Blue-grass and Broadway

by Maria Thompson Daviess

"Part of it I don't even understand," Miss Adair continued to storm, and Mr. Vandeford was about to discover that either a Blue-grass woman or horse, with the bit in their respective mouths, is mighty apt to go a pace before curbed. "What was that scene in the last act just before the dinner-party? She read so fast and he had his back to me, so I suppose that is the reason I didn't get it." Miss Adair was alluding to the scene whose vulgarity Mr. Vandeford had wished to sacrifice, but which Mr. Meyers had pleaded for on account of its extra dash of "pep" exactly suited to the Hawtry style.

"You won't be able to judge the Hawtry scenes at all until the opening night," Mr. Vandeford answered, positively quaking in his boots for fear that Miss Adair would force him to an elucidation of the scene, which was mostly of the cleverest innuendo. "She is a miserable study, and she and Height rehearse the big scenes alone. She just walks through with the company. Truly, you can hardly judge anything of what a play will be from just a reading or from any rehearsal. Please trust me and help me as you promised you would."

"But the play isn't mine, at all! My play is—is killed—and dead, and murdered." Miss Adair persisted, still writhing from the butchery.

"It is your play; but granting that it isn't, at all, think what it will mean to all of us if this—this nobody's play succeeds. Think what it will mean to the actors in the company. Miss Lindsey was hungry when she got her first advance on your play, and Bébé Herne hasn't had a part that suited her so well in years. If it goes she ought to have enough to make her easy; and she is getting old now—"

"If you'll say and tell everybody that the play isn't mine, of course I'll help you, and—" Miss Adair agreed, with the tears dried by the anger and a degree of sanity returning at Mr. Vandeford's skilful appeal to her generosity, which he made when he saw that his attempt to bluff her about calling off the play had failed. Mr. William Rooney came into the box. His hat was tilted on the back of his head and in the corner of his mouth was a large cigar, which he was chewing and not smoking. He seated himself without invitation and spoke with his usual abruptness:

"That play is a hummer, Vandeford, if I can just make the dolts put it across. It is a genuine Hawtry vehicle, but in a new vein. It's a corking situation and yet rings true. Did any old dame really have the spunk to put that dinner-party across on both lover and husband that you've got in your play, miss?" As Mr. Rooney asked the question of Miss Adair, it was the first time that he had seemed aware of the existence of the author of "The Purple Slipper."

"It's not my play, Mr. Rooney," Miss Adair said haughtily to the thick-skinned genius. "That—that situation is—was—is true, however."

"Then it's your play all right!" declared Mr. Rooney. "The situation is all there is to any play. The staging is the rest. Anybody can put in good lines. Any simp can doll up the actors in costumes, and one actor can put the ideas across pretty near as good as any other, if he's directed all right; but when it's done, the play is the man's or woman's who made the first layout of the idea—and what the stage-manager does to it. Author and stage manager, I say. The rest is easy."

"That's what I've been telling Miss Adair," Mr. Vandeford eagerly assented.

"And authors ought to go off and die until the first night, too," Mr. Rooney continued to say. "When I staged 'Only Annie' for E. and K., I told that author if he came on my stage any more at rehearsals I would biff him one in the nutt, and I meant it, too. His thinks and mine ran into each other so bad that I was near crazed."