As the voice went on, without her having much to do with it, she found that she could, through the haze of beams from the spotlights, make out, not individual faces, but the circling front of the top balcony. She must have unknown friends up there, among the students; all the young girls and boys who wanted to go on the stage. They were with her--and all her terror was gone.
Her voice came sure and urgent at the end of the prologue:
'If you with patient ears attend, what here shall miss, our toil shall strive to mend.'
'Swell!' whispered Eldred, as she pushed back into the wings again, and the pompous curtain set sail upward.
As much as she could, she watched from the wings.
Andy maintained through the play the easy serenity he had shown at dress rehearsal, but Zed Wintergeist ceased to be himself; he was Mercutio, completely. His Mab speech was half drunk with young fantasy; in his duel with Tybalt he was the young nobleman, fierce, swift, haughty, one who could revel in every sin save cowardice.
Doc Keezer--in frock coat and reversed collar, as Friar Laurence--stood beside Bethel, his arm lightly through hers, as they watched Zed's last scene: Mercutio blazingly angry with Death, but not afraid.
Doc sighed: 'I certainly don't like that young Wintergeist. He thinks he knows it all . . . and he whistles in his dressing-room. I'm not superstitious, but everybody knows that's bad luck. And he's the kind that'd treat women like cattle. But just the same, he ought to be playing Romeo!'
'And what ought Andy to be playing?'
'My two parts, chick. He'd be a fine sun-ripened Montague and a holy friar. And me, I ought to be playing animal noises on the radio. Or playing checkers back in Vermont. I'll lure you up there yet.'
It seemed to roll. Andy was voluminously in love; Mrs. Boyle sighed her softest sighs; Hugh Challis-Capulet was undiluted acid of domestic petulance; and Mabel Staghorn the most lewdly winking beldam that ever set a gallery giggling.
In the one long intermission the actors hugged one another, not quite sure just whom they were hugging, and shook the powder off their make-up aprons, and screamed, 'Oh, they're loving it--they're eating it up--we've got a Success!'
And when, a little reluctant to end the sweet last chords, Bethel appealed to them with her epilogue--'Go hence, to have more talk of these sad things'--the applause was like the roof falling.
There were sixteen curtain calls. And on one of them Andy led out Bethel and Iris, and it seemed to Bethel that the pounding hands were louder than for Mrs. Boyle and Mahala. At the end of it all, Andy made a curtain speech, while Bethel stood in the wings and worshipped. He was boyish and grateful and endearingly awkward:
. . . They were all so grateful to this, the first audience to greet their humble efforts, and if the audience had half the pleasure that the company had felt . . .
Zed, beside Bethel, was grunting, 'What a lousy Mothers' Day speech that is!'
Bethel actually swung about, her hand up like a cat's paw, to slap him, and if she stayed her hand, it was because of Zed's expectant leering and not for the sake of manners befitting a little lady. Later she heard Iris confiding to Zed, 'Let's go out and dance after the show; I've heard about a place with a hot orchestra', and Zed agreeing. But it was over, and they were all too tired to be anything but hysterically happy.
She had seven opening-night telegrams. (Andy had sixty-three, Mrs. Boyle had four, Hugh Challis had one hundred and sixteen, and Zed had seventeen.) In one wire Fletcher Hewitt coaxed her.
THIS NIGHT DO ENVY YOU HOWEVER WE GOING HAVE HOUSEFUL GUESTS CHRISTMAS HOLIDAYS WISH WERE THERE TO-NIGHT TO GIVE EARNEST WISHES IN PERSON DON'T FORGET FLETCHER.
But most astounding was the wire from Professor Miss Bickling:
IN YOUR GREAT TRIUMPH DO NOT FORGET OLD FRIENDS WHO WERE HAPPY EARLY TO PREDICT YOUR FUTURE SUCCESS.
Bethel laid that yellow telegram down in a mess of tan powder and burnt-out paper matches and lining pencils and sat quiet, almost weeping. She had forgotten Miss Bickling and Point Royal College. They were antique and dated and a little absurd and achingly kind.
It was six months and nine days since she had played Nora.
The Belluca stage doorman had pretty liberal ideas about admitting visitors without bothering himself by taking in their cards.
Into their dressing-room--Charlotte's, Vera Cross's, Miss Staghorn's and Bethel's--after the play, the visitors moved like doubtful elephants blundering down to a new waterhole. Charlotte had two Belluca residents who apparently knew and detested each other: a tall woman, very diamond and sable and positive, and a thin, shy, olive-coloured young man who was certainly either a Communist or so guilty about not being one that he was going to a psychoanalyst. There was no one for Vera--who was at least as lost an orphan as Bethel--and for Miss Staghorn only an overstuffed woman who sighed between phrases and smiled as though it hurt her. She had apparently given up the stage for matrimony, and didn't think it had been much of an idea.
Then, with horror, Bethel saw oozing into the door a trial of her own: a classmate in Point Royal whom she had always disliked. She was, in fact, the kind of a girl who wasn't any kind of a girl but solely a classmate. Bethel was yet to learn that there is a separate breed, roughly to be classed among human beings, called College Classmates. You can recognize the species on the street ten buildings away, but never place any of its individuals. 'That looks like a classmate,' you say, and shudder.
This particular one had had the habit of leaning over Bethel's shoulder at a table in the college library and smacking gum, slowly and firmly, in her ear. She entered now remarking: 'And you never even let me know you were coming! Getting the big head already!'
'Why, Mary, I didn't know you lived here in Belluca!' gurgled Bethel.
Of course she didn't know it! If she had, that would have been the one secret, haunting horror in this otherwise benign and imperial city.
'Oh yes, I'm married now!'
Already? Impossible! Bethel felt herself still a baby.
'Well, isn't that dandy?' said Bethel.
'Oh yes, I'm very happy. But my, who ever thought you'd be an actress. You were so cranky to everybody about acting in college, and talking about discipline and what have you, that I thought you really hated it!'
Oh, a darling, just a Belluca darling.
The classmate was followed by a woman, stringy and chronically indignant and to Bethel perfectly strange, who shrieked, 'Well, Beth, guess you don't remember me.'
'Oh, I'm sorry--'
'Well, 's matter of fact, I don't know how you could, because you never saw me, not really, but I'm your cousin Lizzie.'
'Oh-uh.'
'Well, your second cousin, I guess it is, really. Lizzie Porch--you know--Mrs. Reginald Porch. My husband is in gents' outfitting, but he hasn't been so well lately. I'm your mother's sister's husband's first wife's daughter, and I don't know just what that makes us, but after all, relatives are relatives, aren't they, and they can't very well be strangers.'
'Yes, that's dandy!' said Bethel. Detestable word 'dandy' with which she had not befouled her virginal tongue since she had left Sladesbury but that she had used now--so corrupting and hideous are unwanted visitors to dressing-rooms--twice in five minutes. 'That's dandy. And did you enjoy our show?'
'That's what I came to see you about. Reggie and I can't afford to buy theatre tickets, now that we're paying for the new car and the new electric garbage disposer and Junior's tennis lessons, but of course as you're my cousin, I did think it would be nice to honour you while you're here by giving you a supper party, with a theatre party beforehand, and I'd be delighted to arrange it any time you say, any evening at all, except Wednesday or Thursday, and if you'll choose the time that's most convenient to you, and if you could get me eight tickets--they needn't be in a box; the orchestra would be all right--I'll go right ahead and arrange it.'