'You seem to be sufficiently really-acquainted with Iris.'
'Yuh. Too well!'
'You're one of the gweat big men that all of the poor weak women follow!'
'Pet! Would you mind stopping talking like a fool--like a suburban wife flirting with the dentist? Let's get back to work.'
She was angry and a little curious; not so much as to what his intentions might be as to whether this bumptious young stroller took enough trouble with women to have any intentions toward them at all.
It was a relief to ask cool, pleasant young Douglas Fry his opinion of their fate.
'Of course the show will succeed!' asserted Douglas. 'Isn't Romeo and Juliet the greatest love story going? Aren't Americans the most sentimental people in the world? And isn't this the first time Romeo has been done so people to-day will identify themselves with it? Why, of course! It'll be a wow!'
'Oh yes, I'm sure it will be a wow,' exulted Bethel.
XXII
There were excursions that made Bethel feel gratifyingly professionaclass="underline" the election of the company's Equity deputy, when for a quarter-hour they ceased being artists and vigorously became labour-union members who had jobs and wages to protect. Wyndham Nooks diaconally offered to serve and to guard them all like little lambs; so Doc Keezer was elected. As a junior member of Equity, Bethel had no vote. She just prayed for Doc's election.
And the first professional photographs: individual ones to be exhibited in the frames in the theatre lobbies. They were photographed in a rapid-fire theatrical studio in a shaky old building over an orangeade stand on that shockingly decayed Rialto, Broadway.
The photographer, a black-haired young Pole who wore a beret and a checked business suit, glared at Bethel, announced, 'You've got a nice, sensitive face for Hollywood, young lady, when you can get out of this damn-fool stage business', and before she could protest that she was an Artist, he was yelling at her, 'Look Up! Look down! Now look up here where I'd be saying "Look at the canary", if you were about two years younger. Swell! Scram! Next!'
She was rather unausterely pleased when the proofs of her photographs made her seem alive and exciting, all living dark eyes, while the pictures of the lovely lily Iris revealed her as a little washed-out and plebeian. She told herself that she oughtn't to think things like that . . . she told herself.
The last ten days out of the four weeks of rehearsals accelerated like a car without brakes running down a mountain road.
For days it did not seem probable that there ever would be a performance. Half the time the old troupers like Doc Keezer and Hugh Challis and Mabel Staghorn saved their voices and dismayed Bethel by stingily talking only to themselves. Sometimes she was impressed by the dignity and noble pity of the prosaic Doc Keezer as Friar Laurence.
His whole face seemed larger; his forehead wider; his tranquil gestures more priestly. Then he would shrink again into peddling his gestures dully across a counter. Andy was always awake and romantic. Mrs. Boyle was for an accidental moment, now and then, transformed into the passionate girl. Her voice was living music, and an inner glow seemed to make her whole body rosy as in divine tenderness she cried:
And five minutes later Mrs. Boyle would be breaking the spell, and infuriating Romeo, by sweetly crooning, 'Oh, Mr. Deacon, I am so sorry to interrupt but, Mr. Satori, did you say you thought I ought to lay my hand on the nurse's shoulder just before I say "O what a beast was I to chide at him", or just afterwards?'
And when even the rock-bound Satori blew up with, 'Oh, for God's sake, Aurelia, do it just the way you've been doing it ever since you played it with Charles Kean in 1855!' then Mrs. Boyle smiled demurely.
Zed Wintergeist referred to Mrs. Boyle as the 'six-minute egg'.
By sheer torture Satori got old Wyndham Nooks not to say his line as Sampson, 'I strike quickly, being moved', as though he were about to be sick. Most of the time most of the cast floundered and forgot their lines and spoke them like sulky schoolboys and forgot fifty times over just when they were to turn and when to walk; and to the anxious Bethel, the whole thing was a straw pile.
It was on Tuesday afternoon, in the last week of rehearsals, that the miracle happened, and suddenly they were playing--they were not school children doing exercises but trained actors playing, and then not actors at all, but real people, suffering, loving, fighting. She cried a little, and she saw Satori breathe deep, as line came smoothly after line like water flowing.
Incredibly, the rehearsal time was almost over, and they were preparing for their journey that would take them out to Iowa, Kansas, perhaps to Colorado and California, that might last a year and might end up in New York or Australia--or in Palooka Junction.
They were all buying wardrobes and baggage, and all talking about it. Mahala was going to have a new evening frock of silver lamé--she would be going to elegant parties with Andy, she sniffed. Iris, at the celebrated 'little dressmaker on a side street, so cheap, and just as good as Bergdorf', was having made an evening frock that had a jet black front and tight long sleeves but, economically, no back at all.
Bethel's father, always so amazingly understanding of things that he couldn't possibly have understood or imagined, had sent her a hundred dollars, with a note ending, 'I guess I can get along without this for a while and you will want to buy trunk & etc. & be as well dressed as all the other girls in Show, guess to do that would cost three four hundred, afraid can't quite afford that but hope enclosed will help a little'.
She tenderly sent back ten dollars, and spent the rest on underclothes and a sweater and a trunk. She was suddenly sharply impatient with the swank of Mahala and Iris. If she bought anything, it would be out of her savings along the road after she had paid Sol Gadto for his lessons--and if the others sniffed at her shabbiness, why, she'd just have to get along with being as badly dressed, off-stage, as Mrs. Lumley Boyle!
But she excitedly shopped for a second-hand trunk. She calmly drove a number of Third Avenue Jewish dealers in such baggage, dealers esteemed in the profession for their shrewdness and persistence, to frothing madness by picking at the corners of wardrobe-trunk drawers and counting the number of clotheshangers and refusing to be moved by broken-hinged coffers with lovely flowery chintz lining.
No newly made knight had more satisfaction than did Bethel when the new old trunk arrived in her room--necessitating her standing on the bed when she was dressing--and she beamed at its lordly inscription:
She read timetables. She looked at maps in the library. She mugged up on such exotic knowledge as the origin of the names Des Moines and Milwaukee. And she was somewhat terrified all the while, because the longest journey she had ever made had been from Sladesbury to Bar Harbour, by motor car, and she had never spent a night on a Pullman car in her life--to her generation, aeroplanes were more familiar than trains. And she was sure, up to the moment when their train left for Belluca, Indiana, that this grown-up company of real actors would never actually pay her train fare and take her along.
Andy Deacon had a rich cousin, one Romer Ingalls, in the plumbing-supply-manufacture and Sons of the American Revolution line in Belluca, and no professional play had opened there for years. With these two advantages, they were bound to succeed, and to all of the company, even Doc Keezer and Mrs. Boyle, Belluca suddenly took on the aspect of Bethlehem.