Blue-grass and Broadway
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 boob 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
assented 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 shore,
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 passion; 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
buttressed 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-butter 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