Title: Bethel Merriday (1940)
Author: Sinclair Lewis
* A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook *
eBook No.: 0604031.txt
Language:  English
Date first posted: July 2006
Date most recently updated: July 2006

This eBook was produced by: Don Lainson dlainson@sympatico.ca

Project Gutenberg of Australia eBooks are created from printed editions
which are in the public domain in Australia, unless a copyright notice
is included. We do NOT keep any eBooks in compliance with a particular
paper edition.

Copyright laws are changing all over the world. Be sure to check the
copyright laws for your country before downloading or redistributing this
file.

This eBook is made available at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg of Australia License which may be viewed online at
http://gutenberg.net.au/licence.html

To contact Project Gutenberg of Australia go to http://gutenberg.net.au

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Title: Bethel Merriday (1940)
Author: Sinclair Lewis



'Until the nineteenth century, actors were classed as Rogues &
Vagrants.  They were outside of respectable society--like Kings--
and I am not sure but that this was better for their art and their
happiness than to be classed as lecturers, tax-payers, tennis-
players, suburban householders, and lovers of dogs.'

ARTHUR KULOSAS





NOTICE

No character in this novel is the portrait of an actual person, and
if there is any resemblance to the name of a real person, it is
accidental.

Such notices as this have become increasingly familiar because of
an increasing habit among readers of finding themselves portrayed
in every novel, and of being annoyed or unduly pleased.  It is
particularly necessary in this book because in recent years I have
been acquainted with six summer theatres and with a touring play.
I declare vigorously that the Nutmeg Players of Point Grampion, in
my tale, are not drawn from the Stockbridge, Cohasset, Ogunquit,
Provincetown, Clinton, or Skowhegan companies, and that the tour of
a Romeo and Juliet company, here chronicled, is not the history of
my Angela Is Twenty-Two.  And Sladesbury is not Hartford, but the
county seat of Cloud-Cuckoo-Land.

I hope that this signboard may have some effect.  After the
appearance of Arrowsmith I was informed that at least half my
medical characters had been drawn from professors of whom I had
never heard.  With It Can't Happen Here, adherents of two editors,
one in Vermont and one in Connecticut, gave rather convincing proof
that each of these gentlemen was the model for Doremus Jessup.  But
the happy days were with Elmer Gantry when, on the same Sunday
morning, in the same Western city, each of two clergymen announced
from his pulpit that the Reverend Elmer had been drawn solely from
him, but that the portrait was crooked.

I shall not explain to self-elected prototypes of my Bethel
Merriday or Roscoe Valentine just how I probed their own lives; and
if it shall prove that there really are persons so unfortunate as
to be named Zed Wintergeist or Mrs. Lumley Boyle or Mrs. J. Goddard
Deacon or Jerome Jordan O'Toole or Tudor Blackwall, I shall merely
point out that there is a tradition that fiction characters have to
be called SOMETHING.

Of course writers might call them X76 -- 4 or Pi R Square.

But if we did, all the persons with automobile licences numbered
X76 -- 4 and all the coolies named Pi Lung Squong would write to
us, which heaven forbid.

SINCLAIR LEWIS





BETHEL MERRIDAY




I


That was the first time that anyone ever called her an actress--
June 1st, 1922, Bethel's sixth birthday.  There was no spotlight,
no incidental music, and her only audience were her mother and a
small dog looking regretfully through the window of a boarding-
house.  But she was sensational.

Her mother and she were on their way to the A. & P. Store, and as
usual Bethel had with the greatest violence been running in
circles.  She was slight and small and entirely feminine, but she
was the best runner in her neighbourhood.

She stopped, then moved with a queer slow hitching.  In front of
them an old lady was scraping along, sunk forward from her
shoulders as though she had given up all hope of ease and love.
Her whole life seemed to be in her painfully sliding feet.  Bethel
tried to recreate that dejected walk, and she went at it so
earnestly that the back of her neck ached with the weight of
sagging shoulders, and every step was a frightened effort.

Her mother interrupted.

'Good gracious, don't copy folks that way, Bethel.  You'll hurt
their feelings.'

The small, black-eyed child halted, in protest.

'Oh!  I'm not copying her.  I'm trying to be her.  I can be a lot
of different people.'

'My, aren't we grown-up!  I'm afraid that you like to show off,
dear--the way you always say your text so loud in Sunday school.'

'I love to say texts!  "I will praise thee, O Lord, with my whole
heart.  I will show forth all thy marvellous works".'

'It all sounds like maybe you're going to be an actress.  I guess
that wouldn't be a bad text for an actress.'

'Look how the poor old lady's heels are run down,' said Bethel, too
busy with her career for prophecies of glory.

Bethel was born in 1916, on the day after the Battle of Jutland.
Her father, kneeling by the bed, had prayed, 'Dear Lord, please
make this baby a child of peace and justice--yes, and happiness,
Lord'.

Five months after the six-year-old Bethel gave her imitation of the
old lady, the Black Shirts marched bravely into the maws of the
movie cameras in Rome; and five months after that, Hitler bounded
out of a Munich beer garden.  But perhaps it was as important that
at this time John Barrymore was playing Hamlet and Pauline Lord
Anna Christie and the Theatre Guild producing Back to Methuselah.
They were so much less stagy.


Herbert Merriday, Bethel's father, was a dealer in furniture, to
which, later, he was importantly to add electric refrigerators and
radios.  They lived in Sladesbury, a city of 127,000, in central
Connecticut, a fount of brassware, hardware, arms, precision
instruments, clocks.  Here is the renowned establishment of
Lilydale & Duck, makers of machine-guns for killing policemen and
revolvers for killing gangsters and the Duck Typewriter for
joyfully chronicling both brands of killing.

Sladesbury is Yankee, not Colonial, and it envies and scorns the
leisurely grace of Litchfield and Sharon.  It proclaims itself
constantly as 'modern', and is beginning to boast of being
'streamlined'.

Even for Sladesbury, the Merriday family stood high in modernity.
They had been the first family to have a radio installed in their
car, and Mrs. Merriday, though she was a solid Universalist, was so
advanced as to belong to the Birth-Control League.

In May of 1931 Bethel was almost fifteen, and finishing sophomore
year in high school.  It was suitable to the neighbourhood
modernity that her brother Benny, now twenty-one, should be working
in the Dutton Aeroplane Works, and talking about designs for
transatlantic clippers, talking about (though never actually
reading) the Bible by Karl Marx, and that the girls she knew should
be talking about careers.  They wanted homes and babies as much as
their mothers had, but none of them expected to be entirely
supported by husbands.  Most of them were, they asserted, going to
be aeroplane hostesses, motion-picture stars or radio artists,
though certain of the less studious sort confessed that they would
not mind being 'hostesses' in the large dance halls.

Bethel could not look upon serving cold consommé at an altitude of
a mile, or dancing the rumba, as having much meaning.  She was
learning touch typewriting in high school--that was her father's
one insistence about her studies--and she could become a secretary,
busy and important, receiving the boss's magnificent callers.  But
privately, ever since her sixth birthday, she had yearned to be an
actress.

As she had never seen a play with professional actors, she was
shaky as to just what being an actress implied, and certainly she
never admitted to her companions so eccentric an ambition.  She was
one of a whole generation of youngsters under twenty who considered
the London of Shakespeare and the Paris of Molière as barbaric and
rather comic, who were familiar with radio broadcasts from Madrid
and aeroplanes just landed from Alaska and two-million-dollar film
dramas and the theory of the atom, but half of whom had never seen
a real play or entered an art gallery or heard an orchestra play
anything but dance music.

Bethel herself had seen only a high-school farce, in which a
football player in a red wig kept kicking a fat boy; a Republican
party pageant in Brewster Park, with Lawyer Wilkie as Lincoln,
heavily accented as to shawl and beard; and the melodramas about
gun-molls and sunken submarines which Alva Prindle and Bethel
herself performed on the workbench in the Prindle garage.  So
altogether futile and babyish seemed the intention of acting that
probably she would not have confessed it to her friends Alva
Prindle and Charley Hatch on that evening in May 1931, had the
newspapers not been hinting that, for the first time in ten years,
Sladesbury was to have a professional stock company all summer
long.

And it was one of her queer, secret, sensitized days when she saw
everything with intolerable acuteness.

When she awoke, that Saturday in May, the morning was bewitched
with fog.

She had, proudly, a room of her own, with a candlewick cover on a
spool bed of 1860.  Benny, the worshipper of new machinery, laughed
at the bed as old-fashioned, but she prized it as somehow connected
with Pilgrims who shot wild turkeys with blunderbusses on
Thanksgiving Day, and came home to drink hot toddies in the company
of grey ladies in poke bonnets.

She also had a shaky white-painted desk of her own, with a
bookshelf on which were a complete Shakespeare, an Edgar Wallace
novel, a Mary Roberts Rinehart novel, a ragged volume of Keats, a
manual of tennis, and No. 1567 in the Haldeman-Julius Little Blue
Books, namely, Making Men Happy with Jams and Jellies.  The
wallpaper was canary yellow, with small scarlet birds; the rug was
blue.  She loved her secure retreat and its friendly brightness.

But this morning of mist was forlorn to her as she crawled out, in
her blue-and-white-striped pyjamas, her bobbed hair, which was very
black, flickering above her charming shoulders, which were very
white.  She was afraid, or pretended that she was afraid, to look
out of the window--and then looked.  The Hatch house, next door,
had alarmingly vanished in the fog.  The elms were hard pillars,
their foliage unseen; the silver birch was chilly as winter.

On such a day, even at her mature age of fourteen years and eleven
months, she could again convince herself that she was the foundling
child of wicked gipsies.

She knew that all this was quite insane.  But there was a good,
efficient, earthy Bethel who always guarded the mad Bethel, and who
now insisted that being a gipsy was no crazier than her father's
love for assaulting golf balls, or her mother's stated belief that
anyone born in New Hampshire was handsomer and healthier than any
Vermonter.

As Bethel wriggled and rubbed herself under the shower bath--oh
yes, the Merridays were as modern as all that--and drew on her
bloomers, her rolled stockings, her flowery cotton dress, she was
prim and a little stern, that she might not betray her Crazy Ideas.

Things were not right, downstairs.

The house was only ten years old, and the living-room was still of
suitable modernness, with interior decorations correct by the
highest standards of the women's magazines: a large, frameless
mirror over the white fireplace, reflecting two marble vases; a
glass-topped nickelled coffee table in front of the convertible
davenport; on the wall, a travel souvenir in the way of a 'Ye Motor
Mappe of Ye Quaint Olde Cape Codde', depicting whales and Pilgrims;
an enormous combination radio and phonograph, shining like syrup;
and no books whatever.  But to the revolutionary Bethel, this
morning, the room was as oppressive as too hot a bath.

She apologized to herself that her father and her mother and her
house were really very nice.  But a little smug . . .?

Then she first really discovered ash trays; then she found that ash
trays can be fascinating but horrible.  On the coffee table was a
still unemptied tray; a half-sphere of rock crystal, which should
have been spotless, shining as a handful of upper air, but was
smeared now with black ash stains and filled with dead paper
matches and cigarette stubs like the twisted dead white arms of
babies.  The whole thing, she shuddered, was a shell pit, only
smaller.

But she seized herself and pushed herself on into the dining-room,
with a reproving, 'You're IMAGINING things!'

'Good morning, Beth.  That's doing pretty well.  Only ten minutes
late.  You look as if you slept pretty well,' said her father.

'Foggy enough for you to-day?' said Gwendolyn, the hired girl.

'Hya, Toots.  Hya, handsome,' said her brother.

'Good morning, dear.  You look cheerful, this morning,' said her
mother.

(She didn't feel cheerful, and she was hanged if she'd BE cheerful,
not all day long, she reflected.  But if they thought she looked
so, she must be doing some good acting.)

She studied her corn flakes, and found that corn flakes are as
fastastically [sic] improbable as ash trays, once your eyes were
open.  They certainly didn't look like food.  Food was lamb chops
and chop suey and corn on the cob and apple pie à la mode; these
things were twists of brown paper, with minute bubbles on their
speckled surfaces.  What a thing to eat!

She did eat them, and enjoyed them very much, but now she was at
the fascinated vexation of studying just how they all ate.  Her
father sturdily opened his lips up and down like a pair of trap
doors, showing his teeth.  Her mother nibbled like a rabbit, her
faded pink lips (she would not use her lipstick till she went to
the bridge club this afternoon) trembled a little and hid her
teeth.  And Brother Ben twisted his mouth sidewise, with the right
corner of it scornfully elevated.

She tried to imitate them all.

'What are you daydreaming about, dear?' said her father.

'Eat your nice hot muffins, Beth,' said her mother.

'I hope you'll know me the next time you see me,' said her brother.

'What makes it foggy to-day?' said Bethel.

'The fog,' said Ben.


For two hours, that schoolless Saturday morning, she worked in her
father's store, polishing tables and radio cabinets.  Her hands
were swift, and she liked seeing the sleek grain of the wood emerge
from dullness.  But as this was, she luxuriously sighed, one of her
poetic days, she would spend all afternoon in Brewster Park.  It
had a grove of thick Japanese walnuts with a tiny stream, and
there, on a small pad of the best linen correspondence paper, she
would write a poem about the Grecian city hall . . .  She was much
given to writing poetry, except that she never had been able to
write more than a dozen lines of it.

But into the store bounced her friend Alva Prindle, to demand that
she come to the North Side Tennis Club that afternoon.

Alva Prindle was a big, beautiful, bouncing blonde.  She was born
that way; she was spiritually like that; she would have been a big,
beautiful, bouncing blonde even if she had been as dark and
delicately made as Bethel.  It was Alva whom the high-school girls
had nominated as a future Queen of Hollywood.

Bethel did play tennis that afternoon, and she played well enough,
and she hated it.  She felt that there must be something
complicated and wrong in herself, for while just that morning she
had been able to see herself as Lady Macbeth, satisfyingly
murderous and flamboyant before an audience of two thousand, this
afternoon, showing off her rapid, accurate, nervous little serve
before an audience of not more than a dozen musical young gentlemen
aged sixteen, she was terrified; she was embarrassed every time
Alva answered the gallery's 'Good work, beautiful', with a merry:
'Go climb a tree'.  (Alva varied it by retorting, 'Go lay an egg'
or 'Go jump in the lake'.)

The North Side Tennis Club was founded by the medium-successful
retail merchants, the minor doctors and lawyers and insurance
agents and real-estate sellers of Sladesbury, to give their
children something of the social glory of the private en-tout-cas
courts of the bank vice-presidents and the factory owners.  Its
club house was a one-room shack with a counter at which were sold
Coca-Cola, orangeade, cigarettes, chewing-gum and stale sweet
crackers, but this counter was to Bethel what Twenty-One and El
Morocco and the Stork Club and the like New York exhibits of
elegance and celebrity were some day to seem.

Alva dragged her in there after the match.  The young men lounged
on high stools, drinking soda from bottles through straws, and
singing 'She Didn't Say Yes, She Didn't Say No'.

The sanctities of Prohibition had more than two years to run, and
the young people still considered it a social duty to drink raw
gin.  The oldest of their group--Morris Bass, the handsome, the
fast-driving, the generous, the loudly lecherous, eighteen and the
sole scion of a catsup factory--was urging on them cheer from a gin
bottle with a counterfeited Gordon label.  Alva had a shot of it in
her root beer and began to giggle.

Not till now had anyone like Morris Bass ever given heed to Bethel,
but this afternoon (she was flattered, so baronial was he in his
pink-and-apricot sweater, his white-linen plus fours, his oiled
chestnut hair) he dragged her by the arm to a bench outside the
club shack, poured half a glass of gin into her sarsaparilla, and
with heavily breathing satisfaction pushed his heavy arm about her
waist . . .  In her life, she had tasted gin perhaps twice;
certainly no gallant had embraced her publicly.  The Modern
Merridays did not hold with drunkenness and public slobbering.

'Please!' she begged.

'What's a matter?  Don't you like hootch?'

'Oh, yes, I think I do, but I've been playing tennis so hard--'

'Go on!  Bottoms up!'

A stir of pride and rebellion ran through her profound shyness.
She set the drink on the ground and drew his arm from about her.

'Little Puritan, eh?  Haw, haw, haw!'

'No!  I'm not!  Of course I'm not!'

It must be admitted that to Bethel, like most children in most
Sladesburys in the 1930's, it was worse to be prudish than to be
loose.  She was sorry that she didn't like to have Morris's thick
red hand pawing her white linen blouse.

'No!  Of course I'm not a Puritan!'

'Then what's a matter?  First time I ever got a good eyeful of you,
this afternoon.  You played pretty good tennis.  And you got nice
legs.  I guess you won't ever get thick ankles, and that's a girl's
best point, believe you me.  So what's eating you?  Not afraid of a
little necking, are you?'

He kissed her, greasily.

She was up and away from him, all in one compact movement.  'I just
don't like uncooked beefsteak!'

She ran like a leopard.

As she reached home, her only conclusion was that 'necking' in
itself seemed interesting but that, unfortunately, something in her
would always make her sick of the Morris Basses and all persons who
drank out of bottles and exploded in laughter.  Were actors ever
like Morris? she wondered.  Would it keep her from being an
actress?

'There won't be any people like that in MY theatre, when I'm
running a show!' she snapped; and it is curious, not to be
explained, that she should have said that, because never in her
life had she heard of an actor-manager, of an actress-producer.

She knew nothing beyond the names of Sarah Bernhardt and Duse and
Mrs. Fiske and Ethel Barrymore; nothing of the young Helen Hayes,
except as a movie actress, nor of the young Katharine Cornell, who
just then was appearing in The Barretts of Wimpole Street.  Like a
child born to be a painter, she got her ideas from the wind, the
earth; and this moment she, who couldn't possibly have known about
anything of the kind, saw herself in a star's dressing-room,
halting her making-up to look at a bill for new props, and then,
ever so gently and sympathetically, giving a drunken leading man
his two weeks' notice.

After such eminence, it was with a good deal of quiet dignity that
she went into the kitchen to help Gwendolyn, the youthful cook,
wash the vegetables for dinner.  (For fifteen years now the Modern
Merridays had had evening dinner at seven instead of evening supper
at six.)

'Have a nice time playing tennis?' bubbled Gwendolyn, who was the
lady-love of a prominent bus driver.

'Oh--yes--pretty nice . . .'

(Silver lace and a tiara--the queen enthroned, centre-stage.  Dirt-
crusted bars and the hateful teeth of grinning guards--the queen
waiting for the guillotine.)

'Still foggy near the river, Beth?'

'I don't--no, I don't guess it was quite so foggy.'

(A young farmwife who has hidden her murderer-husband in the attic,
and who faces expressionless the searching sheriffs.)

'What're you so quiet about?  Guess you must be in love.'

'I am not!'  And Bethel shuddered.  Love did not, to her, seem a
mystery to be funny about.

With dignity and a degree of hunger for all the whipped cream of
culture, she paraded royally into the living-room and put an aria
from Carmen on the phonograph.  She did not hear it through.  She
was so suddenly and bewilderingly sleepy that she dashed up to her
little room and till dinnertime slept like a kitten.

The star is sleeping, as only stars can sleep.

With the blonde goddess, Alva Prindle, and Charley Hatch, the
sturdy, soothing, rather stupid boy next door who was Bethel's
trustiest friend, she went to the Connecticut Palace Motion Picture
Theatre that evening, and breathlessly viewed The Heart of an
Understudy.

There was, it seems, a woman star, beautiful but wicked, and
jealously devoted to ruining the fine young leading man by scandal-
hinting and cruel looks instead of by the simpler and much more
effective weapon of upstaging him.  This lady fiend had an
understudy, a poor foundling girl, who had learned her histrionic
craft in a Seventh Day Adventist Home for Orphans.  The understudy
hadn't a friend in the company except the kind young leading man,
who carried her bags on overnight jumps.

So the wicked star also persecuted the understudy, till the
glorious night when the star fell ill (with a particularly sudden
onset of author's disease) and the understudy went on, and played
so radiantly, so competently, that the critics and a lot of
reporters--who just happened to be in the theatre on that ninety-
third night of the New York run--wrote reports which were given two-
column heads in all the dailies:  'Miss Dolly Daintree Greatest
Theatrical Find of Years: Unknown Girl Thrills Thousands at the
Pantaloon Theatre.'

The star seemed distinctly annoyed by this until, dying, she
discovered that the unknown female genius was her own daughter, by
some marriage that she had forgotten, and handed her over to the
arms of the hero, along with a sizable estate--presumably so that
they wouldn't have to go on acting.

It was a gorgeous movie, with shots of the Twentieth Century train,
supper with the producer at the Waldorf, and gilt cupids on the
star's pink bed.  There was even a tricky shot in which a minor
movie actor acted as though he were a trained actor acting.

When the screen had darkened, Bethel did not merely hope--she
joyously knew that she was going to be an actress.

She confessed it to Alva and Charley Hatch at their after-theatre
supper at the Rex Pharmacy and Luncheonette.

The Rex, a drugstore which was less of a drugstore than a
bookstore, less of a bookstore than a cigar store, less of a cigar
store than a restaurant, was characteristic of a somewhat confused
purpose in American institutions, whereby the government has been a
producer of plays and motion pictures, movie producers are owners
of racing stables, churches are gymnasiums and dance halls,
telegraph offices are agencies for flowers and tickets, authors are
radio comedians, aviators are authors, and the noblest purpose of
newspapers is to publish photographs of bathing girls.

The actual drug department at the Rex consisted of a short counter
laden with perfume bottles and of a small dark man who looked
angry; but along one whole side were magnificent booths with
ebonite tables shining like black glass.  Here, cosily, the three
children, world-weary connoisseurs of radio programmes and
ventilation systems for motor-cars, supped on a jumbo malted milk,
a maple pecan sundae and a frosted coffee.

'That was a wonderful movie.  That dress the star had on at the
dance must of cost a thousand dollars,' said Alva.

'Yuh, pretty good.  That was swell where she bawled out the fellow
in an aeroplane and HE said he'd chuck her overboard if she didn't
shut her trap,' said Charley.

'I'm going to be an actress,' said Bethel.

Alva gurgled noisily with a straw.  'Look who's here!  You don't
think you're serious?'

'Yes, I am!'

'Honest, Beth, you aren't so bad, in a mousy kind of way--you got
nice big eyes and a kind of, oh, ivory skin, but if you tackled
Hollywood, the producers would laugh themselves sick.  Now I AM
going in the movies.  Maybe I'm dumb--I can't do Cicero like you
can--but I got the build.'

Alva made rather indelicate motions, denoting curves.

'I'm not going to Hollywood.  I'm going to be a stage actress.  And
be able to ACT, like that understudy.'

'Honest, Beth, you slay me!'

'I am!  I'm going to study voice in college--'

'You better study mascara!  Beth, there ain't any stage actresses
any more!  All that old-fashioned junk has gone out.  Plays!'

'You've never seen one.'

'I read about 'em in Movie and Mike Weekly.  What's a stage play
got?  Couple scenes, maybe three, and six-eight actors, where in
the movies, lookit what they show you--a castle on the Riveera and
a submarine torpedo room and the Paris fashions and a Chinese
geisha girl and everything; and in a show you wouldn't get but
sixty dollars a week, but in the movies I'll get a thousand!  Hot
dog!  I'm going to have a sable coat!'

More sympathetic, Charley offered, 'No, you don't want to be an
actress, Beth.  They all lead immoral lives.  And you wouldn't like
it on the stage.  You'd be scared.  You're kind of shy.  You better
be a nurse.'

'I will not!  I'm going to act.'

'Maybe you could organize an amateur show in the hospital.'

'I'm not going to be an amateur.  I'm not going to play at playing.
No!  IT ISN'T GOOD ENOUGH!'



II


Once upon a time Sladesbury, with its population of more than a
hundred thousand, had known a dozen touring companies a year:
Sothern and Marlowe, Maude Adams in Peter Pan, Arnold Daly in
Candida; and had supported a permanent stock company, presenting
fifty plays, from As You Like It to Charley's Aunt, in fifty weeks
of the year.

Now in 1931 not one professional play had been presented in
Sladesbury for more than five years.  The block of old-fashioned
spacious buildings which had contained the Twitchell Theatre--
opened by Edwin Booth--the Latin Academy, and the Armoury of the
Honourable Company of Foot had been replaced by a gold-and-scarlet
filling station, a Serv-Ur-Self food market, and a Bar-B-Q Lunch
which lent refinement to hamburger sandwiches by cooking them with
electricity.

The former stock-company theatre, the Crystal, had long been a
motion-picture establishment.  But by Bethel's fifteenth birthday,
June 1st, 1931, it was certain that the Crystal would gamble again
with living actors.  The Sladesbury that manufactured aeroplane
motors was going to become as modern as Athens in 500 B.C.  The
Daily Advocate announced that the 'Caryl McDermid Stock Company of
Broadway Actors' would take over the Crystal, on June 15th, and
play through the summer.

For Bethel, heaven had come to Charter Oak Avenue.

She cut out the daily notices and pictures of the company.  She
pondered over the photographs of McDermid, the actor-manager, with
his handsome square face, his lively eyes, his thick hair low on
his forehead, his wide mouth.  Proudly, as though he belonged to
her--was she not the greatest local patroness of the drama?--Bethel
noted that sometimes he looked like a factory executive, sometimes
like a soldier-explorer, once, in rags, like a poet vagabond;
proudly she learned that he had been a star in the silent motion
pictures and had toured with Otis Skinner and Frank Craven.

She had always considered it shameless to be seen loitering on
Charter Oak Avenue, whistled at by the interested knots of young
loafers who at this period were called 'drug-store cowboys', but
now she went out of her way to stop in front of the Crystal and
study the pictures of the cast: McDermid bejewelled in Richelieu
and terrifying as the Emperor Jones; Miss Maggie Sample comic as
Mrs. Wiggs; and the pale glory of Irma Wheat as St. Joan.

Dearest to Bethel of all these pictured gods was Elsie Krall, a
fragile girl who seemed, for all the stiffness of her Shakespearian
ruff and brocade, not much older than herself.  If she had one
friend like Elsie, she would attack Broadway in another year, and a
year after that she would be a famous actress!

When the large red-and-black show bills were plastered about town,
and the names of Mr. McDermid and Miss Wheat stared at her, she
felt as though it were her own name that was thus startlingly
discovered.

The first play of the McDermid season was The Silver Cord, by
Sidney Howard, of whom Bethel had never heard--as she had never
heard of Pinero or Somerset Maugham or Clyde Fitch.  The press
notes said that the play was 'a story of mother love fighting for
itself'.  Bethel pictured the mother as a pioneer in a log cabin,
doing exciting things with an axe.

She wanted so feverishly to go to the opening night that she did
not let herself go till Wednesday.  But it was a youthful self-
discipline in her (the kind that might some day take her through
all-night rehearsals), rather than a Connecticut Puritanism whereby
anything she wanted to do was wicked.  By no discipline, however,
could she keep away longer than Wednesday.

It was a part of the era and the country that it did not occur to
her parents, since it was known that she had no taste for glossy
young drunks, to prohibit her going out by herself in the evening,
provided she was back by eleven-thirty.  And even in these
depression days, when the family were putting off buying a new car
and Mr. Merriday was worrying about having to cut the staff in his
store, it was sacred to them that Bethel should have 'her own
income'--two dollars a week, theoretically her salary for working
in the store on Saturdays.

She could get no one to go with her to the theatre.

She knew that her father and mother and brother would no more go to
a play than to a chess tournament, and that neither Charley Hatch
nor Alva Prindle would pay a dollar to hear six actors, when for
half of that they could see six hundred.  Bethel felt as lone and
venturous as a young-lady Christian martyr in a den of Roman lions.
She longed to wear her party dress of yellow taffeta, but even as a
Christian martyr she could not endure the comments of her brother,
and it was in the humility of skirt and sweater that she went off
to her first play.

'Give you a lift?' yelled Charley, as she passed the Hatch cottage.

'No!  I--I got to meet a friend,' said Bethel.

The crowd that was wavering into the Crystal Theatre was none too
large, but Bethel was a little frightened by it.  She felt herself
the only greenhorn and hoped that she would not betray herself.  By
the most acute figuring she had arrived at the theatre exactly five
minutes before the announced curtain time, so she was a quarter of
an hour early.  She was in awe of the veteran-looking doorman, who
snatched her ticket and irreverently tore it, of the young
gentleman who was demanding hats to check, of the supercilious girl
ushers.

She climbed, panting, to the balcony, and came out under a noble
ceiling with frescoes of pink goddesses sitting on gilt clouds and
leering.  She was shamed by having to crawl past the rigid knees of
four early-comers, and wanted to apologize to them, and was afraid
to.  But when she had sunk down on the stony leatherette seat in
the front row of the balcony, she felt secure, she felt at home.

She looked beatifically at the curtain, which appropriately
depicted the Bay of Naples.  The orchestra members, handsomest and
most artistic of men, crawled from under the stage and scratched
themselves a little and whispered and looked up--not at her, Bethel
hoped--and then relented and sat down to play a Wienerwalz.

Bethel's soul skipped with ecstasy.  She read every word in the
slim programme, even the advertisement of The Mount Vernon Funeral
Home, Where Sympathy Is Our Watchword, Phone Night or Day.  She
noted that Elsie Krall, the girl actress whose picture she had
loved, was playing a character called Hester.  She primly folded
the programme, then bent over the rail and prayed for a larger
house.  But the place was only half filled when her heart turned
over as the orchestra shivered and stopped.  The house lights were
dimmed, and for the first time during the fifteen years that she
had waited for it, Bethel knew the magic pause, the endless second
of anticipation, with just a fringe of light at the bottom of the
curtain, before it went up.

She had never been so happy.

Instantly she was disappointed.  Here was no battling mother in a
frontier cabin, no fetching young man in buckskins, but a girl of
to-day reading Sunday newspapers of to-day in a room that might
have been in any of the old 'mansions' on Bucks Hill, Sladesbury.
But she saw that the girl on the couch was Elsie Krall, and that
the pictures had not revealed Elsie's surprising copper hair, or
the eggshell texture of her skin, pale above cheeks scarlet with
make-up.  She seemed frightened; and Bethel loved her for it; felt
herself up there on the stage, reassuring Elsie.

But Bethel's affections, so bewilderingly fickle this evening,
instantly shifted to Caryl McDermid, as the star himself opened the
double doors and smiled his way on stage.  He was Apollo in single-
breasted heather mixture.  He couldn't be more than twenty-eight,
decided Bethel.  Of course that was thirteen years older than
herself, but if she grew fast and caught up with him, maybe she
could some day know him and win his heart.

[Pictures]

He was speaking, in a voice hearty and electric:  'Isn't mother at
home?'

She loved the lily-swaying Irma Wheat, as Christina; and with a
hate warmer than love, she hated Maggie Sample, the stage mother; a
handsome, authoritative, menacing Juno of fifty.  And all the while
she forgot that she was at a play.  This was life, and she was in
it.

She hadn't known that there were plays in which the characters
talked like real people, and in which you could live and struggle
and forget yourself.

The story was of a mother who, to hold her sons, was willing to
break up their marriages and reduce them to babyhood.  Bethel
particularly loved the brave Hester--Elsie Krall--fiancée of the
younger son; she bounced in her seat with hope that Hester would
leave the young pup.

In the intermissions, she did not go out, and she glanced rather
snippily at people so unimaginative that they could chatter and
walk about.  And all the time she knew, beyond argument, that she
was going to be an actress.

She came out of the theatre as drunk as a bacchante; a pitiable and
happy sight.  She wavered home under the summer elms, and felt that
she was shouting poetry, though she was not thinking at all about
moonlight and roses or swords and barricades, but repeating over
and over, rather queerly, 'Sterility--that's your professional
mother's stock in trade'.  As she came up to the Merriday porch,
where Charley Hatch and her brother Ben were dangling their legs
and discussing gliders and Colonel Lindbergh, she stopped, staring
at them, swaying.

'What's the matter with you, Toots?  You stay up too late.  Gwan,
get to bed,' said her brother.

'All right.'

'Did you like the show?' demanded Charley.

'Yes--I guess so--all right.'

'I knew you wouldn't like it!' crowed Ben.

'I did so!  I thought it was the most wonderful thing I ever saw.'

'Rats!'

'I did!'

She wanted to cry, but she mastered it and crept up to her room,
her refuge.

She paced, unable to stop and undress.  She found herself re-
enacting the play and, curiously, it was not her own Elsie Krall
whom she mimicked, but the mother.  Sitting on the edge of the bed,
crouched, obviously broken, yet with a hint that she enjoyed
showing off her woes, her elbows on her knees and her hands
dangling absurdly, she muttered,

'"I'm not asking you to be sorry.  It's--"  How did it go, now?
"It's Robin I'm thinking of.  And now that I'm old and sick . . .
dying--"'

Her memory ran out, but she could not sleep.  She was acting a
thousand plays; she was an Arabian woman watching her son die of
hunger; she was a Russian princess and then she was a Russian
commissar accusing the princess; she was a 'bathing cutie', very
tough; and she was a ghost-pale abbess.  She clawed her complete
Shakespeare down from the shelf and read a dozen speeches from The
Merchant of Venice aloud, sitting primly in a straight chair by the
window, where the net curtains whispered in the night.

Portia's speech, of course; but more eagerly, Jessica and Lorenzo.

She was on the avenue in Belmont; the trunks of the great trees--
lime trees, was that right?--were white-washed, and visible in the
silvered darkness.


     'The moon shines bright: in such a night as this,
     When the sweet wind did gently kiss the trees
     And they did make no noise, in such a night
     Troilus methinks mounted the Troyan walls,
     And sigh'd his soul toward the Grecian tents
     Where Cressid lay that night.'


Thus Lorenzo, round and manly.  She laid the book down on the edge
of her small bureau, on the starched white cover embroidered with
violets; she held out unsteady hands; she leaped up (not in the
least knowing that she was doing so) and in the mirror watched her
face grow soft, her lips imploring.  She hastily sat down and read
on.  She was Jessica:


     'In such a night
     Did young Lorenzo swear he loved her well,
     Stealing her soul with many vows of faith
     And ne'er a true one.'


The audience was hushed.  She had been so wistfully gay; so tender
yet so appealing.  Then the applause, like a breaker!  By the
window again, she was reading:


  '. . . Antonio hath a ship of rich lading wrecked on the narrow
  sea; the Goodwins, I think they call the place; a very dangerous
  flat and fatal, where the carcasses of many a tall ship lie
  buried . . .'


Thus Salarino, on a street in Venice.  She saw the street
perfectly; it ran by a canal, under archways.  (She laid her head
on her arm on the window sill.)  She herself--yes, she was
Salarino; masked and cloaked, hand on rapier hilt, slipping off to
a rendezvous.  A gondola, in the canal below, was revealed in the
light from a lamp far up in a harsh wall, and Salarino saw--Bethel
saw--a girl in white satin, flower-crowned, in the arms of a man
young but bearded and angry-eyed . . .

She started out of her dream and it was dawn.  She was painfully
stiff, but she was in ecstasy.  Then she shook her head vigorously,
rubbed her shoulders, and snorted, 'Don't be so silly, Bethel!  Go
to bed!'



III


However much she tried to conceal her emotion when she told him
about having seen The Silver Cord, Charley Hatch saw that it was
going to be difficult to 'cure her of this crazy notion that she
was going to try and be an actress'.

Charley was a friendly boy, rather like a kind old milk-wagon
horse.  His hobby was collecting stamps.  'You learn a lot about
geography and foreign places and so on from stamps,' he stated.  He
wanted to be a farmer; but to his father, who himself had come from
a farm, this would have been a shocking retrogression from his
urban position as superintendent of a bus line; so Charley was
planning to become an osteopath.  He had soft tow hair on a large,
thick skull, and he whistled constantly.

'Lookit, Beth,' he implored, as they sat on a branch of a maple,
twenty feet up in the air.  'Of course a girl wouldn't know about
all such things--'

'I bet I would!'

'--but you got no idea what you'd be up against if you tried to go
and get to be an actress and went looking for a job on Broadway.
It's full of pitfalls.'

'Pitfalls?'

'Pitfalls.'

'What kind of pitfalls?'

'Awful pitfalls!  Managers and all like that, that betray young
girls.'

'How do they betray them?'

'You wouldn't understand.'

'What do they do to 'em?'

'Beth!  What language!  It ain't ladylike.  Golly!  You're already
showing what awful influence the stage has got on you.  You don't
want to be immoral and bohemian, do you?'

With the utmost sweetness, like an indignant wren, Bethel
explained, 'How do I know?  I don't know what you have to do to be
immoral, but of course if I have to, to be a great actress, why
then I have to.  Don't you see?'

'This is awful!  I never heard anything like it!  You don't know
what you're talking about!'

'I do so know what I'm talking about!'

'You do not know what you're talking about.'

'Oh, shut up!'

'Shut up yourself, telling me to shut up!'

'Oh, Charley, I'm sorry if I was rude.'

'Oh, that's okay.  But I don't think you had ought to be immoral,
just the same.'

'Well, maybe I won't have to.  And honestly I like loganberry juice
much better than beer.  Gee!'


Upon Bethel's solicitation, Alva Prindle did go to The Silver Cord
Wednesday matinee.  And she hated it.  Bethel met her at the Rex
Pharmacy for her report.

'It was so talky!' Alva complained into her cherry sundae.  'Maybe
some folks might like it, but what I say is, it don't hold your
attention, like a movie.'

'Twice as much!'

'It did not!  There wasn't anything happening.  Not even a
penthouse or a machine-gun.  All talk!'

'Alva, you just wait till I get to be an actress--'

'So you're still going to be an actress!'

'I certainly am.  And I'm going to talk on the stage--oh, about
everything--about patriotism, and love--'

'Why, Beth-el Mer-ri-day!'

'--and why a person feels religious--'

'It would be awfully improper to talk about religion, right up
there on the stage.  They never do, in the movies.  People hate
it.'

'But I will--honestly I will.  And I'm going to get up a dramatic
society in high school next year.'

'That'd be kind of fun.'

'It'll be kind of hard work, too, let me tell you!  There's not
going to be any fooling around when I get up a play!'

'Oh, there isn't, eh!  You think you know so much!  I bet you don't
even know what a stage door is!'

'I do so!'

'How do you know?' scoffed Alva.

'I read about it.'

'That's a heck of a way to learn about things--to read about them!
But I bet you didn't dare go to the stage door at the Crystal.'

'YOU didn't?'

'I certainly did!'

'Alva!  And you saw the actors, close?'

'I certainly did.  And I got old McDermid's autograph, and Elsie's
and Irma's.'

'Oh, you didn't bother them for their AUTOGRAPHS!'

'I certainly did!  What would you talk to actors for, except to get
their autographs?'

'Tell me, Alva--oh, tell me!  Is Mr. McDermid as handsome as he is
on the stage?'

'Him?  Old Mac?  No!  He's maybe forty-five, and he wears a wig.'

'Oh no!  Oh, darling!  It couldn't be!  Oh, not forty-five!  Almost
as old as my father!  And a wig!  But I don't care.  I think Mr.
McDermid is just--uh--adorable.'

'You do, eh?'  Alva had regained all her Hollywood superiority.
'Well, let me tell you, baby, Mac's married to that red-headed
little dumbbell, Elsie Krall.  You better stay off.'

'Oh no!  How do you know he is?'

'The stage doorman told me.  And Mac treats Elsie terrible, the
poor kid.'

'Do you know what I think?' said Bethel.  'What?'

'I think you're a liar.  You're like that mother in the play.  Good-
bye!'

This from the meek Bethel who, year by year, had let Alva snatch
her lollypop, her scooter, her beaux.

She waited till no [sic] Wednesday, the second week of the McDermid
company's season, when they played Dulcy with Elsie Krall as the
ingénue Angela.  She had to know about Alva's strictures on her
favourite gods.  She was there on Monday evening, not embarrassed
now, and when her last agitated laugh was finished, she marched
down the alley to the stage door, rather wishing that Alva could
see how professionally she went about it.

The stage entrance was at the back of the theatre, on a rotting
balcony overhanging Swan Creek, now a sewerlike trickle between
muddy banks, but once, when Sladesbury was a country town, a
handsome stream.  She was annoyed by the crowd of three girls with
autograph albums, but she wrapped herself in an imaginary cloak--
black lined with crimson--and waited, mysterious under an arch in
Venice.

The magic beings were coming out of fairyland, and Bethel knew that
she was right about them.

Caryl McDermid--yes, he must be forty-five or more--quite an old
man--but that certainly was no wig, that lovely mane thick as
horsehair, and he smiled so easily, took in the autograph hunters
with his gaily curved lips, his innocent eyes.  Elsie was on his
arm, clinging, adoring.  And there were Irma Wheat, whose smiling
made her more beautiful than on the stage, and the terrible Maggie
Sample, the overwhelming character woman, who was a pillar of ice.

Bethel tried to resist, but as these four walked through the alley,
down Charter Oak Avenue, with its red neon lights over bowling
alleys and cafés, she followed them, glad that they really were so
beautiful . . . even if she did notice that Mr. McDermid's elbows
were shiny, and Elsie's heels worn down.  To what glamorous party
were they going?  Would they meet professors and newspapermen from
great Hartford?  Was Mrs. Beaseley Payne's sixteen-cylinder
Cadillac waiting to whisk them to splendours at her pine Gothic
castle on Bucks Hill?

Her idols were turning into Boze's Beanery . . . they were casually
sitting down at a long marble-topped table . . . they were ordering
hamburgers and flapjacks and coffee . . . and Bethel heard Elsie
addressing McDermid:  'Oh, darling, I think I'm stinking in Dulcy.
I wish to God I could act,' and heard Maggie Sample's snappish, 'So
do I--wish you could!'

Bethel was sitting at the other end of that Beanery table, too
scared to move, her voice breaking as she ordered, 'P-please, a
chocolate éclair and a g-glass of m-milk.'


There was an elegance about Caryl McDermid that was hard to define.
His suit, of soft blue flannel, was glassy at the seams; he wore a
commonplace soft white shirt and solid blue tie; but there was an
unwrinkled firmness and smoothness about his cheeks and chin; and
the lapel of his coat curved as though he had magnificent
shoulders.  His smile was consuming; it took in everybody, as
though he loved them yet realized all their absurdities.

Elsie Krall, his wife--the child must have been thirty years
younger than he--was frail copper and ivory; the statuette of a
stilled dancer; but her eyes were not alive like McDermid's.  They
rested always on him, gratefully; and imploringly on the bitter
Miss Maggie Sample.

They were real gods, as Bethel had known they must be.

She was not shocked by the undivinity of their chatter.  Probably
she really had the professional stage virus in her system.

'Maggie,' said McDermid, 'I wish you wouldn't wave your arms so,
when you make your cross in your scene with Forbes, in two.'

'Elsie, listen darling, don't yell so when you say to me, "It was
just the most romantic thing that ever happened in the world".
Can't you underplay it a little?  Dulcy is a comedy, you know!'

'Say, did you see that Ramona Snyder has been cast for the name
part in Stop It, Rosika?  They go into rehearsal in August,' said
Irma Wheat.

'And is she lousy!  I bet they don't pay her a hundred and fifty,
and no run-of-the-play contract,' said Maggie Sample.

'Don't mention money.  I don't know what we got a box office for,'
said McDermid.

It was the catsup bottle that introduced Bethel to them, though
this did not surprise her, since she loved the romantic catsup
label with its legend:  'Made only of fresh ripe tomatoes, onion,
salt, and rare and imported spices from the Orient.'

'Please pass us the catsup,' said McDermid to her.

'Oh--yes.'  It was a convulsive effort, but Bethel got out, 'I--I
loved the play to-night.'

'Oh, did you, honest?  Was I terrible?  I just can't seem to do
these swell society girls,' wailed Elsie Krall.

For all her loyalty, Bethel had confusedly felt that Elsie really
had been fairly 'terrible' on the stage; awkward and bouncing.  But
she lied like a gentleman.  Then--oh, she HAD to know; it was her
whole life--Bethel blurted:

'How can you get to be an actress?'

Elsie stared.  She looked as though she were asking the same
question herself.  McDermid smiled.  Irma Wheat said, 'God only
knows!  But what do you want to go on the stage for, anyway?'

Maggie Sample was like Lady Macbeth in one of her moments of
exasperation with her husband, as she protested to Bethel, 'Do you
want to starve?  I've been on the stage thirty years, and here I am
in this flop of a stock company in the sticks--'

McDermid smiled.  'Hey, hey!' was all he said.

'--and next fall I'll be lucky if I get a job as a kosher ham
sandwich in a Number Two Company of Abie's Irish Rose.  When you
grow up, child,' and she smiled at Bethel, 'you try to squirm into
prison, or get a nice job hustling hash, or even get married, or
anything to avoid going on the stage.'

'You know you'd rather act than eat, Maggie,' said McDermid.

'That's only because I never get a chance to eat.'

'Now don't discourage this young lady.  She has wide-awake eyes.
Maybe she's felt the call to the stage.


     'Shabby and crouched and shockingly fed,
     Whistling, he sits on his unmade bed
     In the airless bedroom down the hall,
     And smiles because he had heard the call
     (At Equity minimum!) back to the stage--
     Rusty beggar or golden page--
     Claudius, Hamlet, or Player King--
     The glory that flutters wing on wing--'


'Oh, you and your Lambs Club poetry!' Miss Wheat scolded at
McDermid, as she arose, with the sardonic Maggie Sample.  'You're
going to be telling this poor, deluded kid that it's better to
climb up on the steam pipes in a dressing room in order to keep
your feet out of the water when the toilet has busted, and to sit
up all night learning seventy-five sides, at sixty bucks a week,
closing on Saturday, than it is to work in a grocery store.  Me,
that've got it on Gloria Swanson from ankles to consonants, playing
in a dump behind a factory in Connecticut.  You can keep it.
Caryl, darling, if you weren't my boss, and if I didn't love you
distractedly, I'd tip you off that you're as screwy as a Russian
director.'

'No.  He's not bright enough,' said Miss Sample.

Exeunt, Irma and Maggie.

'It isn't true, what she said.  It is fun to be on the stage, isn't
it?' Bethel begged of Elsie.

'Yes, I guess it is.  I don't know yet.  I been acting such a
little time.'  Elsie looked troubled.  'I was waiting on table in
Teneriffe Junction, in Iowa, when Mr. McDermid came along and
married me.  He's been so sweet--yes, you have, too, Caryl--but I
guess he gets kind of impatient--oh, I don't blame you, darling.
It's so kind of hard for me to understand why a lot of the
characters act like they do.  Take like last week; why did Hester--
Did you see me in Silver Cord then?'

'Oh YES!'

'Oh, I'm glad.  But I don't guess I was very good.  But why did
Hester fall for a softie like Robin?  Honest, it's so kind of hard,
all this acting.  But I love the travel.  I collect things--from
department stores.  We only been married a year, and I got an
Austrian peasant costume from Marshall Field's and a pair of python
shoes from Halle's, in Cleveland, and a brazeer from Sicily, all
hand-embroidered, in Columbus, and all kinds of things.  But I do
get scared--all those hellhounds in the audience coughing!'

McDermid said hastily, 'Elsie is about as new to it as you are, my
dear, but you'll both make good.  And--How do you get a chance to
act?  Well, first you get all the training you can.  TRAINING!  Act
wherever you can--even if it's in the barn.  And then get God to
pass you some good luck.  That's all I know.  And it's worth it.
Even if you aren't much good--and me, I guess I'm probably just the
run-of-the-mill ham--even so, when you've been creating a human
being, and living in him, then the rest of the world outside the
theatre, with all its fussing about houses and motor cars and
taxes, seems pretty shabby.  Acting--it's a heightening of life.  I
guess we're all stage-struck, us old troupers, no matter how we
kick.'

'And do you think maybe I could do it?'

McDermid studied Bethel, rubbed his nose, droned, 'Maybe so--maybe
so.  Let's see.  Get up and walk to the door and back.'  When she
returned, his appraisal was warmer.  'You're pretty graceful, and
you have some spirit in you, and a rather warm voice, for such a
thin kid, and you watch things--you see how things are done--I was
watching you watch us.  Yes, I think you probably can act!'

It was her accolade.

As they went out, Elsie whispered to her, 'Come see me in my
dressing-room.'

'Oh, I'd be pleased!'

'And we can play with my doll.  I got such a funny doll--so long-
legged and so sweet.  I've never told a soul but you that I still
play with it--not even Mac--Mr. McDermid.  I don't know anybody in
Sladesbury--they all seem so grownup and busy here.  Will you come
see me?'

'Oh, I'd love to!'

'Come next week then.'

'Yes!'

Bethel was intoxicated with the friendship of this, her first real
actress.  But she never saw Elsie's dressing-room.  The McDermid
stock company closed, that Saturday night, and she did not meet
Caryl McDermid again till years afterward, when he told her of
Elsie Krall's dying of pneumonia in a hospital in Hollywood,
looking bewildered and a little frightened, and clasping to the end
a long-legged, armless doll.



IV


'You know Gale Amory--she's such a grand girl, you'd never expect
to find her in a hen college.  Well, she was to play the husband's
part in Doll's House, you know, Ibsen, it was the senior-class
play, and she came to rehearsal all made up like a man, I mean,
double-breasted blue suit of her brother's, and she's so feminine,
everybody laughed their head off.  So, of course, they all began to
cut up and laugh and kid their lines, and the girl who played Dr.
Rank, she ran out and came back with a burnt-cork moustache, and of
course, I mean that simply convulsed them, and she said in a deep
voice, I mean, it was a serious line from the play, but she
burlesqued it and she said, "At the next masquerade, I shall be
invisible", and everybody simply howled!  And then Gale goes out
and puts on a moustache, too!

'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 'Noyesterdayitwasparticularlynoticeableyouseepausehe-
suffersfromadreadfulillness'.  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.

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!'

Bethel felt that she was acting an actress in the dressing-room
rather competently--the pleased modesty, the clinging smile.  In
the midst of people she could make out her family, and see Charley
Hatch looking at her as wistfully as a lost lone dog, Miss Bickling
coming down from her synthetic ivory tower to say firmly, 'You did
splendidly, and I was very angry with Gale for clowning, and I'm
going in and tell her so', and a whole puppy-rollick of classmates,
mocking, 'You certainly showed up the husbands, Beth!'

Miss Bickling cleared them all out.  Mr. O'Toole of the Dory
Playhouse was waiting; Mr. O'Toole had to get back to New York that
night.

So, in glory, Bethel met her first producer.


Mr. Jerome Jordan O'Toole, at forty-five, had directed seven
Broadway plays--two of them surprisingly successful--and for twenty
years before that had acted chauffeurs, tramps, detectives and such
other examples of what playwrights, peering out of their clubs,
regard as the Common People.  He was Yankee-Irish, from Bangor.  He
was tall and dry and sunken-cheeked; hard and exact and honest.  In
summer he was managing director of the Dory Playhouse, at
Hardscrabble Beach, Connecticut, which was classed as one of the
dozen summer theatres that were competent and professional.

Bethel, heart fluttering, didn't know whether to sit still, as a
confident actress, doing something or other with cold cream and
Kleenex, or to stand humbly in the presence of power, and before
she had time to figure out the interpretation of her role, Jerry
O'Toole was in the doorway, like Abraham Lincoln in tennis costume,
and she had popped to her feet and stood blushing.

Miss Bickling crowed, 'This is our lovely little heroine, Miss
Merriday.'

O'Toole shook Bethel's hand with a croaking 'The performance was
very interesting' that was more completely a nothing than anything
Bethel had ever heard.

'Was I as bad as that?' she begged.

'No.  You weren't bad.  Of course the others were all of them
excellent--splendid.'

'Oh-uh!' of bliss from Miss Bickling, and a diminutive 'Oh' of
chagrin from Bethel.

'They weren't trying to act at all, and they did that very well.
They managed to turn Ibsen into a farce, and I guess that requires
a college education--I never had one.  But you, my dear--'  He held
Bethel's hand in his long wide brown hand, which felt comforting.
'You were trying to act, so I'll compliment you by applying
professional standards, and by them, you were pretty bad.  You
showed that someday you may be able to act, if you ever get any
training.  But you were pretty bad!  You overplayed everything.
You made Nora sound like a kitchen mechanic scrapping with the
iceman.  But you were alive.'

'But--'  She did not know that she was copying his hitching style.
'Then I guess there's no chance for me to get into your summer
theatre this season?'

He gave what seemed to her a curious answer:  'Not till you've been
lucky enough to fail a few times.  Then come see me, my dear.  Good
luck!'

He was gone; a broad-shouldered, gaunt man who moved easily.

Miss Bickling had scarce got through protesting to Bethel that she
was disappointed, that Mr. O'Toole had proved to be nothing but a
Broadway Commercialist and a Heartless Algonquin Wit, when they
were interrupted by the pleasant exuberance of Mr. Roscoe
Valentine, who always carried his own private sun.


Mr. Jerome O'Toole's summer stock company, the Dory Playhouse, and
the Nutmeg Players, conducted by Mr. Roscoe Valentine at Point
Grampion, Connecticut, were both on the shore between New Haven and
New London, twenty miles apart, and the feeling between them was
that of caviare for butterscotch sundae.  Roscoe Valentine, aged
fifty, was a man composed, except for his brains and his indignant
red eyes, entirely of powder puffs.  In winter he was a Bostonian
and a scholar, editor of a magazine of the arts called The Spiral,
and director of The Spiral Theatre, where Back Bay met the
backwoods in one-act glorifications of a proletariat that they
actually hated and misunderstood.

Bethel had never seen a man like this: so squashy, so giggling, so
spiteful, yet so calmly understanding of everything a woman thought
before she finished thinking it.  His hand felt like a cold wet
piece of oiled silk, as he held hers and bubbled:

'Splendid, my dear!  You gave an entirely new conception of the
role of Nora.'

'Do you hear that?' said Miss Bickling.

'Oh, thank you!' said Bethel.

'Yes--oh, indeed yes,' said Mr. Valentine.

'Mr. Jerome O'Toole told Bethel that she overacted,' said Miss
Bickling.

'Jerry O'Toole must have been reading a book again.  It always
takes him that way.  One time, he was quite a good stage manager.
He knows all about carpentry, but don't you think, my dears, it's
just on the too-too side when he talks about the social drama?  No,
my poppet, don't you worry.  You did Nora with real éclat.  So
beautifully fallible.'

Bethel didn't know what it was all about.  She never would be adept
at doing word tricks.  She looked at Valentine like a shivering
kitten, and Miss Bickling carried on for her.

'That's so kind of you.  I'm sure Bethel and I appreciate it a
lot.'  (Bethel wasn't at all sure.)  'Now she feels that she has a
calling to the stage, and after to-night I'm sure she has, and
we're wondering if you could make a place for her in your summer
theatre?'

'Why, I think perhaps I could.'

'Oh, how gorgeous!' said Miss Bickling.

'Oh!' said Bethel.

Valentine sat down facing the back of a wooden chair.  And that was
the first time, outside of the movies, that Bethel had ever seen
this posture, and she noted and put away the fact that it made his
fat knees prominent and very silly.

He spoke youthfully:

'Now as we're just three girls together, let's let our hair down
and be frank.  You know there's no box office at all in the summer
theatres.  Even a roundneck like O'Toole can't make it pay--in
fact, if you want to know, I make more than he does!  But even so--
And for the apprentices, such as you'll be, Miss Merriday, I have
simply splendid teachers, with practical lessons in voice and
eurythmics, and the chance to appear in my plays with famous
actors.  So I'm compelled to charge each student actor two hundred
and seventy-five dollars for the ten-week season, and fifteen
dollars a week for room and board--really below cost.  Do you think
you could dig up all that fabulous wealth--four hundred and twenty-
five dollars?'

And to Bethel it WAS fabulous wealth.  'I don't know.  I'll try to.
I'll try so hard.'

'When can you find out?'

'My family are waiting outside.  I'll see them now.'


The senior Merridays and Charley looked small and rustic in the
stretches of the Assembly Hall stage, gazing distrustfully at a red-
headed co-ed in shorts who was moving scenery.  Bethel flew up to
them, her dress three-quarters buttoned, her hair uncombed.

'What is it--what IS it, dear?' urged her mother.

'Anything gone wrong?' her brother demanded, rather gladly, as
though he were going to have a chance to hit someone and restore
his own superiority in this over-feminine maze.

'Oh no, it's just--Daddy, I can be in a summer theatre this summer,
with real actors, and then be ready for a job on the stage this
fall, in New York, if you can let me have four hundred and twenty-
five dollars for the lessons.  But honestly, I'll pay it all back,
as soon as I get a job--'

Her father fretted, 'Well, finances are pretty tight, just now, and
I had hoped you'd begin bringing in a little before long.  And I
guess I don't understand girls now.  When I was young, girls were
glad to stay home and marry some nice fellow, but now seems like
they all want to go off some place and be actresses or fly to
Australia.  No, I don't understand it but--Yes.  We'll fix it
somehow.  My girl's going to have her chance!'

'I don't NEED a new Chevvy this year,' said her brother.

For years, Bethel was to be at a disadvantage when young actresses
explained that they had the most interesting excuses for every
lapse, because their parents and brothers had been so unimaginative,
unsympathetic and generally so American.


As she went to bed, she exulted that she was a real employed
actress now; that in just a month she would be at the Point
Grampion school.  But there was something irascible lurking behind
the bland joy, and she dared to drag it out:

'I DID overdo Nora.  It wasn't good enough.  I wasn't good enough!'



VI


All those two days at home, June 15th and 16th, 1938, before she
went off to the summer theatre at Grampion, she earnestly enacted
the role of a girl saying good-bye to childhood and to every loved
spot that her infancy knew: the cement garage, the pergola on which
the Concord grapevines were always rather dry, the basement
playroom with the tracks of the electric railroad which she had
inherited from Ben.

She also devoted herself to sound self-examination--she tried to.

She felt, and quite guiltily, that she ought to be devoting herself
to worrying about the dispossessed Jews in Germany and Poland, the
share croppers in Oklahoma; and, if not doing anything about them--
for obviously she never would do anything about them--at least
showing herself a right-thinking liberal by hourly agonizing, 'Oh,
isn't there something I CAN do?'  But she had to admit that what
she wanted was much simpler: she just wanted to act.

She felt guilty because none of her life had been conspicuously
devoted to 'doing things for other people'.  That was Professor
Miss Bickling's war cry and nursery ditty:  'The greatest joy and
privilege in life is doing things for other people.'  But Bethel
found that she coveted dancing lessons, fencing lessons, French
lessons, piano and voice and make-up, for herself.

'Well then, I guess I'm just that kind of a selfish pig,' she
lamented.

She was equally dissatisfied with her examination of the status, to
date, of the Heart of Bethel Merriday.  She wasn't quite sure that
she had one.

Certainly, if the test was, as she often read, lying awake longing
for the smiles and caresses of some particular young man, she had
no heart, as yet.  She liked the laughter of the young men and
their hard handshakes, but she wanted to jeer when she heard Alva
Prindle or Gale Amory yearn that some curly-headed, pipe-
flourishing young male was 'just wonderful'.

Alva had given up her claim to Hollywood.  Already a little stringy
at twenty-three, she was devoted to the hope that one A. Alexander
Brown, a fat insurance agent with the optimism characteristic of
all insurance agents, would marry her and provide a mink coat and a
set of etched cocktail glasses.  Not toward Alva, not toward her
father and mother and brother, did Bethel feel guilty, but toward
that shaggy house dog, Charley Hatch, who had been compelled by
family deficits to give up his dreams of osteopathy for a job in
the sales department of the Flamolio Percolator Corporation.

'You don't think maybe you'd rather marry Charley, he'll be making
thirty-five dollars a week pretty soon, instead of going off and
taking such an awful chance on the stage, do you?' her father had
said.

'No!' said Bethel.

'Well,' said her father.

On her last night in Sladesbury, Charley came calling, and they sat
on the porch.

Americans making love have always sat on porches, except for those
who were too poor or too rich.  In the house was electricity; Mr.
Merriday was reading about the tear-gas bombing of strikers in the
aeroplane industry, and Ben drawing television diagrams; but Bethel
and Charley sat on a porch in New England and, despite all
announcements that the whole world has changed since 1920, no one
could have told them from their grandparents.

'Look, Bet, while we got the chance to be alone together--'

'You must drive down to Grampion this summer.  I'll bet it'll be
awfully cool on the shore.'

'I sure will, but look--'

'I hope there won't be a lot of mosquitoes.'

'I guess there won't be, but--'

'Isn't it funny how you can be awfully earnest and excited about
something like acting, and then some silly little thing like
mosquitoes will throw you right off!'

'Bet!  I want to talk seriously--'

'Please don't.'

'You know how doggone fond I am of you.'

'Yes, I think I do, but--Oh, Charley, don't make me feel guilty.
Maybe I'm the bloodless kind of girl that can't ever devote herself
to any man.  But I've got to go on.  Honestly, please believe me, I
do envy the girls that can settle down to a nice little home, but
for me--prob'ly I'm crazy--it doesn't seem good enough.'

'You'll never find folks that you can depend on like you can on
your home folks.  In the world outside, they'll use you and then
throw you away like a worn glove.'

She studied Charley.  His soft hair was babyish and pathetic, yet
his large, solid head seemed fatherly and protective.  Was she a
fool to leave this eternal kindness?

She sprang up.  She cried 'No, no, no, no!' and fled into the
house.

None of them could drive her down to Grampion that day--Friday,
June 17th--and she went by train, which was, for one of the Modern
Merridays, like travelling by oxcart.

She was overwhelmed into complete guilt by Charley's farewell
present: a make-up box.

It was the most beautiful, most elaborate make-up box, with every
cosmetic she had ever heard of: two kinds of rouge, evening and
daytime lipstick, skin freshener, powder, mascara, nail polish in
two shades, 'Dawn Delight' and 'Faint Memory', 'nourishing cream'
and the humble cold cream.

She cried over it.  Not for three weeks did she discover that the
only things that were of the smallest use to her were the cold
cream and the empty tin box.



VII


Grampion centre was a picture-book village.  Red-fronted chain
stores and crimson gasoline pumps had enterprisingly tried to
improve its quiet quality out of existence, but Grampion was all
gambrel roofs and elm trees and white steeples and white cottages
with small-paned windows, and the quickening smell of salt marshes.

It was Bethel's new-found-land, and she was another pioneer of the
American tradition.

The only conveyance at the station was a sedan, at least ten years
old.  The driver, a young man with a yellow sweater and a blue
denim shirt, thrilled her by clucking (and not laughing at her,
either), 'You one of the actresses, miss?  Jump in.  You'll have a
good time this summer.'

They drove through marshes, grey-green and still, crossed a tidal
creek, and came to a mile-long bay, with sun-clipped waves.
Twoscore sailboats were at anchor.  On one of them, three handsome
burnt youngsters, in white ducks, white jerseys and white boating
hats, were getting up sail, and they waved at her hopefully.  Then
the sedan skirted a private estate with bayberry hedges and came
abruptly into the Nutmeg Theatre grounds, which occupied a quarter
of the square-shaped Point Grampion and had Long Island Sound to
south and westward.

Born in the hill-circled city, going to a college on the Housatonic
River, Bethel little knew the sea.  She looked across the Sound
some ten or twelve miles to the blurred shore of Long Island, near
Greenport.  Fishing schooners were slanting northward, the lofty
sail of a yacht leaned perilously, and through the middle distance
slipped a freighter from foreign lands.  The flickering stretch of
the Sound was to her bluer and more fluid and ever-changing than
the blue sky above her own hills.  She felt superstitiously glad.
The Sound was a tributary of open ocean, and she was a tributary of
the great theatre.  Actresses, she assured herself, if God is good
to them, come down at last to the sea and to a ship which will bear
them to the lights and cheering in far-off lands.


The grounds had a sand beach on one side, which promised bathing,
and rocks on the other, for loafing in the sun.  The flat top of
the low bluff was a whole village in itself: the actual theatre
building, which had been a church; a one-room building as office;
the house of the old-time pastor-farmer, where splendidly lived the
director, Mr. Valentine, and most of the seven permanent members of
the stock company--all professional actors--and such lordly 'guest
stars' as might adorn the casts from week to week; a shop for
painting and carpentry; the School of the Theatre--the old pastor's
barn, with a small stage and rows of doubtful chairs inserted; and
at last, on the sea edge, with tennis courts beside it, Bethel's
new home, the dormitory and dining quarters for the apprentices.
She was too excited to be critical; otherwise she might have
noticed that the dormitory was shakily knocked together of second-
hand boards and painted with pigment guaranteed to peel
immediately.  The windows were narrow and low, their mosquito
netting of cotton.  But to Bethel it was the Temple of the Muses,
all cool marble and bright gold.

'Good luck, miss!  Hope you drag the crowds in!' said the driver.

'Oh, thank you.  It's wonderful to be here,' she crowed, and her
friend drove off, leaving her alone in the Temple.

Uncomfortably alone.

She ventured into the hallway, which was also the living-room, of
the apprentices' dormitory.  With a scratched upright piano, a
long, bare table, a cushionless window seat and a litter of third-
hand chairs, rockers and wicker and canvas deck-chairs, the room
was a charity home.  But Bethel was pleased.  She was a worker in
the theatre and an insider, not one of the luxurious 'carriage
trade' who came in limousines and demanded upholstered seats but
were never (she innocently believed) welcomed in the holy places
backstage.

The room was still, there was no one on the uncarpeted stairs; the
only stir was from an outboard motor on the Sound.

'Oo-hoo!' she cried, timidly.

Through a door at the back resentfully emerged a lean man, in
overalls, with a stained white moustache.

'What d'you want?  You one of the students?'

'Yes, I think so.'

'You THINK so?  Don't y' know?  My name is Johnny Meddock.  I run
this place.'

'You DO!'

'Yes, I do!  I'm the caretaker.  And janitor.  I'm responsible for
keeping the floors clean and the windows washed and chasing the
small boys off.  Folks also think I'm a Quaint Local Character.  I
let 'em think so.  It's worth money to me.  I even let 'em think I
used to be a fisherman here, when this place was a decent
churchyard and a fish wharf and not no theayter, with a lot of you
young women chasing around and flirting and not enough clothes to
dress a pussycat in.  I never was.  I hate fish.  I used to be a
janitor in the State Capitol, in Hartford.  Well, what d' you
want?'

'I suppose I ought to see Mr. Roscoe Valentine, first.  Do you know
if he's anywheres around?'

'He's in the office--that one-hen coop by the front of the theatre.
Yes, I guess you might's well see Roscoe, as Andy Deacon ain't come
yet.'

'Andy Deacon?'  It was the first time that Bethel had ever heard
the name.

'Yuh, he's the real boss here.  Andrew Deacon.  He makes out he's
just one of the actors, but it's him puts up most of the money for
Roscoe to blow in.  He went to college and everything.  Long about
twenty-eight, Andy is.  Acts on the stage regular--God knows why,
rich fellow like him--his dad was J. Goddard Deacon; run the big
gun factory up in Worcester.  Nice-spoken fellow, Andy is, too--
like a Hartford man.  But you better see Roscoe.  So long.'

Johnny Meddock vanished.  He who often remarked that he 'hated
theayters and hated their guts' was the most theatrical object in
the place.  He was Punch and Judy and Policeman and Devil all in
one.

Bethel, having decided that he was either very hateful or lovable,
went searching for the high priest, Roscoe Valentine.

Mr. Valentine, in sandals, lilac trousers, a dark blue shirt, a
voluminous white tie and English eyeglasses, was at his desk in his
small cabinlike office, simultaneously writing an advertisement for
The Petrified Forest which, on June 27th, would open the season,
dictating a letter to an agent in New York complaining because he
had not received another script, scratching his left calf with his
right foot and planning a lecture on 'Relaxation, the Secret of
Acting'.  He looked up at Bethel blankly.

'Yes?  What do you want?'

'I just came to say I'm here, Mr. Valentine.'

'I'm so bright that I might have deduced you were here, but I still
don't know why you are here or who you are.'  He looked for
applause from his secretary, a sensible, agreeable-looking young
woman, and didn't get it.  He was irritated, and demanded, 'Are you
one of the apprentices?'

'Why yes, don't you remember?  I'm Bethel Merriday.  Point Royal
College?'

'Oh yes.  Nora in Doll's House.  You overacted it atrociously.'

'That's what Mr. O'Toole said.'

'Oh, he did, eh?  But even Mr. Jerry O'Toole can sometimes be
right.  Well, you go and report to Cynthia Aleshire, my scene
designer.  She'll put you to work.  And begin to learn right now,
my pigeon, that if you're serious about your stage career, you've
got to do everything you can around here--learn everything about
the theatre--everything.'

'Oh, yes sir.'

'Very well then.  Marian, skip out and show this baby the shop, and
hustle back here.'

The girl secretary, outside, patted the dismayed Bethel amiably.
'Don't worry about him.  His bite is worse than his bark.  But he
does know something about acting and producing . . .  I hope he
does! . . .  My name is Marian Croy.'

Miss Croy was twenty-six or -seven, and placid.

'You're his secretary?'

'No, I'm an apprentice, like yourself.  I've been teaching school
for six years, out in Nebraska--I organized a town dramatic club.
I've saved up enough money to take one year off, for a shot at this
place and then Broadway.  God knows why I want to act!  I always
say it's because I like to read Maeterlinck aloud (I hope YOU don't
think he's too sentimental, too!), but maybe it's to try and escape
from the prairie winters.  If I don't make a go of it, I'll go back
and marry Oscar Heyden--he's a nice man, but he looks just the way
his name sounds . . .  Am I babbling, Bethel?'

She loved this kind woman, as Marian went on:

'I am, but you know, I'm just as lonely and scared here as you are.
But busy!  Roscoe found out I knew shorthand, so he put me to work.
That's how you learn to act here--doing everything that Roscoe
would have to pay to have done--scrubbing floors or addressing
envelopes to theatre subscribers or driving up town to buy
cigarettes.  I do hope you don't know pedicuring, or Roscoe'll
probably have you doing his sweet, pink, plump toes.  Good luck,
dear.  Miss Cynthia Aleshire, scenery boss--Miss Bethel Merriday,
freshman.'

Cynthia was a trim, tall, Greek-coin lady of thirty-five.  Bethel
did not believe that she would ever know Cynthia, but she instantly
felt herself one with the apprentices, sprawled inside the work
shed and in front of it, repainting last year's scenery a flat
grey.  They were a joyful crew: two girls in shorts and jerseys;
three young men in overalls, or sweaters and grey flannels.

There was the plump, jolly, hither-eyed Toni Titmus, who had just
finished freshman year in the University of Wisconsin, but who at
the moment thought that she preferred playing English duchesses to
playing basketball.

An almost anonymous, fresh-faced girl named Anita Hill.

Pete Chew, a round, stupid, wistful rich young man who had taken to
the drama only after having been dropped by Amherst, Rollins
College, and the Schenectady Flying School.

Walter Rolf, slim, competent, decent, twenty-three or -four and a
track runner.  It was Walter Rolf's misfortune that, however much
you tried to avoid the word 'clean' in describing him, you were
sure, in the end, to pigeonhole him as a Clean Young American.  He
looked like a Princeton Man, and by a coincidence he was a
Princeton Man, with a dash of Oxford.

Last of the crew, incredible as a student actor, was Harry Mihick.

Like Marian Croy, Harry had come to the theatre late; unlike her,
he was that most portentous of bores, the yearner who knows that he
is much more artistic than he is.  Harry was forty; and at home, in
Hannibal, Missouri, he was a bookkeeper.  He was also an actor, in
the Y.M.C.A. Drama Guild; a poet, in the Southwestern Christian
Advocate; and a dramatist, in nothing perceptible.  The gang had
concluded that Harry had come to Grampion to find someone who would
listen to his play plots.  He would stop swimming to discuss his
psyche, and he wrote poetry to all the girl students.  It was
pretty good poetry, too--by Richard Lovelace.

Of these apprentices, Bethel guessed that only Toni Titmus and
Walter Rolf had talent.  But that made two more young actors than
she had ever worked with before, and she was content, though later
she was to calculate that her estimate may have been too high, by
two.


They all knew so very much about the theatre.  As they painted and
glued and hammered, and constructed the lunch counter for The
Petrified Forest, they gave final verdicts:

'Claire Luce and Wally Ford were both of 'em too doggone
SOPHISTICATED in Mice and Men.  I wouldn't of played Claire's role
that way at all.  I'd of made her more awkward.  You know.  Small-
town.'

'I didn't think Cedric Hardwicke was so hot.  He made the canon so
darn heartless.  I felt he was showing off, all the while.  Too
much technique.  Now if I'd had that role, I'd of shown how deeply
he felt everything underneath.  Of course Sir Cedric is nothing but
an Englishman.  How could he play an Irishman?  Of course, I'm not
Irish, either, but still . . .'

'I don't know how the Lunts could waste their time on foolishness
like Amphitryon.  I like a play that's got some social significance.
Maybe if I'd been running their schedule, I'd of stood for The Sea
Gull, but these FRENCH plays--Whatever you may think about the
Russians, you certainly got to admit they got ART!'


The practically senile Harry Mihick (aged forty) had greeted her.
'Well, Miss Merriday, I hope you're going to take advantage of this
intimately associating with artists and having a chance to brush up
on ideals this summer.'  Nobody laughed much, either.

Listening to their wisdom, peeping in awe at Toni Titmus as she
perkily revealed that she had once been introduced to Jo Mielziner,
the scene designer, at Sardi's, Bethel felt that she was again a
freshman.

How many more times would she find that she had graduated only into
new freshmanhood?  Freshman as a baby, freshman in her first year
in grammar school, freshman in high school, freshman in college,
freshman in a summer theatre, freshman on the professional stage--
perhaps freshman in marriage and freshman as a star--would it end
only with death and her awakening to freshmanhood in heaven?

But she was rescued from humility when she discovered that these
airy habituées of the Nutmeg Playhouse, these blasé upper-classmen,
had been here only twenty-four hours longer than herself.  By the
end of an hour's painting she was becoming one of them and was
saying some pretty profound things about gag lines.  She had
discovered that if she endured their idiocies without laughing,
they would stand for hers.

The sea wind ran across the rough wild grass, touching her hair;
and she was really painting a stencil on real scenery; and she was
in a world where she could talk about the theatre from eight a.m.
to two a.m.

'I--I--I think I'm going to like it!' she burst out to the
beautiful Walter Rolf.

'Sure,' he said convincingly.

It was more than good enough.



VIII


Bethel's dormitory room, a double room which she was to share with
Iris Pentire of the stock company, was as utilitarian as a boxcar.
It had two cots, two straight chairs, two tilted bureaus, with
blisters in the paint, and a row of hooks.  But to Bethel, washing
up for dinner on her first evening in Grampion, it was enchantment,
for on the wall was a last season's poster:


                     THE NUTMEG PLAYERS

                           Present

                    MISS ETHEL BARRYMORE

                             in

                      THE CONSTANT WIFE


This was no bedroom, but the anteroom to glory!  Here her friend
Iris Pentire and she would be queens of the stage, along with Ethel
Barrymore.

Cynthia Aleshire, the scene designer, said that Iris, who would
arrive to-morrow, was a phenomenon: slim, lovely, only twenty, but
already a professional actress and one of the seven Equity-member
professionals of the Nutmeg permanent stock company at Grampion.
Iris had, reported Cynthia, been a chorus girl, a photographer's
model, played stock in Baltimore, and toured in a minor part in
Teacher Mustn't Slap.  In fact, at only twenty, Iris had as much
grilling stage experience as, a generation before, she would have
had at the age of six.  But as the youngest of the professional
stock company, at minimum salary, Iris was to live not in the
Bostonian luxury of The House but with the submarginal citizens of
the dormitory.

Bethel was going to love Iris even if she hated her.

She stripped off her sweater and slacks, sang in the shower, and in
the pride of blue skirt and clean white sweater she ran down to
dinner.

There were sixteen student-apprentices at Grampion.  They were
unpaid, and classed as amateurs, but each of them was permitted by
Equity to appear in three plays during the summer.  Higher in the
hierarchy were the permanent stock company, with Mr. Andrew Deacon
and Miss Mahala Vale as leads, and other visiting professional
actors and 'guest stars' who appeared in one or two out of the
schedule of ten plays presented during the summer of 1938.

To-night eleven out of the sixteen apprentices had come, and were
being dramatic over veal loaf, cottage-fried potatoes, coleslaw,
stuffed peppers, and huckleberry pie about a table which was made
of two retired barn doors resting on saw horses.

Pete Chew, the rich and roundly young, of whom it was already
obvious that his best role in the theatre world would be donating
scholarships to the hat-check girls in night clubs, had wondrously
changed from overalls (by Abercrombie, Fitch) to chequed grey
trousers, black and white shoes, and a sweater from the Isle of
Uist.  (But why Uist?)  He had been buzzing about Toni Titmus at
the workshop; now, as Bethel ventured into the dining-room, Pete
looked brightly at her, approached her with a festive waddle,
seized her arm and cheered, 'Uncle Pete'll sit beside you, pretty-
pretty, and save you from the sharks.'

'So the poor little rich boy is going to tell another prospect how
unappreciated he is,' said Marian Croy, the teacher-secretary-
apprentice.

'Let him alone.  Maybe he'll put money into a show for us someday!'
screamed Toni.

'I don't think it's nice of you to mock a fellow-traveller on the
gipsy trail of the arts,' said Harry Mihick.

Bethel listened doubtfully.  But Cynthia Aleshire was talking about
things called 'functionalism' and 'formalism' in stage settings,
and how you can play Macbeth all up and down and under a staircase.

The sea, filling the windows, was softening into apricot over
toward the horizon; and now Bethel met Fletcher Hewitt . . . quite
the nicest man, she decided, whom she had ever seen.

Fletcher Hewitt, though he could not have been over thirty, was the
traditional Yankee; Uncle Sam without his whiskers; tall, thin,
rusty-haired, speaking with calc'lation.  His father had been a
Rhode Island carpenter, his mother an ambitious New Jersey school
teacher, caught in matrimony on an innocent summer vacation.  At
eighteen, with his widowed mother, Fletcher had gone direct to
Broadway.  He was a good stage manager.  He had nursed twoscore
plays in New York and on the road.  In the Nutmeg Players it was
his job not only to watch entrances and off-stage noises and
curtains and all the other housekeeping and kitchenwork of the
arts, but to carry on direction when Mr. Valentine was sick after
one of his nauseas of temperament, and to keep Cynthia from making
the scenery so functional that it wouldn't function.

Fletcher's pale blue eyes were serene as summer.

Looking at the Higher Thinkers--Marian Croy, Cynthia Aleshire,
Fletcher Hewitt, Walter Rolf--Bethel was certain that she was going
to have four solid friends.  But still to arrive were the real
divinities: Andrew Deacon, Mahala Vale, the young leading woman,
and Iris Pentire, who would be Bethel's own true twin.

The rocks looking on the Sound were their drawing-room after
dinner, and the twilit moment was complete as they lounged there--
Bethel, Fletcher, Walter, Toni Titmus; tired actors (tired from
scraping scenery), carelessly disposed in rest (but pretty careful
about their attitudes of carelessness; the indolence of a knee, the
angle of a face resting on a hand).

Toni screamed, 'I've got to go up and write the loving parents.  I
wonder do we get any dancing lessons this summer?  Oh, to be a
Bernhardt, now that my stage career is here, and me not in the
doghouse--not yet.  See you soon.'  Walter Rolf sighed, 'I've got
to try and finish Stanislavski's An Actor Prepares, before we
get down to real work and I learn that Stanislavski is all
exhibitionistic nonsense.  Good night.'

Fletcher Hewitt stretched and demanded, 'Your name's Bethel?'

'Uh-huh.'

'Going to take acting seriously?'

'Oh, I am.'

'I guess most of the apprentices are.  For instance, a nice chap
like Rolf--I'll bet anything he's got an uncle who's head of some
factory and would give him a job, but Walter will gamble on earning
fifty dollars a week twenty weeks a year, as an actor.  Or an old
bird like me--I'm thirty and I didn't have a job all last winter
and I have to support my mother and prob'ly I could make two
hundred a week in Hollywood, but I'd rather get sixty as assistant
stage manager of a road show.  Thousands of youngsters ready to
starve if they can just have a chance on the stage, and no more
permanent winter stock companies to train them, and so few touring
companies--and that's the fault of the provincial audiences; they'd
get the shows if they wanted 'em enough, if they knew their
business as audiences as well as we know our jobs on the stage.  So
we flock to these theatrical Boy Scout camps--and we're making 'em
into good theatres, too!  Probably eighty-five summer theatres in
the country solid enough to last through the season--probably two
thousand kids, mostly from comfortable homes, that are willing to
scrub floors and usher and shift scenery, with the thermometer a
hundred backstage, to get a chance to act.  If the theatre's dead,
we're going to revive it--we're reviving it right now!  So!  Well,
I've got to go and have a fight with our electrician.'

She was alone on the rocks when the oversize faun, Pete Chew, found
her and crouched by her and automatically seized her hand.

'You like it here?' he said.

'Oh yes.'

'And we'll have a good time, too.  You stick by Uncle Pete, pretty-
pretty.  There's a lot of places where you can go dancing, and take
a drink, but I'm liberal; I never insist on a girl taking a drink,
unless she wants to.  If we can maybe get hold of another fellow
when the rest get here--I thought Walter Rolf would be a good
sport, but he's a stuffed shirt--but if we can round up some live
wire, him and Toni and you and I can have one swell summer.  And
swimming.'

'I'm afraid I'm going to work most of the time.'

'Oh, don't be that way.  That kind of junk is all right in college,
but we're artists--we can do anything we like and get away with it.
Don't you know that?'

'I'm afraid I hadn't thought about it.'

'Well, I see where old Uncle Pete has got to start your brain
whirling.  You come from a woman's college, don't you?  And the
backwoods?'

'Just a small manufacturing city.'

'You see?  How do you expect to be a high-class actress and act in
plays about Long Island society if you don't hustle up and see the
world?  Why, I'll take you down to New Haven sometime, and we'll do
Savin Rock.  I got my own car.  A Lincoln!'

Bethel tried to be tactful and retreat.  'Do you want to act in
society plays?'

'Well, I'll tell you, Bethel.  I'm not so much on the charm and
social stuff, though my family is one of the best in Bronxville.
I'm more you might say a comedian.  I did Falstaff in prep school--
the Ypsilanti Military Academy.  I had a row with a crank in the
dramatic club at Amherst, so I never got into that--oh yes, I'm an
Amherst man, I went there till I got sick of the place, so darn
PROVINCIAL--but I'm a good comedian.  And I'm thinking about doing
a lot with the financial backing of plays.  I can be the biggest
influence on Broadway!  That's why I want all this training this
summer.  You'll see me one of the hottest producers in town some
day.  What I could do for a girl!  I'd plan for her and make her
the biggest actress in America!'

'I see.  Maybe you can do that for Toni Titmus.'

'Her?  That little tramp?  She thinks she knows everything.  I told
her I was just interested in her artistically, and she laughed at
me.  She claims she was a walk-on in Our Town, and so she's a
professional, is she!  And when I asked her if she liked presents,
she says she only likes jewellery!  Nothing doing!  No, no--but you
and me would get along wonderfully.  I had a voice teacher in New
York for a month, Miss Lazla Lastigora--you know, the famous one
that taught Mrs. Pat Campbell and Clark Gable and everybody--and
she said I was very sensitive.  Come on!'

He patted her shoulder enthusiastically.

She achieved in answer nothing more than, 'I--uh--'

'If you been stuck away in a girls' college, you probably don't
know anything about having a good time.  And I certainly hate to
see as lovely a kid as you wasted on a lot of amateur hams here.
Maybe you think it's kind of sudden, but I swear, I'm falling in
love with you.  Do you like me?'

She spoke feelingly:

'I hope it won't happen to you, what happened to the last boy that
fell in love with me.'

'What's that?'

'Yes.  In Sladesbury.  Oh, the handsomest, wildest, gayest boy--
Charlemagne Hatch.  I TOLD him I wouldn't be good for him.  I
WARNED him.  But oh, why, why, why did he--'

'Did he WHAT?'

'Just when I'd got so I couldn't live without him.  I was always
telephoning him when he wasn't there!  Why did he do it?'

'W-what did he do?'

'Leaped right off the top of the City Hall.'

'Gee!'

'Oh, ever so much worse than that old professor . . .  Doctor
Bickling.'

'W-what happened to HIM?'

'Oh, not so bad, but I remember he talked so much like you.  He was
sensitive, too, the way you are.  And just when I thought he and I
were going to be so happy he--I can't stand it!'

'What DID he do?'

'He ran away.'

'Golly!'

'They say somebody saw him afterwards in a low grogshop in, uh,
Mexico!'

'No!'

'Why is it, Pete?  You don't think I'm insane, do you--am I a femme
fatale?'

'A WHAT?  No, no, I don't believe you are.  Well, I--gotta be
getting along.  I'll be seein' you!'

Bethel heard him shouting under Toni's window.  'Hey, come on down
and let's go summers and get a drink.  I need one!'

She smiled, even as she sat among the ruins hearing her mother say,
'Bethel Merriday, I'm sur-PRISED!'

But in the darkness she remembered Fletcher Hewitt's sermon about
the children's crusade of the summer theatre.  She thought of the
hundreds of other young people who were this moment dreaming of the
theatre, by the sea, in the cool hills, in the rustling woods,
under the stars--boys and girls from factories and colleges and
farms, from disapproving New England mansions and flats in the East
Side ghetto, exhibitionists and sound workers, Communists and
Tories and plain bored at home--an army of Gay Contemptibles.

How absurd must once have seemed the butcher's son from Stratford,
piping on his penny whistle as he trudged to London, under the
stars.



IX


On Saturday, her second day at Grampion, Bethel could not see what
the tasks which Roscoe Valentine and Fletcher Hewitt and Cynthia
Aleshire gave her had to do with acting.  She helped the coloured
maid set the table in the dormitory.  She answered the telephone in
the box office for an hour.  She sewed at heavy red curtains for
the courtroom scene in Night of January 16th till her fingers
trembled.  She stitched and hung a new chintz curtain in the star's
dressing-room, to honour their greatest guest star, the famous Nile
Sanderac (she ranked almost with Ina Claire in playing elegant
young married women), who would be coming in a week now, to enact
Candida.

Bethel's most theatrical duty was to drive the old Ford station
wagon into Grampion Centre and borrow, for the Petrified Forest
set, a cash register and a couple of round tables from Mr. Butch
Stevens, proprietor and maître d'hôtel of the Lobster Pot Dance
Hall and Dinery.  Mr. Valentine did not 'believe' in buying such
accessories or in renting them.  It was a serious matter of
principle.  He loved a nickel with the same spirited and devoted
passion that he devoted to God and Bernard Shaw.

'B-but suppose Mr. Butch doesn't want to lend them?' protested
Bethel.

Roscoe almost screamed:  'Don't take any nonsense from him!  You
tell him I say he gets half his customers from my theatre, and he
won't need this stuff--second-hand junk; I know; I've used 'em
before!--till mid-July, when the summer season's in full swing.
Don't let him bluff you!'

Across the lunch counter of the Lobster Pot, Bethel smiled on the
lumpish Butch Stevens and said briskly, 'Hello!'

'Hya.'

'I'm glad there's such a nice place to eat at in Grampion.  I
suspect I'll be coming here a lot this summer, with my bunch.'

'You one of the theatre girls?'

'Yes.'

'Huh!  None of you kids ever buy anything more than a malted milk.'

'Oh, my bunch will.  I'll see to it they do.  Now Mr. Stevens, I
can see--'

'You can call me Butch.'

'--I can tell from the way you look at me that you know I want to
ask you a favour.  You're the kind that can't be fooled.'

'So what do you want to borrow for the theatre this time?  Summer
'fore last, they took all my Coca-Cola posters and brought 'em back
torn.  But last summer, one time I was away, damn' if Valentine
didn't send some of the kids in here to "borrow" four ham
sandwiches!--and the girl let 'em have 'em, and that's the last
time I ever see any of them sandwiches, and when I tackled
Valentine about paying for 'em, he said he didn't know anything
about it, and asked me which girls it was borrowed 'em, and Lord, I
can't tell none of you actresses apart--you all look alike to me--
all bare-nekkid legs and sweaters and a lay-off-roe look.  So what
do I get stung for this time? . . .  Just some tables and a cash
register?  Does there have to be money in the cash register?
Because I suppose if Valentine wanted it, I'd have to give it to
him, or else these codfish-eating Yankees here would say I didn't
have any public spirit.'

'Aren't you a Yankee?'

'Me?  No, thank God!  I'm a foreigner . . . from New Jersey.'


She returned to the theatre, at noon, to find newly arrived four
members of the permanent stock company: Tudor Blackwall, the second
juvenile, sleek and doe-eyed and just faintly effeminate; Clara
Ribbons and George Keezer (incomprehensibly but always known as Doc
Keezer), who were both middle-aged veterans technically classed as
'wise old troupers'; and, at last, the baby of the stock company,
Iris Pentire, who was to be Bethel's own twin.

And she knew instantly that she would never know Iris.

That other twenty-year-old, Toni, the plump and pretty, had been
unhesitatingly friendly, but Iris, moving silkily about the room
she was to share with Bethel, putting away salmon-coloured silk
pyjamas and maribou-edged silver bed jacket and scarlet pumps with
gold heels high as obelisks, cautiously smiling and musically
murmuring, 'Thank you for letting me come in with you', was hidden
with cloudy veils.  She was a Mystery.

And Miss Iris Pentire saw to it that she should continue to be a
Mystery.

The most nearly convincing stories about Iris that Bethel was ever
to hear were that she was the daughter of an Irish nobleman, reared
in a nunnery, still piously virginal and viewing her stage career
as a means of portraying the austere beauties of virtue; and that
she was shanty Irish, from Wheeling, West Virginia, and had had
only twelve words, headed by 'Okay', in her vocabulary until, at
the age of sixteen, she had become the sweetheart of Clum Weslick,
the distinguished director, who had provided her with tutors and
chiropodists.

Slender, fragile, with hair not golden but colour of sunset gold
reflected on a silver box, sweet eyes, and mouth that appeared
sweet unless you saw it twisted in anger; silent, defenceless and
slim as the child Elsie Krall; silent and sweet and never quite
saying what she meant; silent and soft-moving; that was Iris
Pentire; and one moment Bethel thought she was a statuette of gold
and ivory, a charm to wonder at; and the next, a voodoo priestess.

'I--I don't suppose you care much for swimming?' said Bethel.

'No, I'm afraid I don't care much for swimming,' smiled Iris.

'I hope you'll like it here,' said Bethel--the Old Resident at
Grampion.


Saturday noon, a young man who looked like a research scientist,
and who may actually have been so but was now employed as one of
the Deacon chauffeurs, flashed into the theatre grounds and left
Mr. Andrew Deacon's favourite car, an English Rolls-Royce with a
convertible coupé body, to await Mr. Deacon's arrival as male lead
in the Nutmeg company.  It seemed that Mr. Deacon's mother would be
driving him down from Newport in a day or two.

All the apprentices, whether they came from Fond du Lac or New
York's East Side, were expert and blasé about automobiles.  But
even their youthful American cocksureness was shaken now.

'Gosh, this Andy Deacon must be some actor.  I bet if he chased
Juliet in that buggy, he'd get her,' said Toni Titmus, in a tone of
vesper prayer.

Bethel wondered if Roscoe Valentine overmuch loved his partner,
for, looking at the car, Roscoe muttered--even to her, the
outsider, the raw recruit, 'Huh!  Andy doesn't hide his wealth
much, does he--our theatrical playboy!  But the fact is, all the
money is his mother's, not his at all--and does the dear old
dowager let him know it!'


Roscoe interrupted her stippling of canvas flats, for the adobe
walls of the Black Mesa Bar-B-Q in The Petrified Forest, Saturday
afternoon, and sent her on the illustrious mission of meeting
Mahala Vale, the leading lady--she who had done so well, the past
two seasons on Broadway, as a featured player in Betty, Be Quick,
which lasted four months, and the sensational share-cropper play
You Cannot Dispossess Our Souls, which had lasted four nights and
one matinée--the second play having been a favourite of labour-
union publications and the first play of labour-union members.

Mahala Vale descended from the dusty local train like a leading
woman determined to be pleasant, and with a high handshake she
caroled, 'It was so sweet of you to meet me, Miss Merriday'.

Mahala could not have been over twenty-five or -six, but she looked
like a young woman who knew her job; carrying herself with
authority, on the tall side, wide-browed, chestnut-haired, the
true goddess; beautiful in a standard way where Iris was pretty in
an exciting, perplexing way, and Bethel was either insignificant,
or as tantalizing as music.

'A station wagon?  How very exciting!  Shall I sit up beside you?
It smells of fish, doesn't it!' said Mahala.

Bethel was hereafter to hear her say a great many things in her
'cello voice, and never to know whether Mahala meant any of them,
or what she was thinking, or whether she was thinking at all.  If
Iris Pentire was openly mysterious, Mahala Vale was mysteriously
open; if Iris bewildered the frank heart of Bethel by her silence,
Mahala baffled her by easy and indecipherable chatter.


All sixteen of the apprentices and most of the stock company had
arrived by Saturday evening, and they sat all over the rocks by the
shore, as vocal as a flock of blackbirds.  Bethel again felt like a
freshman--like a freshbird.  She was an approachable fledgeling,
but a lone one, never quite willing to belong completely to the
rule of any bevy.

She looked at the bumptious Pete Chew and the enterprising Toni
Titmus snickering together--and sometimes, she felt uncomfortably,
glancing over at her.  She looked at Iris Pentire, alone, posed as
a lone sweet goddess (small-sized) awaiting the mystery of the
moon.  She looked at Mahala Vale, being gracious and countess-like
on behalf of a circle composed of the handsome Tudor Blackwall, Doc
Keezer, the trouper, Walter Rolf, and the rustic Harry Mihick;
telling them what she had said to George Jean Nathan--though with a
considerable avoidance of what George Jean Nathan had said to her.
She looked at the honest Fletcher Hewitt being respectful--God
knows why!--to Roscoe Valentine and to Cynthia Aleshire, the scene
designer.  Suddenly she preferred the honest guttersnipes, Pete and
Toni, to all of them, and felt elated when she saw Pete (to-night
incomparable in a cream Palm Beach suit with a white silk shirt and
a crocus-yellow sash about his globular middle) rolling toward her.

'Look, Beth,' Pete whispered hoarsely, 'don't worry about you
telling me about your Past.'

'What are you talking about?  I haven't GOT a Past!'

'You can trust me, Beth.  I'm like the grave.  I haven't told a
soul.'

'Except Toni!'

'Huh?  Oh.  Her.  Well.  Yes.  Maybe.  She don't count.  How about
you and me going to Clinton to the dance tonight?'

'Aren't you afraid to go with me?'

'Well, I think a fellow ought to have experience, if he's going to
be a star.  In school I didn't hardly have a chance to see any
life.'

'How about that little waitress?'

Now Bethel knew nothing whatever regarding the relationship of Pete
Chew to any waitress.  Something inside her had told her to say
that; and she was as astonished as Pete, who gasped like a carp,
and begged:

'How the dickens did you ever--Honestly, that didn't mean anything
at all.  I fixed it all up.  Oh, sure!  I learned about women from
her.  But Beth, you got to remember, you GOT to remember that I've
always been kept down by a whole slew of rich relatives and profs.
You got to teach me.  Golly, you and me could be such friends.
Would you like a snake-skin belt?'

'I would not!'

'I know where I can get an elegant one for you, cheap.  I mean I
want to give it to you.  I mean a present.  You know.  I mean just
as a present.'

'No, thank you, Pete.'

'And you won't go to the dance with me?'

That intrusive inner voice was again speaking:  'Don't be such a
blasted prig to this poor Bronxville Casanova.  He's an amateur
even at that.  Even with the best tutors and the best champagne,
he'll never be a good flirt--not a real specialist.'  Thus warned,
she said almost tenderly:

'Not now, Pete.  Maybe some time.'

'And could I give you a box of candy?  Two pounds!'

'If you'd like.'

'I'll drive right into the Centre and buy it.'

It was the first of the assaults on her virtue which, as an
actress, she had the right to expect, in tribute to her charm and
beauty, and she was alarmed to find that she felt rather proud of
it.

Pete gone, Bethel saw Toni Titmus scampering toward her.  If Toni
was not as fat as Pete Chew, there was no reason why she mightn't
become so.  Bethel could see them, forty years from now, as an
admirable old married couple, devoted to food, the theatre, and the
rights of immorality.

Toni said cautiously, 'Well, how do you like it here, Beth?'

'Oh, fine.'

'Well . . . I guess you find it pretty tame, though.'

With huge gratification, Bethel saw that someone was in awe of her.
She felt beautiful, languorous, and a little weary of strange sins.
All of that she put into her line:  'Oh, it's good to get away to
the quiet country for a change.'

'Tell me, Beth--honestly, I've never had a chance to ask any girl
that knew:  Do you think it's better, when you've had a row with
the boy friend and you're in wrong but of course you don't want to
admit it--should you call him up or wait for him to phone?'

This fundamental social problem--one that Bethel had, actually,
never encountered--she solved airily:  'My experience is, you
better wait and keep him guessing.  If he doesn't phone, then you
haven't really got him captured anyway, and so you're safely out of
it.  These men!  You have to be brutal with 'em.'

'Are you brutal with 'em, Beth?'

'Oh, always!'

'Are you really, sure enough?'

'Certainly.  Anyone with experience is.'

'How do you handle 'em if a boy comes home with you and makes a
pass at you--one that you don't WANT to have make a pass at you, I
mean.'

'Just look at 'em and smile sort of cynically.'

'Cynically?'

'Yes, sure--cynically.'

'Well, I don't know.  Of course I haven't been much persecuted by
really dangerous men yet.'  She sighed.  'Oh, there's plenty of
boys that chase you in the university, and back home in Fond du
Lac, but that don't get far if you're living home or with a lot of
girls.  Of course when I get to New York and take a job on the
stage, I guess I'll have a little apartment to myself--of course
just a little one, not very big--and then I guess I'll have to cope
with some pretty unscrupulous fellows, producers and playwrights
and like that, old unscrupulous ones, forty or so, and I'll just
have to cope with 'em!'  She looked much brighter.

Swept by Toni's narrative powers, seeing her own self facing a
vicious old seducer of forty or so in the stilly perils of a one-
room apartment, Bethel panted, forgot the theme of her own role,
and stated with indignant virtue, 'A man like that, you just look
him square in the eye and say, "Now don't be silly!  I'm not your
sort and you better know it right now.  Don't you try--"'

She stopped, realizing that Toni was staring at her, meditative,
then derisive; and after a pause was jeering, 'Look here now,
Bethel Merriday!  My Lord, and you fooled wise old rounders like
Pete and me!  But I'll bet you're nothing at all but a Good Girl!'

Bethel looked stricken.

'Isn't that true?  Huh?  Huh?  Isn't it?'

'I'm afraid it is--more or less,' whimpered Bethel.

Toni was triumphant, then forgiving:  'Gee, I don't blame you for
fooling a dumbbell like Pete.  He's asking for it.  Oh, he's had
experience, all right, but just with waitresses and heiresses and
screwballs like that.  He don't understand educated artists, like
you and I!  And--God knows if this got known around it would ruin
me--but the truth is I'm still a Good Girl myself!  Ain't that the
limit!'

But they agreed that Iris Pentire, still sitting by herself and
smiling mysteriously, couldn't be anything so commonplace as a Good
Girl.

They were the more certain of it as slowly Iris attracted Pete
Chew, Fletcher Hewitt, the blundering Harry Mihick, and two newly
come apprentices: Cy Fickerty, a curly-headed, screaming, village
clown, and Bruce Pasture, a too-sensitive-looking boy from St.
Stephen's College.

The elegant Iris (who was Toni's own age and two years younger than
Bethel), was quavering to her pages with faint, fragile dignity, 'I
said to him, "It's vulgar of you to remind me that I was once a
chorus girl.  I would stoop to even that kind of work to get the
training necessary for my career, but now," I said, "I won't
consider anything but the poetic drama or a good part in a George
Abbott play," I said, "and