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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
In "Bethel Merriday," Sinclair Lewis explores the complexities of identity and ambition through the lens of its eponymous protagonist, a young woman yearning for personal and professional fulfillment in early 20th-century America. The novel is distinguished by its sharp social commentary, weaving together elements of realism and satire to scrutinize societal norms and the struggles of women in a patriarchal society. Rich in detail and imbued with the idiosyncratic style characteristic of Lewis, it delves into themes of self-discovery and the pursuit of the American Dream amidst the encumbering expectations of societal roles. Sinclair Lewis, the first American to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, is well-known for his critical examination of American life during the early 1900s. His own experiences as a Midwesterner and his observations of the cultural shifts of that era undoubtedly informed his portrayal of Bethel Merriday. Lewis's commitment to revealing the dissonance between personal aspiration and social obligation resonates deeply throughout the narrative, reflecting his broader concerns about authenticity in a commodified culture. "Bethel Merriday" is an essential read for those interested in feminist literature, socio-cultural commentary, and the evolution of American literature. Lewis's incisive prose offers a profound reflection on the challenges faced by women seeking autonomy in a rapidly changing world. Readers will find themselves both entertained and enlightened, as Lewis masterfully navigates the intersection of individual desire and societal constraints. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - An Author Biography reveals milestones in the author's life, illuminating the personal insights behind the text. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
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Bethel Merriday
Table of Contents
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.
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.
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:
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:
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.
'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 'Noyesterdayitwasparticularlynoticeableyouseepausehesuffersfromadreadfulillness'. 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.
