Infatuation
interest, and too expert a theatrical man to let a success run along
without a guiding hand. Adair's name went up in electric letters;
pictures and paragraphs were scattered broadcast; an option was secured
on another theater to continue the run, and, what seemed to him the best
of all, he had Adair securely tied up by a new contract. Kemmel, in his
own words, was "on to his job," and in his letters to O'Dowd he was
already urging a number two company, and submitting estimates and names.
The new contract, of course, was a marvel of one-sidedness;
on-to-his-job Kemmel naturally saw to that, and paid a legal iron-worker
twenty-five dollars to make it of seamless steel. But on the running
out of the existing contract at seventy-five dollars a week, it assured
Adair two hundred and fifty as long as it pleased O'Dowd to employ him.
Seamless steel could not accomplish everything, and a substantial
increase of salary had to be accorded. Adair would have stood out for
more; but Phyllis, with feminine caution, prevailed on him, to make no
demur. Booful's day would come; stick to her and he would wear
diamonds--not to speak of bells on his darling fingers and toes; but
just now money was secondary to cementing his position till he was stuck
up so high on Broadway that they'd have to feed him with a
ladder.--Besides, two hundred and fifty dollars a week was an _awful_
lot of money. Forty weeks at two hundred and--
"Forty weeks, you goose!" expostulated Adair. "I'd be the last person to
object if it were forty weeks. But down there, on that smudgy blue
place, they can cancel everything in forty seconds."
"People aren't cancelled who are playing to capacity."
"I know, but the utter damned meanness that--"
"Poor little Booful mustn't worry, and if he'll stop damning and
rampaging, I'll take him down to his Uncle Macy's, and show him that
lovely fur coat I want him to buy as soon as we have some money."
"I suppose you are right, Phyllis, but it galls me to--"
"My darling, sweetheart love," she broke in with pretty seriousness,
"nothing is so important as your success, and once make that secure,
money follows as a matter of course. Let Booful keep shinning up the
pole, even if they do pick his pockets, and never think of anything but
the gilt ball at the top, and--and _me_."
This was good advice and Booful acted on it. The two hundred and fifty,
too, looked less despicable as every day drew it nearer; and as it
became, not an abstraction to be argued over and theoretically scorned,
but a tidy little bundle of greenbacks that would go far to ease life,
both on the spending side of it and the saving. Oh, yes, half of it was
to be laid by in the bank for a rainy day. Meanwhile, they lived up to
the last cent of the seventy-five, which once so much, now suddenly grew
meager by contrast, and by the greater inroads made upon it. Booful
rolled home in cabs; there were little restaurant suppers with a
fizzling pint of wine; Phyllis bought a coveted peignoir, made out of
pale blue fluffy-nothingness, and with a hand-embroidered collar
delicately touched with gold.--Well, why not? The nearing future was
too bright not to discount it a little in the present.
We have said that Kemmel kept his press agent busy; and in the same
thoroughgoing spirit that placarded every garbage-can from Twenty-sixth
Street to Harlem, strove by a thousand means to get Adair's name
prominently into the papers. If he succeeded beyond all expectations he
ascribed it to his own astuteness, instead of to the fact that Adair,
for the moment, was an extremely spectacular figure in the theatrical
world. It was one of the remarkable things about this man that he
impressed himself so indelibly in the recollection of every one who had
ever known him. It was too often a disagreeable recollection; he had
sown hatred with a royal hand; yet, in a queer, negative, altogether
unprofitable way he had fascinated everybody. Others might make a
disagreeable impression and be forgotten. But no one ever forgot Adair.
Magnetism, personality, genius--whatever word one chose to call it--he
had the peculiar faculty of arresting attention, of exciting interest,
of making people talk and speculate about him.
It was indubitably at times a most unlucky gift. With his reappearance
and success the flood-gates of his past were opened, and there gushed
forth a Niagara of malignant chatter. His amours, his fights, his
disreputable escapades, his divorce--all were revived. Every one seemed
to have a story to his discredit, and to be in haste to get it into
print. Nor was his marriage to Phyllis allowed to escape the same
soiling publicity, and the tale was embellished with slanders and
innuendoes that would have goaded a much more patient man to fury.
Adair was with difficulty restrained from knocking editorial teeth down
editorial throats; and it showed Phyllis' power over him, and the change
generally in his disposition that the police courts were untroubled by
his presence.
Lies about herself Phyllis could bear with some fortitude, but Adair's
earlier life, as thus revealed by the sensation-mongers, cost her many a
bitter pang.--The woman who had tried to shoot him at the Cafe Martin,
and the whole revelation of that horrid affair--the Burt-Wauchope
scandal, where rather than save himself by compromising an unknown girl,
he had gone to prison for contempt; and that, not quietly and nobly, but
with a vain-glorious satisfaction in his martyrdom--the discreditable
spree on Tim Bartlett's yacht--how horrible, how unendurable it
was--this graveyard resurrection of bygone years!
Adair never justified himself to her, never tried to palliate or explain
away the incidents of his outrageous past. That instinct, which in all
his relations with her invariably guided him aright, served him as well
now as it had always before. He was more gentle, more tender, trusting
to kisses rather than words. "Don't let this hurt you," he once said to
her, the only time he had ever ventured to speak to her, "that wasn't
me, Phyllis. There wasn't any me until you came. You know that, don't
you? No me at all, but just a big brute, and if he didn't have a soul
it was because it was in your bureau drawer along with your stockings
and handkerchiefs, and I guess you thought it was a sachet bag or
something, and never looked at it twice."
The most jealous, dismayed and heart-sick of women could not have
resisted such pleading; not if she were in love, that is, and her
lover's voice was as appealing, and his eyes as convincing and
sincere.--In a divine commingling of wife-love and mother-love, so pure,
so uplifting that it transcended all physical expression, save alone
what the breast could give, she drew his head to her bosom, comforting
him, comforting herself in an act emblematic of all that is most
beautiful in humanity.
The more one studies the stage the more one is surprised by its
disregard of principles that govern every-day, ordinary affairs.
Perhaps it is because actors are all children, who have clung
tenaciously to playing Indian in the hall, and shooting tigers under the
parlor sofa long after the rest of us have grown up. It is a good thing
for the world that "temperament" is so largely confined to the
paste-board walls of the theater; or we might see our grocer sulking
over his butter, or railway presidents impetuously ordering off trains
because they had taken a sudden distaste to the landscape of some state.
Self-interest, that sheet anchor of society, is but a kedge to the
theatrical ship, and many plow the main without even that. Caprice
often outweighs all money-making considerations; and though we are far
from decrying those who sacrifice dollars to art (and there are many),
may one not be a little peevish with the others, whose vanity and
wilfulness often take such spiteful forms?
It certainly cost Shamus O'Dowd all of twelve thousand dollars, if not
double or treble that amount to close the run at the Herald Square
Theater and bring it to a peremptory conclusion. From his Rocky
Mountain ranch he had watched, with a grinding and increasing anger, the
success of the man to whom he had left his role. The swelling royalty
returns exasperated him; the laudatory notices, sent in such profusion
by Kemmel (who was innocent enough to think they would please)--were as
tongues of flame leaping up the legs of a captive at the stake (such fat
legs as they were, and with such an ample scorching surface), and all
the talk of another theater and a second company clogged his eyes with
blood, and seared his low, coarse face with the furrows of an
intolerable indignation.
Nightly for twenty-five years he had been taking others' crimes on his
brawny shoulders--murder, arson, embezzlement, forgery--he grabbed for
them all, never so happy as when misjudged, with only the audience in
the secret of his sacrifice; nobody on the stage could do anything wrong
without his making a rush to take the blame--and the oaths he kept with
an incredible fidelity; the superb impulses that started from him as
freely as perspiration; his goodness, chivalry, and almost insensate
honor--! Oh, the irony of reality as contrasted with those affecting
fictions!
"Dear Kemmel," he wrote, in his ugly, sprawling, impatient hand. "Take
the bloody show right off, and fire Adair, and keep the others on
half-salary till you can fix me up a route outside of New York. In
God's name, what do you think I'm made of, that I'm to play a number two
company all around the clock while he's starring my hit on Broadway?
And don't you put up any back-talk about it, either, for I mean every
word of it if it takes my last red--though you must see that it don't.
If we have to go forfeit on the theater, hell's bells, pay the bloody
cormorants, and do you hear, Get Out!!! For I'm sick of the whole
business. Fix it up with Mallory to send out something like this, even
if you have to pay space rates for it, and I want it featured:--'The
substitution of Mr. Cyril Adair for Mr. Shamus O'Dowd in the star-role
of _A Broth of a Boy_ has resulted so disastrously to the management
that the Herald Square Theater will be dark on Monday night, and all
outstanding tickets refunded at the box-office. The experiment was an
unfortunate one for all parties, for Mr. O'Dowd, previous to his
departure from New York, owing to his doctor's orders, was playing to
enormous business, and bade fair to remain all the season. In Mr.
O'Dowd's hands _A Broth of a Boy_ has been a record money-maker, and
friends of the genial star will be enthusiastic to learn of his early
return to harness. The old adage of the lion's skin is thus verified
again, and we are not disparaging Mr. Cyril Adair when we say he was
unlucky to be cast for the Donkey.'
"I hope this is all clear, and that I have not overlooked anything.
Perhaps when you are about it you had better fire Grace Farquar, too.
Pretty girls are cheap, and I should like another more come-on,
preferably a blonde this time. Received your check for $1,182.40. No
more for the present. Cordially yours, Shamus O'Dowd."
*CHAPTER XXIV*
The right girl's cheek against his own is usually worth more to a man
than all the philosophy to be found in books. Adair was stunned; he was
too helpless, too hurt even to murmur. When one is struck by a
thunderbolt, one lies where one falls. He expected Phyllis to fall
also, and in a dull, heart-broken way was surprised by her intrepidity.
She picked up the great, despairing creature; kissed him, petted him,
crooned over him like a baby, smiling through her tears, and exerting
all her pretty fancifulness to make him smile, too. Men may excel in