Maria Thompson Daviess

“ 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. ”

“ I'm due a month's vacation, and I'm going to have my mail from the office relayed back to New York from the yacht off Nantucket so that bunch of money grubbers can't find me. Think of having the honor of being co-producer for Violet Hawtry for my first shot!"
All of which enthusiasm and admiration went like wine to the head of the Violet, though it left her heart uncomfortably cold; and beautiful, cool moonlight heats the heart of a fair woman when it is not more than two feet away from that of a brave and fair man. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The need of a large sum of money in a great hurry is the root of many noble ambitions, in whose branches roost strange companies of birds, pecking away for dollars that grow—or do not—on bushes. And it was in such a quest that Miss Patricia Adair of Adairville, Kentucky, lit upon a limb of life beside Mr. Godfrey Vandeford of Broadway, New York. ”

“ As she rose from the sand Miss Adair held out her hand to Mr. Height, with the friendliness and confidence in her eyes that had smoothed over other rough, though not so rough, places of the same character in her young life.
"That's some kid and there are lots like her. I've got to halt sooner or later," Mr. Height muttered to himself as he dressed for his early dinner. "I'm going to put this fool play across for her, too." There are a few women who distill loyalty out of declined passion; but not many. ”

“ Adolph Meyers shows that it is as dangerous to arouse the affection and loyalty of one genius as it is to incur the anger of another.
The casting of "The Purple Slipper" was a joy to Mr. Dennis Farraday. He was to pay well for it in the future, but it was conducted in pure glee. He sat beside Mr. Godfrey Vandeford in the latter's long, Persian carpeted, soft-tinted, and famous-actor-photograph-bedecked, private office beside that eminent producer, and watched the strong light from over their shoulders reveal the points of the men and women who came in to exhibit themselves. ”

“ He had glanced through the program and seen that the climax would be an exhibition of jungle courtship by one of America's most notorious women and her partner, done to extreme negroid melody.
"Thank you," she murmured as she turned to watch the willowy youth and maid go through some very beautiful movements of the dance that was entirely unobjectionable. In two minutes she had turned her face, beaming with pleasure, so that Mr. Vandeford could see that all was well with her; and ten minutes later she giggled out loud at the repartee of two black-faced artists. ”

“ The Beach Inn was aglow and atwinkle and in full laugh as they ascended the steps of the wide veranda hung out over the ocean, where members and guests were having supper at small tables lit with shaded lamps. Men and girls, in bathing suits that were lineal descendants of the scant fig-leaf, were eating and drinking together sparsely because of their intention of taking a midnight plunge in the breakers under the hot moon, while other women in radiant evening garb were almost as scantily attired, though attended by stuffily garbed men. ”

“ Mr. Vandeford said [306] slowly as if turning his back for the moment to something that stared him in the face.
All Friday morning he worked with "The Purple Slipper" machine with a bitter defiance in his eyes that made Miss Adair keep close to his side, though she didn't understand her reason for doing so.
"Is anything the matter?" she questioned, with her gray eyes stricken with alarm. ”

“ All of this gaiety and amusement was just a prelude to the ride home in the moonlight, which the Violet took with good Dennis Farraday and during which she discovered that there is such a thing as honor among men about poaching on other men's preserves, and during which, also, the fate of Major Adair, Patricia, Roger, and old black Jeff hung in the balance.
"Just what are we racing?" ”

“ There are occasionally mothers who bear sons who can tell them all about things, and Mrs. Farraday really enjoyed the whole story that big, bonnie Dennis poured out to her at the sunset hour by the brink of old ocean, Dago Italiana squatting on his heels out of hearing and basking in inactivity, from the moment of the beefsteak episode in his and Miss Lindsey's acquaintance up to the moment in which Miss Hawtry had established herself in his arms on the occasion of his début in a stage dressing-room. ”

“ 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 [255] 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?" ”

“ Height and the other theatrical people? Am I being warned again?" Mr. Vandeford accepted the teasing and laughed at himself.
"My wings are up. Go out and scratch for yourself."
"Not very far, though," Miss Adair answered. Mr. Vandeford was not sure that she moved a fraction of an inch nearer to him, but he hoped so. "I feel just the same about you as I do about Roger and I like to be going with you—into—into danger." [205]
"Who's Roger?" questioned Mr. Vandeford.
"He's my brother, who treats me as you do. It's fun for a woman to be frightened dreadfully when she is with a man she likes." ”

“ One of the eternal questions is how can a mere man be so wicked—or so good as he is often discovered by temptation to be?
"I'll have to be publicly and finally severed from Van before I annex him, the boob," was the soliloquy of the Violet as she prepared for her slumber of beauty. Another question is how thin a veneer of feminine beauty weathers indefinitely the wash of circumstances.
Then after that moonlit night in August Fate spun her web, which she called "The Purple Slipper," rapidly, and for a number of the people involved life became very hectic. ”

“ 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. ”

“ You may like 'The Purple Slipper.' In which case you get the same salary and I [39] get all the profits instead of the one-fifth our friend Weiner is offering me for letting you act in my other play," he answered his star's outburst in an easy, mollifying drawl.
"Everybody knows that a Hilliard play is a play, and I'm not going to try out a new playwright just to put money in your pockets. Why should I?" demanded the star virago, in a fury that made her snapping Irish blue eyes, tall, strapping, curved body, and pale tawny hair combine into a good semblance of the jungle queen on a prey quest. ”

“ Be accurate, Violet, my dear: did I demand your heart until I had managed you and my own affairs to the point where you could buy Highcliff or any other trifles you wanted? There are other ladies to love in the world besides you, aren't there? There are other gentlemen besides me and you've had five years—and a wide hunting grounds. I've got you under only one contract—business and not—pleasure. ”

“ In justice to myself I feel that I ought to pass under the management of a more forceful person than yourself. And anyway I don't think you would be able to get a theater to open on Broadway in September. Remember that over a hundred good shows died on the road waiting to get into Broadway last winter, and I won't play anywhere else. Now Weiner wants to buy "The Rosie Posie Girl" from you and open his New Carnival Theatre with me in it on October first. You must sell it to him. He will make you a good offer. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Get a taxi by the hour at your stage-door—on me—and come by for him."
. . . . . .
"Good girl! By!"
"What a life!" Mr. Vandeford muttered to himself, then rang his buzzer for Mr. Adolph Meyers.
"Pops, it's eight o'clock. Go get us a couple of slabs of pie at the automat, and then I'll go over to see Breit at the booking office."
"Yes, sir, Mr. Vandeford," Mr. Meyers acquiesced, and departed in search of provender for the lion and himself. Left to himself, Mr. Vandeford fell into another trance, from which he was dragged by another tinkle of his telephone. ”

“ Costumes that cost a million will be the next drag, mark me, Pop," Mr. Godfrey Vandeford declaimed with a gloomy brow, as he still further delayed exploring the violet missive.
"A hundred thousand it will take for costuming 'The Rosie Posie Girl,'" agreed Pop dolefully, from above the letter he was slowly pecking out of the machine.
"For furnishing chiffon belts, you mean, not costumes, if we go by Corbett's clothes ideas," growled the pessimistic, prospective producer of the possible next season's hit in the girl-show line. ”

“ Vandeford, sir, it is never before that you have produced a play without a reading," he remonstrated on the morning of the day set for the picking of the cast from those probably suitable chosen by Chambers, the invaluable agent of the great army of those theatrically employed. "Actors will be here from twelve o'clock even to six. How will a choice be made?"
"I'm trusting to your hunch about the purple manuscript falling on the day of the Violet letter, Pops," answered Mr. Godfrey Vandeford. ”

“ Vandeford could not say whence had flown all the many ways he would have commanded ordinarily for the finding out if such were the case.
"A frightened woman is often rather—rather deadly to a man," he answered before he could stop himself. The habit of speaking out directly to Miss Adair was growing on him, he perceived, and it alarmed him.
"Into what danger are you taking me now?" asked Miss Adair with a fluty, merry laugh.
"We are going with Mr. Farraday and Miss Hawtry to see the Big Show and to the Grove Garden on the roof afterward for supper. ”

“ Howard's brain was of that peculiar caliber which does not originate an idea, but which [130] inserts a solid bone construction as well as keen little sparklets into the fabric of another's labor, and makes the whole translucent where before it may have been opaque. On Broadway he was called a play doctor, and Mr. Vandeford was not the first manager who had shut him up with quarts of refreshment to tinker on the play of many a literary, dramatic, bright light. ”

“ It takes some time to get the New York pace, but you'll strike it. I think I'll stay to see the next Folly with Mr. Farraday," he heard the Violet saying to Miss Adair, and still short-circuited, he went with his calm young author down to the car. The hour was one-thirty, and a moon had climbed the heights of the Broadway cañon. Valentine, with some sort of psychic direction, went across Central Park and down wide, clean, silent, and dimly lighted Fifth Avenue. ”