Blue-grass and Broadway
"Why, she promised Miss Hawtry to go to supper with us and see a
midnight show," Mr. Farraday exclaimed, and there was disappointment in
his voice as he looked at Mr. Vandeford.
"I couldn't get away from the office until just this minute, and I
didn't think I could get away this soon. Miss Adair sent her apologies
to you both, and I came over to bring them."
"Evidently we are not to be trusted with the author, Mr. Farraday,"
laughed Violet, with what good Dennis took as good nature and what Mr.
Vandeford knew to be rage.
"Well, bless the child and her beauty sleep, but don't let that kill our
evening joy. Come along, Van, and we'll go some place sufficiently
disreputable to admit a crumpled person like yourself if you wash your
hands. We can have a good powwow over the play. I want to know what you
have been doing while I was off the job chasing a hat for the author."
And the big, stupid Jonathan linked his arm in that of his anxious and
hovering David and drew him along towards the Surrenese, which stood
across the street, at the same time guiding the steps of the Violet's
satin slippers in that direction.
While the three walked across the narrow street Mr. Vandeford made some
rapid calculations and a decision in his mind. He saw plainly that he
could not undertake to guard Mr. Dennis Farraday from the Violet and at
the same time fend Miss Patricia Adair from her wiles. He'd have to
choose between them, and in the twinkling of an eye he chose Patricia.
It is said that there is a love between men "that passes the love of
women," but nobody has ever witnessed it.
"You people go on to your show--I'm all in," he capitulated as they
stood beside Mr. Farraday's car; and the heart of the Violet rejoiced
within her.
"I'm sure Miss Adair is getting caught up on sleep so she can go with
you to-morrow night. She's a perfect dear, and we'll put her play
across," Hawtry cooed to him in her rich voice, and he knew that she
felt she had struck his price and bought him off.
"If Denny falls for her he'll fall far; but I can't help it. A girl's a
girl, specially from the country," Mr. Vandeford said to himself, as he
stood and watched them drive away into the white-lighted canon of
Broadway. Then he went home and to bed.
A man may put out his night light, stretch himself between his sheets
with the perfection of fatigue and still not sleep. There are various
combinations of reasons that prevent his slumber. Mr. Godfrey Vandeford
was still awake when Mr. Dennis Farraday let himself into his apartment
with a key that had been presented to him five years before when Mr.
Vandeford had installed his Lares and Penates in the tall building on
Seventy-third Street, some of these Lares and Penates being Mr.
Farraday's extra linen and clothes.
"That you, Denny?" Mr. Vandeford asked as he switched on his light and
took a hurried glance at a clock on his mantel which registered the hour
of 2 A. M.
"Yes," answered Mr. Farraday, as he came to the door of Mr. Vandeford's
sleeping apartment. "A thought suddenly struck me, and I stopped in to
explode it at you and sleep here."
"Fire away!"
"My mater is coming to town the first of the week to have her glasses
changed, and I'm going to telephone out to her to-morrow and ask her to
write Miss Adair to have dinner with us informally at the town house
while she is here. You know mater's mother was from old Kentucky, and
she'll adore the child. Think that's good thinking?"
"Fine," answered Mr. Vandeford, with a glow under his ribs about which
he said nothing. Men are vastly inarticulate, but they have various
means of communication, and Mr. Vandeford now felt that in his care of
his author Mr. Dennis Farraday would understand.
"You know I am on new ground, old chap, but--but how about asking Miss
Lindsey, too?" Mr. Farraday questioned, with great diffidence.
"Fine!" agreed Mr. Vandeford, with accelerated glow under his ribs that
Miss Lindsey had been proposed when Miss Hawtry might have been invited.
"Get to bed, can't you, you Indian, you? Night!"
"Good-night!" answered Mr. Farraday, as he departed to his own room.
And still Mr. Vandeford did not sleep.
Flat upon his back he lay and faced, analyzed, and card-indexed his
situation and himself.
"Five years of myself given to that gutter girl and I never even cared;
let her annex me for purposes of parade and publicity, and thought it
funny sport. Wasted? Something to be deducted for pleasure in artistic
success of "Dear Geraldine," but what will it cost me if I have to stand
by and see her make old Denny hate himself as I do myself, or worse?
She'll not stop short with him, and how do I know what he'll do? The
money don't matter, but the--cleanliness does. If I go in to save him,
she gave me notice to-night that she would go for that gray-eyed girl.
What can she do to her? First, kill her play, no matter what I do to
build up a success for the kiddie to cancel that mortgage. Second: do
something, say something that will kill that look in those gray eyes
when they lift to me. Never! Take Denny, Violet, and the Lord help him;
I can't. You've bought me. Washing her hair in the Y. W. C. A.! God
bless that institution and--"
At last Mr. Godfrey Vandeford slept.
After his ten o'clock awakening Mr. Vandeford displayed a marked
eccentricity in his demeanor. That morning was unlike any morning he had
ever experienced, and his conduct surprised himself. A daybreak shower
had fallen on the hot and baked city, and it was as fresh as a suburb.
Arrayed in the coolest of white silk, linen, and suede, Mr. Vandeford
had his chauffeur drive him not to the whirling office but to the most
sophisticated Fifth Avenue florist, where he purchased the most
unsophisticated bunch of flowers at the highest price to be obtained in
New York.
"The Young Women's Christian Association," he commanded the obsequious
young Valentine who drove the big Chambers. Mr. Vandeford was never
sufficiently unoccupied of mind to pilot a car in and out of New York
traffic. For half a second the young Frenchman hesitated.
"I don't know where it is--Find out," commanded Mr. Vandeford, and again
he had the foreign experience of feeling the blood burn the under side
of the tan on his cheeks.
Valentine consulted the tall man in uniform at the door of the flower
shop, and this menial consulted some one within, who must have consulted
a directory, judging from the time it took to obtain the correct
address. With his eyes straight in front of him, as a chauffeur's eyes
should always be, he then drove rapidly down the avenue.
And on that beautiful morning Mr. Vandeford's luck was with him.
Valentine whirled expertly up to the curb in front of the large,
hospitable building which had emblazoned over its door the impressive Y.
W. C. A. letters, letters that send a beacon all over the known world as
they did to Mr. Vandeford in little and unimportant New York. Mr.
Vandeford got out of the car with hurried grace in his long limbs and,
with actual trepidation, went in through the door, into a world he had
never even thought of before. He had entered many an African lion jungle
with less fear. He glanced with awe at the natty young woman in white
linen who presided at the desk, and wanted intensely to put his flowers
behind him and back out of the door rather than approach and ask for the
lady to whom he wished to donate them. In fact, he might have
accomplished such a retreat if again luck had not come his way.
"Oh, Mr. Vandeford, how glad I am that you got here before we went out
to the museum," exclaimed a fluty, slurring young voice just behind him,
and he found that the gray eyes with the black lashes were just as
unusual as he had decided they could not possibly be in the interval
that had elapsed since he had looked into them. "Oh, how lovely!"
The last exclamation was made over the edge of the bouquet, which he had
tendered Miss Adair as silently as a school-boy hands out his first
bunch of buttercups to the lady for whom he has picked them.
"Did you come for me to go to help work on the play?" was the energetic
question that brought him out of his trance.
"No, not right now," he answered haltingly, and when he realized how
many times he would have to put her off with words to that same effect,
his trance became a panic.
"When are you going to need me?" Miss Adair asked him with a direct and
business-like look right to his eyes. "I am ready for work now."
"Now what'll I do?" he demanded of himself.
CHAPTER IV
"I thought of a lot of new things for my characters to say, while I was
coming up from Kentucky on the train, and I want to put them in." Miss
Adair further tortured Vandeford.
"This morning I am going to talk to the electrician and the costumer and
the scene painter." Mr. Vandeford answered by telling her the truth,
because, with her very beautiful and candid eyes beaming into his,
showing both interest and consideration, he had not the power to make up
any kind of lie to put her off the trail of "The Purple Slipper."
"I am so glad that I got up early and am ready to go with you! I can
tell them about what my great-grandmother really wore when it all
happened, and it will be such a help to them!" Miss Adair exclaimed
with great business acumen shining in her eyes. Mr. Vandeford gave up
the fight, piloted her into his car, and gave the command, "Office!" to
the very decorous, but very much interested Valentine.
As they were skimming back up the avenue and about to turn into
Forty-second Street, an inspiration came to Mr. Vandeford.
"Didn't you keep some of those costumes of the period of the play hid
away in an old brass-nailed leather trunk in your garret?" he asked Miss
Adair, with desperate eagerness shining in his eyes.
"Yes," Miss Adair answered readily. Then she hesitated, and the genuine
blush rivaled the one in the northeast corner of the bouquet at the
waist of the very chic, blue-silk suit. "That is, I did have some--"
"Have they been destroyed?" questioned Mr. Vandeford, with the greatest
anxiety.
"No, not exactly," answered Miss Adair, with a distressed tremor at the
corner of her curved mouth that rivaled a rose of a deeper hue in the
southwest corner of the bouquet.
"I see," answered Mr. Vandeford, with great relief. "You are not just
sure where they are. That's great! You can have a talk with Mr. Corbett,
who is to design the costumes, and then hop right back home in a day or
two, as soon as you are rested and we've had a little bat on Broadway,
and find them for him to use in his designs. The management will pay all
the expenses and you can--can--"
Mr. Vandeford cast around in his mind for some other business in
connection with "The Purple Slipper" that would keep the author thereof
busy and contented in Adairville, Kentucky, out of the clutches of
Violet and out of the way of his stage director until it all was running
smoothly.
"How about your getting a lot of photographs of the house in which it
all happened?" he went on. Vaguely he felt photography must be a slow
process in Adairville, Kentucky.
Also, in his heart he was forced to acknowledge that his inspiration for
getting the author out of the way of her own play while it was being
murdered was not entirely original. Tradition had told him, whether
truly or not, that at a certain crucial moment in the butchering and
rehearsal of "The Great Divide" the poet-author, Moody, had been sent
West to hunt a genuine war costume for a great Indian war-chief, his
favorite written character, and on his return with the trophy had found
the Indian cut entirely and forever from the play.
"Those dresses would be the greatest help you could give us now," he