SUE felt that the woman was about to speak, and suddenly she knew that she could not listen. Fighting down the rather terrifying force of her emotions, fighting tears even, she rushed to the door, mutely brushed Mrs. Wilde aside and ran down the stairs. Sue let herself out on the front porch, closed the screen door and leaned hack against it, clinging to the knob, breathless, unstrung. The eyes of the Street would be on her, of course. She thought of this and dropped into one of the porch chairs.
A man turned the corner—a tall, rather young man who wore a shapeless suit of gray, a limp collar, a flowing bow tie, a soft hat; and who had a trick of throwing his leg out and around as he walked and toeing in with the right font.
He turned in, grinning cheerfully and waving a lean hand. He mounted the steps. Sue sat erect, gripping the arms of her chair, eyes bright, and laughed nervously.
“Henry,” she cred, “you're hopeless! Where's the new suit? You're not a bit respectable.”
He seated himself on the porch railing and gazed ruefully downward.
“Sue, I'm sorry. Plum forgot. And I swore I'd never disgrace you again. I am hopeless. You're right.” Then he laughed—irresponsibly, happily, like a boy.
She stared at him. “What is it, Henry?”
“Everything, child! You see before you the man who has just conquered the world. All of it. And no worlds left. Mr. Alexander H. Bates.”
“Oh,” said she, thinking swiftly back—“your novel!”
“Right. My novel.”
“But it isn't finished, Henry.”
“Not quite half done.”
“Then, how can—”
He raised a long hand and rose. He gazed down benignly at her. “The greatest publisher in these U. S. has had the good fortune to read the first fourteen chapters. A whisper blew to me yesterday of the way things were going—before I wrote you. But the word this morning was not a whisper. Susan. It was an ear-splitting yell. Mister Greatest Publisher personally sent for me. Told me he had been looking for me—exactly me!—these twenty-eight years. And here I am. Money now if I need it. And do I need it? God, do I need it! And fame later—when I get the book done. Now, child, tell me how glad you are. At once.”
He walked the porch; came back and stood before her; grinned and grinned.
She could not find words. Soberly her eyes followed him. Her set mouth softened. Her tightened muscles relaxed until she was leaning back limp in the chair.
“Isn't it the devil, Sue!” said he. “The one thing my heart was set on was to wear that good suit. Sue, I was going to put it all over this suburb of yours—just smear 'em! And look—I have to go and forget. Nothing comes out to see you but the same disgraceful old gipsy. How could I?”
Sue leaned forward. “Henry, I'm glad. I love this old suit. But there's a button coming loose—there, on your coat.”
“I know, Sue. I sewed at it, but it doesn't hold. I'm meaning to stop at a tailor's, next time I'm over toward Sixth Avenue.”
She was studying his face now. “You're happy, Henry,” she said.
“Well—in a sense! In a sense!”
“It is a good thing you came. I was forgetting about happiness.”
“I know. One does.” He consulted his watch. “It's five-twenty-two now, Sue. And we're catching the five-thirty-eight back to town.”
She did not speak. But her eyes met his, squarely; held to them. It was a forthright eye-to-eye gaze, of the sort that rarely occurs, even between friends, and that is not soon forgotten. Sue had been white, sitting there, when he came and after. Now her color returned.
He bent over and took her elbow. The touch of his hand was a luxury. Her lids drooped; her color rose and rose. She let him almost lift her from the chair. Then she went in for her hat and coat; still silent. They caught the five-thirty-eight.
“What are we going in for?” she asked, listless again, when they had found a seat in the train.
“Oh, come! You know! To see the almost famous Sue Wilde of Greenwich Village—”
“Not of the Village now, Henry!”
“—in the film sensation of the decade. Nature, suggested and directed by Jacob Zanin, written by Eric Mann, presented by the Nature Film Producing Company, Adolph Silverstone, President. You see, I've been getting you up, Sue.”
She was staring cut the window gloomily.
“I swore I wouldn't go, Henry.”
“But that would be a shame.”
“I know—of course. But—Henry, you don't understand. Nobody understands! I'm not sure I can stand it to sit there and see myself doing those things—and have to talk with people I know, and—”
“I think I could smuggle you in,” said he, thoughtful. “This isn't a little movie house, you know. It's a regular theater. There ought to be a separate gallery entrance. That would make it easy.”
She changed the subject. “Where shall we eat, Henry?”
“The Parisian?”
She shook her head. “Let's go to Jim's.”
To Jim's they went; and it seemed to him whimsically watchful eyes that she had an occasional moment of being her old girlish self as they strolled through the wandering streets of Greenwich Village and stepped down into the basement oyster and chop house that had made its name a full generation before Socialism was more than a foreign-sounding word and two generations before cubism, futurism, vorticism, imagism, Nietzsche, the I. W. W., Feminism and the Russians had swept in among the old houses and tenements to engage in the verbal battle royal that has since converted the quaint old quarter from a haunt of rather gently artistic bohemianism into a shambles of dead and dismembered and bleeding theories. Jim's alone had not changed. Even the old waiter who so far as any one knew had always been there, shuffled through the sprinkling of sawdust on the floor; and the familiar fat grandson of the original Jim was still to be seen standing by the open grill that was set in the wall at the rear end of the oyster bar.
The Worm suggested thick mutton chops and the hugely delectable baked potatoes without which Jim's would not have been Jim's. Sue smiled rather wanly and assented. Her air of depression disturbed him; his own buoyancy sagged; he found it necessary now and then to manufacture talk. This was so foreign to the quality of their friendship that he finally laid down his knife and fork, rested his elbows on the table and considered her.
“Sue,” he remarked, “it's getting to you, isn't it—the old Village.”
She tried to smile, and looked off toward the glowing grill.
“Why don't you come around and have a look at the rooms? I haven't changed them. Only your pictures are gone. Even your books are on the mantel where you used to keep them. It might hook things up for us, so we could get to feeling and talking like ourselves. What do you say—could you stand it?”
She tried to look at him, tried to be her old frank self; but without marked success. The tears were close. She had to compress her lips and study the table-cloth for a long moment before she could speak.
“I couldn't, Henry.” Then with an impulse that was more like the Sue that he knew, she reached out and rested her hand on his arm. “Try not to mind me, Henry. I can't help it—whatever it is. I don't seem to have much fight left in me. It's plain enough that I shouldn't have tried to come in. It was just a crazy reaction, anyway. You caught me when I had been hurt. I was all mixed....”
She was excluding him from her little world now; and this was least like her of all the things she had been saying and doing. But if the Worm was hurt he did not show it. He merely said:
“Sue, of course, you've been going through a nervous crisis, and it has taken a lot out of you.”
“A lot, Henry,” she murmured.
“One thing strikes me—superficial, of course—I doubt if you've had enough exercise this summer.”
“I know,” said she. “To-day I tried a few steps—that—old Russian dance, you know—”
“I'd love to see you do it, Sue.”
She shook her head. “I've lost it—everything.”
“You were stiff, of course.”
“It was painful. I just couldn't dance. I don't like to think of it, Henry.”
He smiled. “One thing—I've decided to make you walk to the theater. It's two miles. That'll stir your pulse a bit. And we'll start now.”
She looked soberly at him. “You've lost nothing, Henry. The work you've done hasn't taken it out of you.”
“Not a hit. On the contrary, Sue.”
“I know. I feel it.”
“No more of the old aimlessness, Susan. No more books—except a look at yours now and then, because they were yours. God, girl, I'm creating! I'm living! I'm saying something. And I really seem to have it to say. That's what stirs you, puts a tingle into your blood.”
She studied him a moment longer, then lowered her eyes. “Let's be starting,” she said.
“Up Fifth Avenue, Sue?”
“Oh, yes, Henry!”
They walked eastward on Waverly Place, across Sixth Avenue. She paused here and looked up almost fondly at the ugly, shadowy elevated structure in the twilight. A train roared by.
“I haven't seen the city for two months,” she said.
“That's a long time—-for a live person,” said he.
The dusty foliage of Washington Square appeared ahead. Above it like a ghost of the historic beauty of the old Square, loomed the marble arch. The lights of early evening twinkled from street poles and shone warmly from windows.
They turned up the Avenue whose history is the history of a century of New York life. Through the wide canyon darted the taxis and limousines that marked the beginnings of the city's night activity. The walks were thronged with late workers hurrying to their homes in the tenements to the south and west.
The Parisian restaurant was bright with silver, linen and electric lights behind the long French windows. He caught Sue giving the old place a sober, almost wistful glance.
At Fourteenth Street they encountered the ebb of the turbid human tide that at nightfall flows east and west across the great Avenue and picked their way through.
Above Fourteenth Street they entered the deep dim canyon of loft buildings. The sweatshops were here from which every noon and every night poured forth the thousands upon thousands of toilers—underfed, undersized, prominent of nose, cheek-bones and lips, gesticulating, spreading and shambling of gait, filling the great Avenue with a low roar of voluble talk in a strange guttural tongue—crowding so densely that a chance pedestrian could no more than drift with the slow current.
The nightly torrent was well over when Sue and the Worm walked through the blighted district, but each was familiar with the problem; each had played some small part in the strikes that stirred the region at intervals. Sue indeed pointed out the spot, just below Twenty-third Street where she had been arrested for picketing. And the Worm noted that she had steadied perceptibly as the old associations bit by bit reasserted their claims on her life. She was chatting with him now, nearly in the old, easy, forthright way. By the time the huge white facade of the Public Library came into view, with its steps, terraces, railings and misty trees, and the crosstown cars were clanging by just ahead at Forty-second Street, and they were meeting an occasional bachelor diner-out hurrying past in dinner-coat and straw hat, the Worm found himself chuckling again. They turned west on Forty-second Street, crossing Sixth Avenue, Broadway and Seventh Avenue, passing the glittering hotel on a famous corner and heading for the riotously whirling, darting, blazing devices in colored light by means of which each theater of the congested group sought to thrust itself most violently upon the bewildered optic nerves of the passer-by.
Opposite one of these the Worm took Sue's arm, very gently, and halted her on the curb. The evening throng brushed past, heedless of the simply dressed girl who yet was oddly, boyishly slim and graceful of body, and who was striking of countenance despite the weariness evident about the rather strongly modeled mouth and the large, thoughtful green eyes; heedless, as well, of the lank, shabbily dressed young man who held her arm and bent earnestly over her. They were atoms in the careering metropolis, uncounted polyps in the blind, swarming, infinitely laborious structure that is New York. And they thought themselves, each, the center of the universe.
“Sue, dear,” said he, “here we are. You're about to see yourself. It will be an experience. And it won't be what you're thinking and—yes, dreading. I've seen it—”
She glanced up in surprise.
“Last night—an exhibition to the newspaper men.” The emotion in his voice was evident. She glanced up again, something puzzled. “It was last night—afterward—that I decided on bringing you in. I wouldn't for anything in the world have missed having you here to-night. Though, at that, if Mr. Greatest Publisher hadn't warmed my soul with that wonderful blast of hot air I probably shouldn't have had the nerve. Of course I knew it would be an ordeal. It's been on my conscience every minute. But I had to bring you, and I believe you'll understand why, two hours from now. I'm hoping you will, Sue.”
He hesitated. She waited. Suddenly then, he hurried her across the busy street and into the dim shelter of the gallery entrance.
“Zanin was out in front,” said he, “With some of the newspaper boys, but I got you by.”
Many individuals and groups were detaching themselves from the endless human stream and turning in between the six-foot lithographs at the main entrance to the theater. More and more steadily as Sue and the Worm stood in the shadow of the lesser doorway they had chosen, the crowds poured in. Others were turning in here toward the gallery and tramping up the long twisting stairway.
“Big house!” chuckled the Worm. “Oh, they'll put it across, Sue. You wait! Zanin's publicity has been wonderful. It would have disturbed you, girl—but it's rather a shame you haven't followed it.”
Sue seemed not to hear him. She was leaning out from the doorway, trying to make out the subjects of the two big lithographs. She finally slipped across to the curb and studied them a moment. Both were of herself, half-clad in the simple garment of an island savage; over each picture was the one word, “NATURE,” under each the two words, “SUE WILDE.”
She hurried back and started up the stairs. The Worm saw that she was flushing again and that her mouth wore the set look.
On a landing, holding her back from a group ahead, he said: “Do you know, Sue, part of the disturbance you feel is just a shrinking from conspicuousness, from the effective thing. Self-consciousness! Isn't it, now?”
But she turned away and kept on.
AT that time no moving picture had been given the setting that Jacob Zanin devised for the Nature film. Zanin had altered the interior of the building to make it as little as possible like the conventional theater. Only the walls, galleries and boxes and stage remained as they had been. The new decorations were in the pale greens and pinks of spring and were simple. Between foyer and auditorium were palms, with orchids and other tropical flowers. The orchestra was not in sight. The ushers were calm girls from the Village—students of painting, designing, writing, sculpture—dressed modestly enough in a completer drapery of the sort worn by Sue in the pictures, such a material as Philippine women weave from grasses and pineapple strands, softly buff and cream and brown in color, embroidered with exquisite skill in exotic designs. The stage before the screen (Zanin used no drop curtain) represented a native village on some imaginary South Sea Island. The natives themselves were there, quietly moving about the routine of their lives or sitting by a low fire before the group of huts at one side of the stage.
Very likely you saw it. If so, you will understand the difficulty I am confronted with in describing the place. It made a small sensation, the theater itself, apart from the Nature film. But a penned description could not convey the freshness, the quiet charm, the dignity of that interior.
The dignity was what first touched Sue. The Worm watched her sidelong as her eyes roved from the flat surfaces of pure bold color on the walls to the quietly idyllic scene on the stage that managed to look as if it were not a stage. She exhibited little emotion at first. Her brow was slightly furrowed, the eyes thoughtful, the mouth set—that was all. She had gone through the difficult months of enacting the film at first with enthusiasm, later doggedly. She had early lost her vision of the thing as a whole; her recollections now were of doing over and over this bit and that, of a certain youthful actor who had taken it for granted that a girl who would dress as she had to dress the character could be casually made love to, of interminable train rides to the outdoor “locations,” of clashes of will between Zanin and the Interstellar people—of work, quarrels, dust, money and the lack of it and a cumulative disillusionment. It came to her now that she had lost that early vision. More, she had forgotten the sincerity and the purpose of Jacob Zanin, that beneath his cold Jewish detachment he believed this thing—that the individual must be freed from conformity and (as he saw it) its attendant hypocrisy by breaking the yoke of the home. It must be the individual—first, last, always—-the glad, free individual—the will to live, to feel, to express.
It was the Village jargon, done into something near a masterpiece. Sue began to see as the film unrolled before her eyes, reel by reel, that Zanin had never for a moment lost his dream. Even now, merely sitting in that steep crowded gallery waiting for the first reel of the ten, Sue knew that he had never lost it. Nor had Peter. The thought was exciting. It brought the color back to her cheeks. Her lips parted slightly. She was feeling again the enthusiasm Peter's scenario had roused in her at the start, but with a new intensity. The Worm, at her side, watching every slight subtle change of that young face, forgot his own stirring news of the morning, forgot that he was Alexander H. Bates, and the expression of a man who had bcen long hungry crept into his eyes.
The Nature film, you recall, pictured an imaginary people, simple, even primitive, untouched by what men call civilisation. To their secluded island comes the ship of an explorer, suggesting by its outlines and rigging and the costumes of officers and crew, the brave days of Captain Cook, or perhaps a period half a century earlier. The indefiniteness of it was baffling and fascinating. At no point did it date! And the island was not one of those that dot the South Seas, at least the inhabitants were not savages. They were intelligent, industrious, gentle. But the women hunted and fished with the men. Love—or passion, at least—was recognized for the impermanent gust it so often is—and, as such, was respected. No woman dreamed of tying herself for life to a lover she no longer loved. Neither want nor respectability could lower her pride to that point. Fatherhood, apparently, was not fixed, a hint being conveyed that the men as a group were bound to contribute to the welfare of young mothers. Thus the men were perhaps less glad and free than the women; indeed there was more than a suggestion of matriarchy.... To this community, thrown by an accident on its shores, the hundred odd men from the ship brought a habit of discipline, a holy book (that was and was not the Bible), a rigid marriage law, a complete hard theory of morality with attached penalties, plenty of firearms, hogshead upon hogshead of strong liquor, and underlying everything else an aggressive acquisitiveness that showed itself in the beginning as the trading instinct and later, of course, became politics and control.
In some measure it was the old obvious outcry against the conquest of weak and simple peoples. Or the situation at the start indicated something of the sort. But the story that grew out of the situation was less obvious. Indeed, developed by Peter, with his theatrical skill, out of Zanin's raw anarchism, it was a drama of quality and power. Zanin had been able to make nothing more out of it than a clash of social theories. Peter had made it a clash of persons; and through the deliberate development of this clash ran, steadily increasing in poignancy and tragic force straight to the climax of assassination, the story of a girl. Peter himself did not know how good it was. Not until he read about it in the papers (after which he became rather irritatingly complacent regarding it). For you will remember, Peter was crazily pursuing that girl when he wrote it. And the girl was boldly, wonderfully Sue—a level-eyed, outspoken young woman, confronting life; ashamed of nothing, not her body, not her soul; dreaming beautifully of freedom, of expressing herself, of living her life, vibrant with health, courage, joy.
The girl, you know, fell in love with a young sailor and gave herself proudly and freely. The sailor could not comprehend her, became furtive and jealous. They quarreled. To quiet her he was driven to brutality. For he was a respectable man and held his reputation high. The affair became known. The men of the ship, muttering strange words about a custom called marriage, held her as bad, fell on the age-old decision that she must continue to be, bad, at their call, though furtively. For they were all respectable men.
Then we saw the girl as an outcast, fed, for a time, secretly by the cowed bewildered tribe. We saw her as a dishonored mother, fighting the sea, the forest, the very air for sustenance. We caught glimpses of the new community, growing into a settlement of some stability, the native men forced into the less wholesome labor, then wives and daughters taken and poisoned with this strange philosophy of life. Then we saw our girl, her child toddling at her heels, creeping back into the society where trade and politics, hard liquor (distilled now from the native grain), that holy book of mysterious spell, the firearms and an impenetrable respectability reigned in apparent security over smoldering fires. And finally we saw the girl, not at all a penitent, but a proud inspired creature of instinct, fan those fires until they purged the taint of sophistication from each slumbering native soul and drove a half-mad people at the desperate job of extermination and of reasserting itself as a people on the old lawlessly happy footing. They burned the hogsheads of liquor, the firearms, the heap of holy books, on one great bonfire.
I am not doing it justice. But this much will serve to recall the story.
As for Zanin's propaganda, I doubt if it cut in very deeply. Critics and public alike appeared to take it simply as a novelty, a fresh sensation as they had taken Reinhardt and the Russian Ballet. The primitiveness of it reached them no more clearly than the primitiveness of Wagner's operas reached them. The clergy stormed a bit, of course; but not because they comprehended the deeply implied anarchistic motive. They were concerned over Zanin's rather unbending attitude toward a certain book. And Zanin; delighted, fed columns of controversy to the afternoon papers, wrote open letters to eminent divines, and in other ways turned the protest into a huge success of publicity. Then a professional objector, apparently ignorant of the existence of an enticing and corrupting “Revue” across the street, haled Zanin, Silverstone and two of the Interstellar people into court on the ground that the costuming was improper. This matter Zanin, after the newspapers had done it full justice, compromised by cutting out twenty-two feet of pictures and one printed explanation which seemed to the professional objector to justify child-birth out of wedlock.
No, beyond these brief attacks of virtue, I have never been able to see that the great city did not pulse along about as before. Broadway and Forty-second Street held their usual evening throngs. The saloons and hotel bars took in fortunes from the flushed, sometimes furtive men that poured out between the acts of that “Revue.” Gamblers gambled, robbers robbed; the glittering hotels thrived; men bought and sold and centered on the ugly business of politics and bargained with the nameless girls that lurked in shadowy doorways—but furtively, of course, with an eye to respectability. And in parsonages on side streets clergymen studied the precise attitude of Paul toward the doctrine of Free Will or wrote (for Sunday evening) of the beautiful day that was close at hand when all men should sing in harmony and not discord, with harp accompaniment.... No, I think, despite Zanin's purpose, despite Sue's blazing faith, what really triumphed was Peter Mann's instinct for a good story. It was the story that held them, and the real beauty of the pictures, and the acting and personal charm and sincerity of Sue Wilde.
All this, or something, held Sue herself. For it did catch her. She had thought she knew everything about the Nature film; whereas she knew everything about it but the Nature film. At first, naturally, her self-consciousness clung a little; then it fell away. She sat with an elbow on the arm of the seat, chin on hand, never once taking her eyes from the screen, hardly aware of the dense audience about her, no more than barely hearing the skilfully selected Russian music of the hidden, very competent orchestra.
There were two intermissions. During the first she tried to chat and failed. In the second, when the Worm suggested a turn in the open air she merely shook her head, without looking up. And that hungry look deepened in the Worm's eyes.
Toward the end, when the buffeted but unbowed young woman was fighting with the strength of inspired despair for the one decent hope left to her, the hope of personal freedom, Peter's story reached its highest point. As did Sue's acting. The girl herself, sitting up there in the gallery, head bowed, shading with a slim hand her wet eyes, leaned more and more closely against the dear whimsical friend at her side. When his groping hand found hers she clung to it as honestly as the girl on the screen would have done.
It was over. For a moment the house was in darkness and silence. This was another of Zanin's effects. Then the lights came on dimly; the concealed orchestra struck softly into another of those Russian things; the primitive people on the stage, you suddenly saw, were quietly going on about the simple business of their village. A girl like Sue walked on, skilfully picked out by the lighting. The audience caught the suggestion and turned where they stood in seat-rows, aisles and entrances to applaud wildly. Still another Zaninesque touch!
SLOWLY the crowd in the gallery moved out and down the twisting flights of stairs. Sue slipped her arm through the Worm's and silently clung to him. They were very close in spirit. Down at the street entrance, she said, “I don't want to see anybody, Henry.” So he hurried her across the street through a lane in the after-theater traffic and around the corner into Seventh Avenue, heading south.
“We'll have a bite somewhere, Sue,” said he then, Her head inclined in assent.
“Somewhere up around here and not on Broadway. Where we won't see a Soul.” Her arm was still in his. She felt him draw a sudden deep breath. “Oh, Sue—if only I could take you down to the old rooms—make a cup of coffee—sit and look at you curled up in your own big chair—” He broke OFF. Sue, still half in a dream, considered this.
“Why, I don't know, Henry—If you—”
His arm now pressed hers so tightly against his side that it hurt her a little.
“No!” he said in a low rough voice. “No!”
She was silent.
“Can't you see what's the matter, girl? I couldn't do it. I'd never let you go—never! I'm insane with love for you. I'm full of you—throbbing, singing, thrilling with you!”
Again he stopped short They walked on slowly, arm in arm. She glanced up at his face. It was twisted, as with pain.
She tried to think. Every way lay confusion. Suddenly she freed her arm.
“Henry—” she began; then walked on a dozen steps before she could continue. “You have a timetable, Henry?”
“Oh—Sue!”
“Please, Henry! I can't miss that late train. I have no key, as it is, It will be difficult enough.” They walked another block, moving steadily toward the Pennsylvania-Station-Herald-Square region whence all roads lead out into Long Island and New Jersey. She did not know what he would say or do. It was a relief when finally he found the time-table in his pocket and handed it to her.
She stood under a street light to puzzle out the cabalistic tangle of fine print.
“What time is it now, Henry?”
He held out his watch for her to see.
“Yes, I can make it. I hate the tube, but there isn't time now for the ferry. Come as far as Herald Square with me, Henry.”
There at the stairway under the elevated road she gripped his hand for an instant, then ran lightly down into the underground station. And not until the smoky local train, over in Jersey, was half-way out to the village that she now called home did it come to her that he had spoken not one word after the little episode of the time-table. She could see his face, too, with that look of pain on it.
She rang and rang at the door. Finally she knocked. Aunt Matilda came then, silent, grim, and let her in.
Her room was as she had left it when she rushed out in the afternoon. The dancing clothes lay on the bed. Rather feverishly she threw them on a chair. The Russian costume fell to the floor. She let it lie there.
She slept little; but, wide-eyed, all tight nerves, lay late. She heard them go off to Sunday-school, at quarter past nine. The children would be back at eleven; but Mrs. Wilde and Aunt Matilda, if they followed their custom, would stay on to church. That is, unless Mrs. Wilde should have one of her nervous headaches. Sue hoped they would stay. It seemed to her that by noon she should be able to get herself in hand.
She lay a while longer. Then went down-stairs in her kimono and warmed up the coffee Aunt Matilda had left on the stove. She tried to eat a little bread, but had to give it up. She began to wonder, a thought frightened now, if she could get herself in hand by noon. Aunt Matilda's appearance, when she came in, had been forbidding. This morning no one had come near her, not even the children.
Slowly she mounted the stairs. Aimlessly she began dressing.
The Russian costume on the floor held her eye. She picked it up, lingered it. Then she put it on. One of the red boots was on the chair, the other under the bed. She found this and drew them both on. Next she got the gay cap from the closet.
She stood before the mirror. It seemed to her that her color was slowly returning. She slapped her cheeks to hasten it. Her thoughts were in a strange confusion. Just as she had been doing all night, she tried again to visualize her memories of those hard busy days of working out the Nature film, tried to build out of what she could faintly, brokenly piece together the picture as she had now seen it, a complete created thing. But it was a jumble; it always went back to a bit of this experience and a bit of that. She tried to believe that the stirring, confident, splendid young creature on the screen was herself.... She pressed her palms against her temples. She could have cried out.
It was a relief to fall into one, then another of the old exercises preliminary to the dance. She went at these hard, until she could feel the warm blood tingling in her finger tips. Then she tried out that difficult Russian step. It did not come easily. There was effort in it. And her balance was not good. Then, too, the room was too small.
After a moment's hesitation she ran down-stairs, shut herself into the parlor, moved the furniture back against the walls, went methodically to work.
Outside, a little later, the human materials for a romantic comedy were swiftly converging on her She did not know it. She did not once glance out the window. She heard nothing but the patter of her own light steps, the rustle of her silken costume, the clinking of the metals in the heels of the red boots that was meant to suggest the jingle of spurs.
Mrs. Wilde did have one of her headaches. She came home from Sunday-school with the children, leaving Aunt Matilda to uphold the good name of the household by remaining alone for church.
When the tall woman and the two little girls—the girls demure, the woman gloomy in her depth of sorrow—turned in at the front walk, a tall young man, in a baggy old gray suit, with a trick of throwing his right leg out and around as he walked and toeing in with the right foot, was rounding the corner, rushing along with great strides. His brow was knit, his manner distrait but determined.
The parlor door opened. Mrs. Wilde stood there, speechless. The girls crowded forward, incredulous, eager, their eyes alight. Becky jumped up and down and clapped her small hands. Mrs. Wilde suppressed her with a slap. The child began to whimper.
Sue stood in the middle of the room, flushed, excited, a glowing picture from a Bakst album.
Mrs. Wilde, bewildered, struggling for speech, gazed at the outraged furniture.
Sue, catching a new sound, stared past her at a lanky figure of a man who stood at the screen door. Then with a sudden little cry, she rushed out to him. He opened the door and stepped within. Her arms flew around his neck. His arms held her close. He lifted her chin with a reverent hand, and kissed her lips. He did not know there was another person in the world.
Mrs. Wilde swept the children into a corner where they might not see.
“Sue,” she cried. “Are you crazy? Have you no sense—no shame?”
Sue threw hack her head, choked down a sound that might have been a laugh or a sob. Her eyes were radiant. “Thank God,” she cried—“None!”
IT was the opening of Peter Ericson (“Eric”,) Mann's new play, The Truffler, at the Astoria Theater on Broadway where the signs never fail and where to have your name blazoned in electric lights above a theater entrance is to be advertised to a restless but numerically impressive world. Peter's name was up there now. It was, you might have supposed, his big night. But Peter was not among the eight or nine hundred correctly dressed men and women that pressed in expectantly through the wide doorway. Instead, clad in his every-day garments, an expression of ill-controlled irritation on his lung face, moody dark eyes peering resentfully out through his large horn-rimmed glasses, he sat alone in the gallery, second row from the front, on the aisle.
Four rows behind him and a little off to the left, sat a good-looking young woman, an Italian girl apparently, who stared down at him in some agitation. She, too, was alone. He had not seen her when he came in; he did not know that she was there.
The two seats in the front row across the aisle were vacant until just before the musicians climbed from the mysterious region beneath the stage into the orchestra pit down front and the asbestos curtain slid upward and out of sight. Then a rather casually dressed young couple came down the aisle and took them.
Peter, when he saw who they were, stiffened, bit his lip, turned away and partly hid his face with his program. The girl was Sue Wilde, the one person on earth who had the power of at once rousing and irritating him merely by appearing within his range of vision. Particularly when she appeared smiling, alert and alive with health and spirit, in the company of another man. When a girl has played with your deepest feelings, has actually engaged herself to marry you, only to slip out of your life without so much as consulting you, when she has forced you to take stern measures to bring her to her senses—only to turn up, after all, radiant, just where you have stolen to be alone with your otherwise turbulent emotions—well, it may easily be disturbing.
The other man, on this occasion, was the Worm.
Peter knew that the Worm, like Hy, had disapproved of the steps he had taken to waken the truffling Sue to a sense of duty, the steps he had been forced to take. It is not pleasant to be disapproved of by old companions; particularly when you were so clearly, scrupulously right in all you have done. Still more unpleasant is it when one of the disapprovers appears with the girl whose selfish irresponsibility caused all the trouble. Sue's evident happiness was the climax. It seemed to Peter that she might at least have the decency to look—well, chastened.
I spoke a moment back of other disturbances within Peter's highly temperamental breast. They had to do with the play. The featured actress, Grace Derring, also was potentially a disturber. If you have followed Peter's emotionally tortuous career, you will recall Grace. With his kisses warm on her lips, protesting her love for him, she had rewritten his play behind his back, tearing it to pieces, introducing new and quite false episodes, altering the very natures of his painstakingly wrought out characters, obliterating whatever of himself had, at the start, been in the piece. He had been forced to wash his hands of the whole thing. He had kept away from Neuerman and Grace Derring all these painful months. He had answered neither Neuerman's business letters nor Grace's one or two guarded little notes. It had perturbed turn to see his name used lavishly (Neuerman was a persistent and powerful advertiser) on the bill-boards and in the papers. It had perturbed him to-night to see it on the street in blazing light. And now it was on the program in his hand!... To be sure he had not taken steps to prevent this use of his name. He had explained to himself that Neuerman had the right under the contract and could hardly be restrained. But he was perturbed.
So here was the great night! Down there on the stage, in a few minutes now, Grace Derring, whose life had twisted so painfully close to his, would begin enacting the play she and Neuerman had rebuilt from his own inspired outburst. Up here in the gallery, across the aisle, one row down, sat at this moment, the girl who had unwittingly inspired him to write it; She was smiling happily now, that girl. She did not know that the original play—The Trufiler as he had conceived and written it—was aimed straight at herself. It was nothing if not a picture of the irresponsible, selfish bachelor girl who by her insistence on “living her own life” wrecks the home of her parents. Peter's mouth set rather grimly as he thought of this now. As he saw it, Sue had done just that. Suddenly—he was looking from behind his hand at her shapely head; her hair had grown to an almost manageable length—a warm thought fluttered to life in his heart. Perhaps it wasn't, even yet, too late! Perhaps enough of his original message had survived the machinations of Neuerman and Grace Derring to strike through and touch this girl's heart—sober her—make her think! It might even work out that... he had to set his teeth hard on the thoughts that came rushing now. It was as if a door had opened, letting loose the old forces, the old dreams (that is, the particular lot that had concerned his relations with Sue) that he had thought dead, long since, of inanition.... Confused with all these dreams and hopes, these resentments and indignations, was a thought that had been thrusting itself upon him of late as he followed Neuerman's publicity. It was that the play might succeed. However bad Grace had made it, it might succeed. This would mean money, a little fame, a thrilling sense of position and power.
Sue glanced around. Her elbow gently pressed that of the Worm. “It's Peter,” she said low. “He doesn't see us.”
The Worm glanced around now. They were both looking at Peter, rather eagerly, smiling. The eminent playwright gazed steadily off across the house.
“He looks all in,” observed the Worm.
“Poor Peter”—this from Sue—“these first nights are a frightful strain.”
“Pete!” the Worm called softly.
He had to see them now. He came across the aisle, shook hands, peered gloomily, self-consciously down at them.
“Hiding?” asked Sue, all smiles.
Peter's gloom deepened. “Oh, no,” he replied.
“Evidently you're not figuring on taking the author's call,” said the Worm, surveying Peter's business suit.
The playwright raised his hand, moved it lightly as if tossing away an inconsiderable thing.
“Why should I? I'm not interested. It's not my play.”
The Worm was smiling. What was the matter with them—grinning like monkeys! Couldn't they at least show a decent respect for his feelings?
“There is a rather wide-spread notion to the contrary,” said the Worm.
“Oh, yes”—again that gesture from Peter—-“my name is on it. But it is not my play.”
“Whose is it then?”
Peter shrugged. “How should I know? Haven't been near them for five months. They were all rewriting it then. They never grasped it. Neuerman, to this day, I'm sure, has no idea what it is about. Can't say I'm eager to view the remains.”
The orchestra struck up. Peter dropped back into his seat. He raised his program again, and again watched Sue from behind it. He had managed to keep up a calm front, but at considerable cost to his already racked nervous system. Sue's smile, her fresh olive skin, her extraordinary green eyes, the subtly pleasing poise of her head on her perfect neck, touched again a certain group of associated emotions that had slumbered of late. Surely she had not forgotten—-the few disturbed, thrilling days of their engagement—their first kiss, that had so surprised them both, up in his rooms....
She couldn't have forgotten! Perhaps his mutilated message might touch and stir her. Perhaps again....
Suddenly Peter's program fluttered to the aisle. He drew an envelope from one pocket, a pencil from another; stared a moment, openly, at her hair and the curve of her cheek; and wrote, furiously, a sonnet.
He crossed out, interlined, rephrased. It was a passionate enough little uprush of emotion, expressing very well what he felt on seeing again, after long absence, a woman he had loved—hearing her voice, looking at her hair and the shadows of it on her temple and cheek—remembering, suddenly, with a stab of pain, the old yearnings, torments and exaltations. Peter couldn't possibly have been so excited as he was to-night without writing some-thing. His emotions had to come out.
The lights went down. The music was hushed. There was a moment of dim silence; then the curtain slowly rose. The sophisticated, sensation-hungry nine hundred settled back in their seats and dared the play to interest them.
I have always thought that there was a touch of pure genius in the job Grace Derring did with The Truffler. Particularly in her rewriting of the principal part. On the side of acting, it was unquestionably the best thing she had done—perhaps the best she will ever do. The situation was odd, at the start. Peter—writing, preaching, shouting at Sue—-had let his personal irritation creep everywhere into the structure of the play. He was telling her what he thought she was—a truffler, a selfish girl, avoiding all of life's sober duties, interested only in the pursuit of dainties, experimenting with pleasurable emotions. He had written with heat and force; the structure of the piece was effective enough. The difficulty (which Grace had been quick to divine) was that he had made an unsympathetic character of his girl. The practical difficulty, I mean. I am not sure that the girl as Peter originally drew her was not a really brilliant bit of characterization. But on the American stage, as in the American novel, you must choose, always, between artistic honesty and “sympathy.” The part of commercial wisdom is to choose the latter. You may draw a harsh but noble character, a weak but likable character, you may picture cruelty and vice as a preliminary to Wesleyan conviction of sin and reformation; but never the unregenerate article. You may never be “unpleasant.” All this, of course, Peter knew. The adroit manipulating of sympathy was the thing, really, he did best. But when he wrote The Truffler he was too excited over Sue and too irritated to write anything but his real thoughts. Therefore the play had more power, more of freshness and the surface sense of life, than anything else he had written up to that time. And therefore it was commercially impossible.
Now Grace Herring was a bachelor girl herself.
She knew the life. She had foregone the traditional duties—marriage, home-building, motherhood—in order to express her own life and gifts. She had loved—unwisely, too well—Peter. Like Peter, she approached the play in a state of nerves. As a practical player she knew that the girl would never win her audience unless grounds could be found for the audience to like her despite her Nietzschean philosophy. What she perhaps saw less clearly was that in her conception of the part she had to frame an answer to Peter's charges. Probably, almost certainly, she supposed the play something of a personal attack on her own life. Therefore she added her view of the girl to Peter's, and played her as a counter attack. If it had been real in the writing to Peter, it was quite as real in the playing to Grace. The result of this conflict of two aroused emotional natures was a brilliant theatrical success. Though I am not sure that the play, in its final form, meant anything. I am not sure. It was rather a baffling thing. But it stirred you, and in the third act, made you cry. Everybody cried in the third act.
The curtain came slowly down on the first act. The lights came slowly up. A house that had been profoundly still, absorbed in the clean-cut presentment of apparently real people, stirred, rustled, got up, moved into the aisles, burst into talk that rapidly swelled into a low roar. The applause came a little late, almost as if it were an after-thought, and then ran wild. There were seven curtain calls.
Down-stairs, two critics—blasé young men, wandered out into the lobby.
“Derring's good,” observed one. “This piece may land her solid on Broadway.”
“First act's all right,” replied the other casually, lighting a cigarette. “I didn't suppose Pete Mann could do it.”
Up in the gallery, Sue, looking around, pressed suddenly close to the Worm, and whispered, “Henry—quick! Look at Peter!”
The playwright stood before his aisle seat, staring with wild eyes up at the half-draped plaster ladies on the proscenium arch. A line of persons in his row were pressing toward the aisle. A young woman, next to him, touched his arm and said, “Excuse me, please!” Sue and the Worm heard her but not Peter. He continued to stare—a tall conspicuous man, in black-rimmed glasses, a black ribbon hanging from them down his long face. His hand raised to his chest, clutched what appeared to be an envelope, folded the long way. Plainly he was beside himself.
The crowd in the aisle saw him now and stared. There was whispering. Some one laughed.
Again the young woman touched his arm.
He turned, saw that he was blocking the row, noted the eyes on him. became suddenly red, and stuffing the folded envelope into his pocket and seizing his hat, rapidly elbowed his way up the aisle.
Immediately following this incident attention was shifted to another. A good-looking young woman, apparently an Italian, who had been sitting four rows behind Peter and oft to the left, was struggling, in some evident excitement, to get out and up the aisle. Her impetuosity made her as conspicuous as Peter had been.
Sue, still watching the crowd that had closed in behind the flying Peter, noted the fresh commotion.
“Quite an evening!” she said cheerfully. “Seems to be a lady playwright in our midst, as well.”
The Worm regarded the new center of interest and grew thoughtful. He knew the girl. It was Maria Tonifetti, manicurist at the sanitary barber shop of Marius. He happened, too, to be aware that Peter knew Maria. He had seen Pete in there getting his nails done. Once, this past summer, he had observed them together on a Fifth Avenue bus. And on a Sunday evening he had met them face to face at Coney Island, and Peter had gone red and hurried by. Now he watched Maria slipping swiftly up the aisle, where Peter had disappeared only a moment before. He did not tell Sue that he knew who she was.