'Why, even Miss Bickling--Professor Bickling, who teaches Drama, Poetry, and the Novel and that coaches the plays--of course I mean she's deadly serious about art and culture and she's so fat and respectable and eyeglassy, but she got to laughing as hard as anybody, and it was terribly hard to go on with the rehearsal, but then it was such fun and after all, wasn't that the real reason for doing the play--to have fun, the last few weeks of those long four years of college?
'In fact the only person that beefed about it was Bethel Merriday; she was playing Nora, so probably she felt like a star or a prima donna or something. Beth is a sweet girl, even if she does get so daydreamy, and she's not a grind, and she certainly does share her candy and introduce her dates around. But for some reason or other, she takes plays so doggone seriously. And she turned on Gale and she had a regular fit of temperament and she screamed, "Will you take off that fool moustache and quit trying to play Room Service? You haven't got the slightest idea yet whether, as the husband, you're supposed to be a stupid, decent book-keeper, or a sadistic stuffed shirt, or what, and here dress rehearsal is only a week away!"
'Well! You did have to admire Bethel, mostly so quiet, like a sparrow, standing up to that big Gale Amory, but still--
'Poor Miss Bickling looked so uncomfortable. Of course she was supposed to be coaching the play, but all she ever said to any of the actors was, "I don't know--maybe if it feels awkward to stand there so long, you better move around a little, and make some gestures--that's it: try to think up some gestures that will look interesting", or "Maybe you better speak a little louder". So when Bethel butted in like this, Miss Bickling was embarrassed as the dickens. She was kind of fond of Bethel, because she always read poetry aloud so lovely, but of course she couldn't stand a tantrum like this, and she said, "Bethel, dear, I know you're very interested in drama, but after all, this is college, and we want to act like ladies and not like paid actresses, don't we!"
'"No, I don't," Bethel said.
'Imagine!'
It was seven years--or seven excited moments--since Bethel had talked to the Caryl McDermids. The time was May 19th, 1938; twelve days before she would become twenty-two, three and a half weeks before she would graduate from Point Royal College for Women, in Connecticut. To-night she would be starring in A Doll's House, but this afternoon, at the panicky, hastily called extra rehearsal, it did not look as though there would be any senior-class play whatever.
The dress rehearsal, last night, had lasted till two a.m., and it had been scandalous. Miss Gale Amory, as Torvald Helmer, did not know her part, and whenever the prompt girl--a terrified and outlawed freshman, crouched on a chair, almost hanging her head inside the window in the right wall--was able to find her place in the script and to throw the line to Miss Amory in an edgy whisper, Miss Amory screamed, 'Please! I can't hear you'. Nils Krogstad did know her, or his, part, but she wasn't sure whether she was a comic villain who ought to close one eye and tap her nose, or a Russian victim of fate who talked deep down and inaudibly. She tried it both ways.
The amateur stagehands had dropped one of the flats for the rear wall and torn a gash, and not till the dress rehearsal had anyone discovered that the music of the third-act tarantella, conveyed by an aged phonograph, could not be heard in the second row.
Bethel was better than that. She did know her part, and she could be heard, and she had some notion that Nora was an amiable little housewife who had never been trained by responsibility. Whether she shouted too loud and wrung her hands too much is a matter of opinion, but just now the appalled Professor Miss Bickling looked on Bethel as a combination of Nazimova and Max Reinhardt, and it may be that our Bethel, just for the day, felt that way herself.
This afternoon, five hours before the performance, they were, with glue and frenzy, repairing the irreparable. Six people were cuing Miss Amory all at once. Miss Bickling was urging Krogstad to take it easy, and Bethel was begging Krogstad to take it hard.
The rest of the time, Bethel was standing absent-eyed in corners, muttering 'Noyesterdayitwasparticularlynoticeableyouseepausehesuffersfromadreadfulillness'. The college engineer--a male, and no artist--was patching the ripped canvas of the flat, and one of the girl musicians was practising a Spanish dance on a hastily imported piano, so placed behind scenes that no one could reach the dressing-rooms without banging her legs on the keyboard. The pianist, though she would not be seen by the audience at all, already had such stage fright that her music sounded like terrified teeth.
In the midst of this merriment Miss Bickling received a message, beamed, and called Bethel aside, with 'What are your plans for the summer, Beth?'
'I guess I'll just stay home.'
'But you still want to try and go on the stage, in the fall?'
'Yes. Anyway, I'll tackle all the managers on Broadway. They might give me a chance as walk-on.'
'What's a walk-on?'
'It's where you walk--on.'
'I see. Well, of course I think being a librarian or getting married or going to Switzerland is more educated than being an actress, but still--You'd like to act in one of the summer theatres, wouldn't you?'
'Oh yes, but I wouldn't have a chance.'
'You know, I tell all my girls that I look after their careers just as much as I do their conjunctions, and I've used all my "pull", as you girls call it, and to-night, right in the audience, will be two ve-ry celebrated proprietors of summer theatres in southern Connecticut--Mr. Roscoe Valentine and Mr. Jerome Jordan O'Toole.'
'Oh dear!' said Bethel.
At dinner in Bemis Hall, before the play, it was dismaying to Bethel that none of the girls were nervous and taut like herself; six hundred hearty young women, gulping chicken hash, clattering their forks, yawning, shrieking about biology and the boys, and making up their lips; carefree and pink and scornful. How could she make them believe in Nora to-night?
She ate her pudding (cornstarch pudding with canned raspberries) as slowly as possible, to put off the terrifying hour of going to Assembly Hall, their temporary theatre. She tried to smile cordially while the girl beside her related with vulgar cheerfulness her experiences with a canoe, a portable radio and a C.C.N.Y. man. They were precisely such experiences as the girl's mother had had with a canoe, a banjo and a Princeton man, and to Bethel they seemed antiquated compared with the woes of the Nora who had first slammed her door sixty years ago.
She wanted to escape from these chatterers, but as she slipped out of Bemis Hall, a LaSalle drove up, and in it were her father and mother and brother and Charley Hatch.
'We thought we'd drive down and surprise you and see you act!' cried each of the four, in turn--so smiling, so sweet, so devastating.
'Oh, that's dandy! I'll see you right after the show. Come backstage!' she chirruped, while she was quaking that it was going to be bad enough to forget her lines and make herself ridiculous before the jeering students and two summer-theatre managers, without giving herself away to her trusting family.
She cried for a good two minutes in her dressing-room, which until one hour ago had been the consultation room of the Professor of Pedagogy and Vocational Psychology; she rolled her head on her dressing-table, which had been the professor's desk, covered with graphs about the relationship of coffee drinking at lunch to the three-p.m. sale of (a) automobile tyres, (b) Dopey Dolls, (c) advertising-column-inches in trade journals. She did not belong with graphs or anything else that was new and brisk and important in A.D. 1938.