He did fairly well, though he had never rehearsed the speech. He left out the line 'From ancient grudge break to new mutiny', but apparently no one noticed. Certainly there was no sound of new mutiny breaking, out there in the awesome dark majesty of the audience.
Through the prologue, Bethel stood in the wings and listened and suffered. She was too frightened to go back to her dressing-room and relax.
She did not come on till fourteen minutes after the rise of the curtain. During those fourteen centuries she tried to listen to Andy, Zed, Challis, Charlotte and several thousand others telling her that she was an admirable Juliet. She heard nothing but her own misery and, having quietly determined that she couldn't remember one line of the play, she saw that the catastrophe was complete and there was no use in worrying about it, and she sat stooped and steeped in misery, till Eldred's signal, and her cue, Mahala's voice cheerily calling, 'Where's this girl? What, Juliet!'
She ran on, her voice saying, 'How now! Who calls?' as gaily and sweetly and naturally as though she had been doing this for a thousand nights.
She even had presence enough to be able to look at Mahala, in Lady Capulet's velvet house dress, and to react to the Nurse's fond smile. She had dived. She was swimming. She was playing. She was Juliet!
She had her first agony in the first long colloquy between her and Romeo.
She started off confidently enough and winningly enough on her first tremendous speech:
Yes, she had said that much, or that much had mechanically got itself said, when she stopped with an incredible jolt. She hadn't an idea how the speech went on. Utter blank. She could see the long lines there before her, like a black wall, but she could not climb them.
She had, by stage usage, 'blown'; she had 'blown higher than a kite'.
And the blessed Andy was 'throwing her the line'--giving her her own words, with variations; speaking as cheerfully as though all was welclass="underline"
Glory! She almost had it again!
He was going on:
She had it! She snatched the speech from him, and capped his interpolation triumphantly with:
And then she was singing on, flawless, to the end of the speech.
Only afterwards did she think that Eldred, holding the script in the wings, must have prompted her and she, in her agitation, not have heard him.
She marched on well enough until the Nurse gave her Romeo's summons to the friar's cell for marriage. Then suddenly she had left in her no blood, no voice. She was not Juliet revealing love and fear; she was a Miss Bethel Merriday reciting lines. When she addressed the Nurse, 'O Lord, why look'st thou sad?' it sounded as though she were speaking to a stranger named Mr. Lord. At the end of the scene, when she made exit, to fly to Laurence's cell with a joyous 'Hie to high fortune!' there was not a ripple from the audience--and here the valiant Juliet of Mrs. Boyle had invariably floated out on applause.
Before the intermission--they were playing Romeo in two acts--she had only one more scene, and then, six minutes before the act-end, she fled to her dressing-room and while Hilda Donnersberg, gaunt and high, looked down at her with Mid-European scorn, she wept on her arm on the dressing-table.
She was finished for ever as an actress.
'In Austria, where there is a really great theatre, a real German theatre, we would never allow a young girl like you to play Juliet, but always a woman with some sense and art, like Frau Boyle.'
'But Juliet's only fourteen in the play.'
'Oh no. That's yoost a mistake in the English translation of Shakesbur,' said Hilda.
'And I ought to be at the hotel with poor Mrs. Boyle. She is sick of the stomach,' said Hilda.
In all that fifteen-minute intermission, the only persons who came into her dressing-room were Andy and Zed and Tertius Tully.
Tertius said, 'Good girl! We're all rooting for you. Well, got to hustle out and count the cash.'
Andy said, 'Good girl! We all think you're swell. Well, I got to hustle in and change.'
Zed, who was Mercutio, and was therefore now dead except for the resurrection of the curtain call, said, 'Good girl. You've got through the worst of it. Good luck!'
She never remembered anything of the second act. She tried to practise the stage art of listening, but she heard nothing the other actors said to her. She was busy running over what her answering speech would be.
While preparing to drink the sleeping potion, she soliloquized:
her inner thoughts were somewhat less lyric:
'Got to remember, lay down the dagger with the cue "Lie thou there". Yes, this speech ends the scene; thank heaven I don't have to give anybody a cue . . . That woman coughing in the front row again. Why doesn't she take a lozenge? . . . Oh, dear, why did I jump Mahala's cue? . . . Did I leave the cover off my powder? I'm almost sure I did; I can see it lying there with the cover off . . . She coughs all the time . . . To have a chance like this and not be able to do it! I can just hear how Katharine Cornell would be playing this; her voice so warm and sure; I just squawk and move like a stick . . . Hey! Careful! Don't hurry that line so much! . . . If I ever play this again--fat chance!--I'd like to try giving most of this speech with my back to the audience--dressing-table or something, and they see me in the mirror? . . . Now there's another cougher, centre.'
The speech was going on:
and her small girl's thoughts racing with it:
'If I only had the training. I swear, maybe I could do it . . . Oh, I do think I'm getting some of the horror into it now . . . Curious, I can say the lines, and really feel them--oh, but really--and still have other thoughts . . . Project--project--look up at the balcony--oh dear, that spot simply blinds me.
'I am so tired; I feel dizzy; I hope I'm not going to faint. That would be dreadful. Shall I fall on the bed now? No, I guess I can get through. I've got to . . . That woman coughing . . .'