Night on night (Andy was frank enough with Bethel now) they were losing money, and neither of them knew quite what to do about it. If the malcontents were not acting so well, it showed only in the slowness and lacklustre of the play.
Bethel's one blow was in Doc Keezer, Mabel, Purvis, and Charlotte. Very mysterious, feeling herself a fixer and a diplomat, practically a female Basil Zaharoff, she got these four into the Purvises' room at Omaha, after their morning arrival. She felt confident. When she had been waiting her turn for a taxicab that morning, on arrival, the December day had been so fresh and brave and sunlit; from the plaza before the Union Station she had looked down on the tracks and on locomotives casting up a coil of bright smoke into bright air.
She fussily got her four statesmen seated on the bed, gave them cigarettes, and said enthusiastically, 'Look: this is a public meeting. I want us all to do something big--get together and see if we can't save the Romeo tour. I know we all love Andy--'
Harry Purvis yawned, 'Not enough to work miracles for him, and only a miracle will save this tour. I give it four more weeks.'
'You honestly think so?' wailed Bethel.
'Well, maybe three,' said Charlotte happily.
'Or two,' smiled Doc Keezer.
'But don't any of you care?' demanded Bethel.
'Why?' wondered Doc. 'It's just another flop. I've been in dozens of 'em. Andy's a good guy, but why all the fuss? We'll hustle back to New York and get busy looking for another job--'
'And that's that,' said Mabel Staghorn, comfortably.
'You don't see something special about this production--making Romeo and Juliet real and important?' said Bethel.
'It's just another show,' said Doc.
'Just another show,' said Mabel.
'I'd like to hear Toscanini in New York,' said Purvis.
'My baby shall,' purred Charlotte.
And then did Bethel disgrace herself, and blow up with a wail of 'Oh, I hate you, all of you! I hate you!'
What they said then, lengthily and affectionately, can be summed up as There there, you're a dear child, never mind, we'll all have dinner together when we blessedly get back to New York.
She bounced off to her own room, flaming, but she didn't even unpack, or wash her face. She telephoned down for the number of Mr. Zed Wintergeist's room. She would go there, right now, and keep her promise to Andy, and eloquently win Zed over to righteousness.
But she stopped in front of the blank grained pine of his door.
No. She couldn't do it: she was being a busybody, intrusively busy about good works, and she hated women who were like that. And you didn't go lightly into Zed's room. Mahala and Iris and she popped innocently enough and frequently into Andy's apartment, and no one thought anything of seeing him wandering down every corridor in pyjamas. But the intense Zed was not like that. No.
She turned away, and in her room she cried a little.
That afternoon Andy summoned her. 'Well, kit, you were right. I've just had a talk with Mrs. Boyle. She'd like to break her run-of-the-play contract. I wouldn't do it. She didn't say much, but she was pretty bleak. So I saw Hoy and Murphy--I'm leaving Zed to you, you know.'
'Uh-yes,' said Bethel, uncomfortably.
'And they both--they didn't exactly give me a two weeks' notice, but they both admitted that they think the tour's going to blow up and they don't much care, and I'm a parlour player. Swine!
to keep their jobs going, to keep the play going, and they won't even gamble with me for a few weeks.'
'We'll beat them yet!' cried Bethel.
'Ye-es,' said Andy.
She marched now relentlessly to Zed's room. He was in. She found him lying on his bed, like a jack-knife, his legs up against the wall, reading Coriolanus aloud, gently waving one foot in time to the beat of the lines. He went on a moment after he had shouted 'C'm in' and she had entered. Then he looked up at her, amused.
It was just a little odd, standing back of him, seeing his face thus, upside down. Faces upside down are disconcerting and not altogether endearing. She let him have it. It was Coriolanus who spoke, as much as she:
'I just dropped in to tell you that you are a coward and a traitor, and that you are willing to ruin an honest theatrical experiment to butter your own vanity.'
He whirled around all in one piece, like a top, and came to, sitting on the edge of the bed, glaring at her. 'I'm a what?'
'You're an amateur actor!'
'Whatever you can call me, that's the one thing I won't stand!'
'You can't even endure discipline. You're the typical ham. You're willing to ruin the whole play if you don't get what you think you want.'
'My good Merriday, when you come out of this dramatic scene you're throwing, I imagine I'll find you're referring to the fact that I think our presentation of Romeo and Juliet has been atrociously misdirected and mismanaged from the beginning, and that I'm quite willing to see it terminated, even to the considerable disadvantage of my own pocket-book, and if you call that being an amateur, why--why--you're crazy!'
She didn't remember ever being asked to sit down, but she was sitting on a straight chair, looking at him sitting on the side of a reproduction mahogany colonial bed. The room was small, tight, but neat as a candy box, and the wall was a temperate grey. She felt that for years now she had been talking to people who sat on the edges of brass beds, maple beds, mahogany beds, iron beds, Pullman berths. Had the whole world turned to sitting on the edges of beds and being querulous? Had chairs gone out? Did anyone anywhere still lie under the shade of trees and seem human?
'So you think it's all misdirected?' she was saying. 'And just how would you direct it?'
'I'd make it really modern. What do the clothes matter, if Andy keeps the whole feeling phony and bookish--the whole reading of the lines? Youngsters to-day love just as passionately as any blasted Elizabethans, but they have humour, and a realization that everything in the world has double and triple meanings, and that if you tell a gal her face is a lotus flower, you'd better be wary about your metaphor or it may fly up and trip you, for God knows what the lotus flower may mean to Freud! I'd have Romeo throw away a line like "Yon grey is not the morning's eye, 'tis but the pale reflex of Cynthia's brow"--say it lightly, and not croon it like the prayer-book, the way Andy does. He reads like an elocutionist. Orson Welles and Co. made Julius Caesar sound like human beings really being sore and scared. And Maurice Evans's Hamlet--remember what a glorious female fool Mady Christians made of the Queen? No, of course you don't remember it! The only real play you've ever seen in your life was some tryout in Hartford. You're a pure little college girl from a fine old farmhouse o'erlooking the Connecticut River, and you think that a Saint Francis in tweed pants like Andy Deacon, that holds the record for chinning himself in the Y.M.C.A., is the hope of a newer and nobler drama with a moral lesson--'
'Zed! You've done a better job than you have any idea. You started making fun of Andy. You've ended by ruining him.'
'He's ruined himself, by not having any dramatic sense.'
'He's done something, while you just sit back and grouch.'
'You sound like the wife of a popular publicity-grabbing clergyman, defending him.'
'Whatever you think of Andy, he's put every cent and every ounce of energy he has into this tour, and now that you've made him ridiculous, you've enabled Mrs. Boyle, that queen of the cats--'