'She sure is!'
'--to show her proper contempt for all of us--poor American amateurs--and kill her contract by ruining the whole show. She won't have to do much. You and that great comedian Tony Murphy have sneered at all of us so effectively that everybody's self-conscious and afraid to cut loose and do some vivid acting, and the show's flat as ditch-water, thanks to you--'
'Thanks to me?!'
'--and so now your fellow-conspirator, Mrs. Boyle, has only to step in and do a few sloppy performances and we're finished. Yes, you didn't like Andy. So you betrayed him for the great Mrs. Aurelia Lumley Boyle!'
'Now by God I won't stand your--Even if you are a girl--'
'Yes, I'll go back to the pure old homestead by the Connecticut. You bet I will! I came on this tour terribly fond of Andy, for his sweetness, as I still am, but feeling that it was an opportunity to work with a really creative actor like you, and you prove to be another smart amateur that hasn't the temperament to be a serious actor, that's just playing at it before he goes off to his proper hideaway in Hollywood.'
'I'm going to choke you--I really am going to choke you to death, Merriday. Nobody can insult me like that and live.'
'To think that I once admired you more than anybody on earth!'
'You certainly never showed any signs of it! I could have gone for you big. I think maybe you have some of the real fire, under your layers of women's college and butterscotch sundae.'
They were not sitting now; he had sprung up, lifted her to her feet; and his soul was no longer lying on its back and waving its spiritual feet. He was frantically earnest and young:
'I liked you, but you were such a baby, and I didn't want to make a fool of myself--funny, isn't it?--much safer to be naive and longing with a wise woman of forty than with an airy brat of twenty! But you really did believe in me?'
'Yes.'
'And you really think I let you down?'
'Yes. You did let me down, Zed.'
He was, after all, only a year older than she, this embryo dictator, and she realized, as he put his arm about her with an embrace too trembling to be anything but sincere, that he was near to bawling like a baby.
'Oh, I never thought I could do that, pet. Tell me, oh, tell me honestly, darling, no kidding, do you really mean that the Boyle is trying to bust the tour, and I was her stooge?'
'Yes.'
'That old witch! When I come to think of it, I hate her more than anybody else I know, because she can act, and doesn't care. She can simply lure your heart out, when she gives that slow, scared half-turn and says, "Trust me, gentleman, I'll prove more true than those that have more cunning to be strange"--she's twice as young as you are, then! Yet she'd give it up for a country-house comedy. She's a traitor. Oh, we'll squash her! Come. Let's go see Andy. He and you and I will put this tour over, Beth! Come on!'
'Now I love you, Zed!'
He stopped, on the way to the door. He said sharply, 'How literally do you mean that?'
'W-why?' was her answer.
'You knew I began to fall for you, after I got over being a fool about Iris?'
'I don't think you really fell.'
'Why do you hold back so with me?'
'You haven't one tiniest little bit of kindness for women. You order them around like waiters.'
'Of course I do. Every epicure orders waiters around and bawls 'em out--just because he cares for his food. It's only the thick-ear that'd just as soon have pork chop as grouse that calls the waiter "George" and asks about his health instead of about his sauces . . . Are you going to fall in love with me?'
'No.'
'Not even to save this tour?'
'Don't be so conceited again! How do you know you can save it?'
'I'll show you. I'll do it. And then I may discourse with thee sweet numbers, pet, of love. Come on!'
They hastened, hand in hand, to Andy's room. Between his own door and Andy's, three floors above, the nimble Zed had evolved a plan.
Andy's room was, again, the cheapest in the house; cheaper than Zed's, with an aspen instead of an iron bed. When they knocked, he gave them 'Come in', but when they entered he was telephoning . . . long-distance telephoning.
The worst vice of Mr. Andrew Deacon was telephoning, preferably to as distant a spot at as expensive a rate as was possible. When in doubt, he reached for a receiver. He was one of a whole new race of executives who take out their escapism not in liquor or South Seas or war, but by instantly transporting themselves across the continent. They may economize on salaries and socks, they may be stay-at-homes, but they will rise up at three a.m. and leap at a telephone instrument and call up some poor unfortunate girl downily asleep in her own decent bed in a city a thousand miles away.
They will have no time to write letters, no, not so much as a postcard with a picture of the Empire State Building, but they will with complaisance spend three hours tracking some distant quarry from home to office to restaurant to theatre to places where he decidedly ought not to be.
And of these telephoniacs, Andy was a chronic case. He telephoned greetings to actors on their opening nights, thereby forcing them to go out to the box office and almost miss their first entrances; he telephoned filial greetings to his mother when she was at crises in bridge games; he telephoned to sick friends in the hospital, just at the times in their lives when they most wanted to be left alone. But to-day he had more apparent reason for telephoning.
As Bethel unavoidably listened to the end of the call he was making, she guessed that he was trying to get more backing for the show from some friend in the East . . . and that he had been making this effort often and recently.
'. . . oh yes, it's picking up. I get reports of a swell advance sale all through Kansas . . . Why of course, I expect to run at a loss for some time yet, till the country gets sold on a novelty . . . No, I can't guarantee a thing. I won't fool you about that. But all I can say is, I'm putting in all I got . . . Well, think it over and I'll phone you again to-morrow.'
He looked up from the telephone as brightly as though he had just heard that the Daughters of Israel had taken a block of two hundred seats.
Zed struck quickly. He stalked to Andy holding out his hand.
'Listen, boss; Bethel has been jumping my neck, and I guess she's right. I'm opposed to you on some of your theories of production. I've never concealed that. But I never realized that my criticism had played into the hands of a gang like Tony and Jeff, that are natural sourballs, and I certainly never realized it could give aid and comfort to mankind's natural enemy, Aurelia Boyle.'
(As Zed continues with his surrender to the beaming Andy, who pats his sleeve in gratitude, it should be noted that Bethel is so remarkable a linguist that she perfectly understands, though she cannot fluently speak it, the astoning new language of Zed, Andy and Lyle, whose vocabulary contains such words of unknown etymology as phony, stooge, blow, flop, wow, bust, and okay.)
'So here's my idea, Andy,' Zed was finishing. 'You've worked the radio and interviews and hens' luncheons pretty hard, and some of the colleges, but we haven't touched the high schools and normal schools, and there's where the cash customers for Shakespeare ought to be. If you want, and if Bethel will back me up and Tertius will get me the dates, I'll make some spirited addresses in high-school auditoriums. God knows I'll hate it, but I swear, I'll coo you as gently as I can, and maybe it'll help.'
'Oh, that's swell, Zed. I certainly appreciate it. I think it's a swell idea. It's too late for this and next week, but I'll wire--no, I better telephone--and get you dates for our seventh and eighth and ninth weeks--Missouri and Kansas and Colorado. I can't tell you how this touches me, Zed.'