Rather numbly, as on the morning before execution, Bethel realized that at seven p.m., this very Saturday, November 26th, 1938, she would be starting, with the company for Belluca. She packed her trunk and three bags, made sure that her purple lining pencil and mascara were in her makeup box, paid her final hotel bill, sent down her baggage, and sat on her bed in the vacated, horribly empty, horribly quiet and utterly strange room, in a panic.
Volitionless, dream-walking, she coaxed herself downstairs and into a taxicab to the Pennsylvania Station.
With a feeling that the flow of passengers would stop and rush up to her, begging for her autograph, if they knew who she really was--i.e., a woman explorer starting for Greenland--she gave her suitcase to an unimpressed redcap.
The whole company were surging in circles or standing patiently at the train gate. She did not know them, for they wore not the familiar, rather back-attic clothes in which they had rehearsed, but their best winter overcoats. How familiar she would become with those overcoats in the next months!--Andy's dark grey herringbone, Zed's loose and cloaklike camel's-hair with the high collar, Iris's vain lilac garment, with two huge purple buttons on the back of the waist (and one tiny grease spot, later to spread by parthenogenesis, on the front hem), Doc Keezer's gloomy, heavy grey worsted which (he told you) he had bought in Wheeling, West Virginia, for thirty-two dollars three years ago.
As she recognized them, her timidity was gone in the joy of this, her family. They were so welcoming, so gay. Everyone's smile said that they loved her and that they were going forth to conquer.
But Andy was edging away by himself, walking up and down the shed, head bent, his hands behind him. Doubtfully she followed him and begged, 'Anything the matter?'
He held her by both arms and burst out, 'Kitten, I suddenly feel so responsible, taking all of you out on this gamble, and a lot of you with dependants--kids and mothers. Real actors, not semi-amateurs like me, trusting their whole lives to an enterprise like this. It scares me! Darling, I want you to kneel in your berth to-night and pray, "God make me a good actress and help me to help Andy put this crazy adventure over"!'
For the first time, she was not shy with him. As he held her shoulders, she put her light hands affectionately about his waist and cried, 'You've been an angel to all of us. And we do appreciate it, though I guess we've all been too stupid to thank you. And we will succeed. We will!'
'Thanks, Beth.' He looked at her with a curious, bright sensitiveness, unlike his complacent bulk, patted her shoulders and hurried away to buy mounds of magazines.
The train gate was open. The company were a ship's complement, shouting farewell to land, anchors aweigh for Ultima Thule, where summer and winter the golden globes shine on the trees and in the street lie pieces of eight. Antonio Murphy, the solemnly comic Peter, was kissing a surprisingly pretty young wife good-bye; so was Geoffrey Hoy, the Benvolio; Mabel Staghorn was crying on the shoulder of a thin, painfully reasonable little man; and Wyndham Nooks kissing the hand of a faded and ageing wife, faded yellow hair and faded pink cheeks and faded pink summery hat, who had been his companion in rackety medicine-show days and who looked at her lion-maned Henry Irving so adoringly, with such loneliness, that Bethel pinched herself for having ever made fun of Nooks.
And they all stamped down the stairs and on to the Pullmans.
They had one and a half Pullmans reserved for them. In the half-car, the Adults' Car, to which were assigned such nobles as Hugh Challis, and Mabel Staghorn, Mrs. Boyle had the drawing-room, which is the sign and privilege of a star; in the other, the frivolous Young People's Caravan, the drawing-room was Andy's, but to-night it was shared by Director Satori, who was going out to Belluca to stay with the show the first week. And on the whole journey it was jammed less with Andy than with blown newspapers, the girls of the company, bridge games, Wyndham Nooks rumbling, portable radios yawping, and everybody's excess luggage, rubbers and troubles. It was as private and honorific as the vestibule.
Before the train started, Andy summoned everybody into the Young People's Car for an announcement. Beth long remembered those twenty-eight people, plus Sally Carpet, come down to the train with the final telegrams for Andy, standing thick in the car aisle, their faces, carven in high planes and shadows by the car lights, uplifted to Andy as he stood up on a pile of suitcases and shouted:
'Ladies and gentlemen of the company! We are about to assault and capture the West. West where the West begins. Where the handclasps are a little warmer and we hope the box offices are a little busier.'
Bethel sharply remembered that, however Andy might joke, she, who had never been more than ten miles west of the Hudson, really was Going West: California sands and yellow rivers and desert and the peaks of Colorado; covered wagons, and John Brown riding, and young men singing on ranches with the moon enormous across the plains. She was almost dancing as he went on:
'So to start us off on our mission--of making a fairly honest living--I want to tell you that I have just received a wire from Belluca that we shall go clean on Monday night, opening night, and that there is a very good chance of our being sold out for all the rest of the week. We're a hit already, boys and girls. Skip, Sally; the train's going.'
Everybody cheered. Miss Carpet darted off, to the tune of that twilight wail, 'All-ll-ll abo-oo-ooard!' from the platform, and the train was moving.
The car was littered with baggage like the debris of a hurricane. Bethel was to know the company's belongings as well as she knew the owners: Doc Keezer's portable radio, canvas-covered with a band of red and yellow, which he played very softly in his berth on the long, train-shaking nights when he couldn't sleep; Mahala's extravagant four bags, in blue morocco so expensive and so easily scratched that she kept them protected by a variety of little dog blankets, so that you never could see the fine leather at all; the two-volume set of Karl Marx which Charlotte Levison always had with her, in train seat and hotel and dressing-room, and which she was never seen to read for more than five minutes at a time; the whole series of plays and books on stage design which Zed Wintergeist and Douglas Fry did read and trade back and forth; Henry W. Purvis's private flask, and Henry W. Purvis's folding pocket chessboard, which he shared with Douglas, Hugh Challis and Mabel Staghorn; and, most conspicuous, most horrible of all the impedimenta, Mrs. Lumley Boyle's hell-born and heaven-hated Pekinese dog, named Pluto.
These objects Bethel came to know better than any piece of furniture in the house in Sladesbury--even the ancient folding card table on which she had done her homework and had drawn hearts and flowers. At home things did get put away in closets now and then, while here you stumbled over Mahala's imperial blue bags, and cracked your shins on them, on the train, in hotel corridors and in front of her dressing-room, all day long.
It was a travelling circus; it was an army with paper banners. There seemed to be no end to the people Bethel met as her new family. On the train she first really talked with the company manager and wet nurse, the Yankee Tertius Tully, and first saw the master carpenter, the electrician and the property man, who would manage local theatre crews: Gene Doric, Wilson Kinloch, and Phil Schoenberg. They were all middle-aged, all hopelessly married, all given toblack sateen shirts. Gene and Phil became her amiable and loyal friends; Bethel felt more at home with them than ever with Victor Swenson or Tudor Blackwall.