In the formal, black-and-white marble lobby they asked for Professor Mattocks, the Director of Productions. They were shown into a too luxurious office, with tapestry chairs and a table of magazines with diagrams and coloured photographs.
'Professor Mattocks. Sounds like a funeral. Worse than Stanley Thrush,' grumbled Zed, turning his sodden brown felt hat.
In on them charged a man not over thirty, a man of Zed's own rough, driving, intellectual type, with the same pretentious simplicity, as exhibited in flannel shirt and wrinkled trousers, paint-spattered. He was a flaming sun of welcome. 'Miss Merriday? Mr. Wintergeist? We were terribly pleased when Mr. Tully said you might come. Tickled to death! I'm Bill Mattocks.'
'Fine!' Zed swiftly looked him over, then grinned and demanded, confidentially, as one alley pup to another, 'When do we meet Prof Thrush?'
'Cheer up. You don't. They keep him on ice, over in the English Department. His only connection with our theatre is to lecture to all the women's clubs in the state about how crude and subversive we are. We're all apologetic as hell to you for his review of Romeo. We thought you were a brilliant Mercutio, something fabulous, and we liked your prologue, Miss Merriday--we'll be waiting for you when you get a real part. Don't for God's sake blame Thrush on me! I've played and directed summer and winter stock, and I toured with Miss Cornell in Romeo and Miss Hayes in Victoria. We're theatre workers, not academic phonographs.'
They had coffee and cakes with a dozen university actors and directors and scene designers, in the green room, which was actually green, beneath the stage. Three of them were teachers, the rest students, but they could not easily be told apart.
The whole group seemed to Bethel to have one sharp, common characteristic: they were all akin to Zed and to Bill Mattocks (who were already first-naming each other as though they had been intimates for years) in being revolutionary and youthful.
Some of them, she thought, worked at their revolution a little too hard and a little too obviously. They felt it a duty to have their trousers and their khaki shirts very wrinkled and very spotty, their ties either greasy or orange-coloured, and one even displayed a horrid little canvas hat with autographs of his fellow souls penned on it. In hatred of the staleness of their homes, some of these children would jump into the hysterical, pseudo-artistic half-world. But that had always been the chromo-coloured fault of every Quartier Latin, and these experimentalists, she felt, unlike some of the quack doctors of dramaturgy whom she had met in left-wing theatrical circles in New York, had enough gaiety and salutary cynicism to inoculate them against cults.
And then they got beyond her entirely.
The proud professional Bethel, who had heard Sol Gadto talk about Stanislavski, and Adrian Satori tell how Lunt and Fontanne rehearsed, was stunned now by a babble about Meyerhold's productions in Moscow, and Nimerovitch-Danchenko's, about Louis Jouvet's pioneering in Paris, about the Gaston Baty version of Crime and Punishment at the Théâtre Montparnasse, about Piscator in the dead great days in Berlin.
It was an almost respectful young Mr. Wintergeist who, with Bethel, followed Mattocks on a tour of the theatre: huge stage, auditorium and lounge with murals by Grant Wood and Tom Benton, dressing-rooms with full-length mirrors surrounded with electric globes in every colour that stage lights could give; workshop with a paint frame, so that the scenic artist could stand up, instead of, like Bethel at Grampion, sitting on the floor, sitting on the canvas flat, or lying on it, while trying to do feather strokes with a ponderous paintbrush.
They sat, Zed and Bethel, on a bench on the campus.
Zed spoke with a curious meekness: 'Beth, do you realize that that university theatre is probably better equipped than any on Broadway? That it has a thirty-eight-foot revolving stage, and a plaster horizont that's actually portable, and a Pre-Selective Remote Control Board, the very latest Von Kleybourg model? You saw that?'
'Oh yes,' said Bethel, who hadn't.
'I tell you, those boys give me a new faith in the theatre. I do believe in Broadway. I don't believe the endowed stage is as real as one that has to fight for its life. But let me tell you that if Broadway closed up entirely, if the Fabulous Invalid finally kicks the bucket, there'll be a new theatre coming out of these universities. That's exciting. Universities actually creating something, and not just teaching boys to write advertising and sell bonds and hold patients' hands. But why not? That's what Oxford and Cambridge did, when the monks kept civilization alive. Oh, I've never been so hopeful of the living theatre, never been so proud of my profession and so glad I picked it out and stuck to it. Now I'm dead sure that not even Hollywood and the radio and an education formed by the comic strips can kill the drama--which is as old as religion. But--'
He took her hand, he held it tight, almost as though he were seeking protection, and he spoke humbly:
'But I certainly got mine. Beth. Pet. Do you mind kicking me, to-night, after the show, when we'll have plenty of time for it? I went in there feeling so superior. I thought those collitch boys would just be another bunch of rah-rah Andys or, at best, learned sots like Harry Purvis. But these kids really study. Isn't that something--to find learning in an institution of learning! Maybe America really is growing up . . . But it was hard on me! I've read a lot about Piscator, but I didn't know much about Baty and Jouvet. Not a thing. Was my face red!'
'I didn't know anything about 'em, either.'
'Yes, but you've never gone around being a bright new genius of the theatre, like Comrade Wintergeist, pet! Forgive me. No. There's no use. I'll be just as bumptious to-morrow.'
'You're never bumptious . . . really. You're just eager.'
'Am I? Well, maybe. Anyway, you were the perfect companion to see that stuff with to-day. Now you take Iris--'
Bethel flinched. She did not want to take Iris, particularly not just now.
'Don't jump so, darling,' he said. 'I know you think Iris is dumb. She isn't really. She doesn't know anything, not with her brains. But she has magic.'
'Has she?'
'Yes. She'd be ridiculous, with a bunch like that over there. She'd probably tell Bill Mattocks that she went to swimming classes with Jouvet, and taught Piscator how to play polo, and showed Mordecai Gorelik how to paint light.'
'And that Meyerhold insisted on giving her that new vanity case, because he admired her mastery of Russian!'
'Wait! Whoa! Let's look at you!' Zed dropped her hand, seized her shoulders, swung her halfway around, so that he could pierce her look. 'Iris was telling me you went and got pure on her, and even moved out on her, because I insisted on giving her a little token of affection.'
'Insisted?'
'Well--practically. Look here, pet. When I first met you, I told you I could get interested in you.'
She was adequately angry. 'Not really? Not the great Maestro Wintergeist? In a poor apprentice?'
'Yes, and maybe he is the great Maestro, too! I'll admit those university sharks know more than I do about the new European technique. And a fifty-foot plaster horizont is something handy to carry in your pocket. But I can act on a check-room counter, and play my own mouth-organ for incidental music.'
'You certainly can play your own--'
'That's not worthy of you! Listen, Beth. I know I'm conceited. I used to be ashamed of it. But I guess I always will be. Won't you try and stand it? It's too bad you let me get sidetracked on to Iris. Because I'll admit, to you, that that young ten-cent-store siren has got me. Magic, that's what she had--black magic. But yours is white. Come on, pet. There's our bus.'