'Why did you make Zed buy that junk for you? You didn't need it!'
Iris was suddenly snarling. 'And why shouldn't he? He's the damnedest tightwad in the company! Oh, he wants everything he can get, all right, and when it's convenient to him, but you have to throw a fit to even get him to buy you a champagne cocktail!'
'Iris! Stop it! He hasn't much more money than we have. He isn't much older than we are. He's a baby. He seems grown up because he knows so much and is so conceited, but he's a mere baby. You might save your wiles--'
'My what?'
'Your wiles.'
'What do you mean, wiles?'
'I'll admit it's a bad word. It's rafained. Like you! Call it your gutter tricks, then.'
'I never in my life--'
'It's none of my business. I hardly know whether I hate Zed or love him. He's the measles. But he's good active measles, anyway. He really loves the theatre. He'll do something with it. And it makes me sick to see you hanging on to him--'
'I am not, and you know it!'
'--and to think that because I room with you, maybe Zed'll think--and Andy'll think and Hugh Challis--'
'Why don't you bring in your doddering boy friend Doc Keezer, too, while you're about it!'
'I do! I certainly do! Doc is the squarest, kindest man in the whole company, except maybe Andy! And I don't want him, or any of 'em, to think that I'm a sponge like you, just because I have to be with you a lot.'
'You don't have to, you know.'
'Yes, that was the idea I was working around to myself!'
She walked alone, that Thursday morning, to the understudy rehearsal which has already been recorded, and it was no comfort to her that Iris, trained in stock, should know her understudy lines. That afternoon she moved to a single room at the Buckingham. It was exhilarating to have her own clear, uncluttered place in which she could breathe, and after she had duly puzzled over whether she had been priggish with Iris, and brawled like a market woman, she asserted, 'I don't care', and felt lonely and happy.
She wanted to tell Zed of Iris's depths of calculated depravity--and expensiveness--but she was no informer, and she felt that that brash young man deserved what he got . . . and she suspected that he wouldn't listen to her. She said nothing about Iris when Zed and she were sent out to the Belluca University Theatre, on Friday afternoon.
Andy Deacon, backed by his weighty local cousin, was doing in Belluca all the brisk, desperate, publicity-cadging tricks which, in the Age of Rotogravure, were supposed to lure disciples to the sweets of the drama. Andy gave interviews, was photographed holding a pipe, holding a copy of Shakespeare, holding Mrs. Boyle; he talked daily on the radio--trying craftily to insinuate into a discourse on the Globe Theatre the fact that we may be seen right here in town to-night at the American Theatre, top two-eighty.
He was manly and athletic at luncheons of the Rotary Club and the Belluca Athletic Club; he was manly and boyish and romantic at the Women's Drama League tea and, with Bethel, Mahala and Charlotte supporting him, did not blench till the very end of a receiving line of one hundred and seventy-six women with whom he shook hands as they maternally murmured to him, 'I'm so glad you're Doing Shakespeare. My husband and I do hope we'll have time to run in and see you this week, though of course we're awfully busy and there's a bridge tournament on'.
Hugh Challis entertained the Drama League, the Tomawattis Club Monthly Literary Luncheon and the English-Speaking Union with anecdotes of Henry Irving, Disraeli's favourite horse and the Duke of Windsor. Lyle Johnson rushed over to the City Auditorium during a scene in which he did not appear and presented a silver cup to the winner of the Boy Scout Hurdle Contest--a stunt which Andy had approved, though Tertius Tully, the procurer of the other personal appearances, had fretted that the Boy Scouts and their doggone hurdling were nothing but Competition for the Show.
Henry Purvis resumed his Ph.D. and addressed the Geographic Club of St. Aloysius College on 'The History and Significance of the Oberammergau Passion Play', Jeff Hoy and Tony Murphy sang duets at a smoker of the Bathtub Executives' Club, Tudor Blackwall dedicated the new Swiss Knitwork Department in Burpling & Blum's Department Store, and Wyndham Nooks, entirely without Tertius Tully's sanction, was found to have given (gratis) a programme of 'Great Moments from Shakespeare' at a six-o'clock Get Together Supper of the Wisconsin Association--it was reported that, with a beard handy in his pocket, he turned himself from a Prince in the Tower to King Lear in ten seconds.
But Mrs. Boyle refused to go out soliciting at all. Between shows she slept, and wrote letters home to England, and encouraged Hilda Donnersberg, her maid, to tell her how bad Andy and Mahala and Charlotte and Mabel Staghorn were.
As part of this campaign, Tertius Tully sent the reluctant Zed and Bethel to represent Shakespeare at tea at the Belluca University Theatre, at five on Friday.
As they rode out on the East Philadelphia Avenue & University Heights bus, they were annoyed.
'It makes me tired, having to go out and be arty with a bunch of college actors that don't know a ground cloth from a grommet. I wanted to go to the St. Louis Symphony concert this afternoon and see the Chinese stuff in the Art Museum,' complained Zed, a tireless explorer of new towns. 'It'll be awful. They'll all ask us--they don't get a chance at real professional actors very often, and they'll ask us how they can get on the stage on Broadway, and Do we do our own make-up, and Don't we meet such interesting people in our dressing-rooms! The theatre will be a hall over the horse-doctoring laboratory, and we'll be expected to admire an eighteen-foot stage with a hand roll drop. To ask actors to do a thing like this! Artistic slumming! Andy Deacon is a travelling salesman for the drama.'
'He is not--but it will be dreadful,' said Bethel. 'I remember my own college plays. But maybe we'll meet some wide-awake young professors. I hear these Middle Western colleges are so progressive.'
'You think so, do you! You read our review in the Herald, didn't you, by Professor Stanley Thrush, of the university, the old songbird? There ought to be a law.'
'How old are you really, Zed?'
'Twenty-three. What's that got to do with it?'
'Baby!'
'I was more perceptive at six than old Thrush and the whole gang of Belluca profs are at sixty-six, which is probably their average age. Well, here we are at the business college. We'll probably be greeted by twenty-one rah-rah-rahs and the chief artistic nucleus of the university--the glee club, singing "Down on the Bingo Farm". And Thrush will be swanking around, looking benevolently amused. I hope I won't be rude to him--I don't really like to be so rude to stuffed shirts--not too rude.'
She had never made a quantitative analysis of the relationship of ivy to education, but from observation of Point Royal and Yale, she had concluded that it was direct. The Point Royal buildings were, perhaps, pretty ugly: of bumpy brown sandstone, and given to arched windows with clotted glass, but they dripped with ivy, and so that must be necessary. The Belluca University buildings, ivyless and of a correct and uninspired No. 32A Tudor, seemed to her like factories, and the trees were anaemic, the turf was scraggly.
Before they had time to ask for the way to the theatre, they came to a pillared, white-limestone structure with the inscription 'McCoggins Memorial Theatre' on the pediment. (A Mr. McCoggins, third-generation manufacturer of machinery, who had loved Maude Adams and William Gillette more than cream separators, had left to the new university a million dollars.)
'Have they got a whole building to themselves?' said Zed, uneasily.