But the managers were made of sterner stuff than the actors and playwrights; they had longer memories, and skins that still smarted. They brightened at the name of Adair for the unexpected pleasure it gave them to say "No." Each had his special wrong to avenge, each his emphatic and passionate denunciation of a man they abominated. "I've only two rules in running my theaters," said Mr. Fielman. "The first is to give the public the best that money can buy; the second, never to engage Mr. Cyril Adair!"--Mr. Paw went further: "My poy, they say in our peeziness that the box-office talks, but if it said Adair all day and all night, I'd sooner get out and sell shoe-laces on the street than see his damn sneering face in any broduction of mine!" Niedringer was no more encouraging, and the Fordingham Brothers were curt and profane.
But the New York theatrical world is a big one; and these giants, while of enormous importance, do not rule all the roost. There are always new producers bobbing up; stars themselves make ventures into management and branch out; many others, independent on a smaller scale, choose the companies that support them. Then there are the second class houses, the vaudeville houses, the stock companies--all requiring an army of professional people. Then, too, hardly a season passes without several incoming actors from some woolly, wild, unheard-of region, arriving, full of eagerness to add Broadway laurels to brows already crowned in Teepee City or Nuggetville, Nevada. Add to these, imported English companies with the lesser parts often unfilled, and "angels," both male and female, with barrels of money for some stagestruck pet, who, desirous of a short cut to greatness, insists on beginning (and usually ending) at the top;--and you will have some small conception of what New York is--theatrically.
Adair did not despair. Not only was the atmosphere of the Thespian Club too redolent of success for that, but he was sustained besides by a couple of small offers which he received for the "road." Determined though he was to appear on Broadway, it was good for his courage and perseverence to have these engagements to refuse. They served to take the edge off the rebuffs he constantly experienced, and gave him something not altogether mournful to reflect on as he waited interminable hours in agents' and managers' anterooms. Not but what there were times when it was almost unendurable. Rejection, with an actor, carries with it a personal mortification; and his air of fashion, his nosegay, his smartly folded overcoat, his affected jauntiness--all intensify by their contrast the bitterness of his lot. He slinks off with pitiful bravado, and eyes suspiciously bright, to pull himself together for another attempt at another place, as dispirited a figure as any to be seen under heaven.
While Adair, with an effort as clumsy as it was touching, strove to hide his disappointment from his wife, and put by in their little home a steadily deepening sense of failure--she, on her side, was keeping him in ignorance of a matter that troubled her exceedingly. Her father had begun to write to her, but in such a way that a reconciliation, instead of becoming nearer, seemed more remote and impossible than ever. With all his tenderness and longing, and almost pathetic appeal "to be friends again," he was unable to resist taking flings at Adair. His hatred for the man came out in implications and covert allusions Phyllis could not forgive. Ostensibly holding out the olive branch, his letters served instead to heighten the estrangement, for behind everything was his conviction it was simply her pride that kept them apart; that having made a mess of her life, and committed an irreparable folly, she was defiantly accepting the misery she had brought down upon herself. That she was insanely happy--that she adored her husband--that neither poverty nor hardship counted a jot in her decision--all these to Mr. Ladd were incredibilities.--Yet the same story dressed up for him on the stage or in a book, would have won his sympathy, and reached his heart.--Of such inconsistencies are we made, and the poor puppets are cried over when flesh and blood is denied.
Of course, Phyllis was abnormally sensitive. Had her husband secured a good engagement, and some recognition she would have been in a more receptive mind to receive her father's advances. But Adair's unspoken anxiety, their diminishing money, their meager meals and the need that they had to take account of every penny--here were so many reasons to accentuate her critical faculties.--And this to be held as a proof that she had been "dragged down" was altogether too much. At first, full of eagerness and over many a closely-written page she had tried to explain matters to her father; but his disbelief was chilling, and from hopelessness her feelings gradually changed to anger. For a couple of weeks she had kept the thousand-dollar check he had sent her, hoping that he would so far relent toward Adair that she might accept it without disloyalty. Then, chagrined, she had returned it, though her extremity was bitter, and the tears dripped over the letter that bore it back. No reconciliation was possible that did not include her husband, or that was offered to him contemptuously and grudgingly. If this were impossible she begged her father to write no more, and spare her further suffering. His answer was as unreasonable as the others, and he contrived to wound even while he thought he was conceding everything.
His next letter she sent back unopened, and also the one after that. Then there were no more, and the postman's whistle presaged nothing after that but a post card from Tommy. These, with pictures of a local court house, or a new Masonic building, or some bald park, were almost daily visitors. But they spoke of affection and remembrance, and to a sad heart were not without their comfort.
Early one afternoon the sound of the key in the lock warned her that Adair had unexpectedly returned. His face announced his good news before he could so much as utter a word, and then the facts came out in a panting, breathless torrent. Shamus O'Dowd--she knew Shamus O'Dowd, the Irish comedian?--No?--What, never heard of Shamus O'Dowd?--Well, anyway, O'Dowd was at the Herald Square--big business--seats selling three weeks in advance--A Broth of a Boy, you know--and the fellow who was playing Captain Carleton had dropped out, and the understudy wasn't satisfactory--and--and--it was seventy-five dollars a week--and here were the lines--and you could have knocked him over with a feather when O'Dowd came right up to him at the club, and fixed it up in five minutes, and they had run through a rehearsal to give him a notion of the business, and it was a damned good character part, and--then, I wonder if that twenty-one dollar apartment had ever seen the like--with Phyllis sitting in Booful's lap, and her arms tight around his neck, and talking two to his one, all rapture and exclamations as though he had done something extraordinary instead of merely getting a job; and Booful, no less proud and foolish and excited felt, too, he had done something extraordinary, holding to the lines as though they were a patent of nobility, and crazy to begin the study of them; and describing the play with such humor and absurdity that his little wife thought she had never heard anything so funny in her life, her teeth shining as she laughed and laughed--especially at O'Dowd, who was described as fifty, with a bull-neck, and ever too much of him in front and behind, with a very short coat, and bounding fat legs, and such a Broth of a Boy that he was ready to fight or dance or sing or make love at the drop of a hat, and generally to caper from sheer exuberance of Irish youth.--Then Booful turned suddenly serious, and got up, and said that on no, no account was he to be disturbed, and began to pace like a lion up and down the doll-baby sitting-room, mumbling his part to himself with a far-away expression, and an occasional frown and swear as he missed a word; while Phyllis, pretending to sew, squeezed herself into a corner, and made as though she was not watching him, which she did in timid little peeps, thinking how handsome he was and noble and manly and splendid, with such returning recollections of his devotion, and gentleness, and simple, unrepining courage in the hard days now fast finishing, that she could have swooned from very tenderness.
A Broth of a Boy was a typical Irish drama. The central figure was a rollicking imbecile, with a tuneful voice and the customary shillelah, who foils the wicked mortgager, chucks colleens under the chin, does a hair-raising leap over a waterfall, and is altogether so Brothy and gay that no one can resist him. The usual British officer, condemned to carry out an unpalatable order, and falling under the spell of a pair of saucy Irish eyes, is found not to be half so bad a fellow as we had anticipated; and though a good deal of a booby, and the target for sarcasms that he is too obtusely English to perceive, gradually wins the toleration and even the affection of the gallery. In real life he would probably have been court-martialed for his arrant disregard of instructions, nor would a bare-legged milk-maid have been considered quite the prize the dramatist deemed her.--But one mustn't criticize this dreamy region too harshly. That great baby, the public, loves it,--and in the theater-world there is plenty of room for this grotesque Ireland, and always will be; and baby's patronage feeds many worthy and deserving people, who otherwise might have not a little trouble of it to live.
Yes, let us be lenient toward the Irish drama. It brought seventy-five dollars a week to that little apartment high up in East Fifty-eighth Street, and hope and courage to hearts that were beginning to falter.
CHAPTER XXI