But Wilson Kinloch proved that a man may be a member of a labour union, in good standing, and still be rather less than a saint. Kinloch hated, roughly in this order: Andy's wealth, Andy's acting, Gene Doric's not altogether guileless habit of dropping hammers on his (Wilson's) toes, William Green president of the American Federation of Labour, J. Pierpont Morgan, Zed Wintergeist's jeering, Iris Pentire's softness, and Pluto, the dog of Boyle. And he hated them so heartily and industriously that, before the tour was over, he became rather of a sympathetic character to a Bethel getting fed up with balconies, moonlight effects and genius.
She now met first the final members of the excursion: Hilda Donnersberg, Mrs. Boyle's maid, a wild strained Austrian who was convinced that everybody but Mrs. Boyle was a fool; and Ernie Smith, the boy who came along to sell the illustrated programmes in the lobbies and who loved nothing so much as giving Iris and Bethel his opinion of the acting of Francine Larrimore and Katharine Hepburn and Pauline Lord. It seems that all of these ladies had frequently called him to their dressing-rooms for technical advice, and had benefited gratifyingly. Miss Larrimore had said to him--asserted Ernie--'I consider you the smartest critic of acting in New York. You got it all over George Jean Nathan, Ernie. It's an injustice, Ernie, that you aren't up here on the stage yourself, instead of out in that lobby wasting your voice selling programmes.'
'I see!' said Bethel.
They would be much quieter later, but perhaps the company were a little loud, this first evening in the diner. Lyle Johnson and Charlotte Levison sang 'Frankie and Johnnie'. Zed and Douglas Fry rehearsed Waiting for Lefty. Iris rather loudly told Victor Swenson her theories of make-up. When they settled down in the sleeper again, it was already beginning to be home.
Three bridge games started, with suitcases, supported on knees, for tables. Miss Staghorn was knitting. Charlotte returned to not reading some more Marx. Hugh Challis, who belonged in the bleak correctitude of the other car, was telling Gene Doric, the master carpenter, about the trick Larry Lewis, the music-hall comedian, had played on Billy Bush, the expert on playing Mayfair butlers, at the golf club in Little Pimple, Surrey, at or about three in the afternoon on September 16th, though it may have been the 17th, 1903.
In the drawing-room, their legs rather cramped with suitcases, Andy and Satori and Tertius Tully and Eldred, the stage manager, were wearily scribbling on papers--papers--papers. If Andy was a Romeo belated, he had also heard about the need of bookkeeping.
Only Zed and Douglas and Bethel were reading, and she was too restless to keep her attention even on Noel Coward's Present Indicative. She raised the blind, pressed her forehead against the cold glass, stared out on the dark farm lands that passed her. Oh, she was going to see and grasp every state in the vast Union!
In each lone light that raced past her, she saw a farmhouse, saw the family--the father, the old aunt, the ambitious son with his manual of automotive engineering, the wild, dangerous daughter listening. She wanted to know them; she wanted by playing them to give them to the world.
She had never been so content.
And that night, unsleeping but happily drowsy in her berth, she listened to the train whistle--that familiar magic summons to be up and wandering--from the engine on her very own train.
XXIII
Belluca, Indiana, pop. 277,000; on the Wabusha River; site state aviation sch.; Belluca Univ., Littlefield Art Museum cont. a Fra Angelico, an El Greco; mfrs. plumbing supplies, sewer pipe, machine tools, watches, gloves, glass.
As they all peered out of the car widows, in Belluca, at eleven in the morning, everything was as it should be: reporters on the platform, photographers with flashlights, and Andy's great rich cousin, Mr. Romer Ingalls, escorted by cousinlets and a uniformed chauffeur.
Whether it was because of Mr. Ingals's patronage, or because no Eastern professional play had opened in Belluca for twenty years, or because, in ten years now, no play except WPA productions had been announced for more than a three-night run, or because of a pure love of the Bard and Mrs. Lumley Boyle, the whole city of Belluca--that is, the section of it that considered the drama as important as ice-cream sodas--was prepared to take the Deacon Romeo & Juliet Production to its friendly Midwestern heart.
Each of the three newspapers had sent at least two reporters--the drama editor and a society chronicler. Behind them and the light-flashing photographers were a medley of horrible little girls with autograph albums; little girls who would delightedly have interrupted Romeo just as he was climbing the balcony but who would much rather have had the sacred totem of the gangster in the film Stick 'Em Up. But they made a very pretty crush to excite Bethel and Iris.
All but one of the reporters packed in about Mrs. Boyle. That one was a baby-faced, eager-faced young man, who grabbed the arms of the two girls, crowing, 'You Iris Pentire and Beth Merriday? I'm Carl Frazee of the News. Look at the sacred white journalistic cows mooing at the Boyle woman--and see her smile at them. Not very strong on smiling privately, is she?'
Bethel giggled. Iris said indignantly, 'She never smiles, in rehearsal, except when she thinks it'll make somebody mad.'
'Lookit, kids. I'll be in and buy you a drink, soon as you get settled in your hotel. I suppose you'll go to the Buckingham-Bradley.'
With dignity, an actress listening to the nobler call, Bethel stated, 'I'm sorry but we have to Be In The Theatre all day. We're Rehearsing All Afternoon, and Dress Rehearsal This Evening. Mr. Satori decided to hold it here instead of New York. But perhaps we'll see you some time this week. You are a reporter?'
'No. He's a college boy!' sniffed Iris. 'Aren't you now, Carl?'
'Ye-es. Well. I was. University of Michigan B.A. Oxford M.A. Licentiate of the Sorbonne. And I'll do the review of your show for the News to-morrow night.'
But of the two girls, one did have sense enough to know how much she had been put in her place, and, from twenty-nine cheerful words, to learn a great deal about Indiana, about the Middle West, about the whole sprawling United States.
'See you soon, kids. Don't take any wooden money,' said Carl Frazee.
They heard Andy's cousin, Romer Ingalls--a thick man with a cigar and an improbable Legion of Honour ribbon--shouting, 'Course you're going to stay with us, Andy, but do you think Mrs. Boyle would like to come, too?'
Andy looked horrified. 'No! I'm going to stay with My Company!'
And, loving him, Bethel knew that Andrew Deacon was as young as she, and as armourless against a cynical world.
Reluctantly, but agreeing because it would save money, Bethel had promised to share hotel rooms with Iris on the tour, and they drove off together in a taxicab.
Iris (before she had seen any of the city) sneered that Belluca was a 'miserable little dump', compared with New York, which was her native city only by very recent absorption, the vital statistics accrediting her to a side street in Wheeling, West Virginia. To Bethel this new city seemed huge and surprising. She looked through the rear window of the taxi at the white limestone façade of the Union Station, with its white tower five hundred feet high; she looked around at the station plaza, with its fountains and sycamore alleys; and she felt that she had come, with her fellow-adventurers in cap and bells, on festivity to Rome.
The taxi sped out of the plaza, round a corner, and she saw their first playbills:
MRS LUMLEY BOYLE
(in person)
in
The world's first production of
the world's greatest love story
ROMEO AND JULIET
in MODERN clothes
with Andrew Deacon and an all-star
Broadway cast
World Premier in Belluca
AMERICAN THEATRE
Nov. 28--Dec. 3