But that smile was a wall, too, that protected her. Day after day, while the fledgelings expected her to go farther and say something cheerful and intimate, like 'The rehearsals aren't going as bad as you'd think', it became more evident that she had a low opinion of Mr. Roscoe Valentine, a high and lively opinion of Mr. Andrew Deacon, a fellow-workman liking for Doc Keezer, and of the others, no opinion at all.
Poor Andy, blundering as bountifully as any other young collegian, tried to persuade Miss Sanderac to like his Mahala, who was not in the Candida cast and therefore sulkily invisible for a while. Sitting in the grass before the porch of The House, Bethel heard Miss Sanderac crying to Andy, 'Oh, Andy, don't you want to drive me to Clinton for dinner? We can get back here before you have to make up.' And heard Andy loyally trying to drag in his pet gazelle, with:
'I'd love to go, Nile. How about taking Mahala with us?'
'Oh, I guess we won't have time, after all,' sniffed Miss Sanderac. And still Andy did not learn. He cried to the great lady, 'I do wish you could have seen Mahala in You Cannot Dispossess Our Souls. She was swell--absolutely like a young prophetess!'
'In what?'
'In You Cannot--Oh, you heard me, I won't say it again.'
'I should think not, darling. "You Can't Possess Us." What a title! What is it?'
'It's a play about share croppers.'
'No. You're kidding.'
'Oh, quit it. And she was swell!'
'Who was swell?'
'Mahala Vale.'
'Who's Mahala Vale?'
'Oh, dry up.'
'That's right, darling. Go on. Use me as you will. Yell at me. Beat me. Divorce me. You never did divorce me, did you?'
'I would, if I had you.'
'Oh course you would, my pie-lamb. Wait! Aren't you the young man I just met this week? We haven't been married, not ever, have we?'
'We have not, darling. Not yet.'
'And you've never even married some little number like Mahala? Oh, dearie me, you have been busy with the Career!'
Andy Deacon could not have known that the slight, pleasant dark girl, sitting on the grass, chin in hand, her back to them--Bess Meredith her name was, or something of the sort--was not only devouring their words but scolding him ferociously:
'Oh, Andy, my dear boy, what a fool you are . . . And so sweet . . . And so dumb! . . . I know, dear; this Sanderac woman is ten or twelve years older than you are, and she's hard-boiled and she's extravagant, and she doesn't care any more for the spotlight than she does for heaven. But how much better it would be if you could fall in love with someone like her, that is honest and stands on her own feet and that can act, instead of these camelia-scented sharks like Mahala or Joan, that'll get everything they can out of you, that'll never stop acting off stage or start acting on! . . . I'll bet Mahala has never kissed you--or anyway, she held on to the kiss and snatched it back. And of course you'd never know that a really nice girl like me ever existed!'
Since she was not rehearsing for Candida, Mahala had the daytimes this week vacant, from her favourite rising hour--noon--till early supper. Bethel innocently wondered what this young actress, not without experience and ambition, would do with her freedom.
Read? Exercise? Go and be noble about something?
Well, Mahala slept. And she also sat on the beach and looked sorry for herself.
Bethel too was lonely--when she had time to think about it. The offended Pete Chew had taken Toni away from her; she could never get through the veil of sweet, shining nothing that surrounded Iris Pentire; and Fletcher Hewitt and Walter Rolf were as pleasant as the west wind and just as impersonal. But she understood loneliness. She was used to being lonely; she always had been, always would be, unless Fate flourished the one miraculous lover . . . who would surely look extraordinarily like Andy.
She watched Mahala looking for a confidante to share her free week; poking a mental finger into the ribs of Iris, Toni, Marian Croy, Anita Hill, and giving them up as too commonplace to appreciate her. At last, rather obviously for a lady actress, she decided that Bethel would have to do, as servant of her bosom. Bethel told herself that she wasn't at all flattered--and was thoroughly flattered and excited by the favour of this wise, experienced old actress of twenty-six. They sat yawning or laughing on the beach, Mahala in a bathing suit so tight, so white, with such handsome long white legs, that she would have seemed embarrassingly naked, had she not too much resembled an unbreathing marble statue.
'Oh, this place is such a bore,' whined Mahala. 'I think I'd of done better to go out to Southampton, on Long Island--Mrs. Fribble invited me to go out and spend all summer--you know, the Montgomery Fribbles, he's the banker; they got scads of money and a yacht. Roscoe is too pixie--he couldn't direct swatting a fly--and the stock company are all such hams.'
'Oh, not Andy, Mahala!'
'No, he's a pretty fair actor--if he doesn't tackle any parts that require subtlety. I had the most awful time carrying him in Petrified Forest. He would play Alan, who ought to be all delicacy, like a Yale basketball player. And he's not so young--he's older than I am; not so young that you can excuse him for falling for an old jalopy like Nile, who'll be playing Irish grandmothers in Hollywood in another year.'
'Mm,' said Bethel.
'You're lucky, Beth. Of course it doesn't make any difference to you what second-raters everybody here are, as long as they're fun to play around with. I notice this Chew boy is interested in you (oh, I never miss anything; that's my business, as an actress!). He's a little dumb, but he ties his ties well, and I know he's got lots of money. You better grab him and marry him--or else you might have to go back to your home town, wherever that is. You're lucky not having the kind of irresistible leaning toward a stage career that I'm cursed with.
'It's all very well for me to get a lot of silly flattery about my talent and beauty--and honestly, I'm so honest with myself, I don't think I'm especially beautiful--but they're like chains--they bind me to the theatre--people just won't let me go and retire and live a quiet life, the way I'd like to.
'Still, I'll admit there are rewards, when--only it doesn't happen very often--these playwrights are such dopes!--when you can get a play that's really worth interpreting. I wish I were back in You Cannot Dispossess Our Souls. Maybe it didn't run so very long, but the praise we got--you never heard anything like it! Oh, the professional critics ganged up on us, of course; they always do; they're jealous of all brave new experiment. Brooks Atkinson said in the New York Times that it was "dull though doubtless worthy", and Dick Watts said in the Herald-Tribune that it was "worthy though doubtless dull", and the second-string critic on the Sun, he wrote almost a whole column--he said it wasn't a play at all, but just a Communist attack on the Governor of Oklahoma, and the New Masses--they said it was a Trotsky-ist attack on Communism and Abraham Lincoln! But they all said I was all right, and Ward Morehouse, he had a note in his column that said I looked like Joan Crawford.'
Mahala stopped, scratched her knee, looked at the sea, apparently decided that all this water was pretty useless, and sighed: