Bethel Merriday

'I'll love it, Doc.'

'Yes, you probably will, child. That'll be the one thing that'll finally tear it--to have you chattering like a canary bird at breakfast, when the rest of us have hang-overs and don't want to be suddenly jarred. You're a nice kid. I couldn't interest you in a goat farm in Vermont, could I? No? Okay, let's go back and see how much more of a beating the Bard will take.'

She was still alone every evening--her companions of the day vanished into nonexistence after rehearsals--but she was not lonely. She curled on the bed in her room, repeating the Juliet part aloud; she washed her hair; she went by herself to a movie, humming such classic epodes as 'Tea for Two', gliding in a warm, lilac-coloured mist that shut out the November drizzle and cement pavements and iron gratings. For the first time in her life she was completely happy.

And once Andy invited her to an evening party at the Picardy, of which she recalled little except Mahala, in a black evening frock with a panel of silver from bosom to hem, being maddeningly gracious and proprietorial, and insisting on pouring out drinks for large strong men like Harry Purvis and Tony Murphy and Victor Swenson.

And once Andy took her to dinner at the Twenty-One Club, at which he appeared at least twice a week for the purpose of explaining to a circle of professional wits that he never went to Twenty-One because there were too many professional wits there.

'Here's the picture you and I have to get, as apprentice actors, both of us. It's an allegory that Dorothy Gish told me,' said Andy. 'There was an old vaudeville couple; they'd been on the stage, mostly in the four-a-day, for thirty years, and they'd never made over sixty dollars a week between them. They'd done the same act--patter with a little Indian-club juggling, and then go into their dance--for fifteen years.

'Well, vaudeville is out, for the time being. They're living in a furnished housekeeping room, and Pop has been working in a clothes-pressing shop, evenings, to keep going. But they've had three days in a movie house in Altoona, and they land back in New York twenty-five dollars to the good. To-night they'll have chicken, and Pop will be able to buy a new pair of pants for three-fifty, and that will keep the old coat going another year.

'It's evening and it's raining, and they carry their own suitcases from the ferryhouse, but they're cheerful until a Rolls-Royce limousine comes flying by, near the kerb, and splashes mud all over them. In the limousine is a handsome, husky young couple--furs and top hat, staring straight ahead, ignoring everybody.

'Pop pulls out his old handkerchief, and wipes the mud off his wife's skirt, and he points after the expensive couple in the car and crows, "But they can't act!" There's our gospel, Beth.'

And once, rather rudely, Zed invited her to dinner at an Italian restaurant in the East Forties, so far over that it was practically in Italy, and filled her with fetuccini, and lectured her as eloquently as Andy.

'This last week, the rehearsals will get pretty hysterical. Satori will work us all night. Nobody will know his lines. Everybody will blow up. But that kind of strain you get over,' said Zed. 'The thing you've got to have the character to stand--good, old-fashioned, Scotch-Yankee-Montana word, "character"; I like it--is after the show closes, and you go plumb loco, because month after month you can't get a job--you're in swell shape, all ready to go, and they won't let you up on any stage.'

'I know. I've had just a month and half of it.'

'You've got to be prepared for a year and a half of it--ten years. Sitting by a telephone all day, waiting for a manager to call you.'

'Do you?'

'No, but then I've got a special method. I insult people, and so they notice me. That takes too much pains and energy for most people. And then, too, it gets around that I'm a really good actor, and they need me.'

'Upon my word! What about--'

'How do you know whether you're a good actress yet or not? How does anybody know? Don't be a lady. Don't look for insults.'

'Uh--well--yes--'

'The actor and the portrait painter are the only artists that have to have people out in front. Writers are lucky! A writer can write even if he's fallen out of an aeroplane on the Sahara Desert.'

'Write on what?'

'On the sand!'

'That wouldn't last very permanently, would it?'

'What writing does? Even Homer's only lasted three thousand years, and the human race's been going on for at least two hundred thousand.'

'Zed! Do you think I'll be able to act?'

'My pet!' 'Pet' was Zed's standard word of endearment, as 'darling' and 'kitten' were Andy's and 'child' was Doc Keezer's. He would do wonderful, histrionic things with 'pet'; he could make it insulting, belligerent, comforting or amorous.

'But do you think so?' insisted Bethel.

'I don't know yet. You're certainly not a dumb faker like Iris--'

'Then why do you go around with her so much?'

'Because she does what I tell her to, petty! You're not dumb like her, or phony and pretentious like Mahala, or sweet and pixie and dull like Mabel Staghorn. You belong more with Charlotte Levison--she's a tract-passing evangelical fundamentalist Marxian, but a tricky actress. Or maybe you even belong with the big bad Boyle. Or you will, if you ever learn anything.

'At present you can't even walk across the stage as though you were really going somewhere and not being dangled on a string by the director. But--yes, you have a kind of--a touch of strangeness. God knows where you got it! A B.A. from a female college! But maybe you'll be able to do some conjuring yet, if you can ever learn to keep your hands from getting tangled up with your feet when you're pulling the rabbit out of your silver snood. Bethel!'

'Yes?'

'Pet!'

'Well?'

'This show will flop, of course. It won't last ten weeks on the road.'

'Oh! No! Zed! It will succeed! It's got to! I'll make it! We'll all make it go. It's the world and all to Andy.'

'But unfortunately Andy isn't anything to the world and all. He's a nice guy--and that's a lot of praise from me, because mostly I don't like these kindhearted, open-faced, upstanding young men from Yale and Princeton and Dale Carnegie's classes in oratory. But we haven't got anything. Modern dress? Hell, pants don't make a show--even the lack of 'em doesn't.

'It's the emotion, the philosophy, the Stimmung, and the Stimmung of our production is as old-fashioned as Joe Jefferson.

'Romeo is biology, that's what he is, not moonshine, and Shakespeare knew it, the old devil--having been, like myself, educated under a hedgerow. Romeo is a decent young snob who's raving, fighting crazy about a girl who's the first one he's ever been really in love with. But to Andy and even to Mrs. Boyle our presentation is merely a prankish pageant to be played in the glade, under the auspices of the Siddons Society of Sweet Briar College, and it's all the more prankish to wear herringbone tweed instead of velvet, so long as all the thoughts are in velvet. So what have we got? Just another semi-professional road company of "Abie's Italian Rose". No, pet, I'm sorry; I like to eat, too, within reason; but we've got a flop on our hands.'

Bethel was desolate; she was full of eager, loyal, imbecile plans for converting Andy to something which she didn't in the least understand. She loved Andy for his pathetic plans of an eager child; she hated Zed for his cynicism; she hated Andy for his amateurishness; she loved Zed for his integrity; and in excitement and bewilderment she lapped up spumoni like a cat lapping cream.

'So,' Zed went on, 'if I'm right, you and I will be back here in New York by about the end of February. We'll be just a couple of kids, with no job. Let's get acquainted on this tour. Really acquainted.'