Blue-grass and Broadway

by Maria Thompson Daviess

The opening night of "The Purple Slipper," by Patricia Adair, produced by Mr. Godfrey 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 manœuvering the frightened and substituted 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. Godfrey 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 cañons 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 class 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 pronounced, 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 gratitude 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. Godfrey 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.