Satori, watching from the tenth row of the orchestra, held up his hand. 'Mr. Nooks! What are you doing?'
'I don't understand, Mr. Director.'
'You are giving rather an exaggerated characterization to the unfortunate Apothecary.'
'I've always thought he was a real cameo of a character picture, and nobody has ever done enough with him. I'm trying to show how the Apothecary is the victim of awful bad luck, and poor fellow, he has to do this awful thing--'
'Quite, Mr. Nooks. Yes. A cameo. But I don't want it to be such a big cameo and get dropped on Romeo's head. I think I'd just play it down.'
Nooks breathed with the joy of being, for the first time, the centre of a Kulturkampf. Ignoring Satori's impatient fingers on the orchestra seat in front of him, Nooks droned, 'Well now, I'll tell you, Mr. Director, I acted it that way when I was with Otto Knippler's company, and Otto said it was real good; he said it was different. And while we're discussing it, Mr. Director, if you don't mind a suggestion from an old actor, I think when Romeo enters, in this scene, and sees me--you know he says, "I see that thou art poor"--he ought to pause and look me over more carefully. I know you're trying to get tempo and all that modern stuff, but when I was with Theodate Thuriber, in 1907, she said--'
'Mr. Nooks!' Satori's voice was rather high. 'This is the dress rehearsal! We'll dispense with all ancient history--all of it!'
'But Mr. Director--'
'You heard what I said!'
Bethel was hurt by the drop of Nooks's seamed old jaw and the glaze in his eyes.
But, an hour later, Nooks was trying to tell a testy Victor Swenson, Prince of Verona, how to return the curtsy of his awed subjects, and she perceived that not time nor tide nor fate's unkindest slam can dull the smiling smugness of the ham.
The last skirmish across the barricades, at a quarter to five on that icy November morning, was the schedule of curtain calls.
Mrs. Boyle suggested, brightly, 'Wouldn't this save a lot of time, Mr. Satori? Not bring the minor members of the cast on at all? I'm sure they'll all be very competent some day--if they ever learn to act. But just now, I don't really see why the Public should be interested in them. I think it would be an interesting and quite original way to have me take my calls, first with Romeo, then with Mercutio, then with the two Capulets, then with the Nurse, then with Tybalt, then with Friar Laurence, then with Paris, and just forget the others.'
Now Bethel knew why Satori was a good director. Debonair, blithe--at 4.47 a.m. and 370 above--he trilled, 'I think it would be original and sensible. But what can you and I do against the selfishness and conceit of actors, Mrs. Boyle? I'm afraid we'll have to let them be seen.'
And at the end he said to Andy, to the peppery-eyed Bethel's admiration and dumbfounding, 'Let's go out and find a drink. It's been a first-rate dress rehearsal--very easy and satisfactory. Worked like a clock, didn't it?'
XXIV
In her energetic small life, Bethel had rarely loafed and lolled and languished; and never, till this morning between dress rehearsal and first night, had she revelled in it. But to-day she slept till noon, and lay afterward on the bed, gossiping yawningly with Iris, reading the newspapers down to the real-estate transfers, and feeling like an actress in society novels. But in her new plain camel's-hair dressing-gown and her pale blue cotton pyjamas, she looked like a counsellor in a girls' camp; while Iris's pale delicacy was set off by plum-coloured silk pyjamas piped with white, and a dressing-gown of green taffeta with a batik scarf for sash. On her milky feet were mules of gilded alligator hide.
'Isn't that outfit all new?' said Bethel. Maybe just on the sniffy side.
'And how!'
'Where'd you ever raise the money?'
Iris smiled, tender as a young cobra. 'A gentleman friend, he asked me if I had anything to wear cold mornings on the tour, and I said no--'
'But you have! You had a swell dressing-gown in Grampion.'
'Oh. That? I--lost it. And I said no, and he just dragged me into Bonwit Teller's and bought this layout--honestly, I had no idea he meant it for me, I thought he just wanted my advice about colours, I thought prob'ly he meant it for his sister or somebody, and then when he shoved the parcels in my arms and said, "It's all yours, baby", I was so surprised, and I said, "For me? Oh I can't take presents from a man", and he said if I didn't take 'em, he'd throw 'em down the subway, and I made it clear he couldn't buy my affections, not with anything, and he said yes, sure, he understood that. So what could I do?' The epithet 'gold digger' dazzled Bethel's mind as crimson spheres dazzle the lidded eyes when you close them in bed, but she managed to keep still, as she made several notes about rooming by herself before the tour was over. She recalled now Iris's new silver bracelet, her new silver brush and comb; she remembered Iris coming out of a luggage shop, in New York, with Zed Wintergeist--and Iris had a new hatbox with that shop's label.
But she didn't want to be a prig. She did think the bumptious Zed ought to have enough wit to protect himself. Perhaps, on that page in Saint Peter's folio devoted to Bethel, there stands a small gold star because she shut up.
With innocent outrageousness, young gentlemen also in dressing-gowns--Andy, Douglas Fry, Lyle Johnson, Antonio Murphy--banged at the door and came in and sat on the beds and talked about the only subjects that could be of interest to the world--how the dress rehearsal had gone, how Miss Staghorn had blown, and the prospects for tonight. By evening there were cigarette butts in every receptacle in the room except Bethel's slippers. And in a growing, edgy tension, ten of them, boiling with chatter, ate at a round table in the Coffee Shop.
'Gosh, we've got to be good!' agonized Henry Purvis. 'I hear the house is sold out.'
'And there's a reviewer come from Chicago!' quaked Charlotte.
Mahala leered at Bethel, 'And the audience aren't good neighbours here, like a summer theatre, that are pulling for you to succeed. These are wolves. They want their two dollars and eighty cents' worth.'
And so they shakily set out to walk to the theatre and the opening.
When, in her Goddess of Liberty gown for the role of Prologue, Bethel stood way down right in the wings, listening to the orchestra's slow murder of Tchaikovsky and waiting for the signal to go on, when it was too late to do anything about it, she knew that her first nights in A Doll's House and Stage Door hadn't helped her in the least, and that if she played for thirty years and endured fifty first nights, she would be just as terrified and just as watery in the knees.
Terrified of what? she demanded.
Of making a fool of herself before that mob--friendly, gay and cruel. Of forgetting her lines. Of standing out there a bedlam fool.
Then Nathan Eldred, gently pushing, was muttering, 'On you go, dear. Good luck!' and she was edging between the tormentor and the backing flats, in front of the curtain, holding her small hands out to the sudden-silenced audience and appealing: 'Two households, both alike in dignity, in fair Verona, where we lay our scene . . .'
Her voice was warm and young and so earnest. She was begging them so to love the pair of star-crossed lovers.