"Until last year, yes, Pops, but now New York is so full of people with munition and war-contract money in their pockets that any show, no matter how rotten, that gets in a Broadway theater plays to capacity and stays. They"d go to "The Old District Skule" because the doors were open and there is no other place to go. What are we going to do?"
"I advise that you see Mr. Breit and trust to some very big failure to give you a place. It is that he will always give you a preference,"
answered Mr. Meyers with little hope, but determination.
"Yes, Breit will let me in if there is a squeezing chance, but Breit doesn"t own a theater, nor do I, or you, Pops; and I don"t blame the fellows who do own them for filling them with their own cheap companies and plays so as to get their buckets under the whole golden stream. Why give money away to any independent producer?"
"Mr. Breit said that he had news that Mr. Weiner would open that New Carnival with a Hilliard show, name not given," Mr. Meyers added to the information already prepared for Mr. Vandeford.
"I"ll see goose-grease frying out of him in Inferno before he gets it,"
said Mr. Vandeford, coolly. "I know that is his game, but I"ll put across this "Purple Slipper" with Hawtry and keep my "Rosie Posie Girl"
until I get good and ready to let her play it. Then I"ll produce it to the tune of a half-million dollars and not Mr. Weiner. I"ve never been squeezed, and I"m not going to have this rotten game beat me. I"ll go over and see Breit and he"ll jockey me a corner on Broadway, somehow.
Back at three." And Mr. Vandeford walked out of his office as coolly as though not sizzling inwardly with anxiety.
"I"ve got you next on the booking of about four-fifths of the theaters on Broadway, Van," said Mr. Breit, the booking king, as he and Mr.
Vandeford smoked leisurely cigars in his big, cool office. "You should worry! E. and K. and S. and Z. are bound to pick some flivvers and in you go. Loaf on the road and lose money like a little man."
"My contract expires with Hawtry if I don"t present her on Broadway by September fifteenth."
"That _is_ a bit of a pickle! But she won"t have any show to jump into, and she"ll compromise with you; won"t she?"
"She"ll have to," Mr. Vandeford declared. "Coming down to Atlantic City to see "The Purple Slipper" open two weeks from Monday, September twenty-third?"
"I"ll be there. Rooney says it is a go; says little genius amateur wrote it and Grant Howard "pepped" it. That right?"
"Yes. By!"
An hour later, in the coolness and seclusion of the grill room of The Monks, Mr. Vandeford was imparting his predicament to his partner in the venture and adventures of "The Purple Slipper."
"And you are worrying about whether Miss Hawtry will stay by us for the few weeks we"ll have to loaf on the road or even close while waiting for the New York opening?" questioned Mr. Farraday. "Say, aren"t you a bit unjust in your judgment of her, Van?"
"I know the whole tribe of actors, and you don"t, Denny," answered Mr.
Vandeford, over a tall gla.s.s of iced tea he was drinking; he didn"t know exactly why, but the habit had grown on him lately.
"Then why not try to put her under contract for those few indefinite weeks?" suggested Mr. Farraday, over his cup of hot coffee.
"You talk as though we were dealing with sane people," answered Mr.
Vandeford. "She"s got us and she"ll keep us guessing up to the last minute, and then put some kind of screws on. I have got to figure out the likely ones, to see what I can do to jam them."
"Well, anyway, ask her. I think she"ll stand by us. I know she will,"
said Mr. Farraday, with both faith and conviction in his voice. "You do her an injustice, I say!"
"I"m not going to make her any request or offer, Denny. I can"t," said Mr. Vandeford, as he looked at the ice floating in his gla.s.s of tea.
"Of course," a.s.sented Mr. Farraday, with pained sympathy in his big voice. "Would you like me to sound her out?"
"It"s half your show; go ahead. She probably knows the situation and has made her plans for the squeeze or double-cross, but you might try her out," consented Mr. Vandeford, with a shrewd glance at Mr. Farraday.
"But I wish you wouldn"t, Denny," he added, with a sudden glow of affection in his eyes. Then he was restrained from further remonstrance with Mr. Farraday by the thought of the author of "The Purple Slipper"
and her plucky sticking by the play through the thick and thin of her disapproval of it. Again he offered up his big Jonathan as a sacrifice in hopes of improving the prospects of "The Purple Slipper."
Mr. Farraday took Miss Hawtry into his confidence about the predicament of finding a New York theater for his play, "The Purple Slipper," that very evening, out on the veranda of the Beach Inn, where he had motored her by request for dinner after her fatiguing rehearsals, which she had made still more fatiguing for Mr. William Rooney.
"And Van sent you to ask me if I was going to stick by?" she asked, with an effective quaver in her voice.
"He felt that we had no right to--to tie you up for indefinite weeks,"
said Mr. Farraday, constructing and temporizing at the same time.
"Did you think as little of me as he did?"
"No, by George, I knew you"d stick by us, and I said so!" Mr. Farraday exploded with genuine emotion.
"Thank you. You know me after these few weeks better than he does after all these years of--" And the Violet bent her head on Mr. Farraday"s nearest arm and began to weep softly. They were in a secluded corner of the veranda of the Inn, and the Violet raged at herself for having closed the complete seclusion of Highcliff for herself and her purposes by renting it to the Trevors when she had gone to town to the rehearsals of "The Purple Slipper."
And as good Dennis Farraday had no valid reason, either within or without the law for not doing so, he put consoling and comforting arms about her, and exposed his wide, silk-garbed shoulder to the rain of her tears, which were not really raining. In his big heart there was the same comforting for this conspirator as there would have been for Mr.
Vandeford"s lawful widow, and he administered it with the same affectionate respect that he would have used to the relict.
"You"re a dear, wonderful little woman!" he was saying, when the voice of the Clyde Trevors was heard calling to them from around the veranda, and an oath rose in the Violet with such force that she almost allowed it to explode. Still she felt sure of her ultimate results.
"You can count on me to stand by you and the play forever," she promised, and the hurried pressure of their lips in the soft, dark, sea-perfumed air was biologically inevitable.
Mr. G.o.dfrey Vandeford had woven a tangled web when he had let fall the purple letter on the purple ma.n.u.script and gone out recklessly to follow the hunch their juxtaposition implied.
CHAPTER VII
The first two weeks of September spent in torrid New York were a strange period of time to have projected itself into the calm life of Miss Patricia Adair of Adairville, Kentucky. Suddenly she found herself a cog screwed tight into a rapid-fire piece of machinery that was running at top speed night and day, by name, "The Purple Slipper."
For long hours she sat in the coolness of that stage-box and held her breath while she threw her whole self into the building of the play, which so fascinatingly was and was not hers. And through all those hours, close at her side, between her and the big dim theater, sat Mr.
G.o.dfrey Vandeford, with his arm across the back of her chair and his eager face close to hers and tilted at the same angle. Her slightest murmur or his lowest whisper caught and was answered, and they almost seemed to be breathing one breath, so absorbed were they in the destiny of their mutual adventure. Like all women of her kind, Patricia Adair had known men only through a cloud, which s.e.x traditions had firmly held between her and them, and G.o.dfrey Vandeford was the first man she had encountered since she had slipped outside of its deadening density into a world where men and women endeavored together first, and left their sentinel undertakings to a fitting secondary time and place. In all sincerity she accepted him as a co-worker and was as happy working with him as it was possible for a woman to be. She specially liked being beside him in the office, and watched him settle the details of the running the big machine smoothly, from the hiring of the property-man to the firing of three successive stage-carpenters.
"Real eats, Mr. Vandeford?" the former had inquired one morning.
"Brown-bread turkey, nice and tasty, good crackers, but soda-pop and so forth for booze. Remember, they"ve got to face it, we hope, many weeks; don"t turn their stomachs so they"ll all gag."
"I see, sir, I see. I fed "Maple Leaves" for two years, and they all et every night and gimme a purse when it closed to go to London."
"Goes!"
"Brown-bread turkey sounds nice. I"m hungry," said Miss Adair, as the good-providing property-man departed.
"Pop is going to bring us a piece of pie and a bottle of milk from the automat," answered Mr. Vandeford, as he began putting busy stabs with the press pencil on a pile of papers. "I ought to send him to get Denny to motor you for a real feed in the cool somewhere, but I want you here." With perfect unconcern, he went on checking the list the property-man had left him. He had ceased trying to decide the meaning of the flutter which he was not sure Miss Adair really gave when she was pleased. He was too busy to think about anything but the rush and roar of the machinery of "The Purple Slipper," so he just kept Miss Adair so near him for all the waking hours of the day that he could have no occasion to have his thoughts distracted by worrying over just what might be befalling her. Day after day he extracted her from the Y. W. C.
A. at ten o"clock A. M., fed her and Miss Lindsey coffee and rolls and berries just any place that they happened to see (often he even ate with the two girls in the big empty cafeteria at the inst.i.tution), lunched with her in the same haphazard fashion, sought a cool and quiet spot to give her dinner, and a ride on a country road, turned her into the big safety at about eleven o"clock, and went to bed to sleep the sleep of the interestedly absorbed.
The few evenings that Miss Adair spent with Mr. Gerald Height Mr.
Vandeford did not find repose so early or with such ease. Also, his awakening on those mornings after was not so joyous, and he arrived at the Y. W. C. A. fifteen and twenty minutes too early upon each occasion.
However, his time was well spent in chatting with the brisk young secretary, and his anxiety was entirely relieved each time by finding the look intact in the gray eyes raised to his in eager greeting after the prolonged absence of fourteen hours, when the usual separation was about ten.