'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.