Blue-grass and Broadway Part 21

"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-gra.s.s 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 rehea.r.s.e 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 n.o.body'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 s.p.u.n.k 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 a.s.sented.

"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 a.s.sociated 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 studying of stagecraft and the writing of half a hundred plays until he writes one that is really great; after which, if he has the strength and the nerves to produce that play, we will all go to see the great human drama. That is, if he has had time to live with and in the hearts of people so as to supply that gross sympathy with the ma.s.ses who buy tickets which Rooney got while climbing out of the gutter. G.o.d grant he comes some day to America--but you are not he!"

"No, I'm not," admitted Miss Adair, with her eyes smiling back into his whimsically, "but what you say makes me see that the--the producer--_you_ are the whole thing. You get it all--me and Mr. Rooney and Miss Hawtry together and pound us into--into a play. I make that acknowledgment."

"If you ask the stage-manager he will say that the success of a play is his; the costumer will claim that success; the star knows it is his or hers, and the lead is sure that it is due to the support; the author surely has some claim to draw the huge royalties, and the location of his theater makes the theater-owner know that any play in that theater will go. Yes, the producer will always claim the whole show if it all goes well. If it fails the show then belongs entirely to the producer, who picked it in its ma.n.u.script stage, and he is no good as a producer.

If he fails a few times hand-running, to the sc.r.a.p heap with him!"

"But you've never failed," Miss Adair exclaimed, with a dart of fear in her eyes.

"My last show, 'Miss Cut-up,' was a flivver all right, though we just saved our faces. But I've got a show now that will put me in electric light for two years hand-running and--" Mr. Vandeford was in a panic as he realized that he was going so far in that curious thinking out loud to Miss Adair that he had been about to launch forth on "The Rosie Posie Girl" to her. It would have been like telling a friend the plans of his own funeral with enthusiasm, as it would be obvious to her that Hawtry would have to fail in and drop "The Purple Slipper" before becoming the triumphant "Rosie Posie Girl."

"I'm willing to--to let them cut my play all up if--if it will really run two years and make your reputation more brilliant than it is," Miss Adair said, interrupting his pause of consternation at his near betrayal of his plans. She spoke with the wors.h.i.+pful uplift of her gray eyes to his that had betrayed him in the first place to such a confusion of schemes. "If it added anything to it, I would even be willing to let you put the Adair name to the vulgar thing they read here to-day, but it wouldn't help it anywhere except in Louisville and Cincinnati and Nashville and Atlanta and New Orleans and Richmond. People don't know us in New York, and any name will do here; so mine won't--won't have to be disgraced."

"Please don't say that!" pleaded Mr. Vandeford with consternation in his soul as he thought of the development of the Howard "pep" Hawtry would make as the rehearsals of "The Purple Slipper" progressed. "It is the same thing with Miss Hawtry as it is with Mr. Rooney; she has a--a kind of gutter drag that gets across to the mult.i.tude, and of course your play had to be--be fitted to her. Hawtry, to be Hawtry, has to do and say things that you couldn't write at all, that you couldn't very well understand; but they'll get the crowd going and coming. Please give me your promise again to sit tight and see it through--or go home and leave it all to me." Mr. Vandeford was surprised to feel how hard his heart beat, and he was afraid that it sounded like the echo of an anvil chorus in the big empty theater.

"I never have to give promises a second time, and this is the last time I am ever going to cry out," Miss Adair answered him, with a lift to her proud little head. "I am going to stay right here and help if I can, and learn. But I won't in any way distress or--or trouble you. Please don't get me on your mind!"

"I won't get you on my mind," Mr. Vandeford answered out loud--"because I've got you in my heart, poor kiddie," he continued to himself, in a kind of desperation.

Mr. Dennis Farraday burst in upon the dusk of the theater and the tragedy of the situation. He was vastly excited and he waved a letter in his hand.

"Oh, you Patricia Adair, why didn't you tell me that you are old Roger Adair's sister?" he demanded.

"Why, what do you mean about Roger? Do you know--"

"Do I know him? Just listen to this, will you, and here I've _not_ been handing you around on a silver salver for two weeks!" He then read the following letter aloud to Miss Adair and Mr. Vandeford:

Adairville, Kentucky.

DEAR DENNY:

Well, here I am! I'm the Captain of my county in the Army of the Furrows, and hope to turn in many thousand pounds of food stuffs for you people in New York to live on. In the meantime Miss Patricia Adair, my sister, is going to New York to see to the putting on of a play she has written for one Mr. G.o.dfrey Vandeford.

She is the greatest girl ever, and you stay right on the job seeing that things go right for her while I plant these potatoes to keep you from starving. She will be at the Y. W. C. A. and will sleep and eat safe enough, but you look out for her and don't let her get homesick. If she needs me, of course I will come, but she's a plucky child and you are the best ever, so I'll go on ploughing with a free mind. Let me know how it all goes. What sort of a chap is that Vandeford?

Yours as always and forever, ROGER.

"Can you beat it?" demanded good Dennis, with a blaze of friends.h.i.+p in his eyes as he regarded Miss Patricia Adair. "It was forwarded from my old office number to my new, to Westchester to Nantucket, back to my office, and finally arrived this morning. I've just sent Roger a thousand-word telegram, and I hope he never knows that I was off the job ten days. Give that child here to me, Van, and go get a report on your character for me before you look at her again. Roger Adair is the best friend I've got on earth, next to you, and you'd better watch your step."

"I like his steps," Miss Adair said, and again Mr. Vandeford felt uncertain as to that curious little flutter that was like a nestling of which he felt he was never to be certain and which Mr. Farraday did not seem to observe at all.

"Didn't you know that Roger was turning you over to me, young lady? Why have you side-stepped me?" Mr. Farraday demanded of the young author, in a voice of great severity.

"I thought that Roger was going to write to a Mr. Denny about me; and I didn't write to him that Mr. Denny hadn't come to take care of me because--because I was afraid he'd leave his work and come up to look after me himself. I didn't remember the Farraday part of your name at all. Roger always said 'Denny.'"