He didn't really have a bottle of Corn-Cola there, you know. He was pretending. And Bethel was moaning inwardly, 'What has all this got to do with playing Shakespeare?'
'YESSIR, folks, that goes right to the spot. Don't forget: at your druggist's or grocer's, five cents the throw, CORN-COLA, and you'll thank me for the tip.
'Now who do you think we've got with us this afternoon, folks? None other than Romeo and Juliet themselves, the most famous lovers in history, and you'd better look sharp, all you young folks, and get on to how the professionals do their love-making. YESSIR, for the first time in a quarter of a century, Belluca is being honoured by the world premeer . . .'
He said that Mrs. Lumley Boyle was too great an actress and too good a sport to mind a little kidding, and so would Mrs. Boyle tell them how many English counts and lords and kings and barons and all those she had kissed?
A number, it seemed, by her modest account.
And now would Andrew Deacon--once known as Ole Andy Deacon, the Pride of the Yale Gridiron--tell the boys and girls how he would win a Juliet if he met her off-stage?
Bethel saw his Adam's apple bobbing and his eyes turning inside out with fear as Andy tried to be witty and then, earnestly, boyishly (sweetly, she thought, and pretty badly) switched into an account of what he was trying to do: pour into the immortal body of Shakespeare the life blood of to-day.
Suddenly Andy had drooped away from the microphone and had sunk in one of the line of folding chairs, mopping his head, while she wanted to run over and kiss him and tell him how good he was. It was presumably Mahala's turn to be pixie. But, horribly, it was at herself that Ted was grinning, while he chatted to his audience:
'Now we'll get away from the big guns of the stage and turn the mike over to a darling kid, Bethel Merriday, Mrs. Boyle's understudy, who if you could see her, as I do now, all you youngsters would rush in and try to date her up for the next ten years. Here you are, Beth. Attagirl!'
Certainly by no volition of her own she had got from her chair to the other side of the standard from Ted and was facing that mocking small grid, her knees and stomach failing her, as Ted piped, 'Now tell us, baby, what's your chief ambition?' And by no will of her own, Bethel was answering--instantly, briskly, 'To be as good an actress as Mrs. Boyle some day'.
She smiled over at the star, who beamed back, eyes like black glass. Bethel never had any trouble with Mrs. Boyle after that day--no violent trouble.
'Why do you want to go on the stage, Belli, pretty kid like you?'
'Because I believe that if an actress can do it--if she can--she'll be something bigger than her own self, when she's playing great roles.'
Bethel realized that she could snap back answers instantly; that Andy and Tertius Tully were nodding to each other, as who should say that she was good.
'The great tradition, eh? That's the stuff. But wouldn't you rather marry a handsome fellow with lots of money?'
'I would not!'
'What's your advice to the girls that would like to get on the stage?'
'Work and wait, I guess.'
As she went on--on--on--four prodigious minutes, Bethel hated everything she was saying more and more. She was being banal. She was being smirkingly good-natured. It wasn't good enough!
And still she went on, while Ted smiled gratitude for her quickness. What choked and stopped her at last was not disgust with her own glibness but a panicky feeling that the blank microphone before her was not connected. It never applauded. It never changed. She was talking into a cold hole in the air, and that contemptuous coldness defeated her.
At the end she heard them all praising her. Andy cried, 'Darling, you're going to be one of our biggest roper-inners.'
Then she saw Zed Wintergeist--heaven knows when or why he had got into the room--standing by the door, smiling bitterly, and she was very sick.
And was Ted Gronitz, in the derisive secret refuges of his heart, as vulgar and half literate as he seemed? He had used Hugh Challis's favourite war cry, 'The great tradition'. She was frightened.
But in the dress rehearsal she forgot all that.
They had held two scenery rehearsals in New York, but this, their first complete dress rehearsal, began at five o'clock Sunday afternoon and staggered to something like an ending at five o'clock next morning.
As they walked from their hotel for the rehearsal, Iris insisted that they enter by way of the theatre lobby, to see the frames with their photographs. 'Nosir!' Bethel said stoutly. 'I'm going back to the stage entrance. That's where an actor belongs, and only an actor has any real right to enter there. Lobby? Frames? The laity can have those. Huh! The carriage trade!'
(But it is true, however, that she had already seen a frame, in the hotel lobby!)
Like a priestess, alone privileged to enter the sanctuary by the low sacred door, Bethel skipped along a cobble-paved alley, between the side of a steam laundry and the back of the old American Theatre of Belluca. She chattered to Iris, but she chattered to keep from crying, for she was remembering the Crystal Theatre of Sladesbury, and Caryl McDermid and frail Elsie Krall, and the first time she had dared go back to watch their glory-trailing appearance at the stage door. The rough, dark red brick side wall of the alley seemed to her beautiful; something out of Dickens, or an enchantment that belonged to Garrick and Mrs. Siddons and Eleonora Duse.
Except for Grampion and the temporary refuges for rehearsals in New York, this was her first theatre; it really was hers; it belonged to her, and she served it. Looking down from the ivory, cloud-hung thrones of the seraphim, she listened to the doorman--satisfactorily old and moustached and wrinkled--when he snapped, 'You girls in the cast?' They smiled at him, entered his narrow coop, and, having left New York a whole twenty-two hours ago, both Iris and she looked carefully through the letters in the box below the call-board.
Bethel stole away from Iris, to be alone in her first moment of coming out on a professional stage.
Andy and Satori were yelling; Zed Wintergeist was yelling in his dressing-room and simultaneously playing an unexplained violin; the company stagehands were yelling at the local stage crew; Douglas Fry was going quietly about with a floor plan in front of his nose; pillars of plywood and stone walls of canvas were leaning over threateningly as they were moved into place. But the curtain was up, and as Bethel slipped through an entrance and stood down on the apron of the stage, looking into the enormous unpeopled auditorium, this, her cathedral, was quiet as midnight, awesome as the still tombs in the cathedral crypt.
The American Theatre of Belluca, which remembered the chariot race in Ben Hur, was a handsome, portly old house, with three balconies, terminating in the perilous mountain shelf of the old-fashioned 'nigger heaven'. The ceiling, in dark wooden panels divided by smoke-darkened ridges of gold, was painted with the twisted Richard III, with Lear raving to the breakers, with soft-sighing Rosalind. The boxes were gilded sea shells. The seats were in faded red plush upholstery; the sharply raked aisles carpeted in maroon. It was in dolorous taste, but it was a real theatre, not a movie shop with neat walls of tan-tinted celotex.
All of the sixteen hundred seats that she could see climbing up in front of her looked like flat-chested people, quiet, polite-faced, waiting for her to begin to act. And she was not afraid of them as she had been of the silent cynicism on the porous face of the microphone. She wanted to begin.
She was to share a dressing-room with Charlotte Levison, Vera Gross and Mabel Staghorn, the character woman who belaboured the part of the Nurse on stage and belaboured sweetness off. As they dressed for this final rehearsal--Charlotte as Rue-de-la-Paix Lady Montague--Bethel was envious of their make-ups. Charlotte, that handsome countess of Communism, with touches of blue-grey along the sides of her nose, became high-well-born, and Miss Staghorn, in her own person a mirror of the Ladies' Foreign Missionary Society of Augusta, Maine, became red-nosed and ribald and toothless.