One-night stands!
At five in the afternoon, after her nap on a strange bed in a strange room in a strange city, she awoke when the telephone again called her. She stretched happily. She yawned with unrefined noisiness. In her negligée she moved across the dark room and raised the blind. Down there was an unknown main street, the shuttle of an unknown corner, and head-lights and tail-lights and neon signs dancing a dance of flame through falling snow. She half remembered thus looking at a city inferno in New York, when she had been hungry and depressed. Now it was all hope and waiting eagerness, for in three hours she would be made up and before an audience. She lifted the window; the wet air was exciting.
A new city, and to-morrow another new city--on for ever through the mighty land.
One-night stands! To Jeff Hoy and Mabel Staghorn, purgatory. One-night stands! To Bethel, 'the very name was like a bell--'
Even if at six-thirty a.m. it was like a telephone bell!
Since it was the only permanent furniture in her wandering home, Bethel became absurdly familiar with her own baggage and every most trivial detail of her small possessions. The theatre trunk, with her costumes, and the other suit, to which she changed for the street at every other town. And maybe that wasn't a proud thing to see: a trunk with her initials and the licensed word 'THEATRE' painted on it. Her make-up box, severe and professional, of olive-green light steel. Her dressing-room slippers, mules of blue wool, and her dressing-gown for making up, near-silk, its pattern of mignonette soon indecipherable among red stains of powder.
In this negligée she was accustomed to run up and down dressing-room corridors. All of them were used to popping into one another's rooms half dressed, and they had all the innocence of children. All the Mrs. Worthingtons who want to put their daughters on the stage are advised that nowhere is the virtue of maidenhood less likely to be assaulted than in the theatre. The Zeds, themselves no celibates, are curiously fastidious, and the Lyle Johnsons--who in the classic shades of country clubs and campuses are such successes--become mere bores to wise and travelled young ladies.
This trunk, with these working clothes, met her daily, deposited in her dressing-room. She herself took care of her three pieces of hotel baggage.
The Big Suitcase, canvas-covered, rickety from much closing by standing on it: an inheritance from Sladesbury; ugly enough but, once opened, a delight to Bethel with its fresh blouses and slips and her two proud afternoon frocks.
The Middle-sized Bag, with stockings, handkerchiefs and doggy copies of Shakespeare.
And the new, quite expensive Overnight Bag, with pyjamas, dressing-gown, slippers, toilet things.
Night after night, on one-night jumps, this last was about the only piece that ever got opened. To the trouper, packing and unpacking are luxuries, like golf or families.
Each tiniest possession became familiar and important against the changing backgrounds. When her canary-yellow-handled tooth-brush, whose colour cheered her when she wearily brushed her teeth, wore out, she felt as lost and guilty at throwing it away as though it were an old companion.
But nothing of her own could be more familiar than the sets of the play, to whose comfortable greeting she kept returning in the strangest places--once in a hall that was practically part of a stockyard, chummily near the pigpens.
Watching Gene Doric, the master carpenter, mount and shift these seats, watching him curse and pray over the resident stage crews whom the local manager dug out of the Civil War Home, Bethel loved Gene and admired his endurance (supported entirely on coffee and chewing gum). He called her Beth and looked at her as though she were his younger daughter, and advised her one by one against the machinations of all the males, from Challis to Ernie the Programme Boy.
On long daylight jumps, some six or eight of the company would always enter the car with books under their arms and with loud protests of 'It makes me sore; I never get any time to read'. And with that they would begin eight hours of play at bridge or poker, on folding tables when they were favoured with Pullman cars, on suitcases on their knees when they had only day coaches.
Only Zed, Bethel, Douglas, Charlotte, Purvis, Andy, ever really settled down to reading anything but tabloid newspapers or picture magazines.
They who did not play cards talked (of the stage!) or slept, fantastically curled in car seats. From time to time these earnest sleepers were awakened by the cries of the bridge players and the triumphant slap of cards, and turned and grunted and went back to sleep.
Thus too they variously used their leisure in the hotels, between shows. When they spent only one day in a town and left by train at night, only Andy and Mrs. Boyle took hotel rooms. The others roosted in Andy's place, and a whole series of young women were to be heard, though not to be seen, innocently taking hot baths in his bathroom.
But Bethel's true home was not in trains or hotels but in the theatres themselves.
She liked to be in her dressing-room early. It had the security and the peace of a convent cell, and all its detachment from the outer world. It was pleasant not to have to hurry; to paddle about the room in her blue wool slippers, to sit before her mirror, one bare foot swinging, carefully putting a red base on her cheeks, and small touches of white along the side of her nose--which otherwise would seem a bit too small--patting it with a cool wet wad of cotton, smoothing it, smoothing it; to sit and recall her lines as Epilogue; to run over the Juliet part (some night, Mrs. Boyle might be ill!) until the dressing-room changed, in Bethel's imagination, from horse stall to palace.
She felt modestly and gratefully superior to all the dull people at dinner outside--such serfs as bankers and plumbers, school-teachers and clerks.
Outside, the voices of the arriving actors were cheery. Hilda was ironing Mrs. Boyle's costumes and singing 'Kom' mit mir, du kleine Prinzessin'. Zed was whistling the Brahms Fourth, down the dressing-room alley. Mabel Staghorn was chirping, 'Come Pippy, Pippy, Pippy'.
They were her family. She loved them all, for their gaiety, their courage, their endurance, their devotion.
The odour called 'the smell of grease paint' grew thicker, more enchanting. It was composed of face salves and powders, eyebrow pencils, cold cream, cigarette smoke, silk, old dresses, wigs, decayed flowers. Outside, the stage manager called 'Half-hour', 'Fifteen minutes', 'Overture', then 'Places, please', like an Old World watchman with his 'Two o'clock and all's well'--a lingering, tender sound that made her nod in security. Only the last, 'Places, please', startled her and brought, for a moment, the familiar frightened sinking in the stomach.
Then she was calmly, evenly as a cogwheel in a watch, moving to the entrance. She was passing Doc Keezer, sitting on a backless chair, nothing of him moving save his lips in smiling. He could sit like that all through a performance, when he was not on stage; waiting--for nothing. He whispered only 'Good luck!'
Eldred, the stage manager, was waiting for her; he smiled; with outstretched forefinger he gave her the signal; she slipped through the draw curtain and stood between it and the drop curtain; the drop rose, with its familiar low roar, like wind far away; she was conscious of the golden glare of a spotlight engulfing her eyes, and mysterious dimnesses beneath it where the high lords of the audience were veiled from her, and she was safely plunged, no more in panic, into the dear familiar music: