Blue-grass and Broadway 8 – Daviess · Library Across
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Blue-grass and Broadway 8Chapter 8
18
Literature · Romance
Blue-grass and Broadway 8
Chapter 8
DaviessEnglish
At twelve-thirty Mr. Rooney was still in the theater with his property-man and his electrician, but just before one he left through the stage-door.
"All over, old man, you can put out your lights, lock up, and beat it," he said to the old gentleman who had sat year after year and kept the gates of his Inferno.
"Star still in her dressing-room, gent with her," the old keeper answered, as he leered at Mr. Rooney, and accepted the big black cigar offered him.
"Big, red-headed chap with the show?" Mr. Rooney questioned carelessly.
"Same," admitted the old keeper.
"Cuss her," Mr. Rooney remarked, without either special interest or malice, and took his leisurely way to his hotel.
The star dressing-room at the little Atlantic City theater, in which half the plays produced on Broadway first try out their charm, is larger than the dressing-rooms in most of the modern theaters, and dainty Susette always made any dressing-room which happened to serve Miss Hawtry look more like a boudoir than seemed possible, by taking thought to have silky rose curtains to adjust over costume-racks and windows, with covers to match to be slipped over the couple of rough chairs usually supplied dressing-rooms. A fillet covering large enough for any dressing-table, the silver and ivory of the make-up outfit, and lights shaded with the fillet over rose were about all the equipment that the French girl carried in the top of one of Miss Hawtry's costume trunks, but she managed an effect with them that many a Fifth Avenue decorator might envy. Following instructions, she had put all in exquisite order and left the theater before Miss Hawtry was off the stage. The Violet had been obliged to send her summons to Mr. Dennis Farraday by the old door-keeper; hence his knowledge of her manoeuvers.
Miss Hawtry was still encased in the magnificence of the costume for the final scene of "The Purple Slipper," and in the rose light of the little dressing-room she glowed like a fire-hearted opal as Mr. Dennis Farraday entered with the great hesitation of a first appearance in a stage dressing-room. His face was pale and serious. Miss Hawtry had seen that her Maggie Murphy insult to Mr. Vandeford had apparently cut more deeply into the big Jonathan than into Mr. Vandeford himself, and she had realized that she must set her scene well and act quickly and with daring if she accomplished her purposes.
"Forgive me--and comfort me. I have hurt myself more than I have hurt him," she cried out as she turned to him and expelled two sparkling tears from her great blue eyes, and held out bare, white, glorious arms to him, with the sob of a repentant child caught in her throat.
Now, Mr. Dennis Farraday, great gentleman and the son of a line of gentlemen, was in the same state that many another good man and true would be in after witnessing "The Purple Slipper" as played by Miss Hawtry in her compelling animality, and his angry eyes suddenly blazed with another light than anger, as with a hard breath he admitted the big, beautiful, treacherous cat into his arms and allowed her bare arms to coil around his neck and her body to cling to his.
"How could you--how can you?" he asked, and the question on his lips made them cold, and kept them from hers--long enough.
Mr. Vandeford stood in the dressing-room door without so much as rapping for permission to enter, and his face was dead white while his eyes blazed in a great terror. He seemed not to notice the purport of the scene he had interrupted, but his voice cut into the situation like cold steel.
"Denny, we can't find Miss Adair anywhere, and here's a note she left Miss Lindsey. What do you make of it?" He handed Mr. Farraday a sheet of hotel note-paper, which he took with a trembling hand while Miss Hawtry shrank back against her lace-covered dressing-table and gathered her forces to annihilate Mr. Vandeford. This was the note, which Mr. Farraday read with one glance, but failed to read to Miss Hawtry, because its few lines struck all consciousness of her existence entirely from his mind.
Dear Mildred:
Dishonor has never smirched the name of Adair until I put it on that theater program. I have branded the annals of my family, and I never want to look into a human face again. Good-by. You've been good to me.
PATRICIA.
"My God! What do you suppose she means?" Mr. Farraday gasped, as he looked in abject terror at Mr. Vandeford, who returned his glance in kind.
"And I promised Roger to take care of her," Mr. Farraday gasped, and without so much as a glance at Miss Hawtry, both men departed with all the rapidity possible. There must be some reason that all bonds without-the-law are so brittle, and those of friendship and honor and love so strong within the code.
Miss Hawtry did some rapid thinking, as unaided, she slipped from the costume of the star of "The Purple Slipper" into her normal raiment and character. Then she called a wheel-chair and had herself trundled to the hotel. While she was propelled, many other wheels were turning and turning fast.
"What does Miss Lindsey think is the matter, and where she is?" Mr. Farraday questioned Mr. Vandeford as they strode along together down the board-walk towards the hotel.
"She says it's that rotten scene between Hawtry and Height that's killed her, and she is right. I felt her die right there by my side," Mr. Vandeford answered.
"You two don't think she would really put an end to--to herself about a play, do you?" demanded Mr. Farraday, and he fairly staggered as he asked the question. Then not waiting for an answer, he began to run toward the entrance of the hotel half a block ahead. Just as he was turning into the doors with Mr. Vandeford closely following, an Italian wheel-chair boy darted out of the dusk of his stand, and plucked the latter by the sleeve; then together they went racing back the way Mr. Vandeford had come.
Half way down the long arbor, dusky under its vines, Mr. Farraday met Miss Lindsey, and in the subdued light they paused and looked into each other's faces; then entirely to the surprise of them both, they went into each other's arms and clung together like two frightened children. Miss Lindsey was smothering sobs which made her tender breast storm against Mr. Farraday's, in whose own a heart was racing with terror.
"I don't blame her; it was loathsome, and it was about her own grandmother," Miss Lindsey managed to say in a fierce, beautiful voice.
"You don't think, do you, that--" Mr. Farraday was gasping as he held Miss Lindsey still tighter against the racing heart, which was beginning to slow down and pound against hers with a slightly different speed. However, the terror in his voice made Miss Lindsey press him to her with sustaining closeness.
"She's Southern and different, and I don't know what to think," she was saying, and in the absorption of their terror they failed to notice that Miss Hawtry passed them not six feet away in her wicker chair.
And while they clung to each other and enjoyed their fright and anxiety together, Miss Hawtry went into the telephone-booth and got a long-distance connection with Mr. Weiner in New York in an incredibly short time. Their conversation was almost as incredibly short in view of its portentousness, but while it lasted, Mr. Gerald Height and Mr. William Rooney had been added to the group of anxiety under the arbor, and they were all in close conclave, though not in embrace, when Miss Hawtry returned to them, walking with cool determination in every step.
"Mr. Farraday," Miss Hawtry said, with a serenity in her rich voice and manner, "I will have to tell you as Mr. Vandeford's partner in 'The Purple Slipper' that I am entirely dissatisfied with the way the play proves up at dress rehearsal and refuse to open in it. As I am under no contract to him since Saturday night, I am motoring back to New York to-night to begin rehearsals to-morrow in 'The Rosie Posie Girl' for Mr. Weiner. Good-night!" With a stately curtsy to the assembled principals of "The Purple Slipper," very dramatic in execution, the Violet bowed herself away from them forever. Ten minutes after she was on her way back to Manhattan in a big touring-car provided by the hotel management per a telephone order from Mr. Weiner of New York.
"And Van sold 'The Rosie Posie Girl,' for her opening on Broadway in the New Carnival Theater with 'The Purple Slipper,'" Mr. Farraday gasped as he sat down suddenly on one of the benches in the dim little arbor.
"Lord, what a lose, both shows and maybe--maybe Miss Adair, too," Mr. Gerald Height exclaimed, and there were both sympathy and anxiety in his voice.
"Oh, I don't know," said Mr. Rooney, as he rolled his fat cigar from the left of his mouth to the right and spat into the vines. "I've made a pretty good play out of 'The Purple Slipper.' It will go all right without her. Actors aren't so much. It's the situation and the stage-managing."
"That's what you think," jeered Mr. Gerald Height, gloomily. "I always had a hunch that I would never play wig and ruffles."
"Can that hunch," commanded Mr. Rooney. "I'm going to put Miss Lindsey in the part and play it refined for a winner. Been understudying Miss Hawtry, haven't you, Miss Lindsey?"
"Yes," answered Miss Lindsey, and a sudden radiance shone from her dark, intellectual face that lit up the whole arbor and lighted a flame in the creative hearts of both Mr. Gerald Height and Mr. William Rooney. And what it lighted in the hearts of both of those gentlemen was nothing to the blaze it fanned in the heart of Mr. Dennis Farraday, where it had been smouldering along from a spark touched off the day of the beefsteak and mushrooms. "If you'll help me play it as I have seen it all along, Mr. Rooney, I can go on to-morrow night."
"Good," agreed Mr. Rooney. "I'll shove Miss Grayson up into your part, and cut out hers until we get a girl. We'll get the little author busy right now, blotting out the Hawtry smell and putting you in, as I say, refined and--"
"Oh, but where is she?" moaned Mr. Farraday, coming back to his agony of uneasiness, which had been drugged by hearing and seeing "The Purple Slipper" and Mr. Vandeford's fortunes rescued and reconstructed right before his ears and eyes.
"There ain't but two places for a refined lady to run in Atlantic City,--the railroad station and the ocean,--and I bet Mr. Vandeford is lugging her from the railroad station right now," Mr. Rooney said with easy conviction. "Course she'd dodge back to the Christian ladies home the first mud-puddle she stepped into, but we'll set her on her feet and rub the splashes off her white stockings and--"
Mr. Rooney was interrupted in his kindly flow of reassurance by the appearance of a wheel-chair propelled by the shrewd Italian youth, who had that evening made his individual fortune, in which sat Mr. Vandeford and the author of "The Purple Slipper." Without command, he stopped beside the group of friends, and Mr. Vandeford alighted, but Miss Adair shrank back into the shadow of the perambulator.
"Oh, darling, listen," cried Miss Lindsey, as she reached into that retreat and drew Miss Adair into her arms. "Miss Hawtry has thrown up the part and gone back to New York, and I am going to act it for you just as you and I have talked about it all this time. Mr. Rooney is going to help us, and we--we are going to make good for you--and Mr. Vandeford--to-morrow night. We are!"
"Just watch us, Miss Adair. I'll do my best, and I'll--I'll be like we talked the other day," Mr. Height said as he came to the other side of the wicker retreat of the hunted author. Something in his voice made Mr. Dennis Farraday put his arm around the lizard's shoulders, a thing he would not have thought of doing a week ago.
"We are all going to stand by, little girl, and it'll be some play that we produce at the New Carnival October first," Mr. Farraday put in by way of his contribution to the wounded young author.
However, it was the crack of Mr. Rooney's whip that brought her to her feet again.
"Miss Adair, you and Lindsey come back with me to the theater now," he commanded the shrinking and tragic author. "Somebody get Fido and tell him to wake up everybody and have 'em all at the theater to rehearse in a hour; that'll be three o'clock. Mr. Vandeford, you'd better get in a press story over long distance before Hawtry beats you to it. You may catch a morning paper or two. Now, everybody get out and work like fun and we'll show Broadway a sure-fire hit October first."
"Can you do it, Bill?" Mr. Vandeford asked in a quiet voice. It was the first time he had spoken since he had coolly and silently picked Miss Adair up off a bench in the little railroad station and put her into the sympathetic young Dago's one-man-power conveyance.
"I can take ten yards of calico, a pot of red wagon paint, and a pretty gal and make a show to fill any theater on Broadway for six months--if I'm let alone," answered Mr. Rooney, with the assurance that moves mountains. "That Lindsey is one good actor with common horse-sense, and the little author filly has Blue-grass speed. Watch us!"
"Goes!" answered Mr. Vandeford, and steel sparks struck out in his keen eyes as he turned and went rapidly to one of the long-distance telephone booths with which all Atlantic City keeps up its intimate relations with New York. It was also astonishing how quickly he got his connection with a great New York morning paper and was put on the desk wire of one of the junior editors, who was a good friend in need.
"Hello, Curt. Godfrey Vandeford speaking."
"With my show in Atlantic City. Can you get a note across in the morning issue?"
"Good! Spread it that Hawtry is put out of 'The Purple Slipper' cast to give place to a new Pacific Coast star, Mildred Lindsey. Hawtry handed it to Denny and me rotten, but put that under pretty deep, with Lindsey blazed in top lines. I'll have my publicity man send you a special Lindsey Sunday story. Hot stuff."
"Thanks, old man! By!"
Another fifteen minutes was spent in long distance communication with Mr. Meyers, and it was ten minutes after three o'clock in the morning when Mr. Vandeford slipped into his chair beside his author in the little Atlantic City Theater, which Mr. Rooney had induced the old night watchman door-keeper to open up at the hour when all teeming Atlantic City is in the depths of repose. Mr. Rooney had with him the entire cast of "The Purple Slipper," to whom he had just finished explaining the cause of their extraction from their well-earned repose.
"Most of the Sister Harriet scenes are with me," Miss Bébé Herne was saying, with efficient energy fairly radiating from her big body, clothed in a decorous tailor skirt, but with a boudoir jacket serving for blouse. Also two kid curlers showed at the nape of her neck. "I can feed Miss Grayson into Miss Lindsey's part enough to get by to-morrow--to-night I mean. And Wallace can do the same when he's on with her. That ugly white cat Hawtry to double on Godfrey Vandeford after he pulled her out of Weehawken!"
"Get on, get on, everybody, and use your brains until they lather," commanded Mr. Rooney as he took his stand beside the left stage box. "Now, Miss, you gimme lines out of your head or your first draft when I call for 'em, and I'll take 'em or leave 'em as suits me. Then you smooth the ones I hand you into good talk, and we'll have a show here by sun-up that you'll be proud to invite your Christian lady friends to attend. And we'll keep all the 'pep' too, Vandeford, that you paid Howard to write into it, only we'll take the Hawtry dirt out of it. On, Betty Carrington, and the curtain's up."
Then from three o'clock in the morning until almost noon the machinery of "The Purple Slipper" was overhauled and adjusted to the new cog. Mr. Rooney lashed and rubbed and polished and oiled with never a let-up on anybody, and beside him sat the author, with her head up and the bit in her mouth. For every line that rang untrue in the reconstruction she had a true one or she took a crude bit from Mr. Rooney and polished it into place. Fido sat crouched in a front seat and transcribed every word into his prompt copy so as to be a veritable first aid.
And Mr. Godfrey Vandeford, experienced show man that he was, felt as if he was witnessing a miracle as he beheld Miss Adair's original "Purple Slipper," with its haphazard amateur charm, again put forth bud and bloom on the branches of Grant Howard's tight-knit, well-constructed, and well-rounded drama. The highly-colored flowers of Hawtry personality Mr. Rooney pruned away and constructed others for Lindsey, and Miss Adair lent them color and perfume in passing them to the new star, who was working steadily, slowly, surely, and with great power.
"Don't tell him that his eyes 'burn into yours until your soul is seared.' That's old. We got to get a kind of smile here where Hawtry looked like she was going to do the ham sandwich act to Height and his silk tights." Mr. Rooney stopped the abhorred scene, being acted along about six o'clock in the morning, to demand that it be played in the proper key, up to which he had succeeded in wringing lines from Miss Adair for the first act and most of the second. "What do hearts do to each other that's hot and decent and funny all at once?" Mr. Rooney fired this biological question to the author of "The Purple Slipper," and looked at her with a demand for an immediate answer in his little, black, driving eyes.
"She can say 'There's chaff in my heart; guard the fire in yours,'" Miss Adair supplied offhand.
"That hands it to him, and a good double meaning, too," Mr. Rooney approved. "Go ahead, Height, but don't get this lady mixed with the other kind. Remember, she lives at the ladies Christian home." The laugh that greeted this sally was an uproar that added to the dash and quick fire of the big scene, which Miss Adair and Mr. Rooney had so quickly expurgated and reconstructed between them.
At seven o'clock the play had been entirely run through, and Fido had the result in his prompt copy and was beginning to rapidly write it into their lines for each of the cast.
"One half hour to get breakfast and Miss Herne's back hair down," Mr. Rooney said, with the callousness of a slave-driver. "Then if you run through again fairly well we'll be done by noon, and everybody can hit the hay for six hours."
Mr. Vandeford watched his author's proud little head droop on the box rail in front of her, and with his face very white he motioned Mr. Farraday to come to her. After his degrading the night before at the hands of Miss Hawtry, he felt that he would be unable to endure the pain of the repulsion he felt sure he would find in her eyes if she ever looked at him again.
But his summons of Mr. Farraday failed in peremptoriness, for that big, bonny gentleman nodded to him, then stood in the wing to catch Miss Lindsey in his arms and bear her away to immediate nourishment. In the excitement of the last few hours a domesticity had grown up between Mr. Farraday and Miss Lindsey that it would have taken months to build in a world less hectic than that in which they were then living.
Their courtship had been brief, and consisted in one question, asked by Mr. Farraday while Miss Lindsey stood in the wings waiting for a moderated, impassioned cue from Mr. Height, and answered by her as she responded to him and the call of her stage lover at the same moment.
"When will you marry me?"
"When 'The Purple Slipper' goes on Broadway."
In the circumstances it was natural that Mr. Dennis Farraday should take Miss Lindsey for a reminiscent beefsteak and mushrooms during the only free half hour she would have for either him or food in the ensuing day, and to fail to heed Mr. Vandeford's summon.
Thus deserted, Mr. Vandeford was about to steal forth and appeal to some member of the cast of "The Purple Slipper" to come to his rescue in providing refreshment to restore the author during the precious half hour respite when "the chaff in his heart" caught fire and began to burn away forever. Miss Adair raised her eyes to his, with the faith still in their wounded depths, and smiled a wan little smile.
"Please get me a glass of milk with an egg in it, and some of that brown-bread turkey," she demanded. "I'm dead, but I'll come alive again if I go to sleep a minute. Shake me when you get back with it, but get something for yourself while you are gone."
"The kiddie, the precious, spunky kiddie," Mr. Vandeford said in his heart over and over as he and the young Italian rushed to the hotel and back with a waiter and a tray of the desired refreshment, to which had been added an iced melon and a couple of bedewed roses.
The shaking had to be literally administered while young Dago Italiana held the tray, and then had to be repeated several times by Mr. Vandeford, as he almost as literally fed his exhausted author, up until the very minute in which Mr. Rooney rang up the curtain and again called her into action.
Five hours was more than enough for the smooth running of the three-hour "Purple Slipper" show, and at eleven o'clock Mr. Rooney dismissed his jaded cast with this strict command delivered in his rich, deep voice, which held a note of genuine solemnity.
"All of you go to sleep every minute between now and night, and then come back here and make good--for all of us."
With the assistance of young Dago Italiana, Mr. Vandeford delivered Miss Adair to a hotel maid, who accepted five dollars from him as a fee for putting her to bed, and then he plunged into still greater strenuosities.
He sat for three hours with his skilled young publicity man and advance-agent, and laid out a discreet, dignified, but very interesting, publicity campaign for the new star of "The Purple Slipper." Due importance was to be given in all the notices that "The Purple Slipper" was to open the New Carnival Theater and in his heart the young advertiser put away the intention of making the fact that Mr. Vandeford had sold Hawtry and "The Rosie Posie Girl" for "The Purple Slipper," his most brilliant reserve story to set all of Broadway, at least, agog for the opening of the expensive new play.
"It puts 'The Purple Slipper' at the big end of the horn, and it's not your fault that there is only the little end of the horn left for 'The Rosie Posie Girl' for the time being," he explained to Mr. Vandeford. "You see, it is a kind of double-cross that acts both ways. If it goes, people will think it was worth your paying a big price for, and if it fails, they'll think the 'Rosie Posie Girl' couldn't have been much if you traded a chance on such a poor show for it."
"Goes!" said Mr. Vandeford, but he was aware that the smart manoeuver, which would once have delighted his soul, made him intensely weary.
In fact, so fatigued did he feel when he left this young press schemer, that he dropped into his bed for an hour, and had a masseur come and pound him into condition to go to the train with good Dennis Farraday to meet Mrs. Farraday, Mrs. and Mr. and Miss Van Tyne, who arrived at five o'clock from big Manhattan. Mr. Farraday had had a like operation performed upon himself, and was in such a radiant condition that Mr. Vandeford felt badly eclipsed beside him.
"What does it all mean about Miss Hawtry and Miss Lindsey and the show, Van?" Mrs. Farraday questioned, with greater anxiety in her face than she had had at any other opening night of her favorite's successful shows. "Are we going to have a terrible time?"
"I'm going to put you in a wheel-chair and let Denny take you up to the north end of the board-walk and tell you all about it while I locate and make comfortable the rest of the folks," Mr. Vandeford answered with a deep relief at her presence in his eyes.
"Where are my girls?" she questioned.
"Both dead--asleep," he answered, as if deeply happy to be able to say it of his star and his author.
His statement was only partly true, for while Miss Adair slept the sleep of the emotionally unanxious, Mildred Lindsey sat crouched by her window, with her eyes looking far out over the Atlantic Ocean, waiting for the result of Mr. Dennis Farraday's talk with his mother at the north end of the board-walk.
There are occasionally mothers who bear sons who can tell them all about things, and Mrs. Farraday really enjoyed the whole story that big, bonnie Dennis poured out to her at the sunset hour by the brink of old ocean, Dago Italiana squatting on his heels out of hearing and basking in inactivity, from the moment of the beefsteak episode in his and Miss Lindsey's acquaintance up to the moment in which Miss Hawtry had established herself in his arms on the occasion of his début in a stage dressing-room. And even at that stage of the narration she rather astonished Mr. Farraday, who was shamefaced enough at the telling, by saying with soft pity in her motherly voice:
"The poor woman. Of course she couldn't help loving you, and now she's lost both Van and you. Now go on and tell me about Mildred."
"She--she's the best ever," was Mr. Farraday's explicit and enlightening answer.
"Of course she is. I saw that the time you brought her to dinner with me, and also that you were in love with her. She's really a rather wonderful girl, and--and--Dennis, I'll tell you something that I never expected to tell you--I've always wanted to be an actress. I simply adore that Lindsey girl, and I know she'll make a great actress. Why on earth should she want to marry you?" Which goes to show that aristocratic Mrs. Farraday was not the ordinary mother.
"Let's go ask her," roared big Dennis, as he embraced her in a way that made the sympathetic and now wealthy young Dago Italiana flash his white teeth in joy.
And nobody can say how much the fate of "The Purple Slipper" was affected by the fact that Rosalind went upon the stage for her first appearance as a star, straight from the tender arms of stately, white-haired Mrs. Farraday.
The opening night of "The Purple Slipper," by Patricia Adair, produced by Mr. Godfrey Vandeford, and staged by Mr. William Rooney, was a triumph undisputed and acknowledged by a brilliant cosmopolitan audience such as Atlantic City furnishes any play presented to it before September the twenty-fifth, for up until that week on the board-walk of that resort East meets West and the South joins them. The eminent author sat in the left stage box with Mrs. Justus Farraday of New York and Mr. and Mrs. Derick Van Tyne, and at her side was a chair into which at times dropped Mr. Dennis Farraday, but which had been reserved for the producer. Things had gone brilliantly from the start, from the moment the curtain went up with polished, interesting Miss Herne manoeuvering the frightened and substituted Betty Carrington through the opening dialogue. A veritable gasp of joy had greeted the beautiful Mr. Gerald Height as he entered in his colonial wig, ruffles, and velvet, and his big eyes under their bowed brows sought out the author and smiled at her with a genuine pledge of loyalty which no lizard could ever have given forth as he glided richly into his archaic banter with Miss Herne.
"He'll get 'em going, get 'em going the whole dame bunch from Harlem to the Battery," muttered Mr. Rooney to Fido, who stood in the wings, with his eyes glued to the much annotated prompt copy. "Now watch out for Lindsey; she's doing forty sides of new stuff in twenty hours. Me for the stock company to train 'em young. Let her rip, Rosalind!" And with a nod Mr. Rooney sent his "bet" out upon the stage to make the audience forget that they had paid their money to see Violet Hawtry and make them glad to have paid it to see her.
As Mildred Lindsey stepped out on the stage in all the glory of an almost unbelievable beauty, Mr. Godfrey Vandeford, who sat with his shoulder back of that of the author of his play, seemed to behold a vision with his trained theatrical foresight. This slender, powerful young woman, with the rose dusk of the prairie sun on her cheeks, the depths of the great cañons in her dark eyes, and the breadth of the far horizons across her broad brow seemed to him to typify the rise of order in her profession, over which so long had ruled chaos. And as her rich voice led the intrigued audience from one brilliant scene to another, in which she reincarnated before their eyes a very flower of the old Southern chivalry with dash, finish, and lucidity, he felt as if he had done his best and now had a right to be allowed to depart in peace from the world of tinsel and illusion. As Lindsey and Height held the audience spell-bound while the tempted wife dueled with her might against the tender and desperate lover, placing, with a combined art that was as great as any he had ever witnessed, the "big scene" of "The Purple Slipper" among the "big scenes" of the modern stage instead of in the class of lascivious masterpieces where the night before Hawtry had laid it, Mr. Vandeford looked down into the gray eyes of the girl who had had it all in her blood for generations, and who had so brilliantly given it birth, and felt a prophecy rise within him that soon the American drama would begin to draw on the wealth of tradition which had been piling up in a vast storage for it, and that when it did, dramatists and actors, men and women, would rise to interpret it to a wondering world.
"Is it really mine?" she asked him, in proud surprise and wonder.
"Yes, it's yours--filtered through Howard and Rooney and all the rest, but--it--is--you," he answered. "You lost it a dozen times, but--his own comes back to a man or a woman."
His eyes blazed so that the long lashes lowered over the stars in hers, and she saw the curtain fall on the last scene in a mist of tears. The onrush of applause that raised the curtain half a dozen times was confused in her by the pounding of Mr. Vandeford's heart back of her shoulder and the echo in her own.
"Fifty weeks and then some, Van," she heard the young press-agent declare, in business-like congratulation.
"Sure-fire hit," Mr. Rooney pronounced, as he spat on the stage floor behind the curtain. "Rehearsals at ten to-morrow to tighten up, Fido. Me for the hay." Miss Adair had gone back of the footlights to cast her gratitude into his arms, and he had failed to notice her appearance in any way at all, but had spat and gone on his autocratic way. Perhaps in the New World of the Theater, stage-managers may be able to afford to be human, perhaps not.
Mr. Vandeford's supper-party to the cast of "The Purple Slipper" and the friends from New York who had come down to see its try-out, lasted until two o'clock in the morning, but when it was over neither the moon, which was as full that night as Mr. Kent had become by coffee and cigars, nor Dago Italiana had retired, and both stayed on their jobs out at the south end of the board walk, where boards melt off into sand and ocean and sky.
Mr. Godfrey Vandeford had got about two thirds of the way along the painful stretch of autobiography, with which he was inflicting agony on himself by recounting to Miss Adair, when she raised her gray eyes to his with the faith and reverence still at their average level, even slightly higher, and stopped his punishment.
"I understand exactly why people like you and Miss Hawtry don't marry each other," she astonished him by saying in all calmness. "Mr. Height explained it all to me the other day. Actors and actresses have peculiar temperaments that fly together when they ought not to, and fly apart when they ought to stay together. I know just how that is because I feel--"
"Hush!" commanded Mr. Vandeford, as he laid his hands on the shoulders of his author, who was standing close to him, with the moonlight full on her clear-cut, high-bred face, and he gave her a savage shake. "The whole crazy bunch will have to have law and order shot into 'em or the theatrical profession will follow horse-racing to the devil. If they don't give up unfaith and the double-cross Broadway will open some night and swallow them all. And here you come out of a real world and say to me--"
"What did you think I was going to say?" demanded Miss Adair, pressing so close to him that it was impossible for him to administer another shake.
"I don't know and I don't want to hear it. I'm afraid to have you say anything to me."
"It was this: I was going to ask you what I would have done if you had been married to Miss Hawtry when I got to you and we had begun to produce our play together. It's different when men and women work together! Standards have to be broader. How do I know that I would have run away to--"
"Don't, don't!" pleaded Mr. Vandeford as she crept still nearer to him and forcibly tried to open his arms for herself. "I'm punished. I've taught you myself! When I leave you how'll I ever know if I'm going to find you there when I come back?"
"Well, how'd you expect to find me--me--there if you don't take me there?" Miss Adair pleaded as she tugged at his folded arms, with such energy that her polished thumb-nail slightly marked his iron wrists.
"I'm not worthy, child, I'm not worthy," Mr. Vandeford answered with grim words, and his arms still taut against his breast.
"You have to judge yourself with the same--same 'broad standards' I judge you by, like you told me to use. Please open your arms!"
"I take those broad standards away from you."
"Jesus Christ gave them to me, only I didn't understand in Adairville."
"God, I wish you had never left Adairville."
"I know what there is for us to do."
"What?"
"I'll go back and marry you by Adairville narrow standards for better and for worse, and then we'll have to keep 'em for ourselves when we come back, because we did it knowing what we know, but let other people be broad wherever they are without judging them. I'm going to drop asleep right here on the sand if you don't open your arms."
"Oh, good Lord, what did You make women out of?" Mr. Vandeford said in all reverence and bewilderment, as he took the "white flame" to his breast and drew it past her lips until it burned away all the chaff in his soul and established itself upon its altar.
After Mr. Vandeford had again delivered his author to the hopeful maid, waiting up for another greenback, he met Mr. Rooney at the desk of the hotel still on his way to "the hay."
"Closed up with Weiner to begin rehearsing 'The Rosie Posie Girl' on Tuesday, after we open 'The Purple Slipper' in the New Carnival. Said Hawtry wouldn't sign up until I had signed too. She's got a hunch for me. If you fail, their show goes in in your place; if you win, Weiner shunts John Drew or Arliss out to one of his other theaters on the road, and puts in 'The Rosie Posie Girl.' Good business, eh?" And Mr. Rooney rolled his cigar from east to west and questioned Mr. Vandeford, with a new fire for a new undertaking beginning to burn in his little black eyes.
"Fine," answered Mr. Vandeford, with all cordiality, and not even thinking of his lost thousands. "It will go big, Rooney, and I'll be glad--none gladder."
"Sure," answered Mr. Rooney. "It's all in the business. Everybody on Broadway is out to stab everybody else--but mostly it's paper daggers if you take it right."
"A tissue-paper world sewed together with tinsel thread," Mr. Vandeford murmured, as he fell asleep with his cheek pillowed on the wrist that Miss Adair had marked in the struggle for her own.
A week from that night "The Purple Slipper" had its first night on Broadway, and opened the New Carnival Theater in a blaze of glory, publicity, and electric lights. The talented young press-agent had done his work well, and the audience assembled was the most brilliant possible, made up of the usual blasé critics, eager theatrical people who were not on the boards themselves, and interested and distinguished men and women from many outer worlds. In the box facing the one occupied by Mrs. Justus Farraday, in a blaze of both the Farraday and Justus jewels and prestige, and the beautiful young author of the play, with her son Mr. Dennis Farraday, and the producer, Mr. Godfrey Vandeford, sat Miss Violet Hawtry with Mr. Weiner, the owner of the beautiful new theater which was opening its doors for the first time on Broadway. When the curtain fell upon the new Lindsey star after its eighth elevation, the Violet rushed behind the scenes and took that astonished young woman in her arms, with the real tears of emotion, with which one genuine artist greets another, in her great blue eyes.
"You were wonderful, my dear, perfectly wonderful," she exclaimed. "You see, Van, I never could have done it like that. Good luck to both of you, and the little author--oh, there you are, my dear! All of you shake hands with Mr. Weiner. He's so pleased that he is speechless, but he's going to give you a big banquet on your fiftieth performance. He's promised me."
Which demonstration was perfectly in keeping with Miss Hawtry and Maggie Murphy's character, and emanated from that quality within her that a month later put "The Rosie Posie Girl" up as high and as brilliant in electric lights as "The Purple Slipper," and kept it there an entire year. Which goes to prove that the "tissue paper world" is yet of heroic fibre.
When Mr. Vandeford went to insert his author into the international safety that evening at about the hour of midnight, he saw that his friend the secretary was shooing a chattering party of Christian ladies, who, as his guests, had sat in a group, fifth row center, in the New Carnival Theater that evening, off up-stairs. With his talisman key, which had never left his pocket since it had been presented to him, in his hand, he paused to speak in a friendly shadow to his successful and now truly eminent playwright.
"You'll have to go South Thursday, and I'll follow Sunday to get that little marriage business over in Adairville before we leave for the Klondike. My commission has arrived from Washington, and the Secretary of the Navy wants quick reports of the copper before the big freeze. Do you suppose I can keep you warm in Eskimo furs and--and my heart?"
"Yes," answered Miss Adair, with the flutter which Mr. Vandeford now answered, without any conscious volition. "There ought to be a great play out of the Klondike. Jack London could have done it, but--but--" the faithful gray eyes were raised to his with the flame in their depths.
With a groan, but an answering flame, Mr. Vandeford replied:
"It's a fatal drag--. Yes. Some day we'll come back and try to put across another one!"
