She thought that Adrian Satori, directing, nodded a blessing. But afterwards it seemed to her that everyone else had read so much more richly: Andy the soul of youthful love, Zed Wintergeist so boldly gay a Mercutio, Harry Purvis a swift blade as Tybalt, Hugh Challis sputtering pomp as Capulet, and Mrs. Boyle not forty-four but an eternal twenty.
(Bethel was quarrelling with Shakespeare and the Nurse for their lie that Juliet was fourteen. Why, she herself, was twenty-two, and it looked as though that enterprising young sprout Juliet had been around at least as much as she.)
When the reading was done, Mr. Wyndham Nooks encompassed Bethel like a fog blowing from a distillery and boomed, 'It's a shame to think of a lovely child like you having to open the play with the prologue. It will be beyond your powers. You'll blow, sure as hell! Of course I have almost more than I can carry already, with three bits, but I'll inform our good friend Deacon that for the good of the show, I can take on Prologue too.'
'You'll get those lines over my dead body!' snarled the young actress who once had been our gentle little Bethel.
The rehearsals wandered from the Ladies' Room up to the stage of the Gotham, then to a hall where Romeo, supposed to be gazing down the long tessellated ballroom at the distant beloved, was actually looking into Satori's yawns, three feet away. But they settled down for two weeks on the stage of that competent new theatre, the Prince Regent, not occupied just now by a play. Bethel felt happily that she had lived here all her days.
No first night, with chandeliers and Jerome Kern overture and furs and white shirt fronts and sparkling applause, could be more enchanting than the undressed stage, illuminated only by a work-light on a standard, with shadowy hints of the tall brick back wall, the bars of steam pipes, dusty stacks of old flats leaning against the wall, the electric switchboard and, mysterious above all, the upward-reaching darknesses of the fly loft. Against this quiet obscurity the actors, in shirt sleeves or old sweaters or too jaunty tweeds, moved back and forth, stammering their lines, repeating them, stopping to read not-quite-learned lines from the typed parts which they held up to their faces with one hand while the other hand made vague wild blind motions of wielding a club--or a girl.
Satori lounged over a kitchen table, making minute delicate notes on his script, and Nathan Eldred, the stage manager, in another chair discreetly drawn two feet farther back, prompted from his own script . . . No audience, but darkness and strangeness, and in the midst of it, the work-light, and the moving actors beginning, gesture by gesture and word by beautiful word, to evoke the passion in Verona.
That was the stage for Bethel Merriday.
Only a few times did Satori run through with her the prologue to the first act--the second-act prologue was cut out; and as Mercutio's page, she was on but a few minutes. Her real task, as understudy for Juliet, was to sit down in the auditorium, unmoving, like a solemn little owl, concentrated on everything that Mrs. Boyle did--every pronunciation of a musical line, every slightest movement of intense eyes, tender lips, eagerly graceful arms.
If she wanted to be up there with the others on the stage, she comforted herself with the assurance that soon she would be. In her next show she would have an understudy of her own--yes, and she'd treat her in a lot friendlier way than she was treated by Mrs. Boyle, whose most ardent attention was to look at her as though she had got in here by mistake and mutter 'Oh!'
Bethel understood better now the improbable stories of understudies who prayed that their principals would fall through a trap door.
It was a strain, sitting paralysed and ignored from ten to one and from two till six, particularly when the hour of six meant, to Mr. Satori, in scorn of Equity rules, seven-thirty or nine-thirty or eleven. Yet she rejoiced in this long, precise, four-week rehearsal as against the panic sketchiness of five-day rehearsals in summer stock.
And she was very cross with Iris Pentire--it didn't take much to make her cross with Iris--for sneaking away from her observation post as understudy to both the Nurse and Lady Capulet for a smoke in the lobby, or backstage to whisper glisteningly to Zed Wintergeist.
Zed was mutinous and critical from the first. Bethel was a little surprised when, after the five-day probation period before contracts were made permanent, Andy and Satori still kept him in the cast.
He wanted to make the articulation of the lines as prosaic and contemporary as the costumes; he wanted, he said, to exchange the gilt decorations of a fairy tale for the beauty of human emotions. Andy read Romeo, he said, like an elocutionist at Chautauqua.
In one of the hysterical blow-ups at rehearsal which are a proof that the play is progressing healthily, Zed denounced Andy and Andy denounced Satori, and in compromise Zed was allowed to deliver his lines as though a laughing, aching human being were talking, while Andy went on winging the empyrean. . . . Even young Bethel could see that the contrast was shocking, but Satori was dictator, as apparently a director must be.
After rehearsal hours, Andrew Deacon was the producer, with all the privilege of coaxing his friends to put money into the venture, and the imperial right to decide whether they should presently be playing three nights in Bonanza City, or one night each in Coyote Crossing, Cathay and Carlsbad. But during rehearsals, Satori told Andy and Zed--and Mrs. Boyle and Bethel--indiscriminately that they were stinking, and Andy took it more gratefully than anybody else in the company.
If there were skirmishes and barricades, there were no feuds or cliques in the company--yet. Everybody said that they were going to have a 'hit'. These modern clothes were making the play not an antique but a love story almost as good as one out of Hollywood. The married men of the cast, Hugh Challis, Geoffrey Hoy, Antonio Murphy, Wyndham Nooks, Nathan Eldred, the stage manager, and Tertius Tully, the company manager, muttered to one another that, after the last lean year, they would now be able to 'send home enough for the little woman and the dear little ones to go out and get soused every Saturday night, like gentlemen'.
Zed's nobly expanding grouch extended to Mr. Schnable's scenery as much as to the speech.
Like Bethel, he did not see why a contemporary Romeo should be played in a mock Lombard palace. With Douglas Fry, the small industrious assistant stage manager, Zed sketched a permanent set suggesting modern Italy; a huddle of yellow plaster walls with red-tiled roofs and a medieval tower, the terrace of Lord Capulet's modern villa, strung with coloured electric bulbs for dancing, with the door of Laurence's cell below the terrace, and behind all, the skeleton of a wireless tower.
They brought in their sketches--two enthusiastic young men who loved the stage so much they were willing to be damned for their impudence--and Mr. Schnable, the designer, a middle-aged man who didn't love anything in particular, promptly damned them. Andy said mildly, Yes, well, it certainly was an interesting sketch, but afraid he'd spent all the money on scenery he could afford to. . . .
Zed returned this benignity with a glare.
That newly fledged trouper, Bethel, was surprised that Mahala took direction almost as humbly as Andy. She began to respect Mahala as purely as she disliked her.
Mahala seemed mobilized now to capture Andy complete. The border-incident came from Joan Hinterwald, and it was Bethel who answered the call when Joan rang up.
Bethel summoned Andy to the telephone, and she couldn't help overhearing him--well, she didn't help it. He sputtered, 'No, honestly, Joan, it's impossible. I can't leave. We're rehearsing . . . What? . . . Serious? Of course it's serious! What do you think I'm doing? Playing at playing? . . . All right; be sore then.'