The Trufflers
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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.
CHAPTER XXXVIII – PETER STEALS A PLAY
PETER rushed like a wild man down the stairs to the street. He looked up street and down for a cruising taxi; saw one at the opposite curb; dodged across, behind automobiles and in front of a street-car. A traffic policeman shouted from the corner. Peter was unaware, he dove into the taxi, shouting as he did so, the address of the rooms in Washington Square. The taxi whirled away to the south. Peter, a blaze of nerves, watched the dial, taking silver coins from his pocket as the charge mounted. At his door, he plunged out to the walk, threw the money on the driver’s seat, dashed into the old bachelor apartment building. The rooms had been lonely of late without Hy and the Worm. Now, his mind on the one great purpose, he forgot that these friends had ever lived. He ran from the elevator to the apartment door, key in hand, hurried within and tore into the closet. He emerged with his evening clothes – the coat on the hanger, the trousers in the press – and his patent leather shoes. From a bureau drawer he produced white silk waistcoat (wrapped in tissue-paper) and dress shirt. A moment more and he was removing, hurriedly yet not without an eye for buttons and the crease in the trousers, his business suit. He did not forget to transfer the folded envelope to the inner pocket of his dress coat. But first he read the sonnet that was penciled on it; and reread it. It seemed to him astonishingly good. “That’s the way,” he reflected, during the process, standing before the mirror, of knotting his white tie, – “when your emotions are stirred to white heat, and an idea comes, write it down. No matter where you are, write it down. Then you’ve got it.”
He looked thoughtfully at the long serious face that confronted him in the mirror, made longer by the ribbon that hung from his glasses. His hair was dark and thick, and it waved back from a high forehead. He straightened his shoulders, drew in his chin. That really distinguished young man, there in the mirror, was none other than Eric Mann, the playwright; author of the new Broadway success, The Truffler, a man of many gifts; a man, in short, of genius. Forgetting for the moment, his hurry, he drew the folded envelope from his pocket and read the sonnet aloud, with feeling and with gestures. In the intervals of glancing at the measured lines, he studied the poet before him. The spectacle thrilled him. Just as he meant that the poem should thrill the errant Sue when he should read it to her. He determined now that she should not see it until he could get her alone and read it aloud. Once before during this strange year of ups and downs, he had read a thing of his to Sue and had thrilled her as he was now thrilling himself. Right here in these rooms. He had swept her off her feet, had kissed her..Well… He smiled exultingly at the germs in the mirror. Then he had been a discouraged young playwright, beaten down by failure. How he was – or shortly would be – the sensation of Broadway, author of the enormously successful Nature film, and following up that triumph by picking to pieces the soul of the selfish “modern” bachelor girl – picking it to pieces so deftly, with such unerring theatrical instinct, that even the bachelor girl herself would have to join the throngs that would be crowding into the theater to see how supremely well he did it. More, was he not minting a new word, a needed word, to describe the creature. “The Truffler” – truffling – to truffle!
A grand word; it perfectly hit off the sort of thing. Within ten years it would be in the dictionaries; and he, Peter Ericson Mann, would have put it there. He must jog Neuerman up about this. To-morrow. Neuerman must see to it that the word did get into the language. No time to lose. A publicity job!.. Come to think of it he didn’t even know who was doing the publicity for Neuerman now. He must look into that. To-morrow. Shrewd, hard-hitting publicity work is everything. That’s what lands you. Puts your name in among the household treasures. People take you for granted; assume your greatness without exactly knowing why you are great. Then you’re entrenched. Then you’re famous. No matter if you do bad work. They don’t know the difference. You’re famous, that’s all there is to it. They have to take you, talk about you, buy your books, go to your plays. Mere merit hasn’t a chance against you. You smash ‘em every time… fame – money – power!
He saw the simply-clad Sue Wilde; short hair all massed shadows and shining high lights; olive skin with rose in it; the figure of a boy; all lightness, ease, grace; those stirring green eyes…
He would read to her again. His sonnet! From the heart – glowing with the fire that even in his triumph he could not forget.
She would listen!
The third was the “big act”; (there were four in all). All was ready for the artificial triumph that was to follow it – trained ushers, ticket sellers, door man, behind the last row of orchestra seats, clapping like mad. Experienced friends of the management in groups where they could do the most good. Trick curtains, each suggesting, by grouping or movement on the stage, the next. Neuerman wanted eight curtains after the big act. He got them – and five more. For the claques were overwhelmed. A sophisticated audience that had forgotten for once how to be cold-blooded, tears drying unheeded on grizzled cheeks, was on its feet, clapping, stamping, shouting. After the third curtain came the first shouts for “Author.” The shouts grew into an insistent roar. Again and again the curtain rose on the shifting, carefully devised group effects; the audience had been stirred, and it wanted the man whose genius had stirred it.
Behind, in the prompt corner, there was some confusion. You couldn’t tell that excited mob that Peter Mann hadn’t written fifty lines of that cumulatively moving story. It was his play, by contract. The credit was his; and the money. But no one had seen him for months.
After the tenth call Neuerman ordered the footlights down and the house-lights up. He wore part of a wrinkled business suit; his collar was a rag; his waistcoat partly unbuttoned. He didn’t know where he had thrown his coat. The sweat rolled in rivulets down his fat face.
Out front the roar grew louder. Neuerman ordered the house-lights down again and the footlights up.
“Here, Grace,” he said, to Miss Herring who stood, in the shirt-waist and short skirt of the part, looking very girlish and utterly dazed – “for God’s sake take the author’s call.”
She shook her head. “You take it,” she replied. “I couldn’t say a word – not if it was for my life!”
“Me take it!” He was mimicking her, from sheer nervousness. “Me take it? In these clothes?”
She laughed a little at this, absently. Flowers had come to her – great heaps of them. She snatched up an armful of long-stemmed roses; buried her face in them.
Neuerman waved the curtain up again; took her arm, made her go on. She bowed again, out there, hugging her roses, an excited light in her eyes; and once more backed off.
“For God’s sake, say something!” cried the manager.
She ignored this; bent over and looked through the heaps of flowers for a certain card. It was not there. She pouted – not like her rather experienced self but like the girl she was playing – and hugged the roses again.
For the twelfth time the curtain rose. Again she could only bow.
Neuerman mopped his forehead; then wrung out his handkerchief.
“Somebody say something,” he cried. “Ardrey could do it.” (Ardrey was the leading man.) “Where’s Ardrey? Here you – call Mr. Ardrey! Quick!”
“I’ll take the call,” said a quiet voice at his elbow.
Neuerman gave the newcomer a look of intense relief.
Miss Derring caught her breath, reached for a scene-support to steady herself; murmured:
“Why – Peter!”
The curtain slid swiftly up. And Peter Ericson Mann, looking really distinguished in his evening clothes, with the big glasses and the heavy black ribbon, very grave, walked deliberately out front, faced the footlights and the indistinct sea of faces, and unsmiling, waited for the uproar that greeted him to die down. He waited – it was almost painful – until the house was still..
Up in the gallery, Sue Wilde, leaning forward, her chin propped on her two small fists, said:
“That beats anything I ever…” She ended with a slow smile.
The Worm was studying the erect dignified figure down there on the stage. “You’ve got to hand it to Pete,” said he musingly. “He sensed it in the first act. He saw it was going to be a knock-out.”
“And,” said Sue, “he decided, after all, that it was his play. Henry, I’m not sure that he isn’t the most irritating man on the earth.”
“He’s that, all right, Sue, child; but I’m not sure that he isn’t a genius.”
“I suppose they are like that,” said Sue, thoughtful.
“Egotists, of course, looking at everything with a squint – all off balance! Take Pete’s own heroes, Cellini, Wagner – ”
“Hush!” she said, slipping her hand into his, twisting her slim fingers among his – “Listen!”
Peter began speaking. His voice was well placed.
You could hear every syllable. And he looked straight up at Sue. She noted this, and pressed closer to the man at her side.
“This is an unfashionable play (thus Peter). If you like it, I am of course deeply pleased. I did not write it to please you. It is a preachment. For some years I have quietly observed the modern young woman, the more or less self-supporting bachelor girl, the girl who places her independence, her capricious freedom, her ‘rights’ above all those functions and duties to others on which woman’s traditional quality, her finest quality, must rest. She is not interested in marriage, this bachelor girl, because she will surrender no item in her program of self indulgence. She is not interested in motherhood, because that implies self-abnegation. She talks economic independence while profiting by her sex-attraction. She uses men by disturbing them, confusing them; and thus shrewdly makes her own way. She plays with life, producing nothing. She builds no home, she rears no young. She talks glibly the selfish philosophy of Nietzsche, of Artzibasheff. She bases her self-justifying faith on the hideous animalism of Freud. She asserts her right, as she says, to give love, not to sell it in what she terms the property marriage. She speaks casually of ‘the free relation’ in love. She will not use the phrase ‘free love’; but that, of course, is what she means.
“No nation can become better that the quality of its womanhood, of its motherhood. No nation without an ideal, a standard of nobility, can endure. We have come upon the days, these devastating days of war, when each nation is put to the test. Each nation must now exhibit its quality or die. This quality, in the last analysis, is capacity for sacrifice. It is endurance, and self-abnegation in the interest of all. It is surrender – the surrender to principle, order, duty, without which there can be no victory. The woman, like the man, who will not live for her country may yet be forced to die for her country.
“The educated young woman of to-day, the bachelor girl, the ‘modern’ girl, will speak loudly of her right to vote, her right to express herself, – that is her great phrase, ‘self-expression’! – her intellectual superiority to marriage and motherhood. She will insist on what she calls freedom. For that she will even become militant. These phrases, and the not very pleasant life they cover, mean sterility, they mean anarchism, they mean disorganization, and perhaps death. They are the doctrine of the truffler, the woman who turns from duty to a passionate pursuit of enjoyment. They are eating, those phrases, like foul bacteria, at the once sound heart of our national life.
“So you see, in presenting this little picture of a girl who thought freedom – for herself – was everything, and of the havoc she wrought in one perhaps representative home, I have not been trying to entertain you. I have been preaching at you. If, inadvertently, I have entertained you as well, so much the better. For then my little sermon will have a wider audience.”
And, deliberately, he walked off stage.
On the stairs, moving slowly down from the gallery, Sue and the Worm looked at each other.
“I’m rather bewildered,” said she.
“Yes. Nobody knew the play was about all that. But they believe him. Hear them yelling in there. He has put it over. Pete is a serious artist now. He admits it.”
“There was rather a personal animus in the speech. Didn’t you think so?”
“Oh, yes. He was talking straight at you. Back last spring I gathered that he was writing the play at you – his original version of it.”