CHAPTER VI

Rehearsals for "The Purple Slipper" had been called positively for

September first, and the response became unanimous at about fifteen

minutes to eleven at the Barrett Theater on West Forty-sixth Street;

that is, it was unanimous except for the presence of the author and the

angel--Miss Adair and Mr. Farraday--and Miss Violet Hawtry, the star,

who never came to first readings until the whole cast was assembled and

could be impressed with the fact that she came and went as she listed.

"Ladies and gentlemen, I take it that you all know one another--and Mr.

William Rooney," said Mr. Vandeford, as he took a seat at the left of a

table placed in the center of the stage just beyond the footlights. Mr.

Rooney marched to a place beside him, and rapped with a large black

pencil for attention from the groups into which the dozen members of the

cast had fallen after mutual introductions and greetings.

"Everybody grab a seat that is good enough to glue to for five hours

while Fido here gives out your parts," commanded Mr. Rooney, without in

any way acknowledging Mr. Vandeford's introduction to the company. Mr.

Rooney's voice was low and rich, and had the precision and decision of a

machine-gun in its utterances. With hurried obedience the entire company

looked about the stage for seats.

Miss Bébé Herne, though having fifty pounds the advantage of any of the

others in avoirdupois, was the first seated. She merely dropped down

upon a stout pine bench, the front of which was stuccoed to represent

antique marble, and peremptorily motioned Mr. Wallace Kent to that

portion of the seat left after she had wedged herself as far to one side

as possible. Mr. Kent obeyed immediately, though he had just placed a

rickety, stuffed chair beside the gold one occupied by Miss Blanche

Grayson, the glowerer. Miss Lindsey sat on the end of an overturned box

hedge before a drop curtain of a twilight night, and Mr. Reginald Leigh

sat in a wicker chair under a brilliant canvas flowering shrub of no

known variety. The rest of the company were soon seated and receiving

the small, blue-backed, manuscript books from the pale young man whom

Mr. Rooney always addressed as Fido.

"Everybody here but Miss Hawtry," said Mr. Rooney, and he glared at Mr.

Vandeford as though that gentleman must be concealing the star in the

pocket of his gray, silk-crash coat.

"And Miss Hawtry is here also," came in a very beautifully modulated

voice from left stage, as the tardy star came down center, and stood

directly in front of the table at which sat the producer and his

stage-manager. Mr. Vandeford rose immediately and said good-morning; Mr.

Rooney kept his seat and looked Miss Hawtry through and through with a

cold reproof.

"Five minutes late," he said with an edge in the words that cut.

"I really beg your pardon, and it shall not happen--" the star was

beginning to say in an apologetic tone, which bent under the cold edge

of the assault, as Mr. Vandeford had hoped it would, when Mr. Rooney cut

it off with a curt command to pale Fido.

"Give out the Hawtry part."

Miss Hawtry accepted the little blue booklet handed her by Fido, and

also Mr. Vandeford's chair, placed carefully in the center of the stage

for her. The first brush between Mr. Rooney and Miss Hawtry had been

pulled off and he had won, much to Mr. Vandeford's delight. For "Miss

Cut-up" he had had to hire, pay for, and fire, three successive

stage-managers, and she had managed all three. Mr. Rooney's boast was

that no star had ever managed him and that he had successfully staged

every play he had undertaken; hence a spectacular salary. Also he felt

that his reputation was at stake in the Hawtry duel, and he was

determined to back his own method.

"Scene first, act first; Betty Carrington is discovered on stage. Go to

it, Betty!" he commanded as Fido took a seat at the end of the table,

opened a copy of the first act, and sat ready for annotations.

"How beautiful the morning is and--" the glowering Miss Blanche Grayson

was beginning to read from her cerulean booklet, when an interruption

occurred.

Miss Adair and Mr. Farraday entered from the stage door.

Mr. Vandeford looked at Mr. Rooney, and muttered under his breath:

"Angel and author, Bill. Easy!"

"Shoot," answered Mr. Rooney, in a mild undertone, though he glared at

the company as though in a cold rage.

"Ladies and gentlemen, let me introduce you to Miss Adair, the author of

our play. You have all of you met Mr. Farraday. Mr. Rooney, our

stage-director, Miss Adair and Mr. Farraday." Mr. Vandeford made the

introductions as rapidly as possible and in a voice of such coolness

that Miss Adair looked at him in astonishment and then at the assembled

company with great timidity. With special trepidation did she regard Mr.

Rooney, who had bobbed his scrubby, black-mopped head at her with no

expression at all in his little black eyes, while he refused to see Mr.

Farraday's offered hand.

"Have seats in the left stage-box," he directed them in the same tone of

voice with which he had quelled Miss Hawtry. "Now, get going there,

Betty Carrington, and open again."

Mr. Vandeford led Miss Adair and Mr. Farraday out into the wings in a

roundabout path to the left stage-box, and paused with them out of sight

of Mr. Rooney. Then the humanity came back into his face and voice as he

spoke to his friends in an undertone.

"Rooney is the genius among stage-directors, but he's the original and

genuine Tartar. How are you both?" As he asked the question he held out

a hand to each of them, and his smile held the cordiality to which they

were both accustomed.

"We had a blow-out on Riverside Drive, and that's what makes us late.

Now I've got to take the car around to the garage," Mr. Farraday

apologized, as he rumpled his leonine mane, fanned himself with his hat,

and departed.

Miss Adair fairly clung to the hand of friendship offered her, with

relief that it had not been withdrawn forever, as she had feared from

the coolness of Mr. Vandeford's greeting before the assembled company of

"The Purple Slipper."

"I'm afraid," she murmured with both alarm and amusement sparkling in

her gray eyes, in which Mr. Vandeford found himself searching for a

certain expression with the eagerness with which he always looked for it

after even a brief separation from his author. It was there and

undimmed. "Let's go sit down where he told us to," Miss Adair

whispered.

"Good girl!" laughed Mr. Vandeford as he led the way to the left

stage-box to which Mr. Rooney had summarily banished the author and the

angel. He seated Miss Adair at the front edge of the box and took the

chair close at her left. She was thus bulwarked and buttressed for any

assault that might be hurled her way. It came in a very few minutes.

Miss Bébé Herne and Miss Mildred Lindsey were in the midst of reading an

animated dialogue on page five by the time Miss Adair's attention was

firmly riveted on the stage and the reading in progress. Fortunately the

little scene was of her own writing. Mr. Vandeford had put it back into

the play instead of the paraphrase Mr. Howard had made of it, and he was

surprised to find how deeply grateful he was to himself for having given

her this bit as he watched the home-made color rise under the gray eyes

as the author sat and heard her written words come to life in a little

bit of really sparkling character comedy, which both Miss Lindsey and

experienced Bébé were acting as well as reading in such a way as to

bring out all the charm of the lines. The happiness of both author and

producer lasted about two minutes, then it was broken into by Mr.

William Rooney with a crash.

"Nuff, there, nuff!" he commanded, in the midst of a quaint epigram,

which Bébé was delivering with unction. "Audiences don't want to hear

smart babble after their seats are all down. They want to see the star

and get going. Cut in Miss Hawtry at the second set-to of Harriet and

aunt. Take it this way: 'And my dear Rosalind has said, Harriet--' Enter

Rosalind with the line you have there."

"Yes, it's time for me to get on and--" Miss Hawtry was agreeing

complacently, when she was quickly snapped off in her remark.

"Line, Miss Hawtry, not gab," Mr. Rooney commanded.

Instantly Miss Hawtry was reading from her lines and faithful Fido was

making annotations upon his manuscript with strokes that spelled

finality to the stricken author, who raised her protesting eyes to the

producer of her play.

"Steady now," Mr. Vandeford whispered. "This is the first reading, and

he's setting. We can't side-track him now. Later you can--" but the

author's attention was caught by the dialogue between Miss

Hawtry and Bébé, which was the first full dose of the Howard

fifteen-hundred-dollar, inebriate, but very brilliant and Hawtry-like,

"pep."

"Oh, I didn't write that at all!" she whispered, as she fairly shrank

against Mr. Vandeford's strength of mind, if not against the strength of

his arm that he had laid across the back of her chair.

"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 début 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," _née_ "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-grass 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 rehearse 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 nobody'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 Bébé 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

spunk 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

assented.

"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

associated 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 masses who buy

tickets which Rooney got while climbing out of the gutter. God 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 manuscript stage, and he is no good as a producer.

If he fails a few times hand-running, to the scrap 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 worshipful 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 multitude, 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. Godfrey 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 friendship 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.'"

"Well, I suppose I'll have to accept that excuse, as it sounds fairly

reasonable; but I'd like to know, Van, why you have been keeping my

child here in this musty old theater until past luncheon time when she

must be both tired and hungry. Come out to Claremont to luncheon, both

of you, this minute," Mr. Farraday both questioned and commanded, with

pure delight in his voice and manner. "I'll go run the car around to the

door, so you won't have to walk in the sun." And he departed as quickly

as he had come.

That night Mr. Vandeford lay stretched on his bed in a dark coolness,

with his hands clasped over his eyes, when Mr. Farraday came in with his

latch-key at twelve-thirty.

"Denny?" he asked from the darkness as Mr. Farraday was tiptoeing past

his open door, through which the southern sea-breeze was pouring, "'What

sort of chap _is_ that Vandeford?'"

"The telegram I sent read, 'the best ever.'"

"Are you competent to judge me?"

"I am."

"Good-night!"

For an hour before this masculine version of a scene a feminine real

thing was being conducted in the two little dotted-muslin-curtained

cells at the Y. W. C. A. Miss Adair was telling Miss Lindsey "all about

it," and sparks and tears both were in the atmosphere. The explosion was

brought on by Miss Lindsey remarking to Miss Adair:

"You know, honey lady, that play of yours is simply ripping, but it is

not at all like--like what I thought it would be from hearing you and

Mr. Farraday tell it."

"It's not my play at all; it's Mr. Vandeford's. He got somebody to fit

it to Miss Hawtry," replied Miss Adair, calmly, as she began to brush

her dark, sleek mane.

"What do you mean?" demanded Miss Lindsey, in astonishment.

"He just took the dinner situation in my play and got a man to make a

new one out of it that is--is vulgar enough to appeal to the New York

theater-goers. He let everybody put in anything they wanted to, instead

of what I wrote. He left in a little of mine to compliment me. It's all

right, because nobody would have gone to see my play if anybody goes to

see--see his." Miss Adair went on calmly with the fifty-third stroke on

her raven tresses, but her eyes were beginning to blaze.

"Mr. Vandeford's a complete fool," was on the tip of Miss Lindsey's

tongue, but she remembered her main chance, which was the favor of Mr.

Godfrey Vandeford, and said instead: "I wish you would let me see a copy

of the play as you wrote it. Have you one?"

"I have, in my trunk, and I'll read it to you," answered Miss Adair, and

in defensive pride she produced a copy of "The Purple Slipper," which

bore the unexpurgated title of "The Renunciation of Rosalind," and

proceeded to read it to Miss Lindsey, with both fire and tragedy in her

voice.

The operation occupied the two hours before midnight, and Miss Lindsey

lay prostrate when it was finished.

"Now, what do you think?" demanded Miss Adair.

"I wish I could have had the making of it over, and for myself instead

of Hawtry. That's no play as it stands, but there is a dandy one to be

worked up from it that you--you--that would be like you," was the reply

that Miss Lindsey gave as she looked out into distance, with glowing

eyes.

"Do you think that--that horrid play will be a success?" asked Miss

Adair, with her voice sparkling.

"I do," answered Miss Lindsey. "And it is curious that with all its

changes it is still--still yours. There is a lot more of your stuff left

than you realize, and the turns that--that Mr. Vandeford's playwright

has given it are very clever. Lots of times he's just paraphrased your

lines into Hawtryites. It will be interesting to see how much of you is

left when we all come out of the wash for the first night."

"I wish I were dead and buried!" she was surprised to hear Miss Adair

confess, and there then ensued a downpour, which the hardier Western

girl weathered for very love of the young Southern tempest in her arms.

"I suppose I ought to go home, out of the way, but I'm going to stay

and--and learn--and write another one all by myself," she finally

sobbed, with returning courage, thus comforting herself with the resolve

which every playwright who ever built a play has used to keep from going

entirely mad during the rehearsals of his first play.

"Just try to live until the New York opening, and then see how you feel.

That is the way actors do to keep going during the awful grilling of the

rehearsals and the road try-out," advised Miss Lindsey, with great

soothing.

"I will," promised Miss Adair, and turned her face on her pillow, to

sleep, while Miss Lindsey took herself and her jar of cold-cream into

her own cell.

"I wish I had a chance at that play! What'll she do when she sees Hawtry

and Height really in action in some of those scenes?" she murmured into

her own pillow.

The next morning Miss Adair rose, donned a most lovely home-spun linen

gown, which was of an old ivory hue and which had been spun upon the

looms of her great-great-great grandmother by that lady's slaves,

crowned this toilet with the floppy hat covered with crushed roses she

and Miss Lindsey and Mr. Farraday had purchased, and reported herself

about an hour late at the rehearsals of "The Purple Slipper," whose

authorship she had repudiated. She seated herself in the dusk of the

left stage-box and bared her breast for blows. They came fast and

furious, but other breasts and heads beside her own suffered. Mr.

William Rooney was in full action. The entire company was on the stage

in the midst of the last ensemble bit in the first act, all talking and

acting with blue booklets of lines in their hands.

"Here you, Mr. Kent," roared Mr. Rooney as he rose from behind his

table, at one side of which sat faithful Fido annotating his copy of the

manuscript, "make up to that old lady like she was the last ham

sandwich extinct and you knew you were going to be fed on alfalfa the

rest of your life. Get her going, man, get her going! She's an old fool,

and you know it, but you've got to have her plantation and slaves. You

can keep a chorus-girl car in the garage if you just get her well

fooled. Fool along, fool along!"

"'I will write the message to your son, Madam Carrington, and dispatch

it forthwith by one of my own black boys. Is my hand not ever ready for

your service and my wit--and also my heart?'" declaimed Mr. Kent with

satisfactory fervor, as he kissed Miss Herne's fat white hand.

"Now blob, Miss Herne, blob!" directed Mr. Rooney, coming entirely from

behind the table. "You are the fool of this show and don't let anybody

get that away from you."

"'I pray a blessing on your excellent friendship, Judge Cheneworth, and

I will rest me content in--'" Miss Herne answered in a most excellent

imitation of the helplessness of an old grand dame.

"Break in there, Miss Lindsey, break in!" raved Mr. Rooney. "'Content

in' is your cue. Grab it. Remember you are just the sister and only in

the play to swell the list of actors on the program, so grab and keep

a-grabbing if you want a place on the salary list. Now, everybody on at

Miss Lindsey's lines and break up this drivel between the old birds."

"'Mother, Rosalind bids me say to you that--'"

"Crowd on everybody, crowd on, and keep things going! It will be nine

o'clock by now, and we'll have to begin to feed the audience the hugging

by a quarter to ten or they will go out and look elsewhere.--Say, Mr.

Leigh, are your feet mates? You don't handle 'em even."

Miss Adair rose and stole from the box to the stage-door, and looked up

and down the street to see if Mr. Vandeford was approaching. She felt

that she could not stand more alone. He was nowhere in sight, and she

decided to walk around the block and see if the sun at ninety degrees

would warm her chill. After this journey she returned to her post and

found the box still empty. Mr. Vandeford had not arrived nor had Mr.

Farraday, but she seated herself resolutely. She was just in time to

witness a pitched battle between Miss Hawtry and Mr. Rooney.

"If you are determined to walk through the scenes, Miss Hawtry, do it

awake and not asleep!" stormed Mr. Rooney.

"Very well," answered Miss Hawtry, but Miss Adair's heart warmed to her

as she noted the contemptuousness in her manner directed toward her

stage-manager.

"Now see here, Height, you know that you want to get away with this

woman before her husband gets back. You can't do it with kid gloves on.

Spit on your hands, man, and grab her by the hair. You say: 'Rosalind, a

strong man's love is a weapon which a woman can easily turn against

herself with deadly outcome,' like you were begging her to go with you

over to Ligget's for an ice-cream soda with crushed strawberries. Say it

this way." And as she sat astounded Miss Adair heard a line that she had

written in a sympathetic fervor of imagination and which was perhaps her

favorite in the whole play, uttered by Mr. William Rooney with the most

exquisite and manly feeling, while his homely, vulgar face and body were

transformed into the same exquisiteness. A breathless happiness

descended upon her, and she waited in it to hear the beautiful Mr.

Gerald Height give utterance to it with the same art. Miss Hawtry

brought her to earth.

"Mr. Rooney," she said with an utter lack of appreciation or

comprehension of the bit of high art that had flashed upon her, "it is

in my contract with Mr. Vandeford that I rehearse my scenes alone with

my support until the dress rehearsal."

"Yes, I might have judged that from 'Miss Cut-up,'" Mr. Rooney answered

her with a blow straight from his shoulder. "Give little sister her

cue, Height, and let her run on to rescue you. God knows you need it!"

"Mr. Rooney, I'll have you understand--" Miss Hawtry came to the center

to continue her tirade, when Mr. Rooney struck the decisive blow.

"Everybody on and begin the scene over!" he commanded right past the

enraged star. "Take it up, Kent, with Miss Herne at 'I will write the

message to your son,' and get her going, get her going!"

At this forceful command the machinery of "The Purple Slipper" was set

in motion, and swept Miss Hawtry off center and into her place for the

time being.

And despite herself Miss Adair was fascinated in watching the machine

grind away, with now and then a spark from Mr. Rooney that took fire in

the very core of her heart or brain or solar plexus--wherever "The

Renunciation of Rosalind" had been conceived. Miss Adair did not know

what it was that thus affected her, but she had got hold of her end of

the psychic cord along which the author feeds the hostile stage-manager

in such a manner that on the first night of a successful play they can

say to each other with clasped hands and wet eyes, "Well done!"

And while Miss Adair sat under the spell of Mr. Rooney, Mr. Vandeford

sat in his big chair in his office and fought a battle for "The Purple

Slipper" that resulted in a draw that filled him with anxiety.

"I can find only one open booking in New York for October first, Mr.

Vandeford, sir," Mr. Meyers was saying, with trouble settled in a cloud

upon his broad brow. "I have it fairly good for the road for 'The Purple

Slipper' until October first, and then it is a jump to Toronto or

Minneapolis, which is into the grave."

"I suppose that one opening on Broadway is Weiner's New Carnival

Theater," Mr. Vandeford asked as though the question were useless.

"You have it right," answered Mr. Meyers. "Still, Mr. Vandeford, sir, it

is always failures that leave Broadway openings into which road shows

can jump."

"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 glass 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 glass of tea.

"Of course," assented 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. Godfrey Vandeford had woven a tangled web when he had let fall the

purple letter on the purple manuscript and gone out recklessly to follow

the hunch their juxtaposition implied.