They drank--none more cheerfully than Zed and Murphy and Jeff Hoy, the rebels against Andy's style of producing.
From his drawing-room, Andy carried out a little silver tree. Despite his own order, he had hung on it a tiny present for every member of the cast and the stage crew: a gold pencil, engraved 'An old accustom'd feast, Xmas '38'. When the tree stood in the aisle, on a porter's footstool, shaking and glittering in the train's motion, when, holding high their paper cups dripping champagne, the whole company chorused, 'Silent night, holy night', then Bethel dropped inside her berth and wept, her eyes against her arms.
It was her first Christmas away from Sladesbury and the big tree in the sitting-room.
She loved her new family, though, and she forgot crying, sang sentimental songs with all of them--till Tertius Tully, usually the rock of discretion but now a little loose with champagne, whispered to her, 'I hope Andy can pay for all this, but we've been dropping a wad of money every night this last week. Exeunt bearing corpses.'
The loving-kindness of their Yuletide companionship had worn a little thin and grey when they assembled for Christmas dinner (donated by Mr. Andrew Deacon, the producer) in a private suite in the hotel in Davenport.
They had none of them slept enough; they were homesick and tired of pumping merriment; and Tony Murphy had started breakfast with brandy in black coffee.
Bethel had been conscious of a waxing criticism of Andy and a pessimism about the tour. The malcontents felt, variously, that Andy was a shallow, unauthoritative actor, that the presentation of the play was too contemporary, that it wasn't contemporary at all, that Andy was paying Mrs. Boyle too much money--a thousand a week against ten per cent of the gross, that he wasn't paying the particular person then speaking (even if that person happened to be Mrs. Boyle), anything like enough, that he was losing so much money that he couldn't carry on, that Tertius and he were falsifying the box-office statements and Andy hideously expropriating them all and making money in car-loads.
But now, at this edgy Christmas dinner, Bethel was able clearly to pick out the rebels.
Before the long Christmas afternoon was over, before the Scotch and port had stopped circling, as everybody moved from place to place about the huge table in the suite the malcontents were tending to sit together and, thus emboldened, to be openly doubtful of the weary charms of Andy. The sharpest conspirators were, she saw, Zed, Antonio Murphy, Geoffrey Hoy and Lyle Johnson, that Balthasar with the bark on.
Tony and Lyle could be discounted. They were the sea lawyers of the company; the inevitable complainers; the kind of mutineers who earnestly believed that this theatrical producer Andrew Deacon, born in 1910, had deliberately designed the smothering dressing-rooms of a theatre built in 1895.
But Jeff Hoy--Benvolio--was a man of competence, of technique and reason. He was the grim comedian. He never gave another actor a wrong cue, a kind word or a dollar. Acting was his business, and he paid his spiritual debts and collected his artistic bills with tight accuracy. He had never liked any other member of any theatrical company in his seventeen years (ever since he was twenty) on the stage, and had never been interested enough in any of them to dislike them. He was as courteous as an executioner, and in his handsome eyes there was no human feeling, no human weakness, no human love. He was married to a stately woman who was the daughter of a lieutenant governor of Ontario and who despised all Americans, all Canadians, all Englishmen and all actors. Jeff Hoy agreed with her in everything.
Not so resolutely mutinous as Jeff, but a little doubtful of Andy and very doubtful of the tour's long continuance were Douglas Fry, Iris, Harry Purvis, and Charlotte, Victor Swenson . . . and Mahala Vale.
Loyal to Andy in everything, never believing in him so much and so adoringly as when they disbelieved, were only Hugh Challis, Mabel and Doc, Tudor Blackwall, Nathan Eldred, Vera Cross, Tom Wherry . . . and all the stagehands . . . and Tertius Tully . . . and Bethel Merriday.
It shook Bethel enough, at this Christmas feast, to find that the competent Mr. Jeff Hoy was allied with the plotters, but what crushed her was the sudden evidence that the cloistered Mrs. Lumley Boyle could have any opinion whatever on any matter whatever aside from her salary and playing centre stage, and that this new opinion of hers was that the tour was going to blow up, and she didn't care much if the explosion came soon.
Mrs. Boyle had, at first, declined to come to the dinner. But perhaps sitting alone with Hilda Donnersberg and with thoughts of Devon mulled wine, in a mouldy hotel suite on Christmas Day, was too much for her. She appeared just after the turkey came on--and she was about one-quarter drunk.
'Sit by me,' said Andy. But Mrs. Boyle looked swiftly over the assembly--far more men than women--and, as fluttery as a girl on Saturday afternoon at a summer resort, she swished over to young Lyle Johnson and youngish Jeff Hoy, gurgling to Andy, 'Oh, darling, let me take this wonderful opportunity of knowing some of the boys I haven't played so much with.'
Lyle and Jeff set a chair for her between them.
Bethel, not far down the table, thought she heard Hoy growl at Mrs. Boyle, 'Why didn't you say to him, "Wherefore the hell art thou Romeo?"' She certainly heard Mrs. Boyle giggle, then yelp at a waiter, 'Whisky-soda, and do be generous for once, Herr Ober.'
It was a rather makeshift dining place. The large table was made up of half a dozen tables of not quite the same height, so that the topography was mountainous and you went uphill from pumpkin pie to mince pie to plum pudding to candied orange peel. The tables so crowded the suite that you had to squeeze between the wall and the chairs, which varied from a saddle-back chair to a piano bench. On the walls, green below and pink above, were pictures of the various state governors who had graced the suite.
Mrs. Boyle, never more than one-half drunk and certainly never less, was lavish. She told Hoy that he would give new life to the London stage, if he would ever condescend to go there. She told Tony Murphy that his humour was in the 'classic tradition'. She told Purvis and Charlotte--now lovingly sitting in one chair--that Andy had not had 'the imagination to comprehend the aristocratic significance of Romeo and Juliet'. They bubbled back at her, and Hoy told the 'raw one, but I'm sure you can stand it', about the preacher and the woman missionary, and Lyle whooped, and kissed Mrs. Boyle--which, on any day save December 25th, was as improbable as his kissing Queen Wilhelmina--and she kissed him back.
Mrs. Boyle's relationship to the continuation of the run of the play was different from that of any other member of the company. She had a 'run-of-the-play contract', whereby she could neither quit nor be discharged except by common agreement between her and Andy, under penalty of the thunders of Equity. She might dislike everything about the show--and in Aurelia Boyle there were truly great powers of disliking--but she could not, the lone, lorn, exiled Pluto could not, return to New York without Andy's willingness. It was a horrid case of the capitalistic oppression of the intellectual proletariat.
While Mrs. Boyle was surrounded by merriment at one end of the table, at the other Andy and his palace guard grew momently more grave and silent.
Mrs. Boyle began effervescently to take them all, the young and provincial, into the sacred places of English stage life. Laughing, friendly, making fun of herself, she told them how Sir Johnston Forbes-Robertson had taught her that no one had learned how to walk across a stage so long as any observer could recall the way in which she had walked; how she had been reintroduced to Mrs. Patrick Campbell seven times--five of them, Mrs. Campbell had pretended not to remember her name, the sixth, she had pretended that Mrs. Boyle was named Blievazatski, and on the seventh had sighed, 'But you can't be Ellen Terry'.