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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.

“Worm here?” asked Hy guardedly.

“Asleep.”

Hy lighted the gas; then looked closely at the wretched Peter.

“Look here, my son,” he said then, “you need sleep.”

“Sleep” – muttered Peter, “good God!”

“Yes, I know, but you’ve got a delicate job on your hands. It’ll take expert handling. You’ve got to be fit.”

“Did you – did you see Sue?”

“No, only Betty. But they’ve been talking you over. Sue told Betty that you interest her.”

“Oh – she did! Say anything else?”

“More or less. Look here – has anything happened that I’m not in on? I mean between you and Sue.”

Peter shivered slightly. “How could anything happen? I haven’t been seeing her.”

“Well – Sue says you’re the strangest man she ever knew. She can’t figure you out. Betty was wondering.”

Hy was removing his overcoat now. Suddenly he gave way to a soft little chuckle.

“For Heaven’s sake, don’t laugh!”

“I was thinking of something else. Yes, I fixed it. But there’s something up – a new deal. This here Silverstone saw Any Street last night and went dippy over Sue. Betty told me that much but says she can’t tell me the rest because it’s Sue’s secret, not hers. Only it came out that Zanin has dropped the idea of bringing you into it. Silverstone bought supper for the girls and Zanin last night, and this afternoon he took Zanin out to his Long Beach house for the night, in a big car. And took his stenographer along. Everybody’s mysterious and in a hurry. Oh, there’s a hen on, all right!”

“So I’m out!” muttered Peter between set teeth. “But it’s no mystery. Think I don’t know Silverstone?”

“What’ll he do?”

“Freeze out everybody and put Sue across himself. What’s that guy’s is his. Findings is keepings.”

“But will Sue let him freeze Zanin out?”

“That’s a point… But if she won’t, he’ll he wise in a minute. Trust Silverstone! He’ll let Zanin think he’s in, then.”

“Things look worse, I take it.”

“A lot.”

Hy was undressing. He sat now, caught by a sudden fragrant memory, holding a shoe in midair, and chuckled again.

“Stop that cackle!” growled Peter. “You said you fixed it.”

“I did. Quit abusing me and you’ll realize that I’m coming through with all you could ask. We leave at eleven, Hudson Tunnel, for the Jersey hills – we four. I bring the girls; you meet us at the Tunnel. Zanin is safe at Long Beach. We eat at a country road house. We walk miles in the open country. We drift home in the evening, God knows when!.. Here I hand you, in one neat parcel, pleasant hillsides, purling brooks, twelve mortal hours of the blessed damosel, and” – he caught up the evening paper – “‘fair and warmer’ – and perfect weather. And what do I get? Abuse. Nothing but abuse!”

With this, he deftly juggled his two shoes, caught both in a final flourish, looked across at the abject Peter and grinned.

“Shut up,” muttered Peter wearily.

“Very good, sir. And you go to bed. Your nerves are a mess.”

Into Peter’s brain as he hurried toward the Tunnel Station, the next morning, darted an uninvited, startling thought.

Here was Zanin, idealist in the drama, prophet of the new Russianism, deserting the stage for the screen!

What was it the Worm had represented him as saying to Sue… that she would be enabled to express her ideals to millions where Isadora Duncan could reach only thousands?

Millions in place of thousands!

His imagination pounced on the thought. He stopped short on the street to consider it – until a small boy laughed; then he hurried on.

He looked with new eyes at the bill-boards he passed. Two-thirds of them flaunted moving-picture features… He had been passing such posters for a year or more without once reading out of them a meaning personal to himself. He had been sticking blindly, doggedly to plays – ninety per cent, of which, of all plays, failed utterly. It suddenly came home to him that the greatest dramatists, like the greatest actors and actresses, were working for the camera. All but himself, apparently!.. The theaters were fighting for the barest existence where they were not surrendering outright. Why, he himself patronized movies more often than plays! Yet he had stupidly refused to catch the significance of it… The Truffler would fail, of course; just as the two before it had failed. Still he had, until this actual minute, clung to it as his one hope.

Millions for thousands!

He was thinking now not of persons but of dollars.

Millions for thousands.

He paused at a news stand. Sprawled over it were specimens of the new sort of periodical, the moving-picture magazines. So the publishers, like the theatrical men, were being driven back by the invader.

He bought the fattest, most brightly colored of these publications and turned the pages eagerly as he descended into the station.

He stood half-hidden behind a pillar, his eyes wandering from the magazine to the ticket gate where Hy and the two girls would appear, then back to the magazine. Those pages reeked of enthusiasm, fresh ideas, prosperity. They stirred new depths within his soul.

He saw his little party coming in through the gate.

The two girls wore sweaters. Their skirts were short, their tan shoes low and flat of heel.

They were attractive, each in her individual way; Sue less regular as to features, but brighter, slimmer, more alive. Betty’s more luxurious figure was set off almost too well by the snug sweater. As she moved, swaying a little from the hips, her eyelids drooping rather languidly, the color stirring faintly under her fair fine skin, she was, Peter decided, unconscious neither of the sweater nor of the body within it… Just before the train roared in, while Sue, all alertness, was looking out along the track, Peter saw Hy’s hand brush Betty’s. For an instant their fingers intertwined; then the hands drifted casually apart.