"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 n.o.body 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. G.o.dfrey 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 subst.i.tuted 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. G.o.dfrey 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 cla.s.s 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 p.r.o.nounced, 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 grat.i.tude 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. G.o.dfrey 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."
"G.o.d, 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 new fire for a new undertaking beginning to burn in his little black eyes.
"Fine," answered Mr. Vandeford, with all cordiality, and not even thinking of his lost thousands. "It will go big, Rooney, and I"ll be glad--none gladder."
"Sure," answered Mr. Rooney. "It"s all in the business. Everybody on Broadway is out to stab everybody else--but mostly it"s paper daggers if you take it right."
"A tissue-paper world sewed together with tinsel thread," Mr. Vandeford murmured, as he fell asleep with his cheek pillowed on the wrist that Miss Adair had marked in the struggle for her own.
A week from that night "The Purple Slipper" had its first night on Broadway, and opened the New Carnival Theater in a blaze of glory, publicity, and electric lights. The talented young press-agent had done his work well, and the audience a.s.sembled was the most brilliant possible, made up of the usual blase critics, eager theatrical people who were not on the boards themselves, and interested and distinguished men and women from many outer worlds. In the box facing the one occupied by Mrs. Justus Farraday, in a blaze of both the Farraday and Justus jewels and prestige, and the beautiful young author of the play, with her son Mr. Dennis Farraday, and the producer, Mr. G.o.dfrey Vandeford, sat Miss Violet Hawtry with Mr. Weiner, the owner of the beautiful new theater which was opening its doors for the first time on Broadway. When the curtain fell upon the new Lindsey star after its eighth elevation, the Violet rushed behind the scenes and took that astonished young woman in her arms, with the real tears of emotion, with which one genuine artist greets another, in her great blue eyes.
"You were wonderful, my dear, perfectly wonderful," she exclaimed. "You see, Van, I never could have done it like that. Good luck to both of you, and the little author--oh, there you are, my dear! All of you shake hands with Mr. Weiner. He"s so pleased that he is speechless, but he"s going to give you a big banquet on your fiftieth performance. He"s promised me."
Which demonstration was perfectly in keeping with Miss Hawtry and Maggie Murphy"s character, and emanated from that quality within her that a month later put "The Rosie Posie Girl" up as high and as brilliant in electric lights as "The Purple Slipper," and kept it there an entire year. Which goes to prove that the "tissue paper world" is yet of heroic fibre.
When Mr. Vandeford went to insert his author into the international safety that evening at about the hour of midnight, he saw that his friend the secretary was shooing a chattering party of Christian ladies, who, as his guests, had sat in a group, fifth row center, in the New Carnival Theater that evening, off up-stairs. With his talisman key, which had never left his pocket since it had been presented to him, in his hand, he paused to speak in a friendly shadow to his successful and now truly eminent playwright.
"You"ll have to go South Thursday, and I"ll follow Sunday to get that little marriage business over in Adairville before we leave for the Klondike. My commission has arrived from Washington, and the Secretary of the Navy wants quick reports of the copper before the big freeze. Do you suppose I can keep you warm in Eskimo furs and--and my heart?"
"Yes," answered Miss Adair, with the flutter which Mr. Vandeford now answered, without any conscious volition. "There ought to be a great play out of the Klondike. Jack London could have done it, but--but--"
the faithful gray eyes were raised to his with the flame in their depths.
With a groan, but an answering flame, Mr. Vandeford replied:
"It"s a fatal drag--. Yes. Some day we"ll come back and try to put across another one!"
THE END