For once Andy stood up to the prima donna and said, soundly, 'Oh, don't be silly'. But it was worse than Aurelia had expected.
Pluto was fascinated by Pippy at once, and then enamoured of her. He showed all the antics of a small boy in love. He stalked round and round the bored Pippy, while the company embarrassed him by giggling. He feebly smiled at her and invitingly paddled with his paws. He escaped from Mrs. Boyle's drawing-room on trains at night and sat lovingly before the berth in which reclined Miss Staghorn and Pippy, and from time to time he awakened everybody with a thin celestial howl, and when they popped out of berths and cursed him, he looked at them with an evil, aged, oriental guile and howled again.
And he almost broke the granite heart of Mrs. Boyle by desertion.
Meantime, Pippy brought those ageing innocents, Mabel Staghorn and Doc Keezer, together.
Being responsible for the cat, Doc went on, in duty to it, buying liver and catnip and cleaning its basket. He found something homelike in caring for a rather helpless woman and her feline child. Hour on hour the three of them, Doc, Mabel and Pippy, sat together in the plush seat of a day coach, relaxed in such warm and velvety communion as 'Well, I can remember when Walter Huston first decided to play in Desire Under the Elms. He says to me, "Doc," he says--of course him and me were old friends . . .'
It occurred to Bethel, a little wretched that she had never seen it, that Doc had overwhelmingly wanted someone who wanted him. He was exhilarated by having a friend who depended on him for small cold walks in unknown streets between matinée and evening, for getting a taxi, for finding the drugstore with the best ten-cent coffee.
His fondness for Bethel had cooled into an amiable 'How's tricks, child?'
Doc Keezer had come home, and she was the more homeless in it. A little frightened, she reached tentative hands out to Zed and Andy.
Zed invited her to attend the Pygmalion movie, and then forgot the engagement.
Andy was too busy quarrelling with Mahala to notice anybody else.
She was truly alone.
She had never in any moment loved Doc or Fletcher Hewitt. But had she ever loved Andy? Or had it been just gratitude and dazzle? Had she ever been on the verge of falling in love with Zed? Or had it just been stimulus and curiosity and the compliment he paid in bullying her?
She had supposed that, whatever complications and dizziness there might be once you were plunged into love, there was first a divine certainty about knowing that you were in love. She felt lost now, and insignificant. She felt like an understudy.
And understudies suffer not so much from cruelty as from invisibility.
It has been recorded that Bethel was naturally of the lonely type--of the loneliness that is the pain and penalty of being individualistic. In the gregariousness of rehearsals and the first credulity of the tour, she had seemed cured. But now she settled down, apparently for the rest of her life, to Steak Medium Rare with Tertius Tully, Hugh Challis, Jones Awkwright (Wyndham Nooks's successor, a pool-playing man) and occasionally Doc Keezer.
They never talked of anything but the stage.
Challis referred to 'the drama'. Doc Keezer said 'the theatre'. To Tertius Tully, it was always 'show business'. To all of them, it was all that was important and pleasant in life.
And so it was with Bethel Merriday as, lonely or no, she became a trouper.
XXIX
The telephone jeering beside her bed. Her whole body trying to shut it out. Sliding instantly, when the bell ceased, into a gulf of sleep. The bell again, ringing for hours and hours, while for hours and hours she tried not to hear it. The sick weakness with which she fumbled for the telephone instrument. The voice, cool, wakeful, in the little black-rubber magic cylinder, 'Six-thirty'. Her body collapsing again into sleep, but her mind making her swing her legs over the edge of the bed, so that she could not yield . . . To miss the train, the performance? Horror!
She had got to bed at twelve-thirty; she had had six hours' sleep; her body was wailing for eight hours--ten--the clock round.
Feebly she picked up the telephone again. Room service. 'This is 1679. I want a pot of coffee and some buttered toast, right away. I've got to catch a train.' 'Yah, right away,' said the Mid-European who, in all mannerly hotels, mis-answers the room-service telephone.
Through a fog she tottered into the bathroom, still wobbly at the stomach, and slapped her cheeks, her eyes, the back of her neck, with cold water. No time for a cold bath--and no energy, either, nor any warmth to spare, this December morning.
She meditatively scratched her knees, and looked down at her toes, reflected that Iris tinted her toenails, thought it would be rather fun to do the same, also thought that it would be intensely wicked, wriggled her toes--then yelled, 'Wake up, you!'
She stalked back to the telephone.
Now six months ago Bethel would have felt herself a fiend to talk loudly to shut-ins down in the service department, and an ingrate and a heathen to have doubted their zealous desire to serve, but she was 'not going to have any more of this business of having to catch a train with the room waiter coming in just as she had to run for the elevator'. She yelled, 'This is 1679. Where's that order of coffee and toast? I've been waiting half an hour.'
''S on the way up,' said Room Service, as mendacious as herself.
Dressed, she tried to stuff the mixture of stockings, handkerchiefs, clippings of reviews, hairbrush, into a suitcase. They were all growing in bulk, or else her bags were shrinking in the winter cold.
The coffee had come. She tipped the waiter--resenting the tip--and drank the coffee--resenting God. She called a bellboy, thought that he looked at her admiringly, foggily forgot it, and staggered after him to the desk, downstairs. The old, old business of the girl cashier's mechanical, dehumanizing, slot-machine demand 'Whacha room number?' of waiting for her bill, looking it over (just to seem wise, not because she could ever add it), making sure that she had left her room key, wavering through the pillared lobby and down crimson-carpeted steps to the sidewalk, to a taxi, counting her bags to make sure she had them all . . . She would probably, in her continued state of drowsiness, have counted two or even one as three, and been wearily content.
Driving through the city in a dream. Half conscious that about her were new buildings, new people. Take that cheery policeman talking to the man opening up a cigar store, both of them laughing, their words coming out in white steam; he was probably important to himself, and worth knowing, but she must forget him and keep going.
One-night stands!
Stiffly climbing out of the taxi at the huge wide sidewalk in front of the railroad station's Corinthian pillars. The rest of the company coming up in taxis behind her, but the loving greetings pretty shy now and doubtful and hungry-sounding, even Andy's affectionate 'Hello, kitten; still alive?'
A safari of silent actors following silent redcaps, luggage-laden, through the vast sonority of the waiting-room, down a gold-and-marble corridor, down stairs to a mysterious dark underpass, like a corridor from the Bastille, with arches along it labelled Track One, Track Two, Track Three, which gave on cinder-smeared stairways. Then up again and into the open air, on a long cement runway between sunken tracks, and, despite a determination never to feel human again, fresher and gayer and full of hope . . . hope of glory and more coffee. And the train pushing in, with white smoke against a flashing winter morning sky.