Blue-grass and Broadway Part 26

"I've arranged for a chair-car to take the whole company down to Atlantic City Sunday morning, so the whole bunch can have a plunge and a good rest-up before the Monday dress rehearsal." Mr. Farraday produced that piece of business with great pride.

"Good!" was all the commendation that he got, and he betook himself off for other good-natured efforts on the affairs of "The Purple Slipper."

Though at times Mr. G.o.dfrey Vandeford approached the heroic in action, he was very human in reflexes and, having paid a price for the happiness of Miss Patricia Adair, he proceeded to partake of as much of that happiness as he could get hold of. He captured the author of "The Purple Slipper" after the rehearsals on Friday, which were the last before the dress rehearsal in Atlantic City on Monday night, because the cast of a play are, after all, so many human beings, who have to be given at least a day for such animal functions as packing trunks, closing apartments, dodging creditors, and severing home ties, and he carried her off to the country with the intention of having her all to himself for dinner at a little inn up Westchester way. After they had started in that direction and were flying behind Valentine along sun-gilded country lanes, he changed his mind, changed the road slightly, and had them landed under the wing of Mrs. Farraday for dinner. He did this with direct intention.

He judged himself, and decided that it would be safest to announce to Miss Adair that her play was to have the honor of opening the great New Carnival Theatre on Broadway somewhere within two hundred yards of Mrs.

Farraday. This program he carried out with efficient directness and then found a strange lacking in himself.

"Oh, how wonderful you are!" was Miss Adair's exclamation when he had imparted his news just as a young moon was silvering the poplar under which they sat on an old stone bench at the bottom of the sunken garden.

"Everybody has said that you couldn't do it, but I didn't worry at all like the rest of them. I knew that you could."

"How did you know that I could do it?" he asked, and he rejoiced with pride that his author did not yet know of either the existence or his sacrifice of "The Rosie Posie Girl."

"Why, I don't know--I knew just because I--I--" For the first time Mr.

Vandeford was absolutely certain of the flutter towards him, and at the same time felt certain that he was the first man who ever had been certain of it; and just as his breast and arms were hollowing themselves to nest it he--denied it and himself. He didn't want it at a purchase price, and he took Miss Adair home and locked her in the Y. W. C. A.

before midnight.

The journey down to Atlantic City on Sunday morning was accomplished with much joy and hilarity. The entire cast of "The Purple Slipper"

acted like boys and girls let out of school, and mischievous children at that. Miss Adair enjoyed it all immensely, and at times she very timidly joined in the fun, which was centering itself upon putting Mr. Leigh of the uncertain feet, and Miss Grayson, the glowerer, into white ribbon bonds, which bonds were supplied from a large box of bonbons, the ident.i.ty of the donor of which she refused to reveal, though Mr. Kent declared he had brought her to the station in a gold limousine with diamond wheels, and bore the name of Billy As...o...b..lt.

Only Miss Hawtry held aloof, as she and her maid and various pieces of ultra luggage occupied the four seats at the end of the car. The seat next her was kept vacant, and at various times during the several hours'

run Mr. Vandeford, Mr. Height, and Miss Adair occupied it with respectful tribute, but most of the time Mr. Farraday sat considerately beside her, and smiled upon the fun. Mr. William Rooney and Fido rode in the day-coach and worked the entire way on duplicate prompt copies.

Also Mr. Rooney and Fido were absent that evening from the dinner-party given by Mr. Farraday in the great new hotel to the entire cast of "The Purple Slipper"--in honor of Miss Hawtry. They were working with the stage-carpenter, the property-man, and the electrician until a late hour, when they met the members of the dinner-party in pairs in wheel-chairs being trundled along the board-walk for sea air before retiring.

"Hope the angel gave the bunch enough drink to keep 'em asleep until two-thirty to-morrow," Mr. Rooney remarked to Fido as he spat out into the Atlantic Ocean. "I'm going to put the gaff to 'em to-morrow night, and I want to start with 'em unstrung and string 'em to suit myself.

That little author is some girl, but I wonder why Vandeford wanted to shunt that white devil onto a nice b.o.o.b like Farraday, and him his friend, too," he further remarked as he watched the star and the angel being trundled by in one of the big wicker perambulators that infest the board walk.

In the other direction were being trundled the author and the producer of "The Purple Slipper," and at that moment they were in the mood of fellow-workmen at the machine of "The Purple Slipper."

"Rooney sent me word that the lighting is doubtful. This rotten little theater is hard to count on for any kind of unusual lighting, and we must have that diffusion for the dinner scene so as to make the candle effect seem real," Mr. Vandeford was saying with great animation to Miss Adair and with a total lack of sentiment under the same young moon that had baffled him Friday night out in Westchester.

"The whole thing seems a confused jumble to me," admitted Miss Adair. "I feel as if I couldn't wait until to-morrow night to really see the play with the costumes and scenery and love scenes and all in the right place. And yet I'm so tired I feel as if I could sleep a week."

"I'll shake you if you go dead on me here as you did the other night in the car," threatened Mr. Vandeford, with a laugh, but he adjusted his shoulder back of hers as if he considered the danger entirely real.

"I'll certainly do it if you don't take me back where I belong, wherever it is," threatened Miss Adair. "I hope Mildred isn't as--as tired as I am and--and can help me. I'll go to bed with my clothes on if she doesn't," Miss Adair gasped between yawns, and fluttered to Mr.

Vandeford with a frank intention of gaining support.

"Back to the hotel, boy, and go a good pace. Double tip," commanded Mr.

Vandeford to their propelling Italian youth, with an alarm which puzzled him as much as it would have puzzled many of his friends, while he accorded his exhausted author the amount of support needed for the occasion--and no more.

And as Mr. Rooney had hoped, the entire cast of "The Purple Slipper"

slept into the afternoon of the dress-rehearsal day in the complete collapse which the sea air induced, and they were in a good condition for restringing. In fact, some of them began that process for themselves by an afternoon plunge in the ocean.

One of those plunges had an after-effect on the fate of "The Purple Slipper" further than keying up Mr. Gerald Height for his dress rehearsals. When he discovered, while detaining Miss Adair for a chat after his late luncheon, that the author had never beheld the sea before in all her inland existence, and had never been in it, he insisted on procuring a bathing-suit and initiating her into that sport. She a.s.sented to the proposition with the greatest eagerness, and in less than half an hour she had trusted herself to the arms of Mr. Gerald Height and the Atlantic Ocean. They were both rough in their handling, and finally she came to resent the boldness of the former as much as she enjoyed that of the latter. With crimson in her cheeks and lightning in her eyes, she first attempted to drown them both, then waded to sh.o.r.e, sat down on the sand, and said things to Mr. Gerald Height, which had the magic effect of making him unburden himself and his lizard-like career to her in its entirety.

"You see, I didn't know what a girl who--who wrote your play was like exactly, and because I couldn't find out I have kept on trying.

Now--now, by George, I know," he said, with a boyishness coming into his murky eyes. "Say, you know my mother was a Kentucky girl, and I guess that is one reason I have stuck by this fool--this 'Purple Slipper.'

That and wanting to chase you down."

"Well, now that you've 'chased me down' and found that I'm not--not there, you'll stay by me and 'The Purple Slipper,' won't you?" Miss Adair asked, and then like two merry children they both laughed at her jumble.

"I will," answered Mr. Height, with the queer attachment in his heart that a man feels for a perfectly good woman who is jolly and friendly with him after she has allowed him to tell her just how wicked he is or thinks he is. "I thought the whole thing was a flivver, but when Vandeford got the opening of the New Carnival for it, I sat up and took notice. Just you watch the stuff between Hawtry and me put a line a mile long from the box office."

"I'm wild to see you and Miss Hawtry in your scenes, and we must go to dress for early dinner. The rehearsals are called for six-thirty. Thank you for--for being my friend." As she rose from the sand Miss Adair held out her hand to Mr. Height, with the friendliness and confidence in her eyes that had smoothed over other rough, though not so rough, places of the same character in her young life.

"That's some kid and there are lots like her. I've got to halt sooner or later," Mr. Height muttered to himself as he dressed for his early dinner. "I'm going to put this fool play across for her, too." There are a few women who distill loyalty out of declined pa.s.sion; but not many.

They make their mark on their generation.

The dress rehearsals of a play are varied in finish and intensity, but the variety which Mr. William Rooney conducted was of the most brilliant, and he expected them to go as well as the opening night. He made small allowance for the strangeness of lights, scenery, and costuming, and that allowance was only for time, not in smoothness. As he willed, his cast generally performed. The cast of "The Purple Slipper" was of experienced actors, and he felt certain that they would meet his expectations. At six-thirty o'clock he seated himself in the middle seat of the sixth row center, looked around to see that the electrician and the costumer were at hand to catch any criticism he wished to make, and in a crisp hard voice that exploded like a cannon he called up the curtain.

The author was at her post in the left stage box, and bulwarked and b.u.t.tressed by the producer as usual, while Mr. Dennis Farraday, the angel, sat alone in the box opposite, with a delighted smile on his broad face.

The curtain went up, and "The Purple Slipper" glided on the stage with never a creak or a careen. The lights scintillated and glared on the wonderful costumes and scenery, and the sparkling dialogue began to unwind itself into the startling plot. For the first ten minutes the author glowed with such joyous excitement that the producer felt the actual radiations; then little by little he felt her begin to cool, and a chill ran up and down his own spine as Hawtry and Height held the stage alone in the first dash of Howard-"pepped" dalliance near the last of the first act. He held his breath, frozen within him, until the curtain went down, and then he refused to turn to the author at his side. He was in a panic and undecided what to do until Mr. Rooney relieved him of the need of action.

"Mr. Vandeford," he commanded from the middle of the theater, "get New York on the wire and have Lindenberg start a good scenery man out on the early morning train. That back-drop must have a toning wash: it jumps out at the costumes. Lindenberg is in his office until seven to get a message from you. It's ten to now. You gotter jump."

Without a look at Miss Adair, Mr. Vandeford "jumped," and thus she was left alone to watch the second act grind along to its climax, with Hawtry acting the high-bred virago with an extremity of brilliant sensuality, with Mr. Height supporting her in broad lines that could be well-read between. Once the author looked at Mr. Dennis Farraday in the box opposite, and then looked away from his blazing enjoyment of the startling climax, which the lovers acted in such beauty of body, and such beauty of execution that, without knowing why, she was thrilled from her head to her feet.

"Broad standards," she whispered to encourage herself, as her eyes shone and her cheeks glowed as she lowered her head and re-read the proof of the program to be used on Tuesday night, which Mr. Vandeford had given her and upon which she observed the name Patricia Adair in type only slightly smaller than that of Violet Hawtry. In a few minutes the curtain was again called up; Mr. Vandeford was still absent, and again her attention was riveted to the stage.

Almost the entire first half of the last act was hers, and the tension in her glowing young body had relaxed and she gave Mr. Vandeford a semblance of a smile as he seated himself beside her just before Hawtry came on the scene to lay with Height the foundation of the great dinner scene. This hurdle was held firmly in front of the young author.

Miss Hawtry entered in a blaze of eighteenth century glory, only with her authentic costume cunningly contrived to reveal more of her wonderful white body than any woman of that period would have done, and beautiful in his velvet and ruffles, Gerald Height followed her to thereupon enact a scene which was a slow and marvellous distilling of the very wine of emotion intended to go through human blood like a stinging poison. It had reached its climax, and even the emptiness of the theater was breathless when, like a whip, Mr. Rooney's cold voice brought Miss Hawtry out of Mr. Height's arms.

"Cut it, cut it!" he commanded. "You couldn't get that across even on Broadway. The censor will close the show. Play it fifty per cent. and then all the subway will quit you."

"I'll play it as I choose, you black monkey, you, with your Irish name."

Maggie Murphy sprang out from the body of the beautiful Hawtry to answer back gutter with gutter.

"Wait a minute, Miss Hawtry." Mr. Vandeford rose in his box from beside the author of the violent scene that was becoming a basis of a scene of violence. "Rooney, it can be played with--"

"You sit down and help your bread-and-b.u.t.ter baby hide her face for writing such rot instead of trying to tell me how to act." Maggie was now commanding the Violet, and she was wild with nervous rage. "She's welcome to you; five years of your living off me and my work is enough, and I don't intend to--"

"Back to your lines on which Miss Hawtry enters, Miss Lindsey,"

commanded Mr. Rooney, in his machine-gun manner. "Get ready for your cue, Height."

Completely ignoring Miss Hawtry, who was standing down center, Mildred Lindsey calmly entered and began the beautiful little bit of persiflage with Miss Herne, who had gone on before her with an agility unlike her usual slow gait. There was nothing for Miss Hawtry to do but retire to the wings, which she did, and with the nervous bomb exploded, she continued the rehearsals to a finish with the greatest brilliancy, playing the interrupted scene at fifty per cent. of its fire, as directed by Mr. Rooney.

But the author of "The Purple Slipper" was not there to see the ending in calm after the storm, for she had fled at the Violet's attack upon Mr. Vandeford, and while he stood his ground to see the matter settled in the face of the insult, she had vanished.

CHAPTER VIII

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.