Blue-grass and Broadway
relief that it had not been withdrawn forever, as she had feared from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 Bebe 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 Bebe 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 Bebe 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 Bebe, 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 debut 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," _nee_ "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 Bebe 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