The Trufflers

CHAPTER XXVII – PETER IS DRIVEN TO ACT

THE spectacle stopped Peter’s brain. Among all the wild pictures that had rushed helter skelter through his overwrought mind of late there had been nothing like this. Why, it was only a matter of days since he and Zanin had pummeled each other to an accompaniment of broken chairs, overturned tables, wrecked china, torn clothing, actual blood. He had pictured Sue, a confused disillusioned girl, rushing back to her home; Zanin a marked man, even in the Village, cowering away from his fellows. But this!

They passed the corner. With a great gulp of sheer emotion Peter followed, almost running. They turned into the Parisian – but not into the familiar basement. Instead they mounted the wide front steps, as matter-of-fact as any two Upper West Siders out of a limousine. Peter pressed his hands to his eyes. He looked again. They had vanished within the building.

Peter walked back and forth. He told himself that he must think. But the fact clear even to his overwhelmed consciousness was that he was not thinking and that there was no immediate prospect of his being able to think. He went a whole block up the side street, stemming the thick tide of Jewish working girls from University Place and the lower Broadway district and men in overalls – muttering aloud, catching himself, compressing his lips, then muttering again. “She played with me!” So ran the muttering. “She is utterly lacking in responsibility, in any sense of obligation. She lacks spirituality. That is it, she lacks spirituality. She has no fineness. She is hard – hard! She is drifting like a leaf on these crazy Village currents of irrepressible self-indulgence. I tried to save her – God knows I tried! I did my best! I can’t be blamed if she goes to pieces now! I can do no more – I must let her go!” But even while he spoke he gulped again; his face, nearly gray now, twisting painfully. He suddenly turned and rushed back to the Parisian.

He paused at the side doorway and peered in. Hy was not in evidence. A later glance, from within the barroom, disclosed that slightly illuminated young man in the corner room of the restaurant hanging over the table at which the taciturn Sumner Smith was still trying to read Le Sourire.

Peter went on into the crooked passage, passed the open doors of two eating rooms where only the first early diners had as yet drifted in, found himself at the door of the barber shop, stopped short, then seeing the familiar figure of Maria Tonifetti approaching her table in the corner, dodged back and into the washroom. Here the boy named Anatole said, “Good evening, Meester Mann,” and filled a basin for him. Peter dipped his hands into the warm water and washed them. He was surprised to find his forehead dripping with sweat. He dried his hands, removed his glasses and scrubbed his face. He turned on the cold water, wet a towel and pressed it to his temples and the back of his head, taking care not to wet his collar. His hands were trembling. And that impulse to talk aloud was rising uncontrollably. He went back to the corridor; stood motionless, breathing deeply; recalled with the force of an inspiration that Napoleon had feared nothing, not even the ladies with whose lives his own had become so painfully entangled and walked deliberately, staring straight before him, past that barber shop door.

At the foot of the crooked stairway he paused again. And again his face was twisting. “I’ve got to make the one more effort,” he said. “It isn’t for myself, God knows! I gave her my love – I pledged her my life – I have suffered for her – I would have saved her if she had played fair! I’ve got to make this last effort!”

He mounted the stairs, crowded past the telephone booths, staging at them as he went. They conveyed a suggestion to his mind. He stepped cautiously to the restaurant door, nodded to the maître d’hôtel and glanced in. The nearer room was empty; but beyond the second doorway, Zanin’s shoulder and profile were visible. Sue he could not see, but she must be sitting there. Yes, Zanin was leaning forward, was speaking, even smiling, in that offhand way of his!

Peter, flushing now, turned away; confronted the boy called Raoul; pressed a silver quarter into his palm. “Page, Miss Wilde,” he breathed huskily. “Tell her she is wanted on the phone.”

The boy named Raoul obeyed. At the Parisian it is not regarded as surprising that a gentleman should wish to speak to a lady.

Peter rushed around the turn and Waited at the farther end of the row of booths.

Finally he heard her step.

When she saw him she stopped. “Oh,” she said, “Peter!” And she frowned a very little.

“It was a deception,” he broke out, “but I had to see you, Sue! I know you are with Zanin. I saw you come in. I don’t see how you can do it, but we’ll let that pass. I – ”

“What is it, Peter? What do you want with me?”

“Oh, Sue! Are you as hard as that? What do I want of you! Good God! When I see you, after all I have suffered for your sake, plunging back into this life – taking up with that crock Zanin as if nothing had happened, as if – Why, he – ”

Sue grew a little white about the mouth and temples. She glanced back at the empty passage.

“Peter,” she said, curiously quiet, “if you think it fair to follow me into a public place, if you really mean to make another hideous scene, you will have to come into the dining-room to do it.”

He reached out, caught her arm. She wrenched away and left him there. For a long moment he stared out the window at the rush of early evening traffic on the Avenue, his hands clenched at his sides. Then he hurried past the office and down to the street.

He stood on the curb and addressed a rattling autobus. “It is unbearable – unbelievable. The girl has lost all sense of the fitness of things. She is beside herself. I must act – act! I must act at once – to-night!”

People were passing. He turned, suddenly aware of the bustlingly unsympathetic, world about him. Had any one heard his voice? Apparently none had. All were hurrying on, up-town, down-town. Standing there on the curb he could see in at the basement window. Sumner Smith was alone at last and deep in Le Sourire. Hy had drifted away – back to the bar, doubtless.

Peter, you recall, was a genius. As a genius he fed on his emotional reactions; they were his life. Therefore do not judge him too harshly for the wild thought that at this point rushed over his consciousness with a force that left him breathless. He was frightened and by himself. But there was a barbarous exaltation in his fear. “It’ll bring her to her senses,” he thought. “I’ve got to do it. Then she’ll listen to me. She’ll have to listen to me then.”

Peter appeared in the corner room down-stairs, almost as curiously quiet as Sue had been in their brief talk. He, too, was rather pale. He came over to Sumner Smith’s table, dropped down opposite the fat journalist, beckoned a waiter, ordered a light dinner, and, that done, proffered a cigarette.

“I’ve got a tip for you, Smith,” he said, “a real one. If The Evening Earth hasn’t lost its vigor you can put it over big.”

The fat man merely lighted his cigarette and looked inscrutably over it at Peter’s drawn face.

“I can’t give you the details. You’ll have to take my word for them. Did you ever hear a question raised regarding the Reverend Doctor Wilde?” Sumner Smith glanced out toward the bar and Hy. The corners of his mouth twitched. “His boss?”

“Right. Editor of My Brother’s Keeper. Author of the famous missionary sermons.”

“There was a little talk last year. You mean the big mission funds he has raised?”

Peter nodded. His eyes were overbright now. “Nobody has the evidence, Mann. It isn’t news as it stands.”

“Suppose you could make it news – big news.”

“Oh, of course – ” the journalist gestured with his cigarette.

“Well, you can. To-night. Go straight to his house – over in Stuyvesant Square, not five minutes in a taxi, not ten on the cars – and ask him point-blank to consent to an accounting. Just ask him.” Sumner Smith mused. “It might be worth trying,” he said.

“Take my word for it.”

The journalist paid his check, rose, nodded to an acquaintance across the room, said: “I’ll think it over, Mann. Much obliged – ” and sauntered out.

This was unsatisfactory. Peter, crestfallen, forgot that Sumner Smith was hardened to sensations. And peering gloomily after the great reporter, he only half saw the man pause at the small desk near the bar, then speak casually to the now somewhat wobbly Hy Lowe: he only half heard a taxi pull up outside, a door slamming, the sudden grinding of gears as the taxi darted away. There were so many noises outside: you hardly noticed one more.

The waiter brought his dinner. He bolted it with unsteady hands. “I must think this all out,” he told himself. “If Sumner Smith won’t do it, one of the other Earth men will. Or some one on The Morning Continental.”

He lit a cigar, sat bark and gazed out at the dim street where dimmer figures and vehicles moved forever by. It occurred to him that thus would a man sit and smoke and meditate who was moved by an overmastering love to enact a tremendous deed. But it was difficult to sustain the pose with his temples throbbing madly and a lump in his throat. His heart, too, was skipping beats, he thought. Surreptitiously he felt his left wrist.

He beckoned the waiter; ordered paper and ink. The lump in his throat was suddenly almost a pain. He wrote —

“It was wrong of me, of course, Sue, dear. But I really must see you. Even though your hostile attitude makes it difficult to be myself. There is trouble impending. It concerns you vitally. If you will only hear me; meet me for half an hour after dinner, I know I can help you more than you dream.

“I am not speaking for myself but for you. In all this dreadful trouble between us, there is little I can ask of you. Only this – give me half an hour. I will wait down-stairs for an answer. P. E. M.”

He sent this up-stairs. Then followed it as far as the telephones, called up his old acquaintance, Markham, of The Morning Continental, and whispered darkly to him over the wire.

As he ran down-stairs and dodged past the barber shop door, he became conscious that the dinner he had eaten felt now like a compact, insoluble ball in the region of his solar plexus. So he stopped at the bar and gulped a bicarbonate of soda while buying a highball for Hy Lowe whom he found confidentially informing the barkeeper of his raise from forty-five a week to sixty.

Then he resumed his seat by the window in the corner room; tried to find amusement in the pages of Le Sourire; failed; watched the door with wild eyes, starting up whenever a waiter entered the room, only to sink back limply at each fresh disappointment.

He wondered suddenly about Sumner Smith. What if he had followed the trail! This thought brought something like a chill. If he, Peter, an old newspaper man, were to be caught in the act of passing on an “exclusive” tip to friends on competing papers – violating the sacred basis of newspaper ethics! You couldn’t tell about Smith. He rarely showed interest, never emotion, seldom even smiled. He would receive the news that Emperor William had declared himself King of All the Americas with that same impassive front.

Peter looked at his watch. It was twenty-five minutes of seven. He had thought it at least eight.

One thing was certain – he must get his bags out of that awful barber shop before it closed. Accordingly he had a messenger called to take them, over to the rooms.

CHAPTER XXVIII – SUE DOES NOT SEND FOR PETER

THE familiar person of the Worm came in through the bar, stood in the doorway, looked about with quiet keen eyes – tall, carelessly dressed, sandy of hair but mild and reflective of countenance.

The Worm’s eyes rested on Peter. He came across the room.

“Sit down,” said Peter, smiling, his mouth a curving crack in a ghastly face.

“Oh,” said the Worm, “you’ve heard?”

“Heard what?”

The Worm studied him a moment; then said, not without a touch of grave sympathy, “Tell me, Pete – do you happen to know where Sue is?”

Peter heard this; tried to steady himself and speak in the properly casual tone. He swallowed. Then the words rushed out – low, trembling, all bitterness: “She’s up-stairs – with Zanin!”

The Worm turned away. Peter caught his arm. “For God’s sake!” he said. “What is it? What do you want of her? If anybody’s got to tell her anything, it’ll be me!” And he pushed back his chair.

The Worm laid a strong hand on his shoulder, held him firmly down in the chair.

“Pete,” he said – quiet, deliberate – “if you try to go up those stairs I myself will throw you down.”