Zed slammed on his disreputable hat and walked out of the hotel lobby, and she could not tell whether his pickle-ish aspect was from real dislike or a sour approbation of her remarkable virtue.
So she went in her habitual blue taffeta to the noise and milling and rum punch at the Rich Cousin's Château, but Zed's jeering had given her what actors call a 'mental hazard'--the blind spot in the mind whereby, for some reason obscure and absurd, you never can remember one certain word in a speech. Andy seemed desirous of bringing her out, of making his cousin understand that here was his pride and his darling, but Bethel flinched and turned silent, and the unquenchable Mahala--that longer-legged Iris--stepped in.
Apparently, with the success at Topeka and a good house to-night in Wichita and with this view of a new and richer cousin, Mahala again saw Andy as a most estimable young artist. She danced with him and wriggled at him . . . And the amiable Andy fell, and Bethel stood back in an indecisive rage at Andy's indecisiveness.
Before the party there had been the inevitable trunk-packing in her dressing-room that had always been her worst chore, except for dragging your own bags across the waiting-room and heaving them up to a train platform, in towns where there were too few redcaps and the train halted only three minutes. Now that she was Lady Capulet, she had twice as much to pack, and this back-breaking stooping, this fussy patting of frocks on hangers, this trying to force shut a trunk that was too full, was enough to soil the glory of acting.
She went so far as to yelp at Doc, in the next dressing-room, 'Oh, for one week when we could leave everything hung up in the dressing-room!' Appalled at her own sharp voice, she went to Doc's door and implored him, 'I'm sorry. I didn't think I'd ever be the kind of actress that kicks all the time.'
He laughed at her.
'My dear, if you never kicked, I'd know that you were just another amateur that only takes one tour, and finds everything just lovely--even railway-stations, beans and no water in the dressing-room--and raves so much about it that it makes the rest of us low, beefing, vulgar troupers sick, and then goes home and never tours again. Darned if I know which is the real mark of the professional--not to kick at the right things or always to kick at the wrong ones. You're a trouper now!'
It considerably increased Bethel's dislike of packing that Mahala now had her own maid.
This was a pretty young coloured girl whom they had acquired in St. Louis. Mahala, herself long a nightly kicker about the horrors of packing, could now sit in ecstasy, before the after-theatre party, and watch her dresser do the work. And into every conversation she could, and did, lug a reference to 'her dresser'.
And as she packed to-night, remembering Zed's admonition to be gaudier, Bethel noticed how all her small sacred possessions were becoming shabby. Her Lady Capulet gowns too, made over from Mahala's, were shabby. She realized that all the costumes of the company now shamelessly showed red stains at the neck from grease paint, and two or three of the men were becoming slack about make-up. Tony Murphy, who at the beginning had always been in his dressing-room three-quarters of an hour before curtain rise, now rushed in, smelling of beer, just at the fifteen-minute call, and sometimes he went on still wearing his street shoes.
All this frightened her about the fate of the tour even more than Andy's whisper that, for all the size and enthusiasm of the audiences in Topeka and Wichita, they hadn't quite met expenses.
Topeka and Wichita were metropolises, with 66,000 and 115,000 population. But Dalesburg, Kansas, in which they awoke on Wednesday morning, was not so mammoth. It had 27,000 population, and the theatre was a motion-picture house, with too large an auditorium, an almost total lack of acoustics, and an audience trained to believe that seventy-five cents should be the top for all theatre seats. Even Zed's passionate exposition, at the high school in the afternoon, of the superior emotional orgies of the living stage did not move Dalesburg.
Four hundred and twenty people huddled protectively together in the centre of an auditorium meant for thirteen hundred. They felt naked to the cold prairie winds, and were afraid to laugh or to give that sighing shiver which tells the actors that a love scene is 'going over'.
It is a fable that the 'fourth wall' of the stage is empty. There, massed, are the most influential part of the cast: the audience. On their acting, their timing, their professional training, depends the contributory vividness of the rest of the cast. And audiences differ, from night to night, at least as much as individual actors. An untrained audience is as uncomfortable a collaborator as an untrained surgeon or an untrained lover.
To-night's audience, at Dalesburg, was the clammiest the company had ever encountered, and it was not entirely the fault of Mr. Andrew Deacon & Associates if they played Romeo and Juliet like the last week of a lawsuit. It wasn't merely that they dropped lines; they didn't know whether they dropped them or not.
To-night, after the show, instead of his usual benedictory 'Another day, another dollar', Doc Keezer grunted, 'Well, got the chores done again, and the cattle are all safe for the night. Ain't this a hell of a way to earn a living!'
With exasperating innocence Andy went on supposing that it was a good notion to escort Bethel and Mahala to the train together. To-night, at Dalesburg, the three of them came out of the theatre into a world blind with snow, a half-gale that felt uneasy and threatening, like the gasping pause before a thunderstorm.
Dalesburg was almost taxiless. The citizens felt as suspicious about a stranger who wasn't driving his own private car as their cattle-herding grandfathers had about a stranger with no visible horse.
The three tired and unromantic workers, idle singers of an idle day in a town where idleness was discreditable, wavered through snow and blast, holding together, skidding across ice-scurfed street crossings. They saw the lights of the bleak station as heaven, and crawled silently into their berths on the Pullman.
The journey from Dalesburg to their next stand, Alhambra, was supposed to take two hours and a quarter--their Pullman to be picked up by the three-a.m. Westbound, to arrive at a quarter past five and lie in the yards till seven. But when Bethel shivered awake at eight in the morning and pulled up her window shade, she saw, through an unnatural grey night, that they were somewhere out in the country, in a confusion of cruelly charging snow. She dressed hastily . . . On tour, washing and powdering become rapid and none too delicate . . . Andy, invariably the first of the caravan to awaken and be disgustingly cheerful, was typing at a portable machine in his drawing-room.
'Yump. Full blizzard. We may be stuck here all day, and late for the show to-night,' he chanted. 'Sit down, darling. I've got some coffee coming.'
And all day long everybody drank coffee from the diner on the stranded train, and played cards, and tried to do charades, and talked about exactly three things: the blizzard, 1 per cent; Hitler and Stalin, 1 1/2 per cent; and the theatre, 97 1/2 per cent. They were gay, they sang, but all of them except such veteran troupers as Doc and Challis and Mabel felt apprehensively that they would starve here, or here, in nameless frozen farm lands, they would freeze to death. Every time they looked out of the windows the smother of snow seemed, beyond all mathematics, to be twice as thick. And though the train heating system, hitched to the great Western locomotive, did its best, outside it was five above zero, and the Pullman grew steadily colder, so that you beheld Juliet wearing her pink bathrobe over her furs, and Lord Capulet with a blanket around his shoulders.