Blue-grass and Broadway
o'clock from big Manhattan. Mr. Farraday had had a like operation
performed upon himself, and was in such a radiant condition that Mr.
Vandeford felt badly eclipsed beside him.
"What does it all mean about Miss Hawtry and Miss Lindsey and the show,
Van?" Mrs. Farraday questioned, with greater anxiety in her face than
she had had at any other opening night of her favorite's successful
shows. "Are we going to have a terrible time?"
"I'm going to put you in a wheel-chair and let Denny take you up to the
north end of the board-walk and tell you all about it while I locate and
make comfortable the rest of the folks," Mr. Vandeford answered with a
deep relief at her presence in his eyes.
"Where are my girls?" she questioned.
"Both dead--asleep," he answered, as if deeply happy to be able to say
it of his star and his author.
His statement was only partly true, for while Miss Adair slept the sleep
of the emotionally unanxious, Mildred Lindsey sat crouched by her
window, with her eyes looking far out over the Atlantic Ocean, waiting
for the result of Mr. Dennis Farraday's talk with his mother at the
north end of the board-walk.
There are occasionally mothers who bear sons who can tell them all about
things, and Mrs. Farraday really enjoyed the whole story that big,
bonnie Dennis poured out to her at the sunset hour by the brink of old
ocean, Dago Italiana squatting on his heels out of hearing and basking
in inactivity, from the moment of the beefsteak episode in his and Miss
Lindsey's acquaintance up to the moment in which Miss Hawtry had
established herself in his arms on the occasion of his debut in a stage
dressing-room. And even at that stage of the narration she rather
astonished Mr. Farraday, who was shamefaced enough at the telling, by
saying with soft pity in her motherly voice:
"The poor woman. Of course she couldn't help loving you, and now she's
lost both Van and you. Now go on and tell me about Mildred."
"She--she's the best ever," was Mr. Farraday's explicit and enlightening
answer.
"Of course she is. I saw that the time you brought her to dinner with
me, and also that you were in love with her. She's really a rather
wonderful girl, and--and--Dennis, I'll tell you something that I never
expected to tell you--I've always wanted to be an actress. I simply
adore that Lindsey girl, and I know she'll make a great actress. Why on
earth should she want to marry you?" Which goes to show that
aristocratic Mrs. Farraday was not the ordinary mother.
"Let's go ask her," roared big Dennis, as he embraced her in a way that
made the sympathetic and now wealthy young Dago Italiana flash his white
teeth in joy.
And nobody can say how much the fate of "The Purple Slipper" was
affected by the fact that Rosalind went upon the stage for her first
appearance as a star, straight from the tender arms of stately,
white-haired Mrs. Farraday.
The opening night of "The Purple Slipper," by Patricia Adair, produced
by Mr. Godfrey Vandeford, and staged by Mr. William Rooney, was a
triumph undisputed and acknowledged by a brilliant cosmopolitan audience
such as Atlantic City furnishes any play presented to it before
September the twenty-fifth, for up until that week on the board-walk of
that resort East meets West and the South joins them. The eminent author
sat in the left stage box with Mrs. Justus Farraday of New York and Mr.
and Mrs. Derick Van Tyne, and at her side was a chair into which at
times dropped Mr. Dennis Farraday, but which had been reserved for the
producer. Things had gone brilliantly from the start, from the moment
the curtain went up with polished, interesting Miss Herne manoeuvering
the frightened and substituted Betty Carrington through the opening
dialogue. A veritable gasp of joy had greeted the beautiful Mr. Gerald
Height as he entered in his colonial wig, ruffles, and velvet, and his
big eyes under their bowed brows sought out the author and smiled at her
with a genuine pledge of loyalty which no lizard could ever have given
forth as he glided richly into his archaic banter with Miss Herne.
"He'll get 'em going, get 'em going the whole dame bunch from Harlem to
the Battery," muttered Mr. Rooney to Fido, who stood in the wings, with
his eyes glued to the much annotated prompt copy. "Now watch out for
Lindsey; she's doing forty sides of new stuff in twenty hours. Me for
the stock company to train 'em young. Let her rip, Rosalind!" And with a
nod Mr. Rooney sent his "bet" out upon the stage to make the audience
forget that they had paid their money to see Violet Hawtry and make them
glad to have paid it to see her.
As Mildred Lindsey stepped out on the stage in all the glory of an
almost unbelievable beauty, Mr. Godfrey Vandeford, who sat with his
shoulder back of that of the author of his play, seemed to behold a
vision with his trained theatrical foresight. This slender, powerful
young woman, with the rose dusk of the prairie sun on her cheeks, the
depths of the great canons in her dark eyes, and the breadth of the far
horizons across her broad brow seemed to him to typify the rise of order
in her profession, over which so long had ruled chaos. And as her rich
voice led the intrigued audience from one brilliant scene to another, in
which she reincarnated before their eyes a very flower of the old
Southern chivalry with dash, finish, and lucidity, he felt as if he had
done his best and now had a right to be allowed to depart in peace from
the world of tinsel and illusion. As Lindsey and Height held the
audience spell-bound while the tempted wife dueled with her might
against the tender and desperate lover, placing, with a combined art
that was as great as any he had ever witnessed, the "big scene" of "The
Purple Slipper" among the "big scenes" of the modern stage instead of in
the class of lascivious masterpieces where the night before Hawtry had
laid it, Mr. Vandeford looked down into the gray eyes of the girl who
had had it all in her blood for generations, and who had so brilliantly
given it birth, and felt a prophecy rise within him that soon the
American drama would begin to draw on the wealth of tradition which had
been piling up in a vast storage for it, and that when it did,
dramatists and actors, men and women, would rise to interpret it to a
wondering world.
"Is it really mine?" she asked him, in proud surprise and wonder.
"Yes, it's yours--filtered through Howard and Rooney and all the rest,
but--it--is--you," he answered. "You lost it a dozen times, but--his
own comes back to a man or a woman."
His eyes blazed so that the long lashes lowered over the stars in hers,
and she saw the curtain fall on the last scene in a mist of tears. The
onrush of applause that raised the curtain half a dozen times was
confused in her by the pounding of Mr. Vandeford's heart back of her
shoulder and the echo in her own.
"Fifty weeks and then some, Van," she heard the young press-agent
declare, in business-like congratulation.
"Sure-fire hit," Mr. Rooney pronounced, as he spat on the stage floor
behind the curtain. "Rehearsals at ten to-morrow to tighten up, Fido. Me
for the hay." Miss Adair had gone back of the footlights to cast her
gratitude into his arms, and he had failed to notice her appearance in
any way at all, but had spat and gone on his autocratic way. Perhaps in
the New World of the Theater, stage-managers may be able to afford to be
human, perhaps not.
Mr. Vandeford's supper-party to the cast of "The Purple Slipper" and the
friends from New York who had come down to see its try-out, lasted until
two o'clock in the morning, but when it was over neither the moon, which
was as full that night as Mr. Kent had become by coffee and cigars, nor
Dago Italiana had retired, and both stayed on their jobs out at the
south end of the board walk, where boards melt off into sand and ocean
and sky.
Mr. Godfrey Vandeford had got about two thirds of the way along the
painful stretch of autobiography, with which he was inflicting agony on
himself by recounting to Miss Adair, when she raised her gray eyes to
his with the faith and reverence still at their average level, even
slightly higher, and stopped his punishment.
"I understand exactly why people like you and Miss Hawtry don't marry
each other," she astonished him by saying in all calmness. "Mr. Height
explained it all to me the other day. Actors and actresses have
peculiar temperaments that fly together when they ought not to, and fly
apart when they ought to stay together. I know just how that is because
I feel--"
"Hush!" commanded Mr. Vandeford, as he laid his hands on the shoulders
of his author, who was standing close to him, with the moonlight full on
her clear-cut, high-bred face, and he gave her a savage shake. "The
whole crazy bunch will have to have law and order shot into 'em or the
theatrical profession will follow horse-racing to the devil. If they
don't give up unfaith and the double-cross Broadway will open some night
and swallow them all. And here you come out of a real world and say to
me--"
"What did you think I was going to say?" demanded Miss Adair, pressing
so close to him that it was impossible for him to administer another
shake.
"I don't know and I don't want to hear it. I'm afraid to have you say
anything to me."
"It was this: I was going to ask you what I would have done if you had
been married to Miss Hawtry when I got to you and we had begun to
produce our play together. It's different when men and women work
together! Standards have to be broader. How do I know that I would have
run away to--"
"Don't, don't!" pleaded Mr. Vandeford as she crept still nearer to him
and forcibly tried to open his arms for herself. "I'm punished. I've
taught you myself! When I leave you how'll I ever know if I'm going to
find you there when I come back?"
"Well, how'd you expect to find me--me--there if you don't take me
there?" Miss Adair pleaded as she tugged at his folded arms, with such
energy that her polished thumb-nail slightly marked his iron wrists.
"I'm not worthy, child, I'm not worthy," Mr. Vandeford answered with
grim words, and his arms still taut against his breast.
"You have to judge yourself with the same--same 'broad standards' I
judge you by, like you told me to use. Please open your arms!"
"I take those broad standards away from you."
"Jesus Christ gave them to me, only I didn't understand in Adairville."
"God, I wish you had never left Adairville."
"I know what there is for us to do."
"What?"
"I'll go back and marry you by Adairville narrow standards for better
and for worse, and then we'll have to keep 'em for ourselves when we
come back, because we did it knowing what we know, but let other people
be broad wherever they are without judging them. I'm going to drop
asleep right here on the sand if you don't open your arms."
"Oh, good Lord, what did You make women out of?" Mr. Vandeford said in
all reverence and bewilderment, as he took the "white flame" to his
breast and drew it past her lips until it burned away all the chaff in
his soul and established itself upon its altar.
After Mr. Vandeford had again delivered his author to the hopeful maid,
waiting up for another greenback, he met Mr. Rooney at the desk of the
hotel still on his way to "the hay."
"Closed up with Weiner to begin rehearsing 'The Rosie Posie Girl' on
Tuesday, after we open 'The Purple Slipper' in the New Carnival. Said
Hawtry wouldn't sign up until I had signed too. She's got a hunch for
me. If you fail, their show goes in in your place; if you win, Weiner
shunts John Drew or Arliss out to one of his other theaters on the road,
and puts in 'The Rosie Posie Girl.' Good business, eh?" And Mr. Rooney
rolled his cigar from east to west and questioned Mr. Vandeford, with a