The Trufflers

CHAPTER I – THE GIRL IN THE PLAID COAT

PETER ERICSON MANN leaned back in his chair and let his hands fall listlessly from the typewriter to his lap.

He raised them again and laboriously pecked out a few words.

It was no use.

He got up, walked to one of the front windows of the dingy old studio and peered gloomily out at the bare trees and brown grass patches of Washington Square.

Peter was a playwright of three early (and partial) successes, and two more recent failures. He was thirty-three years old; and a typical New Yorker, born in Iowa, he dressed conspicuously, well, making it a principle when in funds to stock up against lean seasons to come. He worried a good deal and kept his savings of nearly six thousand dollars (to the existence of which sum he never by any chance alluded) in five different savings banks. He wore large horn-rimmed eyeglasses (not spectacles) with a heavy black ribbon attached, and took his Art almost as seriously as himself. You know him publicly as Eric Mann.

For six months Peter had been writing words where ideas were imperatively demanded. Lately he had torn up the last of these words. He had waited in vain for the divine uprush; there had come no tingle of delighted nerves, no humming vitality, no punch. And as for his big scene, in Act III, it was a morass of sodden, tangled, dramatic concepts.

His theme this year was the modern bachelor girl; but to save his life he couldn’t present her convincingly as a character in a play – perhaps because these advanced, outspoken young women irritated him too deeply to permit of close observation. Really, they frightened him. He believed in marriage, the old-fashioned woman, the home.

It had reached the point, a month back, where he could no longer even react to stimulants. He had revived an old affair with a pretty manicure girl without stirring so much as a flutter of excitement within himself. This was Maria Tonifetti, of the sanitary barber shop of Marius in the basement of the Parisian Restaurant. He had tried getting drunk; which made him ill and induced new depths of melancholy.

No one ever saw his name any more. No one, he felt certain, ever would see it. He could look back now on the few years of his success in a spirit of awful calm. He felt that he had had genius. But the genius had burned out. All that remained to him was to live for a year or two (or three) watching that total of nearly six thousand dollars shrink – shrink – and then the end of everything. Well, he would not be the first…

One faint faded joy had lately been left to Peter, one sorry reminder of the days when the magical words, the strangely hypnotic words, “Eric Mann,” had spoken, sung, shouted from half the bill-boards in town. Over beyond Sixth Avenue, hardly five minutes’ walk through the odd tangle of wandering streets, the tenements and ancient landmarks and subway excavations and little triangular breathing places that make up the Greenwich Village of to-day, there had lingered one faded, torn twenty-four-sheet poster, advertising “The Buzzard, by Eric Mann.”

When he was bluest lately, Peter had occasionally walked over there and stood for a while gazing at this lingering vestige of his name.

He went over there now, in soft hat and light overcoat, and carrying his heavy cane – hurried over there, in fact – across the Square and on under the Sixth Avenue elevated into that quaint section of the great city which socialists, anarchists, feminists, Freudian psycho-analysts of self, magazine writers, Jewish intellectuals, sculptors and painters of all nationalities and grades, sex hygiene enthusiasts, theatrical press-agents and various sorts of youthful experimenters in living share with the merely poor.

He stopped at a familiar spot on the curb by a familiar battered lamp-post and peered across the street.

Then he started – and stared. Surprise ran into bewilderment, bewilderment into utter dejection.

The faded, torn twenty-four-sheet poster had vanished.

A new brand of cut plug tobacco was advertised there now.

Ragged children of the merely poor, cluttering pavement and sidewalk, fell against him in their play. Irritably he brushed them aside.

It was indeed the end.

A young woman was crossing the street toward him, nimbly dodging behind a push cart and in front of a coal truck. Deep in self, he lowered his gaze and watched her. So intent was his stare that the girl stopped short, one foot on the curb, slowly lowered the apple she was eating, and looked straight at him.

She was shaped like a boy, he decided – good shoulders, no hips, fine hands (she wore no gloves, though the March air was crisp) and trim feet in small, fiat-heeled tan boots. Her hair, he thought, was cut short. He was not certain, for her “artistic” tarn o’shanter covered it and hung low on her neck behind. He moved a step to one side and looked more closely. Yes, it was short. Not docked, in the current fashion, but cut close to her head, like a boy’s.

She stepped up on the curb now and confronted him. He noted that her suit was of brown stuff, loosely and comfortably cut; and that the boyish outer coat, which she wore swinging open, was of a rough plaid. Then he became aware of her eyes. They were deep green and vivid. Her skin was a clear olive, prettily tinted by air and exercise… Peter suddenly knew that he was turning red.

She spoke first.

“Hadn’t we better say something?” was her remark. Then she took another bite of the apple, and munched it with honest relish.

“Very likely we would better,” he managed to reply – rather severely, for the “had better” phrase always annoyed him.

“It seems as if I must have met you somewhere,” he ventured next.

“No, we haven’t met.”

“My name is Mann.”

“Yes,” said she, “I know it.”

“Then suppose you tell me yours?”

“Why?”

Peter could not think of a reason why. Deeply as he was supposed to understand women, here was a new variety. She was inclined neither to flirt nor to run away.

“How is it that you know who I am?” he asked, sparring for time..

She gave a careless shrug. “Oh, most every one is known, here in the Village.”

Peter was always at his best when recognized as the Eric Mann. His spirits rose a bit.

“Might I suggest that we have a cup of tea somewhere?”

She knit her brows. “Yes,” she replied slowly, even doubtfully, “you might.”

“Of course, if you – ”

“Jim’s isn’t far. Let’s go there.”

Jim’s was an oyster and chop emporium of ancient fame in the Village. They sat at a rear table. The place was empty save for an old waiter who shuffled through the sprinkling of sawdust on the floor, and a fat grandson of the original Jim who stood by the open grill that was set in the wall at the rear end of the oyster bar.

Over the tea Peter said, expanding now – “Perhaps this is reason enough for you to tell me who you are.”

“Perhaps what is?”

He smilingly passed the toast.

She took a slice, and considered it.

“You see,” he went on, “if I am not to know, how on earth am I to manage seeing you again?”

She slowly inclined her head. “That’s just it.”

It was Peter’s turn to knit his brow’s.

“How can I be sure that I want you to see me again?”

He waved an exasperated hand. “Then why are we here?”

“To find out.”

At least he could smoke. He opened his cigarette case. Then, though he never felt right about women smoking, he extended it toward her.

“Thanks,” said she, taking one and casually lighting it. Yes, she had fine hands. And he had noted when she took off her coat and reached up to hang it on the wall rack, her youth-like suppleness of body. A provocative person!

“I’ve seen some of your plays,” she observed, elbows on table, chin on hand, gazing at the smoke-wraiths of her cigarette. “Two or three. Odd Change and Anchored and – what was it called?”

“The Buzzard?”

“Yes, The Buzzard. They were dreadful.”

The color slowly left Peter’s face. The girl was speaking without the slightest self-consciousness or wish to offend. She meant it.

Peter managed to recover some part of his poise.

“Well!” he said. Then: “If they were all dreadful, why didn’t you stop after the first?”

“Oh.” – she waved her cigarette – “Odd Change came to town when I was in college, and – ”

“So you’re a college girl?”

“Yes, and a crowd of us went. That one wasn’t so bad as the others. You know your tricks well enough – especially in comedy, carpentered comedy. Theatrically, I suppose you’re really pretty good or your things wouldn’t succeed. It is when you try to deal with life – and with women – that you’re…” Words failed her. She smoked in silence.

“I’m what?” he ventured. “The limit?”

“Yes,” she replied, very thoughtful. “Since you’ve said it.”

“All right,” he cried, aiming at a gay humor and missing heavily – “but now, having slapped me in the face and thrown me out in the snow, don’t you think that you’d better – ” He hesitated, watching for a smile that failed to make its appearance. “That I’d better what?”

“Well – tell me a little more?”

“I was wondering if I could. The difficulty is, it’s the whole thing – your attitude toward life – the perfectly conventional, perfectly unimaginative home and mother stuff, your hopeless sentimentality about women, the slushy, horrible, immoral Broadway falseness that lies back of everything you do – the Broadway thing, always. Ever, in your comedy, good as that sometimes is. Your insight into life is just about that of a hardened director of one-reel films. What I’ve been wondering since we met this afternoon – you see, I didn’t know that we were going to meet in this way…

“Naturally.”

“… is whether it would be any use to try and help you. You have ability enough.”

“Thanks for that!”

“Don’t let’s trifle! You see, if it is any use at all to try to get a little – just a little – truth into the American theater, why, those of us that believe in truth owe it to our faith to get to work on the men that supply the plays.”

“Doubtless.” Peter’s mind was racing in a dozen directions at once. This extraordinary young person had hit close; that much he knew. He wondered rather helplessly whether the shattered and scattered remnants of his self-esteem could ever be put together again so the cracks wouldn’t show.

The confusing thing was that he couldn’t, at the moment, feel angry toward the girl; she was too odd and too pretty. Already he was conscious of a considerable emotional stir, caused by her mere presence there across the table. She reached out now for another cigarette.

“I think,” said he gloomily, “that you’d better tell me your name.”

She shook her head. “I’ll tell you how you can find me out.”

“How?”

“You would have to take a little trouble.”

“Glad to.”

“Come to the Crossroads Theater to-night, in Tenth Street.”

“Oh – that little place of Zanin’s.”

She nodded. “That little place of Zanin’s.”

“I’ve never been there.”

“I know you haven’t. None of the people that might be helped by it ever come. You see, we aren’t professional, artificialized actors. We are just trying to deal naturally with bits of real life – from the Russian, and things that are written here in the Village. Jacob Zanin is a big man – a fine natural man – with a touch of genius, I think.”

Peter was silent. He knew this brilliant, hulking Russian Jew, and disliked him: even feared him in a way, as he feared others of his race with what he felt to be their hard clear minds, their vehement idealism, their insistent pushing upward. The play that had triumphantly displaced his last failure at the Astoria Theater was written by a Russian Jew.

She added: “In some ways it is the only interesting theater in New York.”

“There is so much to see.”

“I know,” she sighed. “And we don’t play every night, of course. Only Friday and Saturday.”

He was regarding her now with kindling interest. “What do you do there?”

“Oh, nothing much. I’m playing a boy this month in Zanin’s one-act piece, Any Street. And sometimes I dance. I was on my way there when I met you – was due at three o’clock.”

“For a rehearsal, I suppose.”

She nodded.

“You won’t make it. It’s four-fifteen now.”

“I know it.”

“You’re playing a boy,” he mused. “I wonder if that is why you cut off your hair.” He felt brutally daring in saying this. He had never been direct with women or with direct women. But this girl created her own atmosphere which quite enveloped him.

“Yes,” said she simply, “I had to for the part.” Never would he have believed that the attractive woman lived who would do that!

Abruptly, as if acting on an impulse, she pushed back her chair. “I’m going,” she remarked; adding; “You’ll find you have friends who know me.”

She was getting into her coat now. He hurried awkwardly around the table, and helped her.

“Tell me,” said he, suddenly all questions, now that he was losing her – “You live here in the Village, I take it?”

“Yes.”

“Alone?”

She nearly smiled. “No, with another girl.”

“Do I know her?”

She pursed her lips. “I doubt it.” A moment more of hesitation, then: “Her name is Deane, Betty Deane.”

“I’ve heard that name. Yes, I’ve seen her – at the Black and White ball this winter! A blonde – pretty – went as a Picabia dancer.”

They were mounting the steps to the sidewalk (for Jim’s is a basement).

“Good-by,” said she. “Will you come – to-night or to-morrow?”

“Yes,” said he. “To-night.” And walked in a daze back to the rooms on Washington Square.

CHAPTER II – THE SEVENTH-STORY MEN

NOT until he was crossing Sixth Avenue, under the elevated road, did it occur to him that she had deliberately broken her rehearsal appointment to have tea with him and then as deliberately, had left him for the rehearsal. He had interested her; then, all at once, he had ceased to interest her. It was not the first time Peter had had this experience with women, though none of the others had been so frank about it.

Frank, she certainly was!

Resentments rose. Why on earth had he sat there so meekly and let her go on like that – he, the more or less well-known Eric Mann! Had he no force of character at all? No dignity?

Suppose she had to write plays to suit the whims of penny-splitting Broadway managers who had never heard of Andreyev and Tchekov, were bored by Shaw and Shakespeare and thought an optimist was an eye doctor – where would she get off!

During the short block between Sixth Avenue and the Square, anger conquered depression. When he entered the old brick apartment building he was muttering. When he left the elevator and walked along the dark corridor to the rooms he was considering reprisals.

Peter shared the dim old seventh-floor apartment with two fellow bachelors, Henry Sidenham Lowe and the Worm. The three were sometimes known as the Seventh-Story Men. The phrase was Hy Lowe’s and referred to the newspaper stories of that absurd kidnaping escapade – the Esther MacLeod case, it was – back in 1913. The three were a bit younger then.

Hy Lowe was a slim young man with small features that appeared to be gathered in the middle of his face. His job might have been thought odd anywhere save in the Greenwich Village region. After some years of newspaper work he had settled down to the managing editorship of a missionary weekly known as My Brother’s Keeper. Hy was uncommunicative, even irreverent regarding his means of livelihood, usually referring to the paper as his meal ticket, and to his employer, the Reverend Doctor Hubbell Harkness Wilde (if at all) as the Walrus. In leisure moments, perhaps as a chronic reaction from the moral strain of his job, Hy affected slang, musical comedy and girls. The partly skinned old upright piano in the studio was his. And he had a small gift at juggling plates.

The Worm was a philosopher; about Peter’s age, sandy in coloring but mild in nature, reflective to the point of self-effacement. He read interminably, in more than one foreign language and was supposed to write book reviews. He had lived in odd corners of the earth and knew Gorki personally. His name was Henry Bates.

Peter came slowly into the studio, threw off coat and hat and stood, the beginnings of a complacent smile on his face.

“I’ve got my girl,” he announced.

“Now that you’ve got her, what you gonna do with her?” queried Hy Lowe, without turning from the new song hit he was picking out on the piano.

“What am I gonna do with her?” mused Peter, hands deep in pockets, more and more pleased with his new attitude of mind – “I’m gonna vivisect her, of course.”

“Ah, cruel one!” hummed Hy.

“Well, why not!” cried Peter, rousing. “If a girl leaves her home and strikes out for the self-expression thing, doesn’t she forfeit the consideration of decent people? Isn’t she fair game?”

Over in the corner by a window, his attention caught by this outbreak, the Worm looked up at Peter and reflected for a moment. He was deep in a Morris chair, the Worm, clad only in striped pajamas that were not over-equipped with buttons, and one slipper of Chinese straw that dangled from an elevated foot.

“Hey, Pete – get this!” cried Hy, and burst into song.

Peter leaned over his shoulder and sang the choppy refrain with him. In the interest of accuracy the two sang it again, The third rendition brought them to the borders of harmony.

The Worm looked up again and studied Peter’s back, rather absently as if puzzling him out and classifying him. He knit his brows. Then his eyes lighted, and he turned back in his book, fingering the pages with a mild eagerness. Finding what he sought, he read thoughtfully and smiled. He closed his book; hitched forward to the old flat-top desk that stood between the windows; lighted a caked brier pipe; and after considerable scribbling on scraps of paper appeared to hit upon an arrangement of phrases that pleased him. These phrases he printed out painstakingly on the back of a calling card which he tacked up (with a hair-brush) on the outer side of the apartment door. Then he went into the bedroom to dress.

“Who is she?” asked Hy in a low voice. The two were fond of the Worm, but they never talked with him about their girls.

“That’s the interesting thing,” said Peter. “I don’t know. She’s plumb mysterious. All she’d tell was that she is playing a boy at that little Crossroads Theater of Zanin’s, and that I’d have to go there to find her out. Going to-night. Want to come along?”

“What kind of a looking girl?”

“Oh – pretty. Extraordinary eyes, green with brown in ‘em – but green. And built like a boy. Very graceful.”

“Hm!” mused Hy.

“Do you know her?”

“Sounds like Sue Wilde.”

“Not – ”

“Yes, the Walrus’s child.”

“What’s she doing, playing around the Village?”

“Oh, that’s an old story. She left home – walked right out. Calls herself modern. She’s the original lady highbrow, if you ask me. Sure I’ll go to see her. Even if she never could see me.”

Later, Hy remarked: “The old boy asked me yesterday if I had her address. You see he knows we live down here where the Village crowds circulate.”

“Give it to him?”

“No. Easy enough to get, of course, but I ducked… I’m going to hop into the bathtub. There’s time enough. Then we can eat at the Parisian.”

Peter settled down to read the sporting page of the evening paper. Shortly the Worm, clad now, drifted back to the Morris chair.

They heard Hy shuffle out in his bath slippers and close the outer door after him. Then he opened the door and came back, He stood in the doorway, holding his bathrobe together with one hand and swinging his towel with the ether; and chuckling.

“You worm!” he observed. “Why Bolbo ceeras?”

The Worm looked up with mild eyes. “Not bolboceeras,” he corrected.

“Bolboeseras. As in cow.”

“But why?”

The Worm merely shrugged his shoulders and resumed his book.

Peter paid little heed to this brief conversation. And when he and Hy went out, half an hour later, he gave only a passing glance to the card on the door. He was occupied with thoughts of a slim girl with green eyes who had fascinated and angered him in a most confusing way.

The card read as follows:

CHAPTER III – JACOB ZANIN

THE Crossroads Theater was nothing more than an old store, with a shallow stage built in at the rear and a rough foyer boarded off at the front. The seats were rows of undertaker’s chairs, But the lighting was managed with some skill; and the scenery, built and painted in the neighborhood, bordered on a Barker-Craig-Reinhardt effectiveness.

Peter and Hy stood for a little time in the foyer, watching the audience come in. It was a distinctly youthful audience – the girls and women were attractive, most of them Americans; the men running more foreign, with a good many Russian Jews among them. They all appeared to be great friends. And they handled one another a good deal. Peter, self-conscious, hunting copy as always, saw one tired-looking young Jewish painter catch the hand of a pretty girl – an extraordinarily pretty girl, blonde, of a slimly rounded figure – and press and caress her fingers as he chatted casually with a group.

After a moment the girl drew her hand away gently, half-apologetically, while a faint wave of color flowed to her transparent cheek.

All Peter’s blind race prejudice flamed into a little fire of rage. Here it was – his subject – the restless American girl experimenting with life, the selfish bachelor girl, deep in the tangles of Bohemia, surrounded by just the experimental men that would be drawn to the district by such as she…

So Peter read it. And he was tom by confused clashing emotions. Then he heard a fresh voice cry: “Why, hello, Betty!” Then he remembered – this girl was the Picabia dancer – Betty Deane – her friend! There was color in his own face now, and his pulse was leaping.

“Come,” he said shortly to Hy, “let’s find our seats.”

The first playlet on the bill was Zanin’s Any Street.

The theme was the grim influence of street life on the mind of a child. It was an uncomfortable little play. All curtains were drawn back. Subjects were mentioned that should never, Peter felt, be even hinted at in the presence of young women. Rough direct words were hurled at that audience.

Peter, blushing, peered about him. There sat the young women and girls by the dozen, serene of face, frankly interested.

Poor Hy, overcome by his tangled self-consciousness, actually lowered his head and pressed his handkerchief to his fiery face, murmuring: “This is no place for a minister’s assistant!” And he added, in Peter’s ear: “Lord, if the Walrus could just see this – once!”

Then a newsboy came running on the stage – slim, light of foot – dodged cowering in a saloon doorway, and swore at an off-stage policeman from whose clutches he had escaped.

There was a swift pattering of applause; and a whisper ran through the audience. Peter heard one voice say: “There she is – that’s Sue!”

He sat erect, on the edge of his chair. Again the hot color surged into his face. He felt it there and was confused.

It was his girl of the apple, in old coat and knickerbockers, tom stockings, torn shirt open at the neck, a ragged felt hat over her short hair.

Peter felt his resentment fading. He knew as he watched her move about the stage that she had the curious electric quality that is called personality. It was in her face and the poise of her head, in the lines of her body, in every easy movement. She had a great gift..

After this play the two went outside to smoke, very silent, suppressed even. Neither knew what to think or what to say.

There Zanin found them (for Peter was, after all, a bit of a personage) and made them his guests.

Thus it was that Peter found himself behind the scenes, meeting the youthful, preoccupied members of the company and watching with half-suppressed eagerness the narrow stairway by which Sue Wilde must sooner or later mount from the region of dressing-rooms below.