Blue-grass and Broadway 6 – Daviess · Verses Across
Literature · Romance
Blue-grass and Broadway 6Chapter 6
18
Literature · Romance
Blue-grass and Broadway 6
Chapter 6
DaviessEnglish
Rehearsals for "The Purple Slipper" had been called positively for September first, and the response became unanimous at about fifteen minutes to eleven at the Barrett Theater on West Forty-sixth Street; that is, it was unanimous except for the presence of the author and the angel--Miss Adair and Mr. Farraday--and Miss Violet Hawtry, the star, who never came to first readings until the whole cast was assembled and could be impressed with the fact that she came and went as she listed.
"Ladies and gentlemen, I take it that you all know one another--and Mr. William Rooney," said Mr. Vandeford, as he took a seat at the left of a table placed in the center of the stage just beyond the footlights. Mr. Rooney marched to a place beside him, and rapped with a large black pencil for attention from the groups into which the dozen members of the cast had fallen after mutual introductions and greetings.
"Everybody grab a seat that is good enough to glue to for five hours while Fido here gives out your parts," commanded Mr. Rooney, without in any way acknowledging Mr. Vandeford's introduction to the company. Mr. Rooney's voice was low and rich, and had the precision and decision of a machine-gun in its utterances. With hurried obedience the entire company looked about the stage for seats.
Miss Bébé Herne, though having fifty pounds the advantage of any of the others in avoirdupois, was the first seated. She merely dropped down upon a stout pine bench, the front of which was stuccoed to represent antique marble, and peremptorily motioned Mr. Wallace Kent to that portion of the seat left after she had wedged herself as far to one side as possible. Mr. Kent obeyed immediately, though he had just placed a rickety, stuffed chair beside the gold one occupied by Miss Blanche Grayson, the glowerer. Miss Lindsey sat on the end of an overturned box hedge before a drop curtain of a twilight night, and Mr. Reginald Leigh sat in a wicker chair under a brilliant canvas flowering shrub of no known variety. The rest of the company were soon seated and receiving the small, blue-backed, manuscript books from the pale young man whom Mr. Rooney always addressed as Fido.
"Everybody here but Miss Hawtry," said Mr. Rooney, and he glared at Mr. Vandeford as though that gentleman must be concealing the star in the pocket of his gray, silk-crash coat.
"And Miss Hawtry is here also," came in a very beautifully modulated voice from left stage, as the tardy star came down center, and stood directly in front of the table at which sat the producer and his stage-manager. Mr. Vandeford rose immediately and said good-morning; Mr. Rooney kept his seat and looked Miss Hawtry through and through with a cold reproof.
"Five minutes late," he said with an edge in the words that cut.
"I really beg your pardon, and it shall not happen--" the star was beginning to say in an apologetic tone, which bent under the cold edge of the assault, as Mr. Vandeford had hoped it would, when Mr. Rooney cut it off with a curt command to pale Fido.
"Give out the Hawtry part."
Miss Hawtry accepted the little blue booklet handed her by Fido, and also Mr. Vandeford's chair, placed carefully in the center of the stage for her. The first brush between Mr. Rooney and Miss Hawtry had been pulled off and he had won, much to Mr. Vandeford's delight. For "Miss Cut-up" he had had to hire, pay for, and fire, three successive stage-managers, and she had managed all three. Mr. Rooney's boast was that no star had ever managed him and that he had successfully staged every play he had undertaken; hence a spectacular salary. Also he felt that his reputation was at stake in the Hawtry duel, and he was determined to back his own method.
"Scene first, act first; Betty Carrington is discovered on stage. Go to it, Betty!" he commanded as Fido took a seat at the end of the table, opened a copy of the first act, and sat ready for annotations.
"How beautiful the morning is and--" the glowering Miss Blanche Grayson was beginning to read from her cerulean booklet, when an interruption occurred.
Miss Adair and Mr. Farraday entered from the stage door.
Mr. Vandeford looked at Mr. Rooney, and muttered under his breath: "Angel and author, Bill. Easy!"
"Shoot," answered Mr. Rooney, in a mild undertone, though he glared at the company as though in a cold rage.
"Ladies and gentlemen, let me introduce you to Miss Adair, the author of our play. You have all of you met Mr. Farraday. Mr. Rooney, our stage-director, Miss Adair and Mr. Farraday." Mr. Vandeford made the introductions as rapidly as possible and in a voice of such coolness that Miss Adair looked at him in astonishment and then at the assembled company with great timidity. With special trepidation did she regard Mr. Rooney, who had bobbed his scrubby, black-mopped head at her with no expression at all in his little black eyes, while he refused to see Mr. Farraday's offered hand.
"Have seats in the left stage-box," he directed them in the same tone of voice with which he had quelled Miss Hawtry. "Now, get going there, Betty Carrington, and open again."
Mr. Vandeford led Miss Adair and Mr. Farraday out into the wings in a roundabout path to the left stage-box, and paused with them out of sight of Mr. Rooney. Then the humanity came back into his face and voice as he spoke to his friends in an undertone.
"Rooney is the genius among stage-directors, but he's the original and genuine Tartar. How are you both?" As he asked the question he held out a hand to each of them, and his smile held the cordiality to which they were both accustomed.
"We had a blow-out on Riverside Drive, and that's what makes us late. Now I've got to take the car around to the garage," Mr. Farraday apologized, as he rumpled his leonine mane, fanned himself with his hat, and departed.
Miss Adair fairly clung to the hand of friendship offered her, with relief that it had not been withdrawn forever, as she had feared from the coolness of Mr. Vandeford's greeting before the assembled company of "The Purple Slipper."
"I'm afraid," she murmured with both alarm and amusement sparkling in her gray eyes, in which Mr. Vandeford found himself searching for a certain expression with the eagerness with which he always looked for it after even a brief separation from his author. It was there and undimmed. "Let's go sit down where he told us to," Miss Adair whispered.
"Good girl!" laughed Mr. Vandeford as he led the way to the left stage-box to which Mr. Rooney had summarily banished the author and the angel. He seated Miss Adair at the front edge of the box and took the chair close at her left. She was thus bulwarked and buttressed for any assault that might be hurled her way. It came in a very few minutes.
Miss Bébé Herne and Miss Mildred Lindsey were in the midst of reading an animated dialogue on page five by the time Miss Adair's attention was firmly riveted on the stage and the reading in progress. Fortunately the little scene was of her own writing. Mr. Vandeford had put it back into the play instead of the paraphrase Mr. Howard had made of it, and he was surprised to find how deeply grateful he was to himself for having given her this bit as he watched the home-made color rise under the gray eyes as the author sat and heard her written words come to life in a little bit of really sparkling character comedy, which both Miss Lindsey and experienced Bébé were acting as well as reading in such a way as to bring out all the charm of the lines. The happiness of both author and producer lasted about two minutes, then it was broken into by Mr. William Rooney with a crash.
"Nuff, there, nuff!" he commanded, in the midst of a quaint epigram, which Bébé was delivering with unction. "Audiences don't want to hear smart babble after their seats are all down. They want to see the star and get going. Cut in Miss Hawtry at the second set-to of Harriet and aunt. Take it this way: 'And my dear Rosalind has said, Harriet--' Enter Rosalind with the line you have there."
"Yes, it's time for me to get on and--" Miss Hawtry was agreeing complacently, when she was quickly snapped off in her remark.
"Line, Miss Hawtry, not gab," Mr. Rooney commanded.
Instantly Miss Hawtry was reading from her lines and faithful Fido was making annotations upon his manuscript with strokes that spelled finality to the stricken author, who raised her protesting eyes to the producer of her play.
"Steady now," Mr. Vandeford whispered. "This is the first reading, and he's setting. We can't side-track him now. Later you can--" but the author's attention was caught by the dialogue between Miss Hawtry and Bébé, which was the first full dose of the Howard fifteen-hundred-dollar, inebriate, but very brilliant and Hawtry-like, "pep."
"Oh, I didn't write that at all!" she whispered, as she fairly shrank against Mr. Vandeford's strength of mind, if not against the strength of his arm that he had laid across the back of her chair.
"Just sit still and listen to-day as though it were somebody else's play, and we will talk it over afterward. You know I--I warned you," he whispered with soothing tenderness, his lips almost against her ear in the dusk of the box.
"I promised, and I will," she answered him, and he was at a loss to know if she really did flutter to him a fraction of an inch as he had suspected her of doing in his car on the night of her début on Broadway. The charm of Kentucky girls is composed of many illusions and realities, which they themselves hardly understand, and use by hereditary instinct.
And with her proud head poised in all stateliness, Miss Patricia Adair sat for five solid hours and heard "The Purple Slipper," née "The Renunciation of Rosalind," read from first to last page by the people who were to present it to the public; and Mr. Vandeford found his heart bleeding for the thrusts into hers. Not a protest did she make, but the roses faded and the gray eyes sank far back behind their black defending lashes, and they were glittering with suppressed tears as the wearied company rose to its feet after the last line.
"Here to-morrow at eleven sharp," were Mr. Rooney's words of dismissal as he and Fido followed the company in their hurried exit toward the stage-door, with not so much as a glance at the box in which sat the stricken author.
And there alone, off the dismal and dismantled stage in the cool dusk of the box, producer and author faced each other and the situation.
"If my grandfather were not--not--dying, I'd take it right home and burn it all up!" were the first words the author of "The Purple Slipper" gave utterance to, after the last echo of the last footstep had died off the stage.
"You couldn't, you've sold it to--to me," Mr. Vandeford answered with a coolness in his voice that restored her mental balance, as he had intended it should. "Now answer me truly; is it or is it not a good play?"
"It's not my play; it's horrid and vulgar!" the author stormed, with lightning burning up the tears in her gray eyes.
"That whole situation is exactly as you wrote it, and about a third of the lines are yours, or will be yours by the time it is at the first night, if you play the game. I have not decided whether I think it is a good play or not. If I think it isn't, you may have it and burn it up. I don't know what Rooney thinks yet. If he doesn't want to go on, I won't." Mr. Vandeford had known the women of many climes, and he found himself using that experience on Miss Adair with great skill, though it hurt him to do so.
"Part of it I don't even understand," Miss Adair continued to storm, and Mr. Vandeford was about to discover that either a Blue-grass woman or horse, with the bit in their respective mouths, is mighty apt to go a pace before curbed. "What was that scene in the last act just before the dinner-party? She read so fast and he had his back to me, so I suppose that is the reason I didn't get it." Miss Adair was alluding to the scene whose vulgarity Mr. Vandeford had wished to sacrifice, but which Mr. Meyers had pleaded for on account of its extra dash of "pep" exactly suited to the Hawtry style.
"You won't be able to judge the Hawtry scenes at all until the opening night," Mr. Vandeford answered, positively quaking in his boots for fear that Miss Adair would force him to an elucidation of the scene, which was mostly of the cleverest innuendo. "She is a miserable study, and she and Height rehearse the big scenes alone. She just walks through with the company. Truly, you can hardly judge anything of what a play will be from just a reading or from any rehearsal. Please trust me and help me as you promised you would."
"But the play isn't mine, at all! My play is--is killed--and dead, and murdered." Miss Adair persisted, still writhing from the butchery.
"It is your play; but granting that it isn't, at all, think what it will mean to all of us if this--this nobody's play succeeds. Think what it will mean to the actors in the company. Miss Lindsey was hungry when she got her first advance on your play, and Bébé Herne hasn't had a part that suited her so well in years. If it goes she ought to have enough to make her easy; and she is getting old now--"
"If you'll say and tell everybody that the play isn't mine, of course I'll help you, and--" Miss Adair agreed, with the tears dried by the anger and a degree of sanity returning at Mr. Vandeford's skilful appeal to her generosity, which he made when he saw that his attempt to bluff her about calling off the play had failed. Mr. William Rooney came into the box. His hat was tilted on the back of his head and in the corner of his mouth was a large cigar, which he was chewing and not smoking. He seated himself without invitation and spoke with his usual abruptness:
"That play is a hummer, Vandeford, if I can just make the dolts put it across. It is a genuine Hawtry vehicle, but in a new vein. It's a corking situation and yet rings true. Did any old dame really have the spunk to put that dinner-party across on both lover and husband that you've got in your play, miss?" As Mr. Rooney asked the question of Miss Adair, it was the first time that he had seemed aware of the existence of the author of "The Purple Slipper."
"It's not my play, Mr. Rooney," Miss Adair said haughtily to the thick-skinned genius. "That--that situation is--was--is true, however."
"Then it's your play all right!" declared Mr. Rooney. "The situation is all there is to any play. The staging is the rest. Anybody can put in good lines. Any simp can doll up the actors in costumes, and one actor can put the ideas across pretty near as good as any other, if he's directed all right; but when it's done, the play is the man's or woman's who made the first layout of the idea--and what the stage-manager does to it. Author and stage manager, I say. The rest is easy."
"That's what I've been telling Miss Adair," Mr. Vandeford eagerly assented.
"And authors ought to go off and die until the first night, too," Mr. Rooney continued to say. "When I staged 'Only Annie' for E. and K., I told that author if he came on my stage any more at rehearsals I would biff him one in the nutt, and I meant it, too. His thinks and mine ran into each other so bad that I was near crazed."
"But an author writes a play and he or she knows--" Miss Adair was beginning to say to Mr. Rooney with kind patience, when he interrupted her as he rose to take his departure.
"The author oughter write all he knows and let it go at that," he said as he spat on the carpet of the box with no sign of compunction. "The stage-manager can do the rest." And with no form of leave-taking he departed.
"And the American drama has to be filtered through that sort of--of illiteracy?" Miss Adair turned and demanded of Mr. Vandeford.
"The American drama is often written by people who have been too closely associated with books on a library shelf, so that it needs to be filtered through a little gross humanity to get across to--humanity in the gross, which pays to see it. If a scholar writes and produces a play scholars go to see it all right, but all the scholars in America only fill one theater twice, and then what is to become of scholar and wife and children, as well as producer, manager, and theater-owner?" Mr. Vandeford spoke slowly, choosing his words.
"Aren't any of the stage-managers educated gentlemen?" demanded Miss Adair, with an interest that was fast becoming impersonal, for she had the wit to see that in some ways Mr. Vandeford's summary of the situation between author and stage-manager was sound.
"Yes, a few, but not the most successful ones," answered Mr. Vandeford. "I tell you truly that a stage-manager has to be a genius to succeed. He must be a man with a vision and sheer brutality enough to put the vision that he gets from his conception of the play he is producing into twenty other mentalities and make them present the play as a harmonious whole to an audience. He cannot be a respecter of persons while he is pounding, and he must not be interfered with or his vision is obscured and the play loses. Do you see what I mean?"
"Then an author ought to produce his own plays," Miss Adair decided very promptly.
"Yes," answered Mr. Vandeford, with a whimsical smile down into the eager, pale, intensely creative face raised to his. "When an author is born who will study years until he is an expert electrician, other years in great studios until he can paint scenery that is a work of art, delve into old books until he knows costuming of thousands of periods in hundreds of lands and how to sketch it, then gives himself to the studying of stagecraft and the writing of half a hundred plays until he writes one that is really great; after which, if he has the strength and the nerves to produce that play, we will all go to see the great human drama. That is, if he has had time to live with and in the hearts of people so as to supply that gross sympathy with the masses who buy tickets which Rooney got while climbing out of the gutter. God grant he comes some day to America--but you are not he!"
"No, I'm not," admitted Miss Adair, with her eyes smiling back into his whimsically, "but what you say makes me see that the--the producer--you are the whole thing. You get it all--me and Mr. Rooney and Miss Hawtry together and pound us into--into a play. I make that acknowledgment."
"If you ask the stage-manager he will say that the success of a play is his; the costumer will claim that success; the star knows it is his or hers, and the lead is sure that it is due to the support; the author surely has some claim to draw the huge royalties, and the location of his theater makes the theater-owner know that any play in that theater will go. Yes, the producer will always claim the whole show if it all goes well. If it fails the show then belongs entirely to the producer, who picked it in its manuscript stage, and he is no good as a producer. If he fails a few times hand-running, to the scrap heap with him!"
"But you've never failed," Miss Adair exclaimed, with a dart of fear in her eyes.
"My last show, 'Miss Cut-up,' was a flivver all right, though we just saved our faces. But I've got a show now that will put me in electric light for two years hand-running and--" Mr. Vandeford was in a panic as he realized that he was going so far in that curious thinking out loud to Miss Adair that he had been about to launch forth on "The Rosie Posie Girl" to her. It would have been like telling a friend the plans of his own funeral with enthusiasm, as it would be obvious to her that Hawtry would have to fail in and drop "The Purple Slipper" before becoming the triumphant "Rosie Posie Girl."
"I'm willing to--to let them cut my play all up if--if it will really run two years and make your reputation more brilliant than it is," Miss Adair said, interrupting his pause of consternation at his near betrayal of his plans. She spoke with the worshipful uplift of her gray eyes to his that had betrayed him in the first place to such a confusion of schemes. "If it added anything to it, I would even be willing to let you put the Adair name to the vulgar thing they read here to-day, but it wouldn't help it anywhere except in Louisville and Cincinnati and Nashville and Atlanta and New Orleans and Richmond. People don't know us in New York, and any name will do here; so mine won't--won't have to be disgraced."
"Please don't say that!" pleaded Mr. Vandeford with consternation in his soul as he thought of the development of the Howard "pep" Hawtry would make as the rehearsals of "The Purple Slipper" progressed. "It is the same thing with Miss Hawtry as it is with Mr. Rooney; she has a--a kind of gutter drag that gets across to the multitude, and of course your play had to be--be fitted to her. Hawtry, to be Hawtry, has to do and say things that you couldn't write at all, that you couldn't very well understand; but they'll get the crowd going and coming. Please give me your promise again to sit tight and see it through--or go home and leave it all to me." Mr. Vandeford was surprised to feel how hard his heart beat, and he was afraid that it sounded like the echo of an anvil chorus in the big empty theater.
"I never have to give promises a second time, and this is the last time I am ever going to cry out," Miss Adair answered him, with a lift to her proud little head. "I am going to stay right here and help if I can, and learn. But I won't in any way distress or--or trouble you. Please don't get me on your mind!"
"I won't get you on my mind," Mr. Vandeford answered out loud--"because I've got you in my heart, poor kiddie," he continued to himself, in a kind of desperation.
Mr. Dennis Farraday burst in upon the dusk of the theater and the tragedy of the situation. He was vastly excited and he waved a letter in his hand.
"Oh, you Patricia Adair, why didn't you tell me that you are old Roger Adair's sister?" he demanded.
"Why, what do you mean about Roger? Do you know--"
"Do I know him? Just listen to this, will you, and here I've not been handing you around on a silver salver for two weeks!" He then read the following letter aloud to Miss Adair and Mr. Vandeford:
Adairville, Kentucky.
DEAR DENNY:
Well, here I am! I'm the Captain of my county in the Army of the Furrows, and hope to turn in many thousand pounds of food stuffs for you people in New York to live on. In the meantime Miss Patricia Adair, my sister, is going to New York to see to the putting on of a play she has written for one Mr. Godfrey Vandeford. She is the greatest girl ever, and you stay right on the job seeing that things go right for her while I plant these potatoes to keep you from starving. She will be at the Y. W. C. A. and will sleep and eat safe enough, but you look out for her and don't let her get homesick. If she needs me, of course I will come, but she's a plucky child and you are the best ever, so I'll go on ploughing with a free mind. Let me know how it all goes. What sort of a chap is that Vandeford?
Yours as always and forever,
ROGER.
"Can you beat it?" demanded good Dennis, with a blaze of friendship in his eyes as he regarded Miss Patricia Adair. "It was forwarded from my old office number to my new, to Westchester to Nantucket, back to my office, and finally arrived this morning. I've just sent Roger a thousand-word telegram, and I hope he never knows that I was off the job ten days. Give that child here to me, Van, and go get a report on your character for me before you look at her again. Roger Adair is the best friend I've got on earth, next to you, and you'd better watch your step."
"I like his steps," Miss Adair said, and again Mr. Vandeford felt uncertain as to that curious little flutter that was like a nestling of which he felt he was never to be certain and which Mr. Farraday did not seem to observe at all.
"Didn't you know that Roger was turning you over to me, young lady? Why have you side-stepped me?" Mr. Farraday demanded of the young author, in a voice of great severity.
"I thought that Roger was going to write to a Mr. Denny about me; and I didn't write to him that Mr. Denny hadn't come to take care of me because--because I was afraid he'd leave his work and come up to look after me himself. I didn't remember the Farraday part of your name at all. Roger always said 'Denny.'"
"Well, I suppose I'll have to accept that excuse, as it sounds fairly reasonable; but I'd like to know, Van, why you have been keeping my child here in this musty old theater until past luncheon time when she must be both tired and hungry. Come out to Claremont to luncheon, both of you, this minute," Mr. Farraday both questioned and commanded, with pure delight in his voice and manner. "I'll go run the car around to the door, so you won't have to walk in the sun." And he departed as quickly as he had come.
That night Mr. Vandeford lay stretched on his bed in a dark coolness, with his hands clasped over his eyes, when Mr. Farraday came in with his latch-key at twelve-thirty.
"Denny?" he asked from the darkness as Mr. Farraday was tiptoeing past his open door, through which the southern sea-breeze was pouring, "'What sort of chap is that Vandeford?'"
"The telegram I sent read, 'the best ever.'"
"Are you competent to judge me?"
"I am."
"Good-night!"
For an hour before this masculine version of a scene a feminine real thing was being conducted in the two little dotted-muslin-curtained cells at the Y. W. C. A. Miss Adair was telling Miss Lindsey "all about it," and sparks and tears both were in the atmosphere. The explosion was brought on by Miss Lindsey remarking to Miss Adair:
"You know, honey lady, that play of yours is simply ripping, but it is not at all like--like what I thought it would be from hearing you and Mr. Farraday tell it."
"It's not my play at all; it's Mr. Vandeford's. He got somebody to fit it to Miss Hawtry," replied Miss Adair, calmly, as she began to brush her dark, sleek mane.
"What do you mean?" demanded Miss Lindsey, in astonishment.
"He just took the dinner situation in my play and got a man to make a new one out of it that is--is vulgar enough to appeal to the New York theater-goers. He let everybody put in anything they wanted to, instead of what I wrote. He left in a little of mine to compliment me. It's all right, because nobody would have gone to see my play if anybody goes to see--see his." Miss Adair went on calmly with the fifty-third stroke on her raven tresses, but her eyes were beginning to blaze.
"Mr. Vandeford's a complete fool," was on the tip of Miss Lindsey's tongue, but she remembered her main chance, which was the favor of Mr. Godfrey Vandeford, and said instead: "I wish you would let me see a copy of the play as you wrote it. Have you one?"
"I have, in my trunk, and I'll read it to you," answered Miss Adair, and in defensive pride she produced a copy of "The Purple Slipper," which bore the unexpurgated title of "The Renunciation of Rosalind," and proceeded to read it to Miss Lindsey, with both fire and tragedy in her voice.
The operation occupied the two hours before midnight, and Miss Lindsey lay prostrate when it was finished.
"Now, what do you think?" demanded Miss Adair.
"I wish I could have had the making of it over, and for myself instead of Hawtry. That's no play as it stands, but there is a dandy one to be worked up from it that you--you--that would be like you," was the reply that Miss Lindsey gave as she looked out into distance, with glowing eyes.
"Do you think that--that horrid play will be a success?" asked Miss Adair, with her voice sparkling.
"I do," answered Miss Lindsey. "And it is curious that with all its changes it is still--still yours. There is a lot more of your stuff left than you realize, and the turns that--that Mr. Vandeford's playwright has given it are very clever. Lots of times he's just paraphrased your lines into Hawtryites. It will be interesting to see how much of you is left when we all come out of the wash for the first night."
"I wish I were dead and buried!" she was surprised to hear Miss Adair confess, and there then ensued a downpour, which the hardier Western girl weathered for very love of the young Southern tempest in her arms.
"I suppose I ought to go home, out of the way, but I'm going to stay and--and learn--and write another one all by myself," she finally sobbed, with returning courage, thus comforting herself with the resolve which every playwright who ever built a play has used to keep from going entirely mad during the rehearsals of his first play.
"Just try to live until the New York opening, and then see how you feel. That is the way actors do to keep going during the awful grilling of the rehearsals and the road try-out," advised Miss Lindsey, with great soothing.
"I will," promised Miss Adair, and turned her face on her pillow, to sleep, while Miss Lindsey took herself and her jar of cold-cream into her own cell.
"I wish I had a chance at that play! What'll she do when she sees Hawtry and Height really in action in some of those scenes?" she murmured into her own pillow.
The next morning Miss Adair rose, donned a most lovely home-spun linen gown, which was of an old ivory hue and which had been spun upon the looms of her great-great-great grandmother by that lady's slaves, crowned this toilet with the floppy hat covered with crushed roses she and Miss Lindsey and Mr. Farraday had purchased, and reported herself about an hour late at the rehearsals of "The Purple Slipper," whose authorship she had repudiated. She seated herself in the dusk of the left stage-box and bared her breast for blows. They came fast and furious, but other breasts and heads beside her own suffered. Mr. William Rooney was in full action. The entire company was on the stage in the midst of the last ensemble bit in the first act, all talking and acting with blue booklets of lines in their hands.
"Here you, Mr. Kent," roared Mr. Rooney as he rose from behind his table, at one side of which sat faithful Fido annotating his copy of the manuscript, "make up to that old lady like she was the last ham sandwich extinct and you knew you were going to be fed on alfalfa the rest of your life. Get her going, man, get her going! She's an old fool, and you know it, but you've got to have her plantation and slaves. You can keep a chorus-girl car in the garage if you just get her well fooled. Fool along, fool along!"
"'I will write the message to your son, Madam Carrington, and dispatch it forthwith by one of my own black boys. Is my hand not ever ready for your service and my wit--and also my heart?'" declaimed Mr. Kent with satisfactory fervor, as he kissed Miss Herne's fat white hand.
"Now blob, Miss Herne, blob!" directed Mr. Rooney, coming entirely from behind the table. "You are the fool of this show and don't let anybody get that away from you."
"'I pray a blessing on your excellent friendship, Judge Cheneworth, and I will rest me content in--'" Miss Herne answered in a most excellent imitation of the helplessness of an old grand dame.
"Break in there, Miss Lindsey, break in!" raved Mr. Rooney. "'Content in' is your cue. Grab it. Remember you are just the sister and only in the play to swell the list of actors on the program, so grab and keep a-grabbing if you want a place on the salary list. Now, everybody on at Miss Lindsey's lines and break up this drivel between the old birds."
"'Mother, Rosalind bids me say to you that--'"
"Crowd on everybody, crowd on, and keep things going! It will be nine o'clock by now, and we'll have to begin to feed the audience the hugging by a quarter to ten or they will go out and look elsewhere.--Say, Mr. Leigh, are your feet mates? You don't handle 'em even."
Miss Adair rose and stole from the box to the stage-door, and looked up and down the street to see if Mr. Vandeford was approaching. She felt that she could not stand more alone. He was nowhere in sight, and she decided to walk around the block and see if the sun at ninety degrees would warm her chill. After this journey she returned to her post and found the box still empty. Mr. Vandeford had not arrived nor had Mr. Farraday, but she seated herself resolutely. She was just in time to witness a pitched battle between Miss Hawtry and Mr. Rooney.
"If you are determined to walk through the scenes, Miss Hawtry, do it awake and not asleep!" stormed Mr. Rooney.
"Very well," answered Miss Hawtry, but Miss Adair's heart warmed to her as she noted the contemptuousness in her manner directed toward her stage-manager.
"Now see here, Height, you know that you want to get away with this woman before her husband gets back. You can't do it with kid gloves on. Spit on your hands, man, and grab her by the hair. You say: 'Rosalind, a strong man's love is a weapon which a woman can easily turn against herself with deadly outcome,' like you were begging her to go with you over to Ligget's for an ice-cream soda with crushed strawberries. Say it this way." And as she sat astounded Miss Adair heard a line that she had written in a sympathetic fervor of imagination and which was perhaps her favorite in the whole play, uttered by Mr. William Rooney with the most exquisite and manly feeling, while his homely, vulgar face and body were transformed into the same exquisiteness. A breathless happiness descended upon her, and she waited in it to hear the beautiful Mr. Gerald Height give utterance to it with the same art. Miss Hawtry brought her to earth.
"Mr. Rooney," she said with an utter lack of appreciation or comprehension of the bit of high art that had flashed upon her, "it is in my contract with Mr. Vandeford that I rehearse my scenes alone with my support until the dress rehearsal."
"Yes, I might have judged that from 'Miss Cut-up,'" Mr. Rooney answered her with a blow straight from his shoulder. "Give little sister her cue, Height, and let her run on to rescue you. God knows you need it!"
"Mr. Rooney, I'll have you understand--" Miss Hawtry came to the center to continue her tirade, when Mr. Rooney struck the decisive blow.
"Everybody on and begin the scene over!" he commanded right past the enraged star. "Take it up, Kent, with Miss Herne at 'I will write the message to your son,' and get her going, get her going!"
At this forceful command the machinery of "The Purple Slipper" was set in motion, and swept Miss Hawtry off center and into her place for the time being.
And despite herself Miss Adair was fascinated in watching the machine grind away, with now and then a spark from Mr. Rooney that took fire in the very core of her heart or brain or solar plexus--wherever "The Renunciation of Rosalind" had been conceived. Miss Adair did not know what it was that thus affected her, but she had got hold of her end of the psychic cord along which the author feeds the hostile stage-manager in such a manner that on the first night of a successful play they can say to each other with clasped hands and wet eyes, "Well done!"
And while Miss Adair sat under the spell of Mr. Rooney, Mr. Vandeford sat in his big chair in his office and fought a battle for "The Purple Slipper" that resulted in a draw that filled him with anxiety.
"I can find only one open booking in New York for October first, Mr. Vandeford, sir," Mr. Meyers was saying, with trouble settled in a cloud upon his broad brow. "I have it fairly good for the road for 'The Purple Slipper' until October first, and then it is a jump to Toronto or Minneapolis, which is into the grave."
"I suppose that one opening on Broadway is Weiner's New Carnival Theater," Mr. Vandeford asked as though the question were useless.
"You have it right," answered Mr. Meyers. "Still, Mr. Vandeford, sir, it is always failures that leave Broadway openings into which road shows can jump."
"Until last year, yes, Pops, but now New York is so full of people with munition and war-contract money in their pockets that any show, no matter how rotten, that gets in a Broadway theater plays to capacity and stays. They'd go to 'The Old District Skule' because the doors were open and there is no other place to go. What are we going to do?"
"I advise that you see Mr. Breit and trust to some very big failure to give you a place. It is that he will always give you a preference," answered Mr. Meyers with little hope, but determination.
"Yes, Breit will let me in if there is a squeezing chance, but Breit doesn't own a theater, nor do I, or you, Pops; and I don't blame the fellows who do own them for filling them with their own cheap companies and plays so as to get their buckets under the whole golden stream. Why give money away to any independent producer?"
"Mr. Breit said that he had news that Mr. Weiner would open that New Carnival with a Hilliard show, name not given," Mr. Meyers added to the information already prepared for Mr. Vandeford.
"I'll see goose-grease frying out of him in Inferno before he gets it," said Mr. Vandeford, coolly. "I know that is his game, but I'll put across this 'Purple Slipper' with Hawtry and keep my 'Rosie Posie Girl' until I get good and ready to let her play it. Then I'll produce it to the tune of a half-million dollars and not Mr. Weiner. I've never been squeezed, and I'm not going to have this rotten game beat me. I'll go over and see Breit and he'll jockey me a corner on Broadway, somehow. Back at three." And Mr. Vandeford walked out of his office as coolly as though not sizzling inwardly with anxiety.
"I've got you next on the booking of about four-fifths of the theaters on Broadway, Van," said Mr. Breit, the booking king, as he and Mr. Vandeford smoked leisurely cigars in his big, cool office. "You should worry! E. and K. and S. and Z. are bound to pick some flivvers and in you go. Loaf on the road and lose money like a little man."
"My contract expires with Hawtry if I don't present her on Broadway by September fifteenth."
"That is a bit of a pickle! But she won't have any show to jump into, and she'll compromise with you; won't she?"
"She'll have to," Mr. Vandeford declared. "Coming down to Atlantic City to see 'The Purple Slipper' open two weeks from Monday, September twenty-third?"
"I'll be there. Rooney says it is a go; says little genius amateur wrote it and Grant Howard 'pepped' it. That right?"
"Yes. By!"
An hour later, in the coolness and seclusion of the grill room of The Monks, Mr. Vandeford was imparting his predicament to his partner in the venture and adventures of "The Purple Slipper."
"And you are worrying about whether Miss Hawtry will stay by us for the few weeks we'll have to loaf on the road or even close while waiting for the New York opening?" questioned Mr. Farraday. "Say, aren't you a bit unjust in your judgment of her, Van?"
"I know the whole tribe of actors, and you don't, Denny," answered Mr. Vandeford, over a tall glass of iced tea he was drinking; he didn't know exactly why, but the habit had grown on him lately.
"Then why not try to put her under contract for those few indefinite weeks?" suggested Mr. Farraday, over his cup of hot coffee.
"You talk as though we were dealing with sane people," answered Mr. Vandeford. "She's got us and she'll keep us guessing up to the last minute, and then put some kind of screws on. I have got to figure out the likely ones, to see what I can do to jam them."
"Well, anyway, ask her. I think she'll stand by us. I know she will," said Mr. Farraday, with both faith and conviction in his voice. "You do her an injustice, I say!"
"I'm not going to make her any request or offer, Denny. I can't," said Mr. Vandeford, as he looked at the ice floating in his glass of tea.
"Of course," assented Mr. Farraday, with pained sympathy in his big voice. "Would you like me to sound her out?"
"It's half your show; go ahead. She probably knows the situation and has made her plans for the squeeze or double-cross, but you might try her out," consented Mr. Vandeford, with a shrewd glance at Mr. Farraday. "But I wish you wouldn't, Denny," he added, with a sudden glow of affection in his eyes. Then he was restrained from further remonstrance with Mr. Farraday by the thought of the author of "The Purple Slipper" and her plucky sticking by the play through the thick and thin of her disapproval of it. Again he offered up his big Jonathan as a sacrifice in hopes of improving the prospects of "The Purple Slipper."
Mr. Farraday took Miss Hawtry into his confidence about the predicament of finding a New York theater for his play, "The Purple Slipper," that very evening, out on the veranda of the Beach Inn, where he had motored her by request for dinner after her fatiguing rehearsals, which she had made still more fatiguing for Mr. William Rooney.
"And Van sent you to ask me if I was going to stick by?" she asked, with an effective quaver in her voice.
"He felt that we had no right to--to tie you up for indefinite weeks," said Mr. Farraday, constructing and temporizing at the same time.
"Did you think as little of me as he did?"
"No, by George, I knew you'd stick by us, and I said so!" Mr. Farraday exploded with genuine emotion.
"Thank you. You know me after these few weeks better than he does after all these years of--" And the Violet bent her head on Mr. Farraday's nearest arm and began to weep softly. They were in a secluded corner of the veranda of the Inn, and the Violet raged at herself for having closed the complete seclusion of Highcliff for herself and her purposes by renting it to the Trevors when she had gone to town to the rehearsals of "The Purple Slipper."
And as good Dennis Farraday had no valid reason, either within or without the law for not doing so, he put consoling and comforting arms about her, and exposed his wide, silk-garbed shoulder to the rain of her tears, which were not really raining. In his big heart there was the same comforting for this conspirator as there would have been for Mr. Vandeford's lawful widow, and he administered it with the same affectionate respect that he would have used to the relict.
"You're a dear, wonderful little woman!" he was saying, when the voice of the Clyde Trevors was heard calling to them from around the veranda, and an oath rose in the Violet with such force that she almost allowed it to explode. Still she felt sure of her ultimate results.
"You can count on me to stand by you and the play forever," she promised, and the hurried pressure of their lips in the soft, dark, sea-perfumed air was biologically inevitable.
Mr. Godfrey Vandeford had woven a tangled web when he had let fall the purple letter on the purple manuscript and gone out recklessly to follow the hunch their juxtaposition implied.
