The Trufflers

CHAPTER VI – THE WORM POURS OIL ON A FIRE

PETER came stealthily into the rooms on the seventh floor of the old bachelor apartment building in Washington Square. His right hand, deep in a pocket of his spring overcoat, clutched a thin, very new book bound in pasteboard. It was late on a Friday afternoon, near the lamb-like close of March.

The rooms were empty. Which fact brought relief to Peter.

He crossed the studio to the decrepit flat-top desk between the two windows. With an expression of gravity, almost of solemnity, on his long face, lie unlocked the middle drawer on the end next the wail. Within, on a heap of manuscripts, letters and contracts, lay five other thin little books in gray, buff and pink. He spread these in a row on the desk and added the new one. On each was the name of a savings bank, printed, and his own name, written. They represented savings aggregating now nearly seven thousand dollars.

Seven thousand dollars, for a bachelor of thirty-three may seem enough to you. It did not seem enough to Peter. In fact he was now studying the six little books through his big horn-rimmed glasses (not spectacles) with more than a suggestion of anxiety. Peter was no financier; and the thought of adventuring his savings on the turbulent uncharted seas of finance filled his mind with terrors. Savings banks appealed to him because they were built solidly, of stone, and had immense iron gratings at windows and doors. And, too, you couldn’t draw money without going to some definite personal trouble… It is only fair to add that the books represented all he had or would ever have unless he could get more. Nobody paid Peter a salary. No banker or attorney had a hand in taxing his income at the source. The Truffler might succeed and make him mildly rich. Or it might die in a night, leaving the thousand-dollar “advance against royalties” as his entire income from more than a year of work. His last two plays had failed, you know. Plays usually failed. Eighty or ninety per cent, of them – yes, a good ninety!

Theoretically, the seven thousand dollars should carry him two or three years. Practically, they might not carry him one. For he couldn’t possibly know in advance what he would do with them. Genius laughs at savings banks.

Peter sighed, put the six little books away and locked the drawer.

Locked it with sudden swiftness and caution, for Hy Lowe just then burst in the outer door and dove, humming a one-step, into the bedroom.

Peter, pocketing the keys carefully so that they would not jingle, put on a casual front and followed him there.

Hy, still in overcoat and hat, was gazing with rapt eyes at a snap-shot of two girls. He laughed a little, self-consciously, at the sight of Peter and set the picture against the mirror on his side of the bureau.

There were other pictures stuck about Hy’s end of the mirror; all of girls and not all discreet. One of these, pushed aside to make room for the new one, fell to the floor. Hy let it lie.

Peter leaned ever and peered at the snap-shot. He recognized the two girls as Betty Deane and Sue Wilde.

“Look here,” said Peter, “where have you been?”

“Having a dish of tea.”

“Don’t you ever work?”

“Since friend Betty turned up, my son, I’m wondering if I ever shall.”

Peter grunted. His gaze was centered not on Hy’s friend Betty, but on the slim familiar figure at the right.

“Just you two?”

“Sue came in. Look here, Pete, I’m generous. We’re going to cut it in half. I get Betty, you get Sue.”

Peter, deepening gloom on his face, sat down abruptly on the bed.

“Easy, my son,” observed Hy sagely, “or that girl will be going to your head. That’s your trouble, Pete; you take ‘em seriously. And believe me, it won’t do!”

“It isn’t that, Hy – I’m not in love with her.”

There was a silence while Hy removed garments.

“It isn’t that,” protested Peter again. “No, it isn’t that. She irritates me.”

Hy took off his collar.

“Any – anybody else there?” asked Peter.

“Only that fellow Zanin. He came in with Sue. By the way, he wants to see you. Seems to have an idea he can interest you in a scheme he’s got. Talked quite a lot about it.”

Peter did not hear all of this. At the mention of Zanin he got up suddenly and rushed off into the studio.

Hy glanced after him; then hummed (more softly, out of a new respect for Peter) a hesitation waltz as he cut the new picture in half with the manicure scissors and put Sue on Peter’s side of the bureau.

The Worm came in, dropped coat and hat on a chair and settled himself to his pipe and the evening paper. Peter, stretched on the couch, greeted him with a grunt. Hy appeared, in undress, and attacked the piano with half-suppressed exuberance.

It was the Worm’s settled habit to read straight through the paper without a word; then to stroll out to dinner, alone or with the other two, as it happened, either silent or making quietly casual remarks that you didn’t particularly need to answer if you didn’t feel like it. He made no demands on you, the Worm. He wasn’t trivial and gay, like Hy; or burning with inner ambitions and desires, like Peter.

On this occasion, however, he broke bounds. Slowly the paper, not half read, sank to his knees. He smoked up a pipeful thus. His sandy thoughtful face was sober.

Finally he spoke.

“Saw Sue Wilde to-day. Met her outside the Parisian, and we had lunch together.”

Peter shot a glance at him.

The Worm, oblivious to Peter, tamped his pipe with a pencil and spoke again.

“Been trying to make her out. She and I have had several talks. I can’t place her.”

This was so unusual – from the Worm it amounted to an outburst! – that even Hy, swinging around from the yellow keyboard, waited in silence.

“You fellows know Greenwich Village,” the musing one went on, puffing slowly and following with his eyes the curling smoke. “You know the dope – ’Oats for Women!’ somebody called it – that a woman must be free as a man, free to go to the devil if she chooses. You know, so often, when these feminine professors of freedom talk to you how they over-emphasize the sex business – by the second quarter-hour you find yourself solemnly talking woman’s complete life, rights of the unmarried mother, birth control; and after you’ve got away from the lady you can’t for the life of you figure out how those topics ever got started, when likely as not you were thinking about your job or the war or Honus Wagner’s batting slump. You know.”

Hy nodded, with a quizzical look. Peter was motionless and silent.

“You know – I don’t want to knock; got too much respect for the real idealists here in the Village – but you fellows do know how you get to anticipating that stuff and discounting it before it comes; and you can’t help seeing that the woman is more often than not just dressing up ungoverned desires in sociological language, that she’s leaping at the chance to experiment with emotions that women have had to suppress for ages. Back of it is the new Russianism they live and breathe – to know no right or wrong, trust your instincts, respond to your emotions, bow to your desires… Well, now, here’s Sue Wilde. She looks like a regular little radical. And acts it. Breaks away from her folks – lives with the regular bunch in the Village – takes up public dancing and acting – smokes her cigarettes – knows her Strindberg and Freud – yet… well, I’ve dined with her once, lunched with her once, spent five hours in her apartment talking Isadora Duncan as against Pavlowa, even walked the streets half a night arguing about what she calls the Truth… and we haven’t got around to ‘the complete life’ yet.”

“How do you dope it out?” asked Hy.

“Well” – the Worm deliberately thought out his reply – “I think she’s so. Most of ‘em aren’t so. She’s a real natural oasis in a desert of poseurs. Probably that’s why I worry about her.”

“Why worry?” From Hy.

“True enough. But I do. It’s the situation she has drifted into, I suppose. If she was really mature you’d let her look out for herself. It’s the old he protective instinct in me, I suppose. The one thing on earth she would resent more than anything else. But this fellow Zanin…”

He painstakingly made a smoke ring and sent it toward the tarnished brass hook on the window-frame. It missed. He tried again.

Peter stirred uncomfortably, there on the couch. “What has she told you about Zanin?” he asked, desperately controlling his voice.

“She doesn’t know that she has told me much of anything. But she has talked her work and prospects. And the real story comes through. Just this afternoon since I left her, it has been piecing itself together. She is frank, you know.”

Peter suppressed a groan. She was frank! “Zanin is in love with her. He has been for a year or more. He wrote Any Street for her, incorporated some of her own ideas in it. He has been tireless at helping her work up her dancing and pantomime. Why, as near as I can see, the man has been downright devoting his life to her, all this time. It’s rather impressive. But then, Zanin is impressive.”

Peter broke out now. “Does he expect to marry her – Zanin?”

“Marry her? Oh, no.”

“‘Oh, no!’ Good God then – ”

“Oh, come, Pete, you surely know Zanin’s attitude toward marriage. He has written enough on the subject. And lectured – and put it in those little plays of his.”

“What is his attitude?”

“That marriage is immoral. Worse than immoral – vicious. He has expounded that stuff for years.”

“And what does she say to all this?” This question came from Hy, for Peter was speechless.

“Simply that he doesn’t rouse any emotional response in her. I’m not sure that she isn’t a little sorry he doesn’t. She would be honest you know. And that’s the thing about Sue – my guess about her, at least – that she won’t approach love as an experiment or an experience. It will have to be the real thing.”

He tried again, in his slow calm way, to hang a smoke ring on the brass hook.

“Proceed,” said Hy. “Your narrative interests me strangely.”

“Well,” said the Worm slowly, “Zanin is about ready to put over his big scheme. He has contrived at last to get one of the managers interested. And it hangs on Sue’s personality. The way he has worked it out with her, planning it as a concrete expression of that half wild, natural self of hers, I doubt if it, this particular thing, could be done without her. It is Sue – an expressed, interpreted Sue.”

“This must be the thing he is trying to get Pete in on.”

“The same. Zanin knows that where he fails is on the side of popularity. He has intelligence, but he hasn’t the trick of reaching the crowd. And he is smart enough to see what he needs and go after it.”

“He is going after the crowd, then?”

“Absolutely.”

“And what becomes of the noble artistic standards he’s been bleeding and dying for?”

“I don’t know. He really has been bleeding and dying. You have to admit that. He lives in one mean room, over there in Fourth Street. A good deal of the little he eats he cooks with his own hands on a kerosene stove. Those girls are always taking him in and feeding him up. He works twenty and thirty hours at a stretch over his productions at the Crossroads. Must have the constitution of a bull elephant. If it was just a matter of picking up money, he could easily go back into newspaper work or the press-agent game… I’m not sure that the man isn’t full of a struggling genius that hasn’t really begun to find expression. If he is, it will drive him into bigger and bigger things. He won’t worry about consistency – he’ll just do what every genius does. he’ll fight his way through to complete self-expression, blindly, madly, using everything that comes in his way, trampling on everything that he can’t use.”

Peter, twitching with irritation, sat up and snorted out:

“For God’s sake, what’s the scheme!”

The Worm regarded Peter thoughtfully and not unhumorously, as if reflecting further over his observations on genius. Then he explained:

“He’s going to preach the Greenwich Village freedom on every little moving-picture screen in America – shout the new naturalism to a hypocritical world.”

“Has he worked out his story?” asked Hy.

“In the rough, I think. But he wants a practical theatrical man to give it form and put it over. That’s where Pete comes in… Get it? It’s during stuff. He’ll use Sue’s finest quality, her faith, as well as her grace of body. What I could get out of it sounds a good deal like the Garden of Eden story without the moral. An Artzibasheff paradise. Sue says that she’ll have to wear a pretty primitive costume.”

“Which doesn’t bother her, I imagine,” said Hy.

“Not a bit.”

Peter, leaning back on stiff arms, staring at the opposite wall, suddenly found repictured to his mind’s eye a dramatic little scene: In the Crossroads Theater, out by the ticket entrance; the audience in their seats, old Wilde, the Walrus himself, in his oddly primitive’, early Methodist dress – long black coat, white bow tie, narrow strip of whisker on each grim cheek; Sue in her newsboy costume, hair cut short under the ragged felt hat, face painted for the stage, her deep-green eyes blazing. The father had said: “You have no shame, then – appearing like this?” To which the daughter had replied: “No – none!”

Hy was speaking again. “You don’t mean to say that Zanin will be able to put this scheme over on Sue?”

The Worm nodded, very thoughtful. “Yes, she is going into it, I think.”

Peter broke cut again: “But – but – but – but…

“You fellows want to get this thing straight in your heads,” the Worm continued, ignoring Peter. “Her reasons aren’t by any means so weak. In the first place the thing comes to her as a real chance to express in the widest possible way her own protest against conventionality. As Zanin has told her, she will be able to express naturalness and honesty of life to millions where Isadora Duncan, with all her perfect art, can only reach thousands. Yes, Zanin is appealing to her best qualities. And, at that, I’m not at all sure that he isn’t honest in it.’

“Honest!” snorted Peter.

“Yes, honest. I don’t say he is. I say I’m not sure… Then another argument with her is that he has really been helping her to grow. He has given her a lot – and without making any crude demands. Obligations have grown up there, you see. She knows that his whole heart is in it, that it’s probably his big chance; and while the girl is modest enough she can see how dependent the whole plan is on her.”

“But – but – but” – Peter again! – “think what she’ll find herself up against – the people she’ll have to work with – the vulgarity.

“I don’t know,” mused the Worm. “I’m not sure it would bother her much. Those things don’t seem to touch her. And she isn’t the sort to be stopped by conventional warnings, anyway. She’ll have to find it out all for herself.”

The Worm gave himself up again to the experiment with smoke rings. He blew one – another – a third – at the curtain hook..The fourth wavered down over the hook, hung a second, broke and trailed off into the atmosphere. “.Got it!” said the Worm, to himself.

“Who’s the manager he’s picked up?” asked Hy.

“Fellow named Silverstone. Head of a movie producing company.”

Peter, to whom this name was, apparently, the last straw, shivered a little, sprang to his feet, and for the second time within the hour rushed blindly off into solitude.

CHAPTER VII – PETER THINKS ABOUT THE PICTURES

WHEN Hy set out for dinner, a little later, he found Peter sitting on a bench in the Square.

“Go in and get your overcoat,” said Hy. “Unless you’re out for pneumonia.”

“Hy,” said Peter, his color vivid, his eyes wild, “we can’t let those brutes play with Sue; like that. We’ve got to save her.”

Hy squinted down at his bamboo stick. “Very good, my son. But just how?”

“If I could talk with her, Hy!.. I know that game so well!”

“You could call her up – ”

“Call her up nothing! I can’t ask to see her and start cold.” He gestured vehemently. “Look here, you’re seeing Betty every day – you fix it.”

Hy mused. “They’re great hands to take tramps in the country, those two. Most every Sunday… If I could arrange a little party of four… See here! Betty’s going to have dinner with me to-morrow night.”

“For God’s sake, Hy, get me in on it!”

“Now you just wait! Sue’ll be playing to-morrow night at the Crossroads, It’s Saturday, you know.”

Peter’s face fell.

“But it gives me the chance to talk it over with friend Betty and perhaps plan for Sunday. If Zanin’ll just leave her alone that long.”

“It isn’t as if I were thinking of myself, Hy…”

“Of course not, Pete.”

“The girl’s in danger. We’ve got to save her.”

“What if she won’t listen! She’s high-strung.”

“Then,” said Peter, flaring up with a righteous passion that made him feel suddenly like the hero of his own new play – “then I’ll go straight to Zanin and force him to declare himself! I will face him, as man to man!”

Thus the two Seventh-Story Men!

At moments, during the few weeks just past, thoughts of his anonymous letter had risen to disturb Peter; on each occasion, until to-night, to be instantly overwhelmed by the buoyant egotism that always justified Peter to himself. But the thoughts had been there. They had kept him from attempts to see Sue, had even restrained him from appearing where there was likelihood of her seeing him; and they had kept him excited about her. Now they rose again in unsuspected strength. Of course she would refuse to see him! He slept hardly at all that night. The next day he was unstrung. And Saturday night (or early Sunday morning) when Hy crept in, Peter, in pajamas, all lights out, was sitting by the window nursing a headache, staring out with smarting eyeballs at the empty Square.