Bethel saw him stalk back on the stage and ten minutes later sit down with Mahala. He must have murmured to her something of his troubles, for Mahala patted his arm sympathetically. Bethel sighed.
After that day Mahala was cockier than ever. She tore through the Lady Capulet role like a racing driver, and she had the cheek to say to Mrs. Boyle (twenty-six being lofty to forty-four), 'I wonder if any of the audiences will get the humour of my playing your mother?'
'Perhaps it isn't humorous, my dear,' purred Mrs. Boyle.
The two pages, Bethel and Iris, were not to wear tights and ruffles, but dreary military-school-cadet uniforms. Bethel was simultaneously glad that she would not have to be so immodest as to show her pretty legs in public, and sorry that she was not going to be more attractive. As to the conduct of their two minutes parts, Iris and she fell out.
Iris intended to be as dainty and flirtatious in grey trousers as in chiffon.
'Of course! You don't want to miss being feminine, not with Zed and Douglas and Lyle and Tom Wherry around!' Bethel was guilty of remarking.
'And you an Equity member less than two weeks,' sighed Iris.
'I don't see what that's got to do with it!' But this preposterous attack confused Bethel, and she ended, without much conviction: 'I'm going to be as sturdy a young scrapper as I can.'
'All right, dearie; don't tell me about it; tell Satori,' mused Iris.
Never had Bethel been so put in the wrong, never had she so inexcusably put herself in the wrong. It didn't comfort her much to have Iris and Zed go off to lunch arm in arm. She was privately deciding that since Andy was apparently lost forever in the warm ardours of Mahala, like a bumblebee enveloped in the vegetable horrors of the Venus flytrap, she would better think seriously about Zed.
Then was horrified to discover that she could take Zed very seriously indeed. She could admire his noisy courage; she could be tickled by his ever-changing monkey face.
But this was treachery! she accused herself, and her spirit sat down again before the kindly shrine of Andy.
Of the constant line changes compelled by the modern setting, none produced a better battle than Romeo's order to Balthasar: 'And hire post-horses; I will hence to-night.' Andy was all for rendering it, 'Fill up the car with gas; I'll leave to-night'. Zed (whom no one had consulted) agreed profanely. Satori insisted that this was a trifle too post-Elizabethan. 'You don't absolutely have to have the apothecary sell Romeo a drum of carbon monoxide to kill himself with, you know. Let's make the speech, "Have the car ready; I will hence to-night." That's good enough--or bad enough.'
It was Bethel who most profited by all the violences done to Shakespeare's words.
Iris had boasted though it might be Bethel who understudied Juliet, she had no lines on the stage except the 'regular little college-girl speech' of the prologue, while Iris, as Paris's page, had four whole lines and a whistle.
But Satori and Andy condensed the end of the play. In the new version, after Juliet's death, in a light that rose to earliest dawn, cloaked figures that might have been ghosts moved slowly on stage, and the curtain came down after a speech combined from the last lines of Capulet, Montague and the Prince:
This speech, Victor Swenson, as Prince Escalus, assumed would be his own, while old Nooks pointed out that it would go very nicely indeed with the role of First Watchman. But Andy and Satori, to universal astonishment and considerably less than universal rejoicing, gave it to Bethel, as newly created Epilogue.
And she was to have a lovely new white silk robe and a gold laurel-crown, a combination of Elizabethan and Contemporary, in which to say both prologue and epilogue, and Iris was stunned and despairing, until Zed remarked that the costume looked like Memorial Day Services at the James A. Garfield High School.
She had to cue Mabel Staghorn, as the Nurse. She had to cue Mahala. Much worse, she had to get Iris to cue her, as Juliet. She had her role comma perfect before Mahala had learned half of hers. But that wasn't enough. Maggie Sample had told her that you don't really know a role until it's so deep in your unconscious that you aren't aware of saying the lines at all. So she chased Iris from auditorium to hidden dressing-rooms to the prop room and cornered her, and thrust the part at her, and demanded, 'Here, I want to be cued. You know I'm all ready to cue you, whenever you say the word.'
'Oh, what's the hurry? We're only understudies. Wait till I get a real role,' sighed Iris.
Satori had a theory that present-day audiences find Shakespeare dull because the productions are paced like a funeral. He yielded to Andy and kept Romeo's high poetic lines in a highfalutin elocution, but he drove the other actors to such speed that they went off into the wings and wept. There must not be a tenth of a second between cue and response; no gazing up to the wings with an archepiscopal reverence. Yet he was precise about every detail of action.
Every cross, every slight lifting of the hand, must be fitted to every other movement like a micrometer gauge, and as to the exact meanings of lines Satori and Andy were always diving into the Variorum Shakespeare and coming up, philologically dripping, with 'Look! Look! In the quartos there's no dash before the "no". This is Ritsen's punctuation.'
'I see they got some nice Irish variorum on the menu today. Try some?' said Doc Keezer to Bethel at lunch. He had taken her to Sardi's, where all the debutantes try to look like actresses, and all the actresses try to look like--actresses. Normally the cast's communal lunch, between spasms of rehearsal, was a waxed-paper container of coffee and a ham sandwich from the drugstore, but occasionally Doc Keezer rebelled, and demanded time for real food.
'All that Shakespearian research stuff is the bunk,' he said. 'It's by no means proven that the best way to play Shakespeare isn't to do a Marmaduke Montmorency de Booth, with all the dog you can put on, tights and velvet hats and a lot of rapiers, and chew the scenery and yell and give everybody a good time--and you can get all the fittings second-hand then, and pick out the most rheumatic old ham at Billy McMoriarty's saloon for director. However, Beth, this is a theatrical engagement. We might have to go to work if we didn't have it. How about some cheese for dessert? When we get out on the road, you'll learn to take cheese instead of all this ice cream. It keeps your belly filled, and that's the chief purpose of a trouper, and not no purple ecstasies, or big notices by the police reporter in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.'
'I'm going to love trouping,' said Bethel.
'You are, eh? Wait till you have to catch a seven-a.m. train in Minnesota in January, with the thermometer eighteen below, and that old north-west wind scooting down the platform and the train an hour and a half late, and then it comes in with ice on it like armour, and the heating apparatus gone on the blink.'