She was pale enough always; now she felt herself funereal; and as she shakily started to make up, she plastered her cheeks with a vermilion base and felt better and braver about it. She knew nothing about make-up, but then, neither did the college theatrical dictator, Miss Bickling, who would have felt it rather low to let Ophelia associate with blue lining salve. The one thing Bethel was convinced of was that you always use heavy grease paint and always extend your eyebrows with burnt cork (which you don't). She was proud of slapping her face with powder and getting the powder all over a huge apron she had borrowed from the Bemis Hall kitchen.
While she made up, she stared now and then, like a solemn child, at the portrait of Professor Maria Martin Mitz being vocationally psychological in cap and gown.
When Bethel was done, she looked like an extravagantly painted doll, with very red cheeks, very long black brows, and a very white little nose absurd in the middle of the sunset. Later to-night, on the stage, the effect would not be improved by lighting that was a ferocious illumination by spots, with no gelatins to soften the glare. But nobody minded. The college dramatic enthusiasts--if they were going to have make-up, they wanted it made up, and no nonsense.
To Bethel and the other members of the cast, Professor Miss Bickling was of the greatest help. She came in every two minutes and patted their shoulders and cooed, 'I know you're going to be just wonderful, dear, and be sure now and don't forget your lines'. This was a mild form of what was known in Point Royal College as a 'pep talk', and it had, on writhing amateur actresses, the effect of so irritating them that they were sure now and did forget their lines.
Despite this balk, Bethel was much clearer than at dress rehearsal as to how she saw Nora's shrill little character. She had asked Miss Bickling about it all, and the benevolent professor, who kept culture as she would have kept a tearoom, had purred, 'You mean you want to break down the character? Oh, leave all that psychological fussing to the left-wing theatre. It hasn't anything to do with Art. Just be careful to say the lines as the author wrote them--only, you must say them beautifully, of course--lines like "Never to see the children again--oh, that black icy water"--and then you can't go wrong.'
But, in rebellion, Bethel had tried to think out by herself what Nora really was; what she herself was, as Nora; and having heard the whole cast and Miss Bickling agree that Nora was a very nice young married woman who suffered from an unimaginative husband, Bethel was agitated to find that she considered Nora a fool, in expecting a banker husband to regard forgery as just a little joke between friends, and none too kindhearted a fool, in boasting of her domestic security to the desolate Christina.
If this was true, fretted Bethel, wouldn't it be much more explosive if, in the last act, Nora were more aware of her own childishness than of her husband's stuffiness?
'I'll do her that way!' exulted Bethel. 'It'll be tremendous.'
But she had the grace to jeer, 'Of course there is the little matter of your being such an amateur that the audience won't know whether you see Nora as a gun-moll or an abbess!'
The cast took turns, feeling ever so professional, in peeping out through a hole in the curtain at the audience, which was brutally cheerful in not having to remember lines: cynical fellow-students in bright sweaters, officially cheerful professors, timid parents. Bethel could not find her own family, and felt abandoned, and she could not make out any two men who might be the fate-laden summer-theatre directors, Messrs. Valentine and O'Toole . . . Oh, what of it, what of it, what of it! They'd laugh at her feeble Nora anyway, and she'd have to go home . . . maybe marry Charley Hatch . . . no, she wouldn't . . . oh, why not?
She stood outside the double-door entrance, ready to go on at the beginning of the play. She was a small, resigned figure in a bobtailed Victorian jacket, a small bustle, a skinny fur and a prim little hat. For a moment, in panic, certain to be jeered by the audience out there, the fiendish demanding Audience, the AUDIENCE, she had been certain that she couldn't remember a single line. Now she was too numb to care. If the curtain would just go up, so she could get it over! Did the student orchestra have to go on showing off all evening? She hated the sour and trailing air of 'Weis' du wie gut'. She concentrated on the wheat-coloured canvas and the flimsy crossbar of the backstage side of the double doors. She wondered in what previous play they had been used; what the stencilled DL7 on the canvas meant.
Then she was jarred almost into screaming by Miss Bickling's loving and altogether devastating pat on her shoulder. Then silence from in front--no music, no rustle of audience. Something gone wrong? Then the stage manager's confident voice, 'Curtain's going up, Beth', and instantly, propelled by a power not her own, Bethel-Nora was scampering on the stage and saying cheerfully, her voice as steady as her hands were jittery, 'Hide the Christmas tree carefully, Ellen'.
She was Nora; she was an actress; she was born.
V
Bethel played the first two acts in a still and competent fury. Gale Amory, her stage husband, was the creator of the fury, and the cause was not Gale's incompetence, but her extreme competence in faking.
Perceiving that she would never be able to remember her lines, the bonny Gale decided to treat it as a joke and to share the joke with the audience. So whenever she stopped to listen to the prompter, she smiled at her friends down there like a tooth-brush advertisement--if Gale wasn't strong in intellect, she was extraordinary in whiteness of teeth--and her pals wriggled with affectionate entertainment and muttered that this was the first time that Ibsen had ever been amusing.
For the first time, when Gale burlesqued her line 'My little bird must never do that again' and got almost as good a laugh as if she had kicked a baby or fallen on her nose, Bethel had enough wholesome ham in her to be tempted to join in the fun, but she angrily rejected it, and fought through, making herself as much the kindly, half-baked, tortured Nora as she could. She was too busy keeping up pace to notice whether she herself was good or not, while she was on the stage, but in her dressing-room between acts she had time to decide that she hadn't been too bad.
She had felt authority. But not till her great last scene of breaking with her husband did she feel inspired.
Then (she believed) a great new spirit filled her, and she was Nora, she was all Noras, all women who are bewildered by the brutal and incomprehensible whims of stranger-husbands. As though she were hammering nails she pounded at Torvald--at the Gale Amory now a little embarrassed and much less sportive--'I believe that before all else I am a human being, just as much as you are--or at least that I should try to become one.' She raised her voice, raised her arms; a priestess before the altar; the priestess of the new cult of the awakening women. 'Henceforth I can't be satisfied with what most people say, and what is in books. I must think things out for myself, and try to get clear about them.'
The applause came crashing; and at the end, when she slammed the door, she felt that she was not closing a door but opening one on life . . . first nights on Broadway, velvet-hung first nights in London, famous authors with scripts, and a terrace in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, where she would sit being gaily learned with Lunt and Fontanne and Noel Coward and Helen Hayes and Katharine Cornell and Orson Welles.
She scampered to her dressing-room--a complete success, after eight curtain calls.
It was the first dressing-room reception she had ever held. It was a whirlpool of beaming eyes, handshakes, voices saying that she was 'wonderful', that she 'had a great future if she should ever care to accept a position on the stage', that 'she had been much the best thing in the play--much!' She wasn't deflated even by the fact that from next door, from Gale Amory's dressing-room--which tomorrow would again be the Domestic Science and Dietetics Seminar--she could hear 'You were much the best thing in the play, Gale--you were wonderful--you were so human!'