'Well?' said Bethel to Fletcher.
'I thought you were going to be idiot enough to say "Here's where I go home",' said Fletcher.
'I did say it! But then I decided that's what I was here for--to get hell--to get training.'
'Good girl. Maybe some day you'll be an actress!'
XII
She had quarter-hours when she was free to sneak into the theatre and watch rehearsals of The Petrified Forest. As Alan, the gentlemanly, the poetic, the rather seedy hero, Andy Deacon doffed all his humorous briskness, and in every word and twitchy movement of his hands was the wrecked dreamer. As Gabrielle, the lunch-room waitress who believed in François Villon, Mahala Vale was smaller than herself (but that wasn't so hard; even Bethel knew about flat heels versus high ones) and harder and quicker and more avid of love.
It was strange to Bethel, and a little embarrassing, that while she pored on Andy, he really did not know that she existed. She guessed that to him she was merely a smaller face than most among nine blank faces of girl apprentices. He had never addressed her by any more intimate form than, 'Oh, darling--look here, sweetest', and in the world of the theatre, that constitutes ignoring a person.
But Bethel could sit in the auditorium and hate Mahala and her preenings toward Andy and her dove calls and her wrigglings and her scarlet smiling lips, as large as a clown's, just as comfortably as though Mahala--or Andy--knew it.
Pete Chew had the persistence which, in the American credo, must bring success. If for twenty times a girl shrank and bleated when he tried to kiss her, it was his belief that on the twenty-first she would seize him around the neck and faint in beatitude.
So the Bethel who had never before learned the maturity of making a snug bundle of her secret thoughts and throwing them at somebody's face was driven into learning it quickly.
The precise time was at 7.25 p.m. on Sunday, June 26th, between supper and the beginning of the Nutmeg Players' first dress rehearsal, and the place was the workshop, whither Roscoe, in panic, had sent Bethel to try and find a prop shotgun which was, actually, still in the Grampion Centre Hardware Store & Undertaking.
On her shoulder she felt the familiar soft hot paw of Pete Chew. She turned.
'Will you quit trying to manhandle me? I'm sick of it!'
'Why, Beth, I'm shocked at you! I always thought you were a college woman and a lady, and here you bellyachin' like a Polack hired girl.'
'I'm just learning it. You wait till I get it rehearsed!'
'But I thought you liked me.'
'Pete, I think you ought to be the first to know. You see, I'm in love with--with--'
'Who?'
'With John Barrymore!'
It was a very good dress rehearsal, promising a successful showing of The Petrified Forest. Roscoe and Andy had for cheer the facts that: (1) nobody knew any of his lines--any whatsoever; (2) Mahala was, just now, discovered to believe that Gabby was false and pretentious, whereas she should be simple and real; (3) none of the property guns would go off; (4) the curtain stuck; (5) the prop whisky bottle, Jason's Sam Browne belt, and one shotgun were all missing; and (6) three times during the rehearsal Roscoe screamed like a switch engine.
So the wise veterans like Doc Keezer knew that at the opening, twenty-four hours from now, everything would be perfect; they so assured the almost weeping Bethel; and on Monday night, so it was.
Along with Toni and Anita Hill, Bethel was drafted as an usher that week and had her first chance to study an audience. All the girl ushers discarded their shorts and slacks and wore their best afternoon dresses. As ushers they did not feel servile, but like hostesses and just a little superior to the superior summer theatregoers who never really looked at them. Doubtless, hundreds of readers of this history will have been shown to their seats at Grampion by Bethel Merriday without their now remembering it.
There are only three classes in the audience in a city theatre: those who can afford to go--of whom some really like the play; those who want it thought that they can afford to go--they are too engaged in hoping they look like regular and expert theatregoers to have much attention left for the play itself; and the students up in the gallery, who love the play savagely or hate it volubly.
But at Grampion, in vacation time, the country audience was as mixed as an aquarium: the young station taxi driver and his beautiful wife, and old Mr. Chamberlain Brewster Boles, the banker, from his castle on Crab Neck, tobacco growers and apple growers and dairymen from up the river, the Cap'n who took summerites out fishing in his motor dory, a flutter of young married couples from New York, on vacation, the Grampion Centre doctor, grey, and his young wife, pink and stage-struck, a garage proprietor, and the Baroness Pont d'Evêque (née Quimby). They all thought fairly well of themselves as individual human beings, each with his prides and secrets and sins; they felt patronizing in attending the little theatre; and they did not notice the neat, quick, dark-eyed thin girl who ushered them to their seats. But she was sorry for all of them, that they should be such laymen, such pathetic outsiders, and not allowed backstage.
She hoped, on behalf of the poor heathen souls of the audience, that they were sufficiently advanced toward salvation to be able to see that this was, approximately, the greatest performance of the greatest play in the greatest--well, anyway, the best-managed--playhouse in the history of the theatre. She trembled with desire to tell somebody how privileged she felt.
There had never been such a stage-set as Cynthia's: the whole desert, thousands of shining miles of it, did come through the right-wall window. There had never been so touchingly lost a vagrant as Andy, so brave and mad a girl as Mahala (and if Bethel could admit it, how exquisite Mahala must have been!), so coldly terrifying a gang leader as Tudor Blackwall, so comic an old Westerner as Doc Keezer, impersonating Gramp. Bethel proudly knew that she mustn't disgrace her high office as theatre usher by guffawing, and she stood at attention at the back of the little hall, hands clenched with a mirth that scoured through her like fever, as Doc cackled, 'Don't think he really meant to do me any real harm. Just wanted to scare the pants off of me'.
This was life! At its highest!
So the ecstatic Bethel.
The theatre audience, driving over a sandy side road and parking in long grass which wet their delicate patent-leather slippers or white buckskin shoes, saw an old brown wooden church, not very well repainted. They might still have expected to find a pious meeting except that on the broad stoop were box trees in wine jars from Italy, and over the grained front door an arclight illuminating the sign:
ANDREW DEACON
MAHALA VALE
TUDOR BLACKWALL
in
THE PETRIFIED FOREST
A Desert Melodrama
The entryway had been turned into a lobby by the installation of a box office that was a bright blue coop, in which the apprentices took their turns sweating and fidgeting and misrepresenting the excellence of the tickets. In the country, every ticket buyer felt it only neighbourly to explain, 'I didn't know's we'd come to-night--looked like rain all this week--but I said to Cousin Edie--from Elizabeth, New Jersey--she's staying with us for a couple weeks--I said to her, "Oh, let's go and see a real bang-up theatre show for once," I said . . . Is a dollar sixty-five the lowest you got? My! Just for a theatre ticket!'