than Rejane, more beautiful than Diana Manners, and that it was a shame for her to spoil such incomparably beautiful slim hands with crimson nails like lobster claws. But Mahala incessantly patted him, took his arm, smiled at him apropos of his observation that the weather was colder to-day, hummed at him, looked up at him, looked up at him--
Bethel sighed, 'That female floorwalker will capture Andy, and Iris will seduce Zed--not such a complicated campaign, I'm beginning to think--and even if Mrs. Boyle falls dead--I hope it won't be serious, but I hope it will be soon--and I play Juliet, I'll still be left with only Tudor Blackwall and Doc Keezer for beaux. Oh, this going to be a crusade of mud and glory.'
She watched the end of the casting. The last stroke was an error. Andy was so sick of rejecting applicants, of condemning them to starvation again, that when Mr. Wyndham Nooks proved, in reading the three parts of Apothecary, Sampson and First Watchman, that at least he could pronounce the English language, Andy sighed, ignored Adrian Satori's wildly frowning disapproval and blurted, 'All right, Mr. Nooks, you can have the part, if you'll take fifty a week. Okay? Go in and see my secretary, Miss Carpet, about your contract.'
Before midnight, well berated by Satori, he was groaning, 'Oh, I know it. I was tired. My foot slipped. I've gone and wished a real ham on to the company. Well, that may be a good thing--the rest of us saved souls will have somebody besides Mrs. Boyle to hate.'
Mr. Wyndham Nooks was portly, basso, slow and sentimental, and he quoted poetry--preferably Milton and Eddie Guest--in answer to a request for a match. As a stripling, in Tennessee, he had been a Fundamentalist Baptist preacher. There were two schools of thought as to why he had suddenly left this high calling.
He claimed to be sixty; he had acted, or enacted acting, for thirty-five years. He had been in medicine shows, in Tom shows, in pick-up companies playing Shakespeare and Dumas through the Southwest; he had been drunk with some of the richest cowmen in Oklahoma and in their homes had recited 'Gunga Din'. He had starved after his first venture to New York, but then had fallen into a good line of business doing congressmen and pompous clergymen--though he never did quite understand why audiences laughed so much when he delivered sentiments which he felt to be elegant and noble.
There was a whole gallery of people new to Bethel, and now very important to her, in the Romeo cast:
Young Douglas Fry, from the University of Pennsylvania; slim, colourless, capable. He was assistant stage manager and played Abraham, Friar John and the Second Watchman; he wanted eventually to be a director.
Lyle Johnson, who was to play Balthasar in a chauffeur's uniform, and any number of Torch-bearers and Citizens of Verona in between. He was a good actor, he was a drunken rowdy after eleven-thirty p.m., he looked like a loose farmhand off-stage, but on-stage looked like precisely whatever character he was ordered to portray. He would end in jail or in Hollywood.
Hugh Challis, that stately, kindly old Lambs' Club Englishman who dealt generously in charm. He was Capulet, a role which he had first played in the Nottingham at the age of twenty-two.
The Nurse was that sweetly sighing, tenderly patting and poisonously gossiping old character woman, Miss Mabel Staghorn.
Lady Montague was Charlotte Levison, who was Jewish and a Communist, and who resembled all young eighteenth-century English duchesses depicted against oaks in the deer park. Charlotte had inherited Communism from her family, as she might have inherited Catholicism or Quakerism, and she combined with her vague Marxianism a pious fondness for furs and ruby bracelets and guinea hen under glass.
Tybalt was Henry W. Purvis, PH.D. in English of the University of Chicago. Harry Purvis was the hedge scholar, the Friar Tuck, whom even card-catalogue universities cannot kill out of the eternal human comedy. For a year (he was thirty now) he had been master in that select academy for young gentlemen, Hotchkiss. He was an excellent actor, fresh and vigorous and flexible; and on holidays and after hours, he was a much worse drunk, more sodden and suicidal, than Lyle Johnson. His real initials were H. W. L., but he was trying to lose the L.
Benvolio was the Canadian actor, Geoffrey Hoy--he was mostly clothes and smile. Escalus, Prince of Verona, was Victor Swenson, who, though he was broad-shouldered and Viking-maned, had followed the too-common American transition from wheat farm to decadence in one generation. Peter was Antonio Murphy, a dolorous comedian surly about taking direction.
There were two youngsters: Vera Cross, who understudied Lady Capulet, and Tom Wherry, who understudied all the younger men principals; and both of whom appeared as Citizens of Verona, along with almost everybody in the cast. There was so much doubling that Doc Keezer (Montague-Laurence) said (and frequently) 'when you came offstage, you met yourself just leaving your dressing-room. Still, that's nothing. Why, when I was playing with Lincoln J. Carter, I did six different characters and an off-stage pistol shot.'
Of the permanent crew of three heads of mechanical departments, carried with the company to direct local crews of stagehands--carpenter, electrician and props--Bethel did not know or think for weeks yet, but she was to come to know them as a company of uncles, protective and wise. But Tertius Tully, the company manager, who was as thin and salty and Yankee as a dried codfish, was to be her Chief Uncle.
This was her family, her tribe, her temple, her vagrant home. In it she still loved but almost forgot her earlier homes: her parents, Charley Hatch, Alva Prindle, college and Fletcher Hewitt . . . that innkeeper. She was a nun now, a probationer nun, and she was well content.
This was good enough!
XXI
Their first rehearsal, when they read through their parts aloud, was at the historic Gotham Theatre, but it was not on the stage, which still shone from the presences of Mrs. Fiske and Maude Adams and John Drew and Nat Goodwin. The bones of a recent brief theatrical misfortune were being carted away from the stage; in the lounge, the management was trying to make old red-plush chairs into new red-plush chairs; and the lobby was being painted. And so the auspicious first rehearsal of Romeo and Juliet was held in the Ladies' Room.
It was quite a nice Ladies' Room, with a dressing-table, a wide mirror edged with designs in frosted glass, six refined pink washbowls and a dozen gilt chairs, which were taken by the older troupers. Mrs. Boyle pre-empted two of them, one for her fur, while the others sat on the floor.
As Mercutio's page and as understudy to Juliet, Bethel had nothing to read, in among the organ notes of Romeo and Lord Capulet and the Prince; but as Prologue, she had a whole sonnet, at the beginning of the first act, and she sang it out in the fresh voice of an eager young girl who loved 'the traffic of our stage with the pair of star-crossed lovers'.