Part 39

One wonders sometimes why almost anybody can not be a successful Irish comedian? Given a good figure, a pleasing, sympathetic voice, and a face naturally inclined to smile--and the rest seems as easy as taking pennies from a blind man. Certainly Adair caught his house as surely as ever did O'Dowd, and moved through the piece amid the same thunders of applause. Younger, handsomer, and an incomparably better actor, and with that charm, so baffling to describe, which yet was ever-present and ever-compelling, he measured himself against his predecessor, and never for a moment had the least doubt of the outcome. It is not often that fairy tale came as bravely true; that the dream of overnight turned as quickly into the fact of to-day. Small wonder that Adair, standing there on the stage when all was done, his ears still ringing with the applause of that departing audience, was too exalted, and much too self-sure to fret at Kemmel's misgivings.

"Oh, you did fine," cried Kemmel. "You were splendid, splendid! But will they ever come back?" He jerked his head in the direction of the curtain.--"It was O'Dowd that brought them--not you; they already had their tickets; the pinch comes to-morrow, day after to-morrow. Can you draw them then, ah, that's the point?--No, no, don't misunderstand me, Adair. I'm all up in the air about you; you justified all we hoped; more than we hoped; you don't need to be told how you hit them to-night. But I'm scared--scared of your success--and I'm that nervous that I--!" Again he turned towards the curtain, and his voice was almost a wail. "Oh, my God, Adair, will they ever come back?"

The astonishing thing was that they did--crowded back, swarmed back, breaking all the records of the piece. Business rose by leaps and bounds till they were playing to capacity; till the thrilling words "sold out" were posted almost nightly on the box-office window; till a ravening horde of speculators took possession of the sidewalk in front, alternately delighting Kemmel with their advertising value, and wringing his soul with anguish at the money he saw going astray. Not that these were his only preoccupations; he was too loyal to his employer's interest, and too expert a theatrical man to let a success run along without a guiding hand. Adair's name went up in electric letters; pictures and paragraphs were scattered broadcast; an option was secured on another theater to continue the run, and, what seemed to him the best of all, he had Adair securely tied up by a new contract. Kemmel, in his own words, was "on to his job," and in his letters to O'Dowd he was already urging a number two company, and submitting estimates and names.

The new contract, of course, was a marvel of one-sidedness; on-to-his-job Kemmel naturally saw to that, and paid a legal iron-worker twenty-five dollars to make it of seamless steel. But on the running out of the existing contract at seventy-five dollars a week, it assured Adair two hundred and fifty as long as it pleased O'Dowd to employ him. Seamless steel could not accomplish everything, and a substantial increase of salary had to be accorded. Adair would have stood out for more; but Phyllis, with feminine caution, prevailed on him, to make no demur. Booful's day would come; stick to her and he would wear diamonds--not to speak of bells on his darling fingers and toes; but just now money was secondary to cementing his position till he was stuck up so high on Broadway that they'd have to feed him with a ladder.--Besides, two hundred and fifty dollars a week was an awful lot of money. Forty weeks at two hundred and--

"Forty weeks, you goose!" expostulated Adair. "I'd be the last person to object if it were forty weeks. But down there, on that smudgy blue place, they can cancel everything in forty seconds."

"People aren't cancelled who are playing to capacity."

"I know, but the utter damned meanness that--"

"Poor little Booful mustn't worry, and if he'll stop damning and rampaging, I'll take him down to his Uncle Macy's, and show him that lovely fur coat I want him to buy as soon as we have some money."

"I suppose you are right, Phyllis, but it galls me to--"

"My darling, sweetheart love," she broke in with pretty seriousness, "nothing is so important as your success, and once make that secure, money follows as a matter of course. Let Booful keep shinning up the pole, even if they do pick his pockets, and never think of anything but the gilt ball at the top, and--and me."

This was good advice and Booful acted on it. The two hundred and fifty, too, looked less despicable as every day drew it nearer; and as it became, not an abstraction to be argued over and theoretically scorned, but a tidy little bundle of greenbacks that would go far to ease life, both on the spending side of it and the saving. Oh, yes, half of it was to be laid by in the bank for a rainy day. Meanwhile, they lived up to the last cent of the seventy-five, which once so much, now suddenly grew meager by contrast, and by the greater inroads made upon it. Booful rolled home in cabs; there were little restaurant suppers with a fizzling pint of wine; Phyllis bought a coveted peignoir, made out of pale blue fluffy-nothingness, and with a hand-embroidered collar delicately touched with gold.--Well, why not? The nearing future was too bright not to discount it a little in the present.

We have said that Kemmel kept his press agent busy; and in the same thoroughgoing spirit that placarded every garbage-can from Twenty-sixth Street to Harlem, strove by a thousand means to get Adair's name prominently into the papers. If he succeeded beyond all expectations he ascribed it to his own astuteness, instead of to the fact that Adair, for the moment, was an extremely spectacular figure in the theatrical world. It was one of the remarkable things about this man that he impressed himself so indelibly in the recollection of every one who had ever known him. It was too often a disagreeable recollection; he had sown hatred with a royal hand; yet, in a queer, negative, altogether unprofitable way he had fascinated everybody. Others might make a disagreeable impression and be forgotten. But no one ever forgot Adair. Magnetism, personality, genius--whatever word one chose to call it--he had the peculiar faculty of arresting attention, of exciting interest, of making people talk and speculate about him.

It was indubitably at times a most unlucky gift. With his reappearance and success the flood-gates of his past were opened, and there gushed forth a Niagara of malignant chatter. His amours, his fights, his disreputable escapades, his divorce--all were revived. Every one seemed to have a story to his discredit, and to be in haste to get it into print. Nor was his marriage to Phyllis allowed to escape the same soiling publicity, and the tale was embellished with slanders and innuendoes that would have goaded a much more patient man to fury. Adair was with difficulty restrained from knocking editorial teeth down editorial throats; and it showed Phyllis' power over him, and the change generally in his disposition that the police courts were untroubled by his presence.

Lies about herself Phyllis could bear with some fortitude, but Adair's earlier life, as thus revealed by the sensation-mongers, cost her many a bitter pang.--The woman who had tried to shoot him at the Cafe Martin, and the whole revelation of that horrid affair--the Burt-Wauchope scandal, where rather than save himself by compromising an unknown girl, he had gone to prison for contempt; and that, not quietly and nobly, but with a vain-glorious satisfaction in his martyrdom--the discreditable spree on Tim Bartlett's yacht--how horrible, how unendurable it was--this graveyard resurrection of bygone years!

Adair never justified himself to her, never tried to palliate or explain away the incidents of his outrageous past. That instinct, which in all his relations with her invariably guided him aright, served him as well now as it had always before. He was more gentle, more tender, trusting to kisses rather than words. "Don't let this hurt you," he once said to her, the only time he had ever ventured to speak to her, "that wasn't me, Phyllis. There wasn't any me until you came. You know that, don't you? No me at all, but just a big brute, and if he didn't have a soul it was because it was in your bureau drawer along with your stockings and handkerchiefs, and I guess you thought it was a sachet bag or something, and never looked at it twice."

The most jealous, dismayed and heart-sick of women could not have resisted such pleading; not if she were in love, that is, and her lover's voice was as appealing, and his eyes as convincing and sincere.--In a divine commingling of wife-love and mother-love, so pure, so uplifting that it transcended all physical expression, save alone what the breast could give, she drew his head to her bosom, comforting him, comforting herself in an act emblematic of all that is most beautiful in humanity.

The more one studies the stage the more one is surprised by its disregard of principles that govern every-day, ordinary affairs. Perhaps it is because actors are all children, who have clung tenaciously to playing Indian in the hall, and shooting tigers under the parlor sofa long after the rest of us have grown up. It is a good thing for the world that "temperament" is so largely confined to the paste-board walls of the theater; or we might see our grocer sulking over his butter, or railway presidents impetuously ordering off trains because they had taken a sudden distaste to the landscape of some state. Self-interest, that sheet anchor of society, is but a kedge to the theatrical ship, and many plow the main without even that. Caprice often outweighs all money-making considerations; and though we are far from decrying those who sacrifice dollars to art (and there are many), may one not be a little peevish with the others, whose vanity and wilfulness often take such spiteful forms?

It certainly cost Shamus O'Dowd all of twelve thousand dollars, if not double or treble that amount to close the run at the Herald Square Theater and bring it to a peremptory conclusion. From his Rocky Mountain ranch he had watched, with a grinding and increasing anger, the success of the man to whom he had left his role. The swelling royalty returns exasperated him; the laudatory notices, sent in such profusion by Kemmel (who was innocent enough to think they would please)--were as tongues of flame leaping up the legs of a captive at the stake (such fat legs as they were, and with such an ample scorching surface), and all the talk of another theater and a second company clogged his eyes with blood, and seared his low, coarse face with the furrows of an intolerable indignation.

Nightly for twenty-five years he had been taking others' crimes on his brawny shoulders--murder, arson, embezzlement, forgery--he grabbed for them all, never so happy as when misjudged, with only the audience in the secret of his sacrifice; nobody on the stage could do anything wrong without his making a rush to take the blame--and the oaths he kept with an incredible fidelity; the superb impulses that started from him as freely as perspiration; his goodness, chivalry, and almost insensate honor--! Oh, the irony of reality as contrasted with those affecting fictions!

"Dear Kemmel," he wrote, in his ugly, sprawling, impatient hand. "Take the bloody show right off, and fire Adair, and keep the others on half-salary till you can fix me up a route outside of New York. In God's name, what do you think I'm made of, that I'm to play a number two company all around the clock while he's starring my hit on Broadway? And don't you put up any back-talk about it, either, for I mean every word of it if it takes my last red--though you must see that it don't. If we have to go forfeit on the theater, hell's bells, pay the bloody cormorants, and do you hear, Get Out!!! For I'm sick of the whole business. Fix it up with Mallory to send out something like this, even if you have to pay space rates for it, and I want it featured:--'The substitution of Mr. Cyril Adair for Mr. Shamus O'Dowd in the star-role of A Broth of a Boy has resulted so disastrously to the management that the Herald Square Theater will be dark on Monday night, and all outstanding tickets refunded at the box-office. The experiment was an unfortunate one for all parties, for Mr. O'Dowd, previous to his departure from New York, owing to his doctor's orders, was playing to enormous business, and bade fair to remain all the season. In Mr. O'Dowd's hands A Broth of a Boy has been a record money-maker, and friends of the genial star will be enthusiastic to learn of his early return to harness. The old adage of the lion's skin is thus verified again, and we are not disparaging Mr. Cyril Adair when we say he was unlucky to be cast for the Donkey.'

"I hope this is all clear, and that I have not overlooked anything. Perhaps when you are about it you had better fire Grace Farquar, too. Pretty girls are cheap, and I should like another more come-on, preferably a blonde this time. Received your check for $1,182.40. No more for the present. Cordially yours, Shamus O'Dowd."

*CHAPTER XXIV*

The right girl's cheek against his own is usually worth more to a man than all the philosophy to be found in books. Adair was stunned; he was too helpless, too hurt even to murmur. When one is struck by a thunderbolt, one lies where one falls. He expected Phyllis to fall also, and in a dull, heart-broken way was surprised by her intrepidity. She picked up the great, despairing creature; kissed him, petted him, crooned over him like a baby, smiling through her tears, and exerting all her pretty fancifulness to make him smile, too. Men may excel in marching up to cannon and saving people from burning buildings, and descending to the bottom of the sea in submarines; but in the forlorn hopes of life it is most often the women who lead.

After a while Adair was revived; on examination it seemed that he wasn't seriously damaged at all, only scared--oh, yes--just scared all out of his poor Booful wits; and a fairy potion called: "What does anything matter as long as we have each other?" was extraordinarily effective in pulling him together again. Then Phyllis jumbled up all the swear-words she had ever heard, and hurled them indiscriminately at Shamus O'Dowd, with such piquancy and humor, coming as they did from that sweet mouth, and with such a delicious lady-intonation that Adair was convulsed, and a tiny bit shocked--which was precisely what she had schemed for, the daring little wretch.

Thus began a new era of looking for an engagement; and it must be said it was a very sad, anxious, bitter era, for they were dreadfully poor--hungry-poor--and every time there was a knock at the door it was a dun who had to be coaxed and persuaded into going away. Adair's recent prominence had done little to incline managers towards him, and though they were more civil, and he generally got greater consideration at their hands, it was evident that their former hostility still persisted. But his professional reputation now stood pretty high; and occasionally one, bolder than the rest, would coquette with him, keeping him on tenter-hooks while a frantic search was made "for somebody that would do as well." This somebody was always found, and Adair would be told politely that "the vacancy had been filled."

Incidentally he learned that his parting from O'Dowd had been grossly misrepresented by that "genial star," who had spread it about broadcast that Adair was as impossible as ever, and so inflated and top-lofty that it had been cheaper to break the run of the piece than to stand his vagaries any longer. This was in such accord with Adair's former character that it found ready credence up and down Broadway; and the great Mr. Fielman himself enunciated the general sentiment when he said to Rolls Reece, the dramatist: "If that fellow Adair only had the manners and decency of a common hod-carrier, I'd give him a five years' contract, and make a fortune out of him; but the stage is on too high a level nowadays for men like that to get a second chance to disgrace it--at least from me!"

No one appreciates more than an actor the need for being well-dressed when seeking an engagement. His appearance is a considerable part of his capital, both on the boards and off; he may have had little breakfast, and less lunch, but his clothes must be good, and his linen immaculate, and in a "profession" judged so largely by superficialities, it behooves him, poor dog, to affect at any cost an air of fashion that but too often is the most pathetic of masquerades.

It was now that Phyllis rose to the occasion with an unexpected capacity that showed she was, indeed, her father's daughter. She got the janitress to teach her how to wash and iron white shirts; and in a short time could glaze a bosom better than her instructress, and almost as well as a French laundry-man. She learned how to press Adair's coats and trousers; she turned his ties; she ironed his collars; she cleaned his gloves with gasolene. No man was ever valeted with more assiduous care, or sent out every morning looking sprucer or better-groomed. When she kissed him good-by for the day it was always with a playful admonition, for Adair bore adversity none too well, and though he tried to hide his despondency he was beginning to break down under the long continued strain.