She was a clove-sweet, slim little old lady, unexpectedly comic, a husband-ridden aristocrat who was afraid of the babbling old nurse who dominated the house, and awed, just a bit, by the splendour of her daughter.
Mahala was too weighty and too stately for Juliet, but she was not offensive. There was dignity in her role, and some skill. Never had the company been more heartily applauded than at the curtain calls, and Andy shouted, 'The miracle's happened! The closing notice will come down on Thursday, and the tour will go over!'
To Mahala, this probably meant no more than the fact that she was now nightly queen of Dressing Room 1--the star's dressing-room. It is doubtful if it ever occurred to her that any other star would ever have the impudence to come along and occupy it later. If she had been so profoundly imaginative as to think about it at all, she would have seen those few cubic feet of air known sacredly forever after, through all history, as 'Miss Mahala Vale's Dressing-room'. She really was wrong, though. Four days later a celebrated lady strip-teaser who had never heard of Mahala was treating the room as exclusively hers.
Monday morning, slightly sweating in the zero cold as they drove up to the great high-school building, stage-frightened as he had never been on the stage, Zed addressed a high school at assembly hour.
Bethel sat in the very back of the auditorium and adored him, and watched the teachers, in the row of seats beside her, being astonished by him. That strong face, not ironed out by spiritual massage like most Americans to-day, that face of a strong workman, became the glowing face of a poet, the profound face of a scholar, as he told them, with simple confession, that to him the theatre was both scrupulous priesthood and eager adventure.
And after the performance, Monday night, before they went to the Pullman which they had engaged for the whole week, it was Zed who gave them a party. A rather simple party: beer and tomato-and-bacon sandwiches, at Mike's Le Bon Louvre Lunchroom, but friendly.
Tony Murphy, the Trotsky of the party, arose with a toast:
'Andy, if we get many audiences as good as to-night, the tour will go on. And if it does, I want to get in under the line, and not have you think I'm turning decent just because I'm sure of the cakes. I'm afraid I've done a little crabbing. I swear I didn't mean to. I guess it's just a bad habit I've got. And now that the Boyle--of whom I may say that I fell for her like a ton of brick--has gone, and we're all a roughneck bunch of American troupers--including you, Hugh, who have practically lived down London and have gotten converted to liking ice water--I think we'll do something. But of course the big idea of this toast is that all of us now get up and tell Mahala and Bethel they did a perfectly magnificent job to-night, and they got a lot of swell poetry and a grand quick tempo into their performances, and we're proud of them as hell. Skoal!'
And so they were all very happy, even if Bethel did hear Mahala croak to Jeff Hoy, as they settled down on the train, 'Andy cheerful? He ought to be! He's saving a thousand bucks a week on the Boyle's salary, and if maybe I'm not as good as she is, I haven't played it for a quarter of a century!'
The tour had begun to drain Bethel's secure youthfulness, and, for almost the first time in her life, she could not sleep. She lay in her rocking berth, listening to the car wheels till the strain rose to an intolerable wakefulness. She tried to read herself to sleep, but she read herself awake. She turned off the bed-head light in this tiny, low-ceiled rolling home of hers, raised the curtain and watched the specks of light streak by.
Who were they out there, awake in isolated farmhouses so late, cold wind in cottonwood groves and the cold timbers crackling? . . . She saw herself as the young farmwife, with her first baby coming, lying in a spool bed--what memory was that?--with the doctor watching. But he was not the doctor of the chromos, whiskered and weighty; he was young and fiery, as rough and scolding as Zed.
But the young husband who stood back in the shadows had the solicitous kindness of Andy Deacon.
And Bethel was asleep, while the lone lights hurried by.
She had been alive and competent as Lady Capulet; no amateurishness and no languishing. She had merited the good hand at the curtain call. But she never would know that the 'spontaneous applause' on her first exit had been about as spontaneous as a department-store Santa Claus.
Doc Keezer, as he had done a hundred times on half a hundred tours, had been kneeling way down left, just behind the tormentor, and at her exit had given one mighty smack of his hands. That had started the clapping of the innocent audience for the innocent Bethel, and everybody had been very happy about it, including Doc.
The Andy who vowed to Bethel that he had become so economical that he was washing his own socks in his hotel bathroom had had the Topeka morning-paper review telegraphed ahead, and it greeted them at their hotel in Wichita:
One of the most significant theatrical events with which Topeka has been favoured in years, equal to seeing Our Helen in Victoria Regina, was the performance last evening of the 'Romeo and Juliet in Modern Dress' company, starring Andrew Deacon and Mahala Vale. Their performance, brought up to date, made the famous old love story seem as real as the boy and girl next door. We understand that Miss Vale, who turned out a first-rate performance full of beauty and wearing clothes that made the hearts of all feminine auditors go pit-a-pat, and Miss Bethel Merriday, who turned Mrs. Capulet from the ordinary stuffed shirt of hackneyed theatrical tradition into a darling, fussy old lady, are new to their roles. We wish them every success, and predict for them a great future. Who can be pessimistic about the Theatre of To-morrow when he sees lovely young ladies like these give such skill and devotion?
'Swell! This tour's just begun!' said Andy.
'Maybe it was my being scared and not my skill at playing fussiness,' said Bethel.
'What a lousy review! My first chance at Juliet, and all that reporter could find to talk about was my clothes--and they just some rags we picked up in St. Louis,' said Mahala.
Andy had another rich cousin in Wichita--Andy had other rich cousins almost everywhere, but the Wichita example was a particularly luscious widow, with a Renaissance house containing the interior of a beech-panelled room from a dismantled château in Touraine. She invited the cast, entire, for an after-theatre rout.
Zed descended on Bethel. 'Going to the party?'
'Oh, I don't know; I haven't anything to wear.'
Zed took a fifty-cent piece out of his left-hand lower vest pocket and put it in the right.
'Eh?'
'I just bet myself on what you'd say. You know, pet, you're just the opposite to Iris. You need bringing out. You need to be pushed into grabbing your own kingdom. You'll probably become a competent actress, and then a theatrical miser, like Doc or Mabel; you'll save everything, including your ability, and so land up in a two-room cottage and spend your declining years reading your Iowa clippings. You could be beautiful, in a timid sort of way, but you let yourself look like the housemaid. Come on, I'm going to take you out now, before I make my high-school speech, and make you buy a swell party dress. There's a good department store here.'
'No, no, no!' wailed Bethel. 'I've paid all my debts, and now I want something to make me secure while I find my next job.'
'I'll buy you one.'
'You will not!'
'Why not?'
'I don't like you well enough.'
'"A whining mammet, in her fortune's tender, to answer"--"I'll not let you be my friend, and blow me to a single decent dress." Okay. Hell with you!'