The fourth and fifth weeks of the tour. Waterloo and Mason City and Sioux Falls and Sioux City and Des Moines, Cedar Rapids and Davenport and Burlington and two nights in Omaha, and on New Year's Eve, St. Joseph, only it's really 'St. Joe', with its bright hills above the Missouri River that are shrines to Jesse James, who was the Hitler of his day, with gold watches for his Vienna and Prague and Warsaw.
When she reached Nebraska, the Bethel who had been coddled in Connecticut as in cotton batting was certain that she was already practically in California, and only a step more from Hawaii and China and Australia--yes, and perhaps really going there.
Andy was beginning to hint about their touring Australia. He whispered to Bethel that she need worry no more about the tour's closing; yes, he was still losing money, but not so much, and in the metropolises of Kansas City and St. Louis, so justly proud of their auditoriums, their Little Theatres, their symphony orchestras, he would 'make a pile--enough to carry them till the luck changed and they began to coin money'.
So they went on, descendants of the Covered Wagon, with portable radios instead of the slim columns of signal smoke seen across the sun-drowsing plains. And so she discovered America.
The stretch of plains was so unpunctuated. All morning long, from the train window, the snow and sky had been confused in one slope of empty grey, and Bethel was weighed down by the sky's heaviness. She was homesick for the New England stone walls, lively with squirrels and thrushes that had invited her girlhood outings. But here the farmhouses, cruelly far from one another, crouched with their barns and grim cement silos in little nests of cottonwood trees; as alone and individual and strange as a shepherd's cot in the Highlands.
An hour before they came to their next stand, the sun was through, and the morning of creation was miraculously renewed. Suddenly the sky was tremendous, glorious with unsoiled blue; the snow was a silver mantle; and she saw how many of the houses, along with lean and grey-streaked prairie poverty, were new-painted bungalows, with solid, hip-roofed barns, jauntily bearing bright galvanized-iron ventilating cowls. The silos were towers, now, brave as the old, sea-facing watchtowers she had seen in pictures of southern France.
Their city, when they came to it, was gay with sun, young and eager. The station had miles of leather-and-chromium chairs in the waiting-room, and the attendants were like collegians, very friendly with young actresses. The hotel was new, and her room, all in maple, with a Navajo bedspread, was on the thirtieth floor. She looked out on the medley of Old West and New Pan-America that is characteristic of all that land: skyscrapers and a marble Art Institute and a luxurious-looking Georgian brick Town Hall Club among a Shanghai sprawling of tin-roofed one-story shacks plastered with signs advertising beer and candy bars.
Then her nap, curled snugly on that heavenly bed. (The mattress was astonishingly named the Slumber Coaxie, and had, it seems, been Scientifically Constructed in accordance with the findings of a Conference of Forty Professors, Housewives and Social Leaders. But it really was a good mattress, once you got to sleep and forgot the lush poetry.)
She awoke to sunset.
She had not known such extravagant sunsets as these of the plains. In Connecticut sunsets were usually frail, tranquil, pretty affairs, that economically afforded you a couple of strips of pale crimson, and one of old gold, with a good effort in the way of an apple-green sky beneath. They were the crisp bacons of sunsets. But these displays in Iowa and Nebraska were Ninth Symphonies, battle pieces, insanities of flame and gold.
She discovered a curious rule: A truly great sunset will always be in this form: it portrays a seabound land of burning lava, through which winds a golden river to the bright bays and inlets of a glowing sea.
When they had crossed the Missouri River, she decided that she was no longer in the prosperous Middle West but in the real West that, with its myths and true memories of cow-punchers and John Brown and the Santa Fe Trail and the Gold Rush and Indian braves, of frontier saloons and railroad builders and two-gun sheriffs, of mountains and ranches and deserts, is one of the five or six romantic districts of the whole world.
She loved her tight New England as much as ever; she was not parrot enough to echo, 'New York isn't America'. But she had had a bath of greatness, and she came out of all this not a Yankee but an American.
And an American who, born in 1916, might live to see the fabulous Great Land of the year 2000.
All the time that she was thus tasting greatness, she was entirely surrounded by love, and none of it was hers, and she didn't like the idea at all.
The corporation of Mahala and Andy Deacon, an institution engaged in dancing together, expensively dining together, and squabbling together, went on like tired matrimony, with none of the advantages. Bethel suspected that Mahala would never give up Andy so long as she rather thought he was a good actor and decisively thought that he was a good athlete and very rich; and that Andy stuck only because he was expected to. Bethel was irritated by Andy's unimaginative humbleness. His good-night kisses of Mahala in hotel lobbies were like porridge without cream. And in the fifth week Mahala began writing many letters; began receiving, from New York, many letters, air-mailed, all in the same masculine script.
Bethel could tell exactly the day on which Mahala must have learned that Andy was (if possibly still quite as athletic) not so rich as he had been. It was on December 23rd, in Des Moines. That evening she came gushing into Bethel's dressing-room, which normally Mahala would as soon have thought of entering as she would a lecture-room on foreign affairs. She was an angel in a voluminous white linen dressing-gown with blue ribbons. She gurgled, 'My, you've got such a sweet dressing-room! An arm-chair! Well, you deserve it, Beth. I was just saying to Hugh Challis last night that you have the real, sure-enough Old Vic touch in your--what d'you call it?--prologue.'
'Did you?'
'Oh yes! And he agreed with me. Uh--Beth! Have you heard rumours about Andy not being able to get any more backing, and being busted? I know we're not making any money but--'
'I don't know a thing about it,' lied Bethel.
Afterward she wondered why, since she was going to lie anyway, she hadn't done a really good, crooked, malicious lie and told Mahala that Andy was sneaking off early mornings and pawning his silver-backed brushes and his silver brandy flask and his sapphire-studded (and rather pretentious) cigarette lighter. Then Mahala might have chucked him; then Andy might have stooped fondly down to her, the adoring peasant girl.
But would she have cared now?
Oh yes! Andy was so much kindlier than Zed, so much younger than Doc Keezer, so much wilder and warmer than Doug Fry, so much more desirous of a shining future than Fletcher Hewitt and so much her own good tutelary god.
She saw Andy, now, taking Mahala to cheaper restaurants and buying sherry instead of champagne cocktails; she saw that Mahala was complaining; but seemingly it did not occur to Andy to complain of her complaining.
With all the fury that he gave to rehearsals, to learning a part, or to being rude to people he considered bogus, Zed had dived into books. He was as out of the arena of love as Bethel herself. He was reading--really reading, and not talking about it, like Challis or Mahala or Charlotte: marching through the novels of Hemingway, Dos Passos, Steinbeck, James Farrell.
And Iris had become intellectual--that is, for Iris. As there seemed to be no one more lucrative available, she had cleaved to Douglas Fry, and she listened to his talk about cycloramas and gelatins with a sweet, sedate vacuousness . . . and out of it she did at least have, as a pledge of Douglas's low-pressure ardour, a new trinket bracelet, on which she hung miniature elephants, locomotives, giant pandas, Charlie McCarthy and orchids.