His thin fingers tapped on the bedspread, and, like Colonel Newcome, he awaited the Schoolmaster's final call.
"You and I," he would continue, "have seen our period out. What comes next on the American stage? Cheap prices, I suppose. Best seats everywhere for a dollar, or even fifty cents; with musical shows alone excepted. Authors' royalties cut to ribbons; actors' salaries pared to nothing. Popular drama, bloody, murderous, ousting drawing-room comedy. Crook plays, shop-girl plays, slangy American farces, nude women invading the auditorium as in Paris."
"And then?" asked Potter.
"Chaos," said he. "Fortunately you and I won't live to see it. Turn on the phonograph and let 'Alexander's Rag-time Band' cheer us up."
He got well enough to walk around with a stick, and with movement came a return of the old enthusiasm. A man of less indomitable will would have succumbed and become a permanent invalid. Not so with Frohman. He even got humor out of his misfortune, because he called his cane his "wife." He became a familiar sight on that part of Broadway between the Knickerbocker Hotel and the Empire Theater as he walked to and fro. It was about all the walking he could do.
He kept on producing plays, and despite the physical hardships under which he labored he attended and conducted rehearsals. With the pain settling in him more and more, he believed himself incurable. Yet less than four people knew that he felt that the old titanic power was gone, never to return.
The great war, on whose stupendous altar he was to be an innocent victim, affected him strangely. The horror, the tragedy, the wantonness of it all touched him mightily. Indeed, it seemed to be an obsession with him, and he talked about it constantly, unmindful of the fact that the cruel destiny that was shaping its bloody course had also marked him for death.
Early during the war he saw some verses that made a deep impression on him. They were called "In the Ambulance," and related to the experience of a wounded soldier. He learned them by heart, and he never tired of repeating them. They ran like this:
"Two rows of cabbages;
Two of curly greens;
Two rows of early peas;
Two of kidney-beans."
That's what he's muttering,
Making such a song,
Keeping all the chaps awake
The whole night long.
Both his legs are shot away,
And his head is light,
So he keeps on muttering
All the blessed night:
"Two rows of cabbages;
Two of curly greens;
Two rows of early peas,
And two of kidney-beans."
It was Frohman's intense feeling about the war, that led him to produce "The Hyphen." Its rejection by the public hurt him unspeakably. Yet he regarded the fate of the play as just one more phase of the big game of life. He smiled and went his way.