THE Worm worked hard all of this particular day at the Public Library, up at Forty-second Street and Fifth Avenue. At five o'clock he came out, paused on the vast incline of marble steps to consider the spraying fountains of pale green foliage on the terraces (it was late April) and the brilliant thronging avenue and decided not to ride down to Washington Square on an autobus, but to save the ten cents and walk. Which is how he came to meet Sue Wilde.
She was moving slowly along with the stream of pedestrians, her old coat open, her big tarn o'shanter hanging down behind her head and framing her face in color. The face itself, usually vital, was pale.
She turned and walked with him. She was loafing, she said listlessly, watching the crowds and trying to think. And she added: “It helps.”
“Helps?”
“Just feeling them crowding around—I don't know; it seems to keep you from forgetting that everybody else has problems.”
Then she closed her lips on this bit of self-revelation. They walked a little way in silence.
“Listen!” said she. “What are you doing?”
“Half an hour's work at home clearing up my notes, then nothing. Thinking of dinner?”
She nodded.
“I'll meet you. Wherever you say.”
“At the Muscovy, then. By seven.”
She stopped as if to turn away, hesitated, lingered, gazing out with sober eyes at the confusion of limousines, touring cars and taxis that rolled endlessly by, with here and there a high green bus lumbering above all the traffic. “Maybe we can have another of our talks, Henry,” she said. “I hope so. I need it—or something.”
“Sue,” said he, “you're working too hard.”
She considered this, shook her head, turned abruptly away.
When he reached the old bachelor rookery in the Square he did not enter, but walked twice around the block, thinking about Sue. It had disturbed him to see that tired look in her odd deep-green eyes. Sue had been vivid, striking, straightforward; fired with a finely honest revolt against the sham life into an observance of which nearly all of us, soon or late, get beaten down. He didn't want to see Sue beaten down like the rest.
It was pleasant that she, too, had felt deeply about their friendship. This thought brought a thrill of the sort that had to be put down quickly; for nothing could have been plainer than, that he stirred no thrill in Sue. No, he was not in the running there. He lived in books, the Worm; and he reflected with a rather unaccustomed touch of bitterness that books are pale things.
Peter, now—he had seemed lately to be in the running.
But it hardly seemed that Peter could be the one who had brought problems into Sue's life.... Jacob Zanin—there was another story! He was in the running decidedly. In that odd frank way of hers, Sue had given the Worm glimpses of this relationship.
He rounded the block a third time—a fourth—a fifth.
When he entered the apartment Peter was there, in the studio, telephoning. To a girl, unquestionably. You could always tell, “You aren't fair to me. You throw me aside without a word of explanation.”
Thus Peter; his voice, pitched a little high, near to breaking with emotion; as if he were pleading with the one girl in the world—though, to be fair to Peter, she almost always was.
The Worm stepped into the bedroom, making as much noise as possible. But Peter talked on.
“Yes, you are taking exactly that position. As you know, I share your interest in freedom—but freedom without fairness or decent human consideration or even respect for one's word, comes down to selfish caprice. Yes, selfish caprice!”
The Worm picked up a chair and banged it against the door-post. But even this failed to stop Peter.
“Oh, no, my dear, of course I didn't mean that. I didn't know what I was saying. You can't imagine how I have looked forward to seeing you this evening. The thought of it has been with me all through this hard, hard day. I know my nerves are a wreck. I'm all out of tune. But everything seems to have landed on me at once...”
Finding the chair useless as a warning, the Worm sat upon it, made a wry face, folded his arms.
“... I've got to go away. You knew that, dear. This was my last chance to see you for weeks—and yet you speak of seeing me any time. It hurts, little girl. It just plain hurts to be put off like that. It doesn't seem like us.”
The Worm wondered, rather casually, to how many girls Peter had talked in this way during the past three years—stage girls, shop girls—the pretty little Irish one, from the glove counter up-town; and that young marred person on the upper West Side of whom Peter had been unable to resist bragging a little; and Maria Tonifetti, manicurist at the sanitary barber shop of Marius; and—oh, yes, and Grace Herring. Only last year. The actress. She played Lena in Peter's The Buzzard, and later made a small sensation in The Gold Heart. That affair had looked, for several months, like the real thing. The Worm recalled one tragic night, all of which, until breakfast rime, he had passed in that very studio talking Peter out of suicide.
He wondered who this new girl could be. Was it Sue, by any chance? Were they that far along?
The Worm got up with some impatience and went in there—just as Peter angrily slammed the receiver on its hook.
“I hear you're going away,” the Worm observed
Peter swung around and peered through his big glasses. He made a visible effort to compose himself.
“Oh,” he said, “hello! What's that? Yes, I'm leaving to-morrow afternoon. Neuerman is going to put The Truffler on the road for a few; weeks this spring to try out the cast.”
The Worm regarded him thoughtfully. “Look here, Pete,” said he, “it isn't my fault that God gave me ears. I heard your little love scene.”
Peter looked blankly at him; then his face twisted convulsively and he buried his face in his hands.
“Oh, Henry!” he groaned. “It's awful. I'm in love, man!” His voice was really trembling. “It's got me at last—the real thing. I must tell somebody—it's racking me to pieces—I can't work, can't sleep. It's Sue Wilde. I've asked her to marry me—she can't make up her mind. And now; I've got to go away for weeks and leave things... Za-Zanin...”
He sat up, stiffened his shoulders, bit his lip. The Worm feared he was going to cry. But instead he sprang up, rushed from the room and, a moment later, from the apartment.
The Worm sat on a corner of the desk and looked after him, thought about him, let his feelings rise a little.... Peter, even in his anger and confusion, had managed to look unruffled, well-groomed. He always did. No conceivable outburst of emotion could have made him forget to place his coat on the hanger and crease his trousers carefully in the frame. His various suits were well made. They fitted him. They represented thought and money. His shoes—eight or nine pairs in all—were custom made and looked it. His scarfs were of imported silk. His collars came from England and cost forty cents each. His walking sticks had distinction.... And Peter was successful with women. No doubt about that.
The Worm gazed down at himself. The old gray suit was; a shapeless thing. The coat pockets bulged—note-book and wad of loose notes on one side, a paper-bound volume in the Russian tongue on the other. He had just one other suit. It hung from a hook in the closet, and he knew that it, too, was shapeless.
A clock, somewhere outside, struck seven.
He started; stuffed his note-book and papers into a drawer; drew the volume in Russian from his other pocket, made as if to lay it on the table, then hesitated. It was his custom to have some reading always by him. Sue might be late. She often was.
Suddenly he raised the book above his head and threw it against the wall at the other end of the room. Then he picked up his old soft hat (he never wore an overcoat) and rushed out.
The Muscovy is a basement restaurant near Washington Square. You get into it from the street by stumbling down a dark twisting flight of uneven steps and opening a door under a high stoop. Art dines here and Anarchism; Ideas sit cheek by jowl with the Senses.
Sue was not late. She sat in the far corner at one of the few small tables in the crowded room. Two men, a poet and a painter, lounged against the table and chatted with her languidly. She had brightened a little for them. There was a touch of color in her cheeks and some life in her eyes. The Worm noted this fact as he made his way toward her.
The poet and the painter wandered languidly away. The chatter of the crowded smoky room rose to its diurnal climax; passed it as by twos and threes the diners drifted out to the street or up-stairs to the dancing and reading-rooms of the Freewoman's Club; and then rapidly died to nothing.
Two belated couples strolled in, settled themselves sprawlingly at the long center table and discussed with the offhand, blandly sophisticated air that is the Village manner the currently accepted psychology of sex.
The Worm was smoking now—his old brier pipe—and felt a bit more like his quietly whimsical self. Sue, however, was moody over her coffee.
A pasty-faced, very calm young man, with longish hair, came in and joined in the discussion at the center table.
Sue followed this person with troubled eyes, “Listen, Henry!” she said then, “I'm wondering—”
He waited.
“—for the first time in two years—if I belong in Greenwich Village.”
“I've asked myself the same question, Sue.”
This remark perturbed her a little; as if it had not before occurred to her that other eyes were reading her. Then she rushed on—“Take Waters Coryell over there”—she indicated the pasty-faced one—“I used to think he was wonderful. But he's all words, Like the rest of us. He always carries that calm assumption of being above ordinary human limitations. He talks comradeship and the perfect freedom. But I've had a glimpse into his methods—Abbie Esterzell, you know—”
The Worm nodded.
“—and it isn't a pretty story. I've watched the women, too—the free lovers. Henry, they're tragic. When they get just a little older.”
He nodded again. “But we were talking about you, Sue. You're not all words.”
“Yes I am. All talk, theories, abstractions. It gets you, down here. You do it, like all the others. It's a sort of mental taint. Yet it has been every thing to me. I've believed it, heart and soul. It has been my religion.”
“I'm not much on generalizing, Sue,” observed the Worm, “but sometimes I have thought that there's a lot of bunk in this freedom theory—'self-realization,' 'the complete life,' so on. I notice that most of the men and women I really admire aren't worried about their liberty, Sometimes I've thought that there's a limit to our human capacity for freedom just as there's a limit to our capacity for food and drink and other pleasant things—sort of a natural boundary. The people that try to pass that boundary seem to detach themselves in some vital way from actual life. They get unreal—act queer—are queer. They reach a point where their pose is all they've got. As you say, it's a taint. It's a noble thing, all right, to light and bleed and die for freedom for others. But it seems to work out unhappily when people, men or women, insist too strongly on freedom for their individual selves.”
But Sue apparently was not listening. Her cheeks—they were flushed—rested on her small fists.
“Henry,” she said, “it's a pretty serious thing to lose your religion.”
“Losing yours, Sue?”
“I'm afraid it's gone.”
“You thought this little eddy of talk was real life?”
She nodded. “Oh, I did.”
“And then you encountered reality?”
Her eyes, startled, vivid, now somber, flashed up at him. “Henry, how did you know? What do you know?”
“Not a thing, Sue. But I know you a little. And I've thought about you.”
“Then,” she said, her eyes down again, suppression in her voice—“then they aren't talking about me?”
“Not that I've heard. Sue. Though it would hardly come to me.”
She bit her lip. “There you have it, Henry. With the ideas I've held, and talked everywhere, I ought not to care what they say. But I do care.”
“Of course. They all do.”
“Do you think so?” She considered this. “You said something a moment ago that perhaps explains—about the natural boundary of human freedom.... Listen! You knew Betty Deane, the girl that roomed with me? Well, less than a year ago, after letting herself go some all the year—it's fair enough to say that, to you; she didn't cover her tracks—she suddenly ran off and married a manufacturer up in her home town. I'm sure there wasn't any love in it. I know it, from things she said and did. All the while he was after her she was having her good times here. I suppose she had reached the boundary. She married in a panic. She was having a little affair with your friend—what's his name?”
“Hy Lowe?”
The Worm smiled faintly. The incorrigible Hy had within the week set up a fresh attachment. This time it was a new girl in the Village—one Hilda Hansen, from Wisconsin, who designed wall-paper part of the time.
But he realized that Sue, with a deeper flush now and a look in her eyes that he did not like to see there, was speaking.
“When I found out what Betty had done I said some savage things, Henry. Called her a coward. Oh, I was very superior—very sure of myself. And here's the grotesque irony of it.” Her voice was unsteady. “Here's what one little unexpected contact with reality can do to the sort of scornful independent mind I had. Twenty-four hours—less than that—after Betty went I found myself soberly considering doing the same thing.”
“Marrying?” The Worm's voice was suddenly low and a thought husky.
She nodded.
“A man you don't love?”
“I've had moments of thinking I loved him, hours of wondering how I could, possibly.”
He was some time in getting out his next remark. It was, “You'd better wait.”
She threw out her hands in an expressive way she had. “Wait? Yes, that's what I've told myself, Henry. But I've lost my old clear sense of things. My nerves aren't steady. I have queer reactions.”
Then she closed her lips as she had once before on this day, up there on the avenue. She even seemed to compose herself. Waters Coryell came over from the other table and for a little time talked down to them from his attitude of self-perfection.
When he had gone the Worm said, to make talk, “How are the pictures coming on?”
Then he saw that he had touched the same tired nerve center. Her flush began to return.
“Not very well,” she said; and thought for a moment, with knit brows and pursed lips.
She threw out her hands again. “They're quarreling, Henry.”
“Zanin and Peter?”
She nodded. “It started over Zanin's publicity. He is a genius, you know. Any sort of effort that will help get the picture across looks legitimate to him.”
“Of course,” mused the Worm, trying to resume the modestly judicial habit of mind that had seemed lately to be leaving him, “I suppose, in a way, he is right. It is terribly hard to make a success of such an enterprise. It is like war—-the only possible course is to win.”
“I suppose so,” said she, rather shortly. “But then there's the expense side of it. Zanin keeps getting the bit in his teeth.... Lately I've begun to see that these quarrels are just the surface. The real clash lies deeper. It's partly racial, I suppose, and partly—”
“Personal?”
“Yes.” She threw out her hands. “They're fighting over me. I don't mind it so much in Peter. He has only lately come to see things our way. He never made the professions Zanin has of being superior to passions, jealousies, the sense of possession.”
She paused, brooding, oblivious now to her surroundings, slowly shaking her head. “Zanin has always said that the one real wrong is to take or accept love where it isn't real enough to justify itself. But now when I won't see him—those are the times he runs wild with the business. Then Peter has to row with him to check the awful waste of money. Peter's rather wonderful about it. He never loses his courage.”
This was a new picture of Peter. The Worm gave thought to it.
“First he took Zanin's disconnected abstractions and made a real film drama out of them. It's big stuff, Henry. Powerful and fine. And then he threw in every cent he had.”
“Peter threw in every cent!...” The Worm was startled upright, pipe in hand.
“Every cent, Henry. All his savings. And never a grudging word. Not about that.”
She dropped her chin on her hands. Tears were in her eyes. Her boy-cut short hair had lately grown out a little, and was rumpled where she had run her fingers through it. It was fine-spun hair and thick on her head. It was all high lights and rich brown shades. The Worm found himself wishing it was long and free, rippling down over her shoulders. He thought, too, of the fine texture of her skin, just beneath the hair. A warm glow was creeping through his nervous system and into his mind.... He set his teeth hard on his pipestem.
She leaned back more relaxed and spoke in a quieter tone. “You know how I feel about things, Henry. I quit my home. I have put on record my own little protest against the conventional lies we are all fed on from the cradle here in America. I went into this picture thing with my eyes open, because it was what I believed in. It wasn't a pleasant thought—making myself so conspicuous, acting for the camera without clothes enough to keep me warm. I believed in Zanin, too. And it seemed to be a way in which I could really do something for him—after all he had done for me. But it hasn't turned out well. The ideals seem to have oozed out of it.”
There she hesitated; thought a little; then added: “The thing I didn't realize was that I was pouring out all my emotional energy. I had Zanin's example always before me. He never tires. He is iron. The Jews are, I think. But—I—” she tried to smile, without great success—“Well, I'm not iron. Henry, I'm tired.”
The Worm slept badly that night.
The next morning, after Peter and Hy Lowe had gone, the Worm stood gloomily surveying his books—between two and three hundred of them, filling the case of shelves between the front wall and the fireplace, packed in on end and sidewise and heaped haphazard on top.
Half a hundred volumes in calf and nearly as many in Morocco dated from a youthful period when bindings mattered. College years were represented by a shabby row—Eschuylus, Euripides, Aristophanes, Plato, Plutarch, Virgil and Horace. He had another Horace in immaculate tree calf. There was a group of early Italians; an imposing Dante; a Boccaccio, very rare, in a dated Florentine binding; a gleaning of French history, philosophy and belles-lettres from Phillippe de Comines and Villon through Rabelais, Le Sage. Racine, Corneille and the others, to Bergson, Brieux, Rolland and Anatole France—with, of course, Flaubert, de Maupassant and a tattered series of Les Trois Mousquetaires in seven volumes; some modern German playwrights, Hauptmann and Schnitzler among them; Ibsen in two languages; Strindberg in English; Gogol, Tchekov, Gorky, Dostoïevski, of the Russians (in that tongue); the modern psychologists—Forel, Havelock Ellis, Freud—and the complete works of William James in assorted shapes and bindings, gathered painstakingly through the years. Walt Whitman was there, Percy's Reliques, much of Galsworthy, Wells and Conrad, The Story of Gosta Berling, John Masefield, and a number of other recent poets and novelists. All his earthly treasures were on those shelves; there, until now, had his heart been also.
He took from its shelf the rare old Boccaccio in the dated binding, tied a string around it, went down the corridor with it to the bathroom, filled the tub with cold water and tossed the book in.
It bobbed up to the surface and floated there.
He frowned—sat on the rim of the tub and watched it for ten minutes. It still floated.
He brought it back to the studio then and set to work methodically making up parcels of books, using all the newspapers he could find. Into each parcel went a weight—the two ends of the brass book-holder on the desk, a bronze elephant, a heavy glass paper-weight, a pint bottle of ink, an old monkey-wrench, the two bricks from the fireplace that had served as andirons.
He worked in a fever of determination. By two o'clock that afternoon he had completed a series of trips across the West Side and over various ferry lines, and his entire library lay at the bottom of the North River.
From the last of these trips, feeling curiously light of heart, he returned to find a taxi waiting at the curb and in the studio Peter, hat, coat and one glove on, his suit-case on a chair, furiously writing a note.
Peter finished, leaned back, mopped his forehead. “The books,” he murmured, waving a vague hand toward the shelves. “Where are they?”
“I'm through with books. Going in for reality.”
“Oh,” mused the eminent playwright—“a girl.”
“Pete, you're wonderful.”
“Chucking your whole past life?”
“It's chucked.” Then the Worm hesitated. For a moment his breath nearly failed him. He stood balancing on the brink of the unknown; and he knew he had to make the plunge. “Pete—I've got a few hundred stuck away—and, anyhow, I'm going out for a real job.”
“A job! You! What kind?”
“Oh—newspaper man, maybe. I want the address—who is your tailor?”
Peter jotted it down. “By the way,” he said, “here's our itinerary. Stick it in your pocket.” Then he gazed at the Worm in a sort of solemn humor. “So the leopard is changing his spots,” he mused.
“I don't know about that,” replied the Worm, flushing,' then reduced to a grin—as he pocketed the tailor's address—“but this particular Ethiop is sure going to make a stab at changing his skin.”
SUE was in her half-furnished living-room—not curled comfortably on the couch-bed, as she would have been a month or two earlier, but sitting rather stiffly in a chair, a photograph in her listless hand.
Zanin—big, shaggy, sunburnt—walked the floor. “Are you turning conventional, Sue?” he asked. “What is it? You puzzle me.”
“I don't want that picture used, Jacob.”
He lighted a cigarette, dropped on a wooden chair, tipped it Lack against the wall, twisted his feet around the front legs, drummed on the front of the seat with big fingers.
He reached for the photograph. It was Sue herself, as she would appear in one of the more daring scenes of Nature.
“It's an honest picture, Sue—right off the film.” She was very quiet. “It's the singling it out, Jacob. In the film it is all movement, action—it passes. It doesn't stay before their eyes.” A little feeling crept into her voice. “I agreed to do the film, Jacob. I'm doing it. Am I not?”
“But you're drawing a rather sharp line, Sue. We've got to hit them hard with this thing. I don't expect Mann to understand. I've got to work along with him as best I can and let it go at that. But I count on you.” The legs of the chair came down with a bang. He sprang up and walked the floor again. His cigarette consumed, he lighted another with the butt, which latter he tossed into a corner of the room. Sue's eyes followed it there. She was still gazing at it when Zanin paused before her. She could feel him looking down at her. She wished it were possible to avoid discussion just now. There had been so many discussions during these crowded two years.... She raised her eyes. There were his, fixed on her. He was not tired. His right hand was plunged into his thick hair; his left hand held the cigarette.
“You're none too fit, Sue.”
She moved her hands in assert.
“And that's something to be considered seriously. We need you fit.”
She did not answer at once. She would have liked to send him away. She tried to recall the long slow series of events, each dovetailed so intricately into the next that had brought them so close. Her mind—her sense of fairness—told her that he had every right to stand there and talk at her; yet he seemed suddenly and oddly a stranger.
“Suppose,” she said, “we stop discussing me.”
He shook his head. “It's quite time to begin discussing you. It's suppressions, Sue. You've played the Village game with your mind, but you've kept your feelings under. The result is natural enough—your nerves are in a knot. You must let go—trust your emotions.”
“I trust my emotions enough,” said she shortly.
He walked back and forth. “Let's look at this dispassionately, Sue. We can, you and I. Of course I love you—you know that. There have been women enough in my life, but none of them has stirred my blood as you have. Not one. I want you—desperately—every minute—month in, month out. But”—he stood before her again—“if you can't let go with me, I'd almost—surely, yes, I can say it, I'd rather it would be somebody else then. But somebody, something. You're all buttled up. It's dangerous.”
She stirred restlessly.
“You know that as well as I.” He was merciless.
The worst of it was he really seemed dispassionate. For the moment she could not question his sincerity. He went on—“As lately as last winter you would have carried all this off with a glorious flare. It's this suppression that has got to your nerves, as it was bound to. You're dodging, I'm afraid. You're refusing life.” He lit another cigarette. “It's damn puzzling. At heart you are, I know, a thoroughbred. I can't imagine you marrying for a living or to escape love. You're intelligent—too intelligent for that.” She moved restlessly, picked up the photograph and studied it again.
“You can't go back to that home of yours...”
“I'm not going back there,” she said.
“And you can't quit. We're too deep in.”
“Don't talk about that, Jacob!” she broke out. “I'm not going to quit.”
He dropped casually on the arm of her chair. One big hand rested on the chair-back, the other took hers and held it, with the picture, a little higher.
She seemed for an instant to shrink away; then, with slightly compressed lips, sat motionless.
“You think I am squeamish,” she said.
“Yes, I do.” They both looked at the photograph.
“Really, Sue—why on earth!... What is it, anyway? Are you all of a sudden ashamed of your body?”
“Don't expect me to explain. I know I'm inconsistent.”
He pressed her hand; then his other big hand very quietly stroked her hair, slid down to her forehead, rested slightly on her flushed temple and cheek.
“You poor child,” he said, “you're almost in a fever. You've got to do something. Don't you see that?”
She was silent.
“It's tearing you to pieces, this giving the lie to your own beliefs. You've got to let go, Sue! For God's sake, be human! Accept a little happiness. You're not a small person. You are gifted, big. But you've got to live the complete life. It's the only answer.... See here. Peter's away, isn't he?”
“He left last Thursday... I had a note...”
“I didn't,” Zanin smiled grimly. “It's Tuesday, now. We can't do those outdoor scenes yet. You come away with me. I'll take you off into the hills somewhere—over in Pennsylvania or up-state. Let's have some happiness, Sue. And give me a chance to take a little real care of you. Half my strength is rusting right now because you won't use it.”
He drew her closer.
Suddenly she sprang up, leaped across the room, whirled against the wall and faced him.
Then she faltered perceptibly, for on his face she saw only frank admiration.
“Fine, Sue!” he cried. “That's the old fire! Damn it, girl, don't let's be childish about this! You and I don't need to get all of a flutter at the thought of love. If I didn't stir an emotional response in you do you think I'd want you? But I do.” He rose and came to her. He gripped her shoulders and made her look at him. “Child, for God's sake, don't all at once forget everything you know! Where's your humor? Can't you see that this is exactly what you've got to have—that somebody has got to stir you as I'm stirring you now! If I couldn't reach you, it would have to be some one else. A little love won't hurt you any. The real danger I've been fearing is that no man would be able to stir you. That would be the tragedy. You're a live vital girl. You're an artist. Of course you've got to have love. You'll never do real work without it. You'll never even grow up without it.”
She could not meet his eyes. And she had a disheartening feeling that he was reasonable and right, granting the premises of their common philosophy.
He took his hands away. She heard him strike a match and light a cigarette, then move about the room. Then his voice—
“What do you say, Sue—will you pack a bag and start off with me? It'll do both of us good. It'll give us new life for our job.”
She was shaking her head. “No,” she said. “No.”
“If it was only this,” he said, thoughtfully enough—“but it's everything. Peter is lying down on me and now you are failing me utterly.”
She dropped on a chair by the door. “That's the hardest thing you ever said to me, Jacob.”
“It is true. I'm not blaming you. But it is a fact I have to meet.... Sue, do you think for one moment I intend being beaten in this enterprise? Don't you know me better than that? You are failing me. Not in love—that is personal. But in the work. Lately I have feared that Peter had your love. Now, Sue, if I am not to have you I can almost wish he had. When you do accept love it will hurt you. I have no doubt of that. There will be reactions. The conventional in you will stab and stab. But you are not little, and you will feel the triumph of it. It will make you. After all, however it may come, through door or window, love is life.”
She had folded her hands in her lap and was looking down at them. “I have no doubt you are right,” she said slowly and quietly.
He gave a weary sigh. “Of course. Your own intelligence tells you.... If you won't go with me, Sue, I may slip away alone. I've got to think. I've got to get money. I can get it, and I will. A little more energy, a little more expenditure of personality will do it. It can always be done.”
Her mind roused and seized on this as a momentary diversion. “Do you mean to go outside for it?”
“If it comes to that. Don't you know, Sue, that we're too far in with this thing to falter. The way to make money is to spend money. Peter's a chicken. If he won't come through, somebody's got to. Why it would cost more than a thousand dollars—perhaps two thousand—merely to do what I have planned to do with the picture you so suddenly dislike,” He looked about for his hat. “I'm going, Sue. I've let myself get stirred up; and that, of course, is foolishness. I'm just tiring you out. You can't help, I see that—not as you are.”
She rose and leaned against the wall by the door. He took her arm as he reached her side. “Buck up, little girl,” he said; “don't blame yourself.”
She did not answer, and for a long moment they stood thus. Then she heard him draw in his breath.
His arms were around her. He held her against him.
“Have you got a kiss for me, Sue?” he asked.
She shook her head.
He let her go then, and again she leaned against the walk
“Good-by,” said he. “If you could bring yourself to share the real thrill with me, I could help you. But I'm not going to wear you out with this crude sex-duel stuff. Good-by.”
“Wait,” she said then. She moved over to the table, and fingered the photograph. He stood in the doorway and watched her. She was thinking—desperately thinking. He could see that. The flush was still on her temples and cheeks. Finally she straightened up and faced him.
“Jacob,” she said, “I can't let you go like that. This thing has got to be settled. Really settled.”
He slowly nodded.
“Give me till Saturday, Jacob. I promise you I'll try to think it all out. I'll go through with the pictures anyway—somehow. As for this photograph, go ahead. Use it. Only please don't commit yourself in a money way before I see you. Come to tea Saturday, at four. I'll either tell you finally that we are—-well, hardly to be friends beyond the rest of this job of ours, or I'll—I'll go along with you, Jacob.”
Her voice faltered over the last of this, but her eyes did not. And her chin was high.
“It's too bad,” said he. “But you're right. It isn't me. You've come to the point where you've got to find yourself.”
“That's it,” she said. “I've got to try to find out what I am. If my thoughts and feelings have been misleading me—well, maybe I am conventional—maybe I am little—”
Her voice broke. Her eyes filled. But she fought the tears back and still faced him.
He took a step toward her. She shook her head.
He went out then.
And when the outer door shut she dropped limply on the couch-bed.
TWO days later, on Thursday, the Worm crossed the Square and Sixth Avenue and entered Greenwich Village proper.
He was dressed, at the top, in a soft gray hat from England. Next beneath was a collar that had cost him forty cents. The four-in-hand scarf was an imported foulard, of a flowering pattern in blues and greens; with a jade pin stuck in it. The new, perfectly fitting suit was of Donegal homespun and would cost, when the bill was paid, slightly more than sixty dollars. The shoes, if not custom made, were new. And he carried a slender stick with a curving silver head.
He felt uncomfortably conspicuous. His nerves tingled with an emotional disturbance that ignored his attempts to dismiss it as something beneath him. For the first time in nearly a decade he was about to propose marriage to a young woman. As he neared the street on which the young woman lived, his steps slackened and his mouth became uncomfortably dry.... All this was absurd, of course. He and Sue were good friends. “There needn't be all this excitement,” he told himself with a desperate clutching at the remnants of his sense of humor, “over suggesting to her that we change from a rational to an irrational relationship.”
At the corner, however, he stopped dead. Then with a self-consciousness worthy of Peter himself, he covered his confusion by buying an afternoon paper and walking slowly back toward Sixth Avenue.
Suddenly, savagely, he crumpled the paper into a ball, threw it into the street, strode resolutely to Sue's apartment-house and rang her bell.
Sue promptly lighted the alcohol lamp under her kettle and they had tea. Over the cups, feeling coldly desperate, the Worm said:
“Been thinking you all over, Sue.” It was a relief to find that his voice sounded fairly natural.
She took the remark rather lightly. “I'm not worth it, Henry.... I've thought some myself—your idea of the boundary...”
His thoughts were moving on with disconcerting rapidity. He must take the plunge. It was his fate. He knew it.
“We talked marriage,” he said.
She nodded.
“Since then I've tried to figure but what I do think, and crystallize it. Sue, I'm not so sure that Betty was wrong.”
“That's a new slant,” said she thoughtfully.
“Or very old. Just try to look through my eyes for a moment. Betty had tried freedom—had something of a fling at it. Now, it is evident that in her case it didn't work very well. Isn't it?”
“In her case, yes,” Sue observed quietly.
“Precisely, in her case. She had reached the boundary. You'll admit that?”
Sue smiled faintly at his argumentative tone. “Yes, I'll admit it.”
“Betty isn't a great soul. A stronger nature would have taken longer to reach the boundary. But doesn't it indicate that the boundary is there?”
“Well”—Sue hesitated. “All right. For the sake of the argument I'll admit that, too.”.
“Well, now, just what has Betty done? She doesn't love this manufacturer she has married.”
“Not a bit.”
“And the marriage may fail. The majority of them, from an idealistic point of view, undoubtedly do fail. Admitting all that, you have let me see that you yourself in a weak moment have considered the same course.”
Sue's brow clouded. But she nodded slowly.
“Well, then”—he hitched forward in his chair, and to cover his burning eagerness talked, if possible, a shade more stiffly and impersonally—“doesn't this, Betty's act and your momentary consideration of the same act, suggest that a sound instinct may be at work there?”
“If cowardice is an instinct, Henry.”
“How do you know it is cowardice? From what data do you get that conclusion? Betty, after all her philandering, has undertaken a definite contract. It binds her. It is a job. There is discipline in it, a chance for service. It creates new conditions of life which will certainly change her unless she quits. Haven't you noticed, all your life, what a relief it is to get out of indecision into a definite course, even if it costs you something?”
Again that faint smile of hers. “Turning conservative, Henry?”
He ignored this. “Life moves on in epochs, Sue. If you don't start getting educated when you're a youngster, you go most awfully wrong. If you don't accept the discipline of work as soon as you've got a little education and grown up, you're a slacker and before long you're very properly rated as a slacker. So with a woman—given this wonderful function of motherhood and the big emotional capacity that goes with it—if she waits too long after her body and Spirit have ripened she goes wrong, emotionally and spiritually. There's a time with a normal woman when love and maternity are—well, the next thing. Not with every woman of course. But pretty certainly with the woman who reaches that time, refuses marriage, and then is forced to admit that her life isn't working out. Peter has coined the word for what that woman becomes—a better word than he himself knows... she's a truffler.”
She was gazing at him. “Henry,” she cried, “what has struck you? Where's that humorous balance of yours?”
“I'm in earnest, Sue.”
“Yes, I see. But why on earth—”
“Because I want you to marry—”
It was at this moment that the Worm's small courage fled utterly out of his inexperienced heart. And his tongue, as if to play a saturnine trick on that heart, repeated the phrase, unexpectedly to what was left of his brain, with an emphatic downward emphasis that closed the discussion.
“I want you to marry,” he said.
A sudden moisture came to Sue's eyes, and much of the old frankness as she surveyed him.
“Henry,” she said then, “you are wonderful, coming at me like this, as if you cared—”
“I do care—”
“I know. I feel it. Just when I thought friends were—well...” She did not finish this, but sat erect, pushed her teacup aside and gazed at him with something of the old alertness in the green-brown eyes. There was sudden color in her cheeks. “Henry, you've roused me—just when I thought no one could. I've got to think.... You go away. You don't mind, do you? Just let me be alone. I've felt lately as if I was losing—my mind, my will, my perceptions—something. And, Henry—wait!” For he had risen, with a blank face, and was looking for his hat.
“Wait—did Peter leave you his itinerary?”
The Worm felt in his pockets and produced it.
“He sent me one, but I tore it up.” She laughed a little, then colored with a nervous suddenness; and walked after him to the door. “You've always had the faculty of rousing me, Henry, and steadying me. To-day you've stirred me more than you could possibly know. I don't know what will come of it—I'm dreadfully; confused—but I can at least try to think it out.”
That was all—all but a few commonplace phrases at the doer.
“Oh,” said he, with a touch of awkwardness, “I meant to tell you that I've made a change myself.”
“You?” Again her eyes, recalled to him, ran over his new clothes.
“I start work to-morrow, on The Evening Courier.”
“Oh, Henry, I'm glad. Good luck! It ought to be interesting.”
“At least,” said he heavily, “it will be a slight contact with reality,” and hurried away.