Blue-grass and Broadway

by Maria Thompson Daviess

"If you go home now the whole 'Purple Slipper' will go into cold storage until you come back," Mr. Vandeford growled at her, and the effort it took not to hold on to her with bodily fingers was a great strain. "I told you the usual situation because I felt that you were clever enough to make the best of it and help the play a lot. No author ever has seen a play produced as he wrote it, and he has to stand seeing everybody take a whack at it, from the producer to the man who takes the tickets at the front door. I've got a good playwright shut up until Friday rewriting 'The Purple Slipper'; then I'm going to work at it myself and let Miss Hawtry write in all the things she wants to say, and cut out all the things she doesn't. After that, I'm going to turn it over to Bill Rooney, who was born in a barrel down on the wharf and educated in the gutter, but who is the best and highest-priced stage director in New York. He'll do innumerable things to it while he's 'setting it,' as he calls getting it ready for rehearsals. All the actors and actresses will be allowed at times to butcher and scalp their parts and everybody will stab. And if you are a plucky girl you'll sit still and see it done. There will come lots of times that everything you suggest, even very timidly, will be thrust down your throat; but if they are vital they will get under the hide of Bill and opening night you'll see that your pluck has put a lot into the whole thing and that the mutilated and dressed-up play is still your child. Will you trust me and sit in with me and help me make 'The Purple Slipper' go?"

"I do! I will!" answered Miss Adair, with her head in the air and the Adairville roses flaunting themselves in her face. And as she spoke she offered him her slim, long-fingered, white little hand that his completely engulfed as, answering a signal, Valentine turned the car back toward Forty-second Street. "If I've got to have thorns stuck in me and then cut out I'm mighty glad you'll be there."

"Yes, I'll be there," he answered her softly, as he released her hand at least two seconds sooner than he was really obliged to, though he himself could not have said why he did it. He felt like a grown person who frightens a child with a bear tale to make it cuddle to his own strength in the firelight.

Then followed a day in the offices of Mr. Godfrey Vandeford, Theatrical Producer, which, up to that time, could not have been duplicated on Broadway and perhaps never will be, though the results may have the effect of—but that was all in the future of the theatrical business at that time.

"Mr. Meyers," said Mr. Vandeford, as he ushered the author of "The Purple Slipper" into the outer offices, where he found Pops soothing and controlling about seven enraged experts in different lines of dramatic production, "Miss Adair will have the small office from now on to work in when she is not in consultation with me. Please take her in and see that she is made at home while I run through my mail. Yes, Mr. Corbett, I will be ready for you in a few minutes. Sorry to detain you, all of you," with which apology to the body of assembled experts Mr. Vandeford bowed, went into his sanctum, and firmly closed the door, just as Mr. Adolph Meyers bowed the author into her sanctum and as firmly closed her door. Mr. Gerald Height, who had been sitting looking indifferently out of Mr. Meyers' window, looked after the disappearing author as if a perfumed breeze had suddenly blown across his brow, and whistled softly.

"Say, Pops, who, by thunder is—," he was questioning Mr. Meyers with extreme interest, when Mr. Vandeford's buzzer sounded and Mr. Meyers was forced to answer it before he could attend to Mr. Height's question.

Mr. Meyers found Mr. Vandeford pale, but determined.

"Pops," he said, and Mr. Meyers could have sworn that the voice of his beloved chief trembled, "I'm in the devil of a fix, and you have got to throw me a line to pull out; in fact, you'll have to cast in a drag-net if you want to land me."

"If it was a submarine I would make a rescue of you, Mr. Vandeford, sir," the faithful henchman assured the panic-stricken producer.

"She's worse than any submarine ever floated, and I'm rammed—in a corner, Pops. To make a story that is going to be long in acting, short in telling, I've had to put Miss Adair on to what is usually handed out to the authors of plays, and then to stop her wails, offered to let her sit in and watch her play baby hacked up. Her office-hours here and at rehearsals will be from ten mornings to midnight, and what are you going to do about it?" Mr. Vandeford questioned Mr. Meyers with a kind of forlorn hope in his eyes, for Mr. Meyers had often seen him through the crooks of his trade.