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'Oh--him!'

'So sometimes, to try and relax, I like to just sit down and look at someone who's cool and sweet and good, like you.'

She hooted. 'And I've just this minute been engaged in pulling hair.'

'With who? I'll fire her--or him.'

'Oh no. It's all over. It's just one of those silly self-deceptions, I guess.'

'Kitten! You look tired, too. Skip to bed, then. Bless you!'

She was surprised. She had expected Zed to go childishly back to Iris, but he kept his word, which is a noteworthy phenomenon among young men who are professionally in love. He did, sharply, 'cut out all the women in this company'. He took dinner with none of them, nor supper after the show; and on the train he talked to none except Mrs. Boyle, whom he admired and hated. His chief childishness was in being noticeably merry with cigar-stand girls whenever members of the company were in an hotel lobby to watch him.

He was always seen lunching with Jeff Hoy and Tony Murphy, the three of them leaning over the table to mutter secretly, looking about with supercilious brightness, and then stooping over the table again to mutter humour and conspiracy.

Iris was aflutter at Zed's inattention. The good girl had accepted his statement that he wasn't much interested in her any longer in what she supposed to be the spirit in which it was meant--that is, as meaning nothing at all. She hovered over him, bleating, 'Ze-ed, aren't you going to take me out to supper to-night?' He answered, 'I am not!' so bleakly, so emotionlessly, that Iris quivered, and Bethel hated the young man for his cruelty . . . and was afraid of him.

XXVII

Three nights each in Treverton, Paddock, and Milwaukee; one-night stands in Madison and La Crosse and--crossing the Mississippi, to the excitement of Bethel--in Dubuque.

Six fluttering arrivals, with reporters on the station platform and photographers' flashlights blasting the gloom. Six dashes to get taxis away from her beloved companions in the company. Six anxious inquiries of marble-fronted-hotel clerks about rates; and twice when she angrily made it plain that she couldn't afford it, and quit the caravanserai where Andy and Mahala and Mrs. Boyle were to loll in kitchenette-bedizened splendour and hunted up a smaller hotel that looked like a private house with obesity.

Six broadcasts--in four of which Bethel had a part--and six attempts on the radio to work in, among lively observations on the art of acting and the joy of being in the Middle West, the facts that they would be visible at the Blank Theatre that evening--hurry, hurry, hurry--and that they were a Real Troupe Just From Broadway, Appearing in Person, and not a movie. Six interviews in which Andy and Mrs. Boyle and Hugh Challis, with Mahala and Bethel and Iris and Charlotte sitting in an uncomfortable grinning row on a hotel settee for extra decoration, caroled that Shakespeare was a very fine article for the Middle West and the Middle West was fine for Shakespeare.

Six new banging Coffee Shops in hotel basements, with six new and ever fancier names for beef stew, and six and sixty overworked waitresses who merely looked cross-eyed and fled, if a Professional wailed, 'Look, honey, could you hustle my order? I got to get to the theatre.'

Six new after-theatre restaurants with dancing: The Jeunesse Dorée, with Billy Bagshot's Sunny South Saxophonists; the Hot Spot, with Tommy Trexler's Cowpuncher Chorus; the Covered Wagon, with Teddy Taormina's Yankee Yodlers; the Shanghai Divan, Chinese & American Specialities, with Sven Svenson and His Demon Accordion; the Petit Prunier, with Abe Garfinkle's Dress Suit Boys; and Gus's Lunch, with a radio.

And in every one of these Iris went dancing, with Lyle Johnson or Jeff Hoy or Douglas Fry, while Bethel solemnly sat at a table way back, with Doc Keezer and Tertius Tully, and ate hash while they went pretty thoroughly into the topic of comparative box-office receipts during the past sixteen years.

Six new walks to the theatre, each of them passing a jewellery shop and a beauty shop, into whose windows Iris looked passionately, and a brand-new Bank Building, full of architecture, up at which Douglas looked critically. Six theatres, ranging from an ancient structure rather like a Saratoga trunk to the Treverton auditorium.

This was so very new and mammoth and civically conscious an institution that it could hold six thousand people, and a record audience of twelve hundred people felt lost and forlorn in its leatherette wastes. The actors could be heard, like the horns of elfinland considerably out of tune, only through a Public Address System, and the more intimate love passages between Romeo and Juliet were played as from the balcony of the Grand Central Terminal just after the arrival of the Twentieth Century. On that vast stage, with an apron thirty feet deep, their sets looked like toy houses of cardboard.

And six new dressing-rooms in six different towns, and the speculation as to whether Bethel's next one would be a private suite, or a stall, without running water or ventilation but with a richness of steam pipes, which she would share with all the other women except Mrs. Boyle . . . Not that she speculated much, though. She was fairly sure which it would be.

And six first nights of terror in her stomach. But no matter what changed, and what remained, once she saw the familiar sets, she was at home--they were her home.

For a while she could remember the shifting cities by the dressing-rooms, by the hotel-rooms--whether they looked out on an alley or on a Motor Oil Building that was a reproduction of the Palazzo Vecchio--by the criticisms, which, in the very same town, might be either 'diverting, ingenious and brilliantly acted' or 'this presumptuous but slipshod effort to improve Henry Irving and E. H. Sothern', and by Andy's assurances that though maybe to-night's receipts weren't quite all he'd been led to expect, they would build by the end of the week, and anyway, they couldn't fail to make a ten-strike in this next town--'why, say, Kiss the Boys Goodbye just played it, and took ten thousand bucks out of town, so if we can't do twelve, I'll shoot myself'.

But presently she could remember the cities only by the banana royal that had made her sick, or by being charged twenty cents for coffee, or by the red rubber overshoes she had bought.

So went the second and third weeks of their gipsying, and Bethel became a trouper.

And to her the sensation of those weeks was the genteel murder of Wyndham Nooks.

In Belluca, with some awe of Adrian Satori still hanging about, Mr. Nooks had merely overplayed--'hoked' is the technical word--the role of the Apothecary, which is a pretty easy role for anyone to hoke, if he has been born an earnest, congenital ham.

But in Treverton, the next town, Nooks began to brighten up the normally disregarded role of First Watchman, in the final act. When he bounced on stage, in a New York policeman's uniform not too well fitting at the neck, his speech was, 'Lead boy; which way?' But for Nooks, Shakespeare unadorned was not enough. He had to have a lot of Nooks in his Shakespeare. He stopped after the word 'boy'; he peered about, long pale hand on the visor of his cap; his knees and elbows quivered; and he yelled out 'which way?' as one would yell a fire alarm.

As this all happened just before the death of Juliet, Mrs. Boyle was not pleased.

Andy spoke to Nooks about it every night after the show, in Treverton. But in the city of Paddock it was the resident manager of the theatre who spoke about it--and to Andy.

This manager was named Sam Lee Regis, and he was quite a pleasant old thug and loafer. The Paddock theatre was, in legal theory, owned by the estate of a defunct tin-can manufacturer, whose only chick, a spinster, lived in Vicenza and wasn't very bright about investments, or anything else except Italian primitives.