Then her first stint was done; she was sitting near Doc Keezer, silent as he, till Romeo should come by--Romeo, Andy, so handsomely swaggering in tweed jacket and grey bags and careless cheery-coloured tie; and she went back to her dressing-room, another evening begun safely.
Once her dressing-room was on a balcony above the stage. As she stood by the rail, looking down on the set, Hugh Challis stopped beside her and reflected:
'Like a big sailing ship at sea, isn't it, down there? A ship at night, good weather and clear stars. The cyclorama's like a huge sail, so steady, going up into the darkness--you can't see the top of it. And the set, with the light just dimly shining through it, is the lighted cabin. The stage planks are the deck. And we shall come safely to port--no fear!'
She could see it, though the nearest she had ever come to ships was in the movies. Yes, the stage manager, sitting down there behind the right tormentor, holding the script, their map, and quietly following the lines as they ran smoothly on, was the first officer or the pilot; the electrician, at his switchboard, was an engineer. This must be a sailing ship with auxiliary engines! The dialogue, coming distantly from on-stage, was a steady, low sound, confident as a ship's soft throbbing . . . and, like a ship, it all went on night on night on night . . . the steady ship bearing her to glory . . . the voyage to Verona.
That was the final quality of real actors, she saw; not so much fantastic imagination, or neat imitation, or golden voices, but the patience to go on, night on night, and never quite let down. They never tired of the same play. They could always laugh anew at the Nurse's jeering, at Capulet's tantrums, and when they themselves slipped, when they 'fluffed', they came off-stage grinning and with never-faded excitement whispered, 'Did you hear me say "exiled" instead of "banished". Golly!'
Like all artists--all painters, all musicians, all poets, even some of those plodding recorders, the novelists--actors are glorious children, with a child's unwearied delight in the same story over again, and the child's ability to make dragons grow in a suburban garden, but with an adult magic of crystallizing the daydreams into enduring life.
Agreeably she waited each night for Doc Keezer's inevitable curfew after the curtain calclass="underline" 'Well, another day; another dollar.' Agreeably she lost herself in the inevitable midnight post-mortems which are the actor's chief reward.
Wherever they were, in cafeteria or Chinese restaurant, hotel room or train, they went detail by detail over that night's performance. 'Say, did you see the way Boyle pinched the masquerade scene off Andy by standing back humming when he first looks at her?' 'Was I sore at Harry Purvis! He was kidding all through my duel with him!' 'What was wrong with Hugh to-night? He was late on all his cues, and he almost blew in Thirty-five, where he bawls Juliet out for weeping.'
It was the beloved repetition of lovers, of doctors; it was the sweet, long, important talk of theologians in the monastery; and like these other initiates, the actors resented laymen who intruded on them at table with unlawful talk of the outside world--laymen, non-professionals, whose heathen awfulness could be realized only when they said 'practising' for 'rehearsing', or in deepest depravity asked, 'Does she take off her part well?'
When the nightly details had been fully gone into, they could always recall the time when Lyle was arrested by a traffic policeman just before a performance, the time when Romeo's trousers were stolen and he went on in gymnasium slacks, and Mabel Staghorn's spraining of her ankle by stumbling over a stage screw. She, equally the New Thoughter and the old trouper, played with her ankle bandaged, and was heard to warble, when the ankle was dressed, 'Oh no, dear, it doesn't hurt the teeniest, weeniest bit, if you have faith in the Inner Resources--ouch, damn it!'
Yes, thought Bethel, perhaps their shop talk was thinner than the profundities of philosophers, but it was gayer, and more dear to the frail human soul.
For all their Pullmans and electric heaters in dressing-rooms, they did not altogether lack the pioneering that the old-time saints of trouping had known, when Hamlet rode atop the stagecoach, through a snowstorm, in stovepipe hat and dogskin coat.
They had snowstorms that delayed the curtain. They went through the flu epidemic; Mrs. Boyle was almost carried on the stage by her maid, and Andy played Romeo with a fever higher than that of love.
All these emergencies Bethel found enchanting. But she noticed that Andy was using them for what the business management of a show calls 'the alibis'--the excuses to prove that a show is not really a failure. The alibis for the Romeo company were numerous. They had failed to have better houses not because people didn't vastly like their play but because of:
The cold, which kept people home.
The thaw, which kept people home.
The flu epidemic.
The rival high-school basketball game in Waterloo.
The rival National Guard exhibition in Sioux Falls.
George Cohan's tour in I'd Rather Be Right, in which the dean of American actors was, said Tertius Tully, taking away all the show money there was in the country.
The fact that there hadn't been enough shows in this city lately, so that people were out of the habit of theatre-going.
The fact that there had been too many shows.
The fact that Andy was too chummy with reporters so that they gave him no reverence.
The fact that Mrs. Boyle was too unfriendly with reporters.
The fact that Mahala had worn red shoes at a Baptist church supper.
The fact that Shakespeare was Shakespeare.
The more the alibis, the more certain was Bethel that Andy was continuing to lose money. But lose or not, she went sweeping through her new America.
Waterloo and Des Moines and Cedar Rapids and Davenport and Burlington and Omaha and Lincoln and Kansas City! Sedalia and Columbia, Jefferson City and Springfield; Little Rock, in the state of Arkansas that had seemed to her, from Connecticut, as far away as Alaska; Memphis and the naive surprise that there were more filling stations in the South than moonshiners, more advertising men than colonels; the spacious and pleasant city of St. Louis, royal city by the royal river; then into smaller and smaller towns in Kansas.
From Omaha to Lincoln the company went in two buses. Mabel Staghorn indicated that this was to save money, and she began to worry about their future, but the bright young people loved it, and as the huge green buses swayed through a land of small sturdy cottages, lost in white vastness, they sang Noel Coward's ballad, 'Don't Put Your Daughter on the Stage, Mrs. Worthington'.
The party started just after the performance on Christmas Eve, in Cedar Rapids, and since Christmas was on a Sunday, continued on the train and all the next day, in their hotel in Davenport. On the train two days earlier, Andy had announced to the company that he would be their host for Christmas, but he said, cheerily, casually--only Bethel read anxiety underneath--'Let's all be merry, but let's be economical, at least till the show goes over. No presents from anybody to anybody, if you can help it. And we'll stick to beer.'
Mahala flared up: 'Is that your idea of Christmas in Newport, R.I.? Even in the chorus we'd get champagne. Romeo the spendthrift!'
'The fool. That ends her!' quaked Bethel, and Charlotte and Purvis exchanged glances. But Andy sounded bland:
'All right, if you feel that way, my dear. If it can be done. Did you ever try to buy champagne in Cedar Rapids?'
He did. The train left for Davenport with Tudor Blackwall waving a bottle of champagne and crying, 'Company, attention! Corporals Swenson, Murphy and Keezer will distribute old Mother Pullman's best paper champagne glasses! Fill 'em up, gents and girls. You too, Comrade Purvis--to-night, at least. Now I'll give you a toast! To Andy Deacon, the best boss and the best friend an actor ever had! Skoal!'