'I don't suppose your Miss Hinterwald will be coming down from Newport to see us, though,' sniffed Mahala.
'Her? She will not! What's Newport? Ha' done with the tents of Shem, dear lass, we've seen the Newport seasons through, and it's time to turn on the old trail, the repertory trail, the strictly one-sixty-five-top trail, that is always new. Let's go!' And he kissed Mahala again--but this time as though he took a personal interest in it--and picked up his bags to carry them to the House.
'He's kind of coy, don't you think?' said Marian Croy.
'Oh no, just young,' said old Bethel.
And later, passing the open windows of the House living-room, Bethel heard Andy and Roscoe discussing the season's casting. Andy was talking now without whimsy, quickly, firmly, cajoling the querulous Roscoe but not bullying him--not quite bullying him.
She was convinced that of all the people she had known, this Andrew Deacon was the only one who was radiantly, unquestionably, good enough for earth and heaven.
Sitting alone on the rocks, brooding, that evening, and telling herself that she mustn't sit alone brooding--it was antisocial or something like that--she felt herself a small child, and rather silly in wishing that some day Andy Deacon would be interested in her, be able to identify her in the whole mess of apprentices. She would never have a chance against the luminous Mahala.
Oh, they were all pigs, these tall, demanding women like Joan and Mahala!
She was relieved when Pete Chew came bumbling up and told her that she was a remarkably intelligent woman, ever so much more Intellectual and Sympathetic than Toni Titmus. When Pete tried to kiss her good night at the dormitory door, she had no sensation about it whatever, not even anger.
She was excited to find that someone, if only a Pete Chew, considered her a woman. But was anyone ever going to consider her an actress?
XI
The first week of the Nutmeg Players, while they rehearsed their first bill, The Petrified Forest, and cleaned the theatre of its winter accumulation of dust and cobwebs and the smell of mice, was not so wearing. It was merely slightly hysterical.
There were so many characters in the Forest cast that all the men apprentices had to be used, though their theatrical experience may have been nothing more than singing 'I Love My Little Christmas Lamb' at the Congregational Church at the age of six. So it was that Bethel and Toni, themselves still uncast for a play, had the derisive agony of seeing Pete Chew and the lugubriously artistic Harry Mihick rehearsing as the two telegraph linemen.
During the moments when they could escape from errands and from the School, the two girls, looking owlish and chewing gum, perched in the highest seats of the theatre and glowered at Pete, trying to look lounging and easy at a café table (represented, during rehearsals, by a broken stool), and repeating the line, 'Oh, is God a Russian?' as though it were a funeral speech.
Roscoe Valentine, directing, was still patient so early in the season. He didn't do anything more temperamental than pull his nose and flap his fingers like antennae as he begged, 'Chew. Please! You're supposed to be derisive.'
'Derisive? . . . I see . . . Derisive!' whimpered Pete.
'God is a Russian, or he wouldn't let that hot-water bottle act! It's a plot!' snarled Toni.
The theatre school was opened on Monday morning. It consisted of a barn, a platform, some chairs, the sixteen apprentices (as many of them, at any given time, as were not running errands or rehearsing) and the teacher. The teacher had arrived that morning and, sitting down in the barn, Bethel gasped to discover that she was Miss Maggie Sample, that handsome and bitter character actress whom she had seen seven years ago with the McDermids in The Silver Cord. Miss Sample would be all of fifty-seven now. The pickle had not sweetened in these years.
Bethel was not yet aware of the basic rule of the theatre that if you ever act with anyone, you will act with him again; that if you played St. Clair's daughter in Uncle Tom's Cabin under canvas on the Dakota circuit in 1893, you must not be surprised to find yourself cast as St. Clair's mother in a Gotham Theatre Alliance comedy by Molnar in 1940, with one of the original walk-on bloodhounds now advanced to a Pekingese in the boudoir scene.
Maggie Sample did not remember her; looked at her bleakly as Bethel gave her name.
'Where from?' said Miss Sample.
'Sladesbury! And I saw you in The Silver Cord and Dulcy, Miss Sample.'
'Sladesbury? Where's that? And what was The Silver Cord? Oh yes. Was that the operetta about the Turkish harem? Where I tried to sing the part of the Oldest Wife? And got strangled with a silver cord? Was I lousy!'
'Between my own cultural view of the drama and the practical experience of my resident teacher and the numerous visiting lecturers, I think I may say that every aspirant in our School of the Theatre acquires a complete and at once emotional and scholarly concept of acting as an art,' Roscoe Valentine was saying, just then, to a reporter from the New Haven Journal & Courier.
And he may have been right. Maggie Sample knew her craft as thoroughly as she hated it. If only, Bethel sighed from time to time throughout the summer, Miss Sample wouldn't find it a consolation to assure all young actresses that they would soon be as old and lonely and wretched as herself, with breath as short and hearts that pounded with like terror.
Bethel was never going to be that old--not at ninety, she swore.
After a five-minute speech, which consisted entirely in directing them not to be fools and particularly not to suppose that, because they had been stars in little theatres or in colleges, they could act, Miss Sample assigned to the students detached portions of plays to present next Friday.
Bethel was to play Fanny in Hindle Wakes. She went off to study, and Maggie Sample to sleep. Maggie had spent the night, till five a.m., in sitting up with her mother, who was eighty-three years old, in a gas-smelling one-room flat in Harlem. She had supported her mother for forty years, and every day for forty years her mother had told someone or other that Maggie was a success and sent her so little money because she was keeping two lovers. Maggie hated the stage. Maggie's mother loved the stage. Maggie's mother hated Maggie. Maggie had always been too busy to think about whether she hated her mother. She had also been too busy to remember ever having played, in The Silver Cord, a part about too much mother.
The part of Second Lineman, to be enacted by Mr. Peter Chew in The Petrified Forest, contained exactly eighty words. But to Pete the part was longer than Hamlet's, and more confusing than the Theory of Relativity. The one speech, 'Sure! Go ahead, Pop. Change the subject', he could, without half trying and in the space of not over five minutes, render as, 'You bet, Dad, go on and change the subject', and 'Sure, Pop, go the subject', and 'That's right, pop the subject', and sixteen other versions, all fascinating.
Naturally, he cried for a lot of cuing. He got Bethel, Toni Titmus, Iris Pentire, Anita Hill, and four other girl apprentices, all young, to cue him, and with each of them (so they treacherously reported to one another, with details, laughing as women do) he found that it strengthened his memory to put his arm around her.