Proudly they took themselves out on the damp cement basement floor, bordering which were the coops of their dressing-rooms. All the company, so long familiar, were exclaiming over one another's metamorphoses. Only Andy, in the tweed jacket and grey bags which he intended to wear as a gay and easy-going Romeo, seemed the same kind self.
Zed, Henry Purvis, Geoffrey Hoy and Tudor Blackwall--Mercutio, Tybalt, Benvolio and Paris--they were in the uniforms of Italian officers. No, worse than that: they were suddenly professional actors, and our Bethel felt herself entirely out of it, wanted to blow her little amateur nose and run home crying.
It was Zed who most overwhelmed her. That tousled young rebel, with the frayed ties and the wrinkled soft shirt collars, was an incredibly elegant young nobleman now, a fencer and polo player and aviator, with his oiled hair, his tall peaked uniform cap cockily tilted, his wide shoulders, his thin knees in riding breeches, his scornfully shining boots. Bethel would have told you, earnestly and honestly, that she loathed war and hated Fascism, but when Captain Zed Mercutio-Montague stalked toward her with the gay hard grin of the warrior, when he shouted, 'Well, pet, how do you like your totalitarian hero?' when he squeezed her shoulder--superior, reckless, probably cruel--she was faint, and from no democratic ideology.
When Charlotte saw the uniforms, she clasped her hands like Modjeska and wailed, 'But I hate everything Fascist! I can't stay on in this show!' Harry Purvis (Ph.D., but sober now), flaunted, 'So do I hate it. But don't tie the party line around the end of your nose, my comrade and my particular darling. Who's ever going to connect Tybalt with the Duce? Let's go argue about it.' Charlotte went.
Then the curtain was down, and in front of it Bethel was quavering her prologue. As she came off, Satori grunted at her, 'Okay. Just remember three things: keep your head up, so the gallery can see and hear you. Enunciate--let's hear your r's and t's and m's. And if your foot slips in a line, don't ever go back and correct it. Okay. Take her up!'
They took her up--her being the curtain--and the theory was that, on its rising, Sampson Nooks and Peter Antonio Murphy would gaily be clumping out, ready for a street row. They weren't. They had, that second, appallingly found that one of them had gold buttons on his livery coat and the other silver.
That meant a conference of Satori, Andy, Nooks, Murphy and Mrs. Golly, the wardrobe mistress, who finally relieved them all by the inspired suggestion of keeping the buttons as they were--the audience would think it was intentional. Once, under canvas, Mrs. Golly had played moonshiners' beautiful daughters, then moonshiners' loyal wives, and finally moonshiners' comic grandmothers; and she had played Juliet for two nights in Cheyenne, Wyoming, in 1906.
For twelve blasphemous hours, when everybody slumped on chairs and looked glassy-eyed above limp cigarettes, they carried on what Satori afterward called a fine, satisfactory dress rehearsal.
Over Act I, Scene V--Romeo's first glimpse of Juliet, at Capulet's party--there was an hour of shrieking conference. None of the walk-ons, which included all the young people in the company, agreed with any other on just which cue they were to come gambolling in as maskers. Half the batteries in their electric torches would not work. There was a loud ideological and commercial argument with the union musician who was running the phonograph producing guaranteed genuine old Italian dance music, off-stage, and at this moment of painful class struggle Zed pleased everybody by piping up with what nobody had thought of till now: they ought, with modern clothes, to have modern tango music.
'Oh, shut up!' said Andy to Zed.
'Okay,' said Zed.
There was battle over the ad libs of the entering Bacchantes at the Capulet party. Iris, in character, kept saying, 'Oh, isn't this a lovely party, I think it's just dandy' and Lyle Johnson (as a Cinquescento Veronese) kept growling, 'What's the idea we can't smoke in this show; it would be twice as natural; modern costume--nuts!' And first they were too loud, then Satori couldn't hear them at all, then they were too loud again.
And a completely serious debate as to whether Tybalt-Purvis ought to carry brass knuckles (benevolently replacing the wicked ancient rapier) in the pocket of his white evening waistcoat. . . .
And a half-hour's wait while Satori, Andy, Stage Manager Eldred and Kinloch, the electrician, turned lights off and on, and apparently got none of the effects they wanted, and apparently didn't care much. Hoy and Lyle and Harry Purvis sat on the floor meantime, lighting cigarettes and smearily crushing out the butts, and yawned, 'What the hell's holding us up now? Why the hell don't they get on with it? How the hell do they expect us to give a show tomorrow night? Who the hell is running this amateur benefit? The hell!'
But Zed was surprisingly patient. Given a rehearsal, he seemed to have none of the nerves and muscles and stomach that in all the others were quivering with shaky weariness. This was his sport. He only grinned when, listening to Andy's fervent, 'Oh, she doth teach the torches to burn bright . . . beauty too rich for use, for earth too dear!' Tony Murphy snarled, 'Zed, I don't know how long I can stand here and listen to that student emote!'
All of Bethel's curiosity and her eagerness chilled as she heard this. She did not know whether it was more for love of Andy or her own pride as a judge of acting . . . She had been moved again by Andy's warmth and richness and clear nobility . . . Was she perhaps wrong--was he perhaps bad? . . .
Whatever went wrong--even Lyle Johnson's insertions of a filling-station 'Yuh!' in emendation of the Bard, and the failure of the stage manager's off-stage revolver, with which he had to give voice to Romeo's and Tybalt's pistols, to make any sound but a flat click--the immediate criminal invariably said, 'Oh, that'll be all right to-morrow', and that seemed to repair everything. It was all magic and madness.
Every two hours Andy had coffee and sandwiches brought in. The rehearsal halted, and the comparative silence of homicidal arguments about direction gave way to a crash of joyous babbling, and they all, except perhaps Tony Murphy, loved one another. Hugh Challis murmured, 'In forty-five years on the stage, Bethel, I've occasionally known producers who served coffee once during a dress rehearsal. And I've occasionally known producers who borrowed the money from the actors to go out and get coffee for themselves. But I've none too often heard of one who thought that actors could take to eating as a regular accomplishment. This Andy is a very sweet lad. You're fond of him, I take it.'
'W-why--y-yes--Yes, I am! Very!'
'Splendid. And I rather think, my good girl, that one of these days he'll have time to take a look at our Mahala and see what a tuppeny-ha'penny young woman she is, and turn to you.'
'Me? I don't think there is much of a Me yet, Mr. Challis.'
'No? Perhaps not. Perhaps not. There will be, I fancy, when our company is a great success. Oh yes, we shall be. Can't afford not to be.'
'No!'
Toward three a.m., when even Satori and Zed and Andy were worn down and Mrs. Boyle began to vanish backstage and to smell, though faintly, of whisky, then that old Player King, that Vincent Crummles of the purple sage, Wyndham Nooks, rose to his own.
By the time they had reached the chief of Mr. Nooks's three roles, that of the Apothecary, no one else cared what he did with it. But Mr. Nooks cared. He was convinced that he could 'steal the show' with his enactment of the meagre and inhibited bootlegger, and now he gave his all. In New York he had read the Apothecary's line, 'My poverty, but not my will, consents', inoffensively. But he chose the dress rehearsal to pause after 'my poverty', to raise his chin, look up to God, hold it for three agonizing seconds, then hurl 'but not my will' into the teeth of destiny.