She looked beatifically at the curtain, which appropriately depicted the Bay of Naples. The orchestra members, handsomest and most artistic of men, crawled from under the stage and scratched themselves a little and whispered and looked up--not at her, Bethel hoped--and then relented and sat down to play a Wienerwalz.
Bethel's soul skipped with ecstasy. She read every word in the slim programme, even the advertisement of The Mount Vernon Funeral Home, Where Sympathy Is Our Watchword, Phone Night or Day. She noted that Elsie Krall, the girl actress whose picture she had loved, was playing a character called Hester. She primly folded the programme, then bent over the rail and prayed for a larger house. But the place was only half filled when her heart turned over as the orchestra shivered and stopped. The house lights were dimmed, and for the first time during the fifteen years that she had waited for it, Bethel knew the magic pause, the endless second of anticipation, with just a fringe of light at the bottom of the curtain, before it went up.
She had never been so happy.
Instantly she was disappointed. Here was no battling mother in a frontier cabin, no fetching young man in buckskins, but a girl of to-day reading Sunday newspapers of to-day in a room that might have been in any of the old 'mansions' on Bucks Hill, Sladesbury. But she saw that the girl on the couch was Elsie Krall, and that the pictures had not revealed Elsie's surprising copper hair, or the eggshell texture of her skin, pale above cheeks scarlet with make-up. She seemed frightened; and Bethel loved her for it; felt herself up there on the stage, reassuring Elsie.
But Bethel's affections, so bewilderingly fickle this evening, instantly shifted to Caryl McDermid, as the star himself opened the double doors and smiled his way on stage. He was Apollo in single-breasted heather mixture. He couldn't be more than twenty-eight, decided Bethel. Of course that was thirteen years older than herself, but if she grew fast and caught up with him, maybe she could some day know him and win his heart.
He was speaking, in a voice hearty and electric: 'Isn't mother at home?'
She loved the lily-swaying Irma Wheat, as Christina; and with a hate warmer than love, she hated Maggie Sample, the stage mother; a handsome, authoritative, menacing Juno of fifty. And all the while she forgot that she was at a play. This was life, and she was in it.
She hadn't known that there were plays in which the characters talked like real people, and in which you could live and struggle and forget yourself.
The story was of a mother who, to hold her sons, was willing to break up their marriages and reduce them to babyhood. Bethel particularly loved the brave Hester--Elsie Krall--fiancée of the younger son; she bounced in her seat with hope that Hester would leave the young pup.
In the intermissions, she did not go out, and she glanced rather snippily at people so unimaginative that they could chatter and walk about. And all the time she knew, beyond argument, that she was going to be an actress.
She came out of the theatre as drunk as a bacchante; a pitiable and happy sight. She wavered home under the summer elms, and felt that she was shouting poetry, though she was not thinking at all about moonlight and roses or swords and barricades, but repeating over and over, rather queerly, 'Sterility--that's your professional mother's stock in trade'. As she came up to the Merriday porch, where Charley Hatch and her brother Ben were dangling their legs and discussing gliders and Colonel Lindbergh, she stopped, staring at them, swaying.
'What's the matter with you, Toots? You stay up too late. Gwan, get to bed,' said her brother.
'All right.'
'Did you like the show?' demanded Charley.
'Yes--I guess so--all right.'
'I knew you wouldn't like it!' crowed Ben.
'I did so! I thought it was the most wonderful thing I ever saw.'
'Rats!'
'I did!'
She wanted to cry, but she mastered it and crept up to her room, her refuge.
She paced, unable to stop and undress. She found herself re-enacting the play and, curiously, it was not her own Elsie Krall whom she mimicked, but the mother. Sitting on the edge of the bed, crouched, obviously broken, yet with a hint that she enjoyed showing off her woes, her elbows on her knees and her hands dangling absurdly, she muttered,
'"I'm not asking you to be sorry. It's--" How did it go, now? "It's Robin I'm thinking of. And now that I'm old and sick . . . dying--"'
Her memory ran out, but she could not sleep. She was acting a thousand plays; she was an Arabian woman watching her son die of hunger; she was a Russian princess and then she was a Russian commissar accusing the princess; she was a 'bathing cutie', very tough; and she was a ghost-pale abbess. She clawed her complete Shakespeare down from the shelf and read a dozen speeches from The Merchant of Venice aloud, sitting primly in a straight chair by the window, where the net curtains whispered in the night.
Portia's speech, of course; but more eagerly, Jessica and Lorenzo.
She was on the avenue in Belmont; the trunks of the great trees--lime trees, was that right?--were white-washed, and visible in the silvered darkness.
Thus Lorenzo, round and manly. She laid the book down on the edge of her small bureau, on the starched white cover embroidered with violets; she held out unsteady hands; she leaped up (not in the least knowing that she was doing so) and in the mirror watched her face grow soft, her lips imploring. She hastily sat down and read on. She was Jessica:
'In such a night Did young Lorenzo swear he loved her well, Stealing her soul with many vows of faith And ne'er a true one.'
The audience was hushed. She had been so wistfully gay; so tender yet so appealing. Then the applause, like a breaker! By the window again, she was reading:
'. . . Antonio hath a ship of rich lading wrecked on the narrow sea; the Goodwins, I think they call the place; a very dangerous flat and fatal, where the carcasses of many a tall ship lie buried . . .'
Thus Salarino, on a street in Venice. She saw the street perfectly; it ran by a canal, under archways. (She laid her head on her arm on the window sill.) She herself--yes, she was Salarino; masked and cloaked, hand on rapier hilt, slipping off to a rendezvous. A gondola, in the canal below, was revealed in the light from a lamp far up in a harsh wall, and Salarino saw--Bethel saw--a girl in white satin, flower-crowned, in the arms of a man young but bearded and angry-eyed . . .
She started out of her dream and it was dawn. She was painfully stiff, but she was in ecstasy. Then she shook her head vigorously, rubbed her shoulders, and snorted, 'Don't be so silly, Bethel! Go to bed!'
III
However much she tried to conceal her emotion when she told him about having seen The Silver Cord, Charley Hatch saw that it was going to be difficult to 'cure her of this crazy notion that she was going to try and be an actress'.
Charley was a friendly boy, rather like a kind old milk-wagon horse. His hobby was collecting stamps. 'You learn a lot about geography and foreign places and so on from stamps,' he stated. He wanted to be a farmer; but to his father, who himself had come from a farm, this would have been a shocking retrogression from his urban position as superintendent of a bus line; so Charley was planning to become an osteopath. He had soft tow hair on a large, thick skull, and he whistled constantly.