The Trufflers

“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.

CHAPTER VIII – SUE WALKS OVER A HILL

PETER joined them – a gloomy man, haunted by an anonymous letter. Sue was matter-of-fact. It seemed to Hy that she made some effort to put the well-known playwright more nearly at his ease.

They lurched, an hour’s ride out in Northern New Jersey, at a little motorists’ tavern that Hy guided them to. They sat on a shaded veranda while the men smoked cigars and the girls smoked cigarettes. After which they set forth on what was designed to be a four-hour tramp through the hills to another railroad – Sue and Peter ahead (as it turned out); Hy and Betty lagging behind.

The road curved over hills and down into miniature valleys. There were expanses of plowed fields, groves of tall bare trees, groups of farmhouses. Robins hopped beside the road. The bright sun mitigated the crisp sting in the air. A sense of early spring touched eye and ear and nostril.

Peter felt it; breathed more deeply; actually smiled.

Sue threw back her head and hummed softly.

Hy and Betty dropped farther and farther behind.

Once Sue turned and waved them on; then stood and laughed with sheer good humor at their deliberate, unrhythmical step.

“Come on,” she said to Peter “They don’t get it – the joy of it. You have to walk with a steady swing. It takes you a mile or two, at that, to get going. When I’m in my stride, it carries me along so I hate to stop at all. You know, you can’t pick it up again right off – the real swing. Walking is a game – a fine game!”

Peter didn’t know. He had never thought of walking as a game. He played golf a little, tennis a little less. It had always been difficult for him to hold his mind on these unimportant pursuits. But he found himself responding eagerly.

“You’ve gone in a lot for athletics,” said he, thinking of the lightness, the sheer ease, with which she had moved about the little Crossroads stage.

“Oh, yes – at school and college – basket ball, running, fencing, dancing and this sort of thing. Dancing especially. I’ve really worked some at that, you know.”

“Yes,” said he moodily, “I know.”

They swung down into a valley, over a bridge, up the farther slope, through a notch and out along a little plateau with a stream winding across it.

Peter found himself in some danger of forgetting his earnest purpose. He could fairly taste the fresh spring air. He could not resist occasionally glancing sidelong at his companion and thinking – “She is great in that sweater!” A new soft magic was stealing in everywhere among what he had regarded as his real thoughts and ideas. Once her elbow brushed his; and little flames rose in his spirit… She walked like a boy. She talked like a boy. She actually seemed to think like a boy. The Worm’s remark came to him, with an odd stabbing effect… “We haven’t got around to ‘the complete life’ yet!”

She quite bewildered him. For she distinctly was not a boy. She was a young woman. She couldn’t possibly be so free from thoughts of self and the drama of life, of man and the all-conquering urge of nature! As a dramatist, as a student of women, he knew better. No, she couldn’t – no more than “friend Betty” back there, philandering along with Hy, The Worm had guaranteed her innocence… but the Worm notoriously didn’t understand women. No, it couldn’t be true. For she had broken away from her folks. She did live with the regular bunch in the Village. She did undoubtedly know her Strindberg and Freud. She had taken up public dancing and acting. She did smoke her cigarettes – had smoked one not half an hour back, publicly, on the veranda of a road house! … He felt again the irritation she had on other occasions stirred in him.

He slowed down, tense with this bewilderment. He drew his hand across his forehead.

Sue went on a little ahead; then stopped, turned and regarded him with friendly concern!

“Anything the matter?”

“No – oh, no!”

“Perhaps we started too soon after lunch.”

She was babying him!

“No – no… I was thinking of something!..”

Almost angrily he struck out at a swift pace. He would show her who was the weakling in this little party! He would make her cry for mercy!

But she struck out with him. Swinging along at better than four miles an hour they followed the road into another valley and for a mile or two along by a bubbling brook.

It was Peter who slackened first. His feet began hurting: an old trouble with his arches. And despite the tang in the air, he was dripping with sweat. He mopped his forehead and made a desperate effort to breathe easily.

Sue was a thought flushed, there was a shine in her eyes; she danced a few steps in the road and smiled happily.

“That’s the thing!” she cried. “That’s the way I love to move along!”

Apparently she liked him better for walking like that. It really seemed to make a difference. He set his teeth and struck out again, saying – “All right. Let’s have some more of it, then!” And sharp little pains shot through his insteps.

“No,” said she, “it’s best to slow down for a while. I like to speed up just now and then. Besides, I’ve got something on my mind. Let’s talk.” He walked in silence, waiting.

“It’s about that other talk we had,” said she. “It has bothered me since. I told you your plays were dreadful. You remember?”

He laughed shortly. “Oh, yes; I remember.”

“There,” said she, “I did hurt you. I must have been perfectly outrageous.”

He made no reply to this; merely mopped his forehead again and strode along. The pains were shooting above the insteps now, clear up into the calves of his legs.

“I ought to have made myself plainer,” said she. “I remember talking as if you couldn’t write at all. Of course I didn’t mean that, and I had no right to act as if I held myself superior to a man of your experience. That was silly. What I really meant was that you didn’t write from a point of view that I could accept.”

“What you said was,” observed Peter, aiming at her sort of good-humored directness, and missing, “‘the difficulty is, it’s the whole thing – your attitude toward life – your hopeless sentimentality about women, the slushy horrible Broadway falseness that lies back of everything you do – the Broadway thing, always.’… Those were your words.”

“Oh, no!” She was serious now. He thought she looked hurt, almost. The thought gave him sudden savage pleasure. “Surely, I didn’t say that.”

“You did. And you added that my insight into life is just about that of a hardened director of one-reel films.”

She was hurt now. She walked on for a little time, quite silent.

Finally she stopped short, looked right at him, threw out her hands (he noted and felt the grace of the movement!) and said —

“I don’t know how to answer you. Probably I did say just about those words.”

“They are exact… and of course, in one sense, I meant them. I do feel that way about your work. But not at all in the personal sense that you have taken it. And I recognize your ability as clearly as anybody. Can’t you see, man – that’s exactly the reason I talked that way to you?” There was feeling in her voice now. “I suppose I had a crazy, kiddish notion of converting you, of making you work for us. It was because you are so good at it that I went after you like that. You are worth going after.” She hesitated, and bit her lip. “That’s why I was so pleased when Zanin thought he needed you for our big plan and disappointed now that he can’t include you in it – because you could help us and we could perhaps help you. Yes, disappointed – in spite of – and – and don’t forget the other thing I said, that those of us that believe in truth in the theater owe it to our faith to get to work on the men that supply the plays… Can’t you see, man!”

She threw out her arms again. His eyes, something of the heady spirits that she would perhaps have called sex attraction shining in them now, could see little more than those arms, the slim curves of her body in the sweater and short skirt, her eager glowing face and fine eyes. And his mind could see no more than his eyes.

An automobile horn sounded. He caught her arm and hurried her to the roadside. There were more of the large bare trees here; and a rail fence by which they stood.

“You say Zanin has given up the idea of coming to me with his plan?” He spoke guardedly, thinking that he must not betray the confidences of Betty and Hy.

“Yes, he has had to.”

“He spoke to me about it, once.”

“Yes, I know. But the man that is going to back him wants to do that part of it himself or have his own director do it.”

Pictures unreeled suddenly before his mind’s eye – Sue, in “a pretty primitive costume,” exploited at once by the egotistical self-seeking Zanin, the unscrupulous, masterful Silverstone, a temperamental, commercial director! He shivered.

“Look here,” he began – he would fall back on his age and position; he would control this little situation, not drift through it! – “you mentioned my experience. Well, you’re right. I’ve seen these Broadway managers with their coats off. And I’ve seen what happens to enthusiastic girls that fall into their hands.”

He hesitated; that miserable letter flashed on his brain. He could fairly see it. And then his tongue ran wild.

“Don’t you know that Broadway is paved with the skulls of enthusiastic girls!.. Silverstone? Why, if I were to give you a tenth of Silverstone’s history you would shrink from him – you wouldn’t touch the man’s ugly hand. Here you are, young, attractive – yes, beautiful, in your own strange way! – full of a real faith in what you call the truth, on the edge of giving up your youth and your gifts into the hands of a bunch of Broadway crooks. You talk about me and the Broadway Thing. Good God, can’t you see that it’s girls like you that make the Broadway Thing possible!.. You talk of my sentimentality about women, my ‘home-and-mother-stuff,’ can’t you see the reason for that home-and-mother stuff, for that sentimentality, is the tens of thousands of girls, like you and unlike you who wanted to experiment, who thought they could make the world what they wanted it!”

He paused to breathe. The girl before him was distinctly flushed now, and was facing him with wide eyes – hard eyes, he thought. He had poured out a flood of feeling, and it had left her cold.

She was leaning back against the fence, her arms extended along the top rail, looking and looking at him.

“Silverstone!” he snorted, unable to keep silence “Silverstone! The man’s a crook, I tell you. Nothing that he wants gets away from him. Understand me? Nothing! You people will be children beside him… Zanin is bad enough. He’s smart! He’ll wait you out! He doesn’t believe in marriage, he doesn’t! But Zanin – why, Silverstone’ll play with him!”

Her eyes were still on him – wide and cold. Now her lips parted, and she drew in a quick breath, “How on earth,” she said, “did you learn all this! Who told you?”

He shut his lips close together. Plainly he had broken; he had gone wild, cleared the traces. Staring at her, at that sweater, he tried to think… She would upbraid Betty. How would he ever square things with Hy!

He saw her hands grip the fence rail so tightly that her finger-tips went white.

“Tell me,” she said again, with deliberate emphasis, “where you learned these things. Who told you?”

He felt rather than saw the movement of her body within the sweater as she breathed with a slow inhalation. His own breath came quickly. His throat was suddenly dry. He swallowed – once, twice. Then he stepped forward and laid his hand, a trembling hard, on her forearm.

She shook it off and sprang back.

“Don’t look at me like that!” his voice said. And rushed on: “Can’t you see that I’m pleading for your very life! Can’t you see that I know what you are headed for – that I want to save you from yourself – that I love you – that I’m offering you my life – that I want to take you out of this crazy atmosphere of the Village and give…”

He stopped, partly because he was out of breath, and felt, besides, as if his tonsils had abruptly swollen and filled his throat; partly because she turned deliberately away from him.

He waited, uneasily leaning against the fence while she walked off a little way, very slowly; stood thinking; then came back. She looked rather white now, he thought.

“Suppose,” she said, “we drop this and finish our walk. It’s a good three hours yet over to the other railroad. We may as well make a job of it.”

“Oh, Sue,” he cried – “how can you!..”

She stopped him. “Please!” she said.

“But – but – ”

“Please!” she said again.

“But – but – ”

She turned away. “I simply can not keep up this personal talk. I would be glad to finish the walk with you, but…”

He pulled himself together amid the wreckage of his thoughts and feelings. “But if I won’t or can’t, you’ll have to walk alone,” he said for her.

“Yes, I did mean that. I am sorry. I did hope it would be possible.” She compressed her lips, then added: “Of course I should have seen that it wasn’t possible, after what happened.”

“Very well,” said he.

They walked on, silent, past the woods, past more plowed fields, up another hillside.

She broke the silence. Gravely, she said: “I will say just one thing more, since you already know so much. Zarin signs up with Silverstone to-morrow morning. Or as soon as they can finish drawing up the contracts. Then within one or two weeks – very soon, certainly – we go down to Cuba or Florida to begin taking the outdoor scenes. That, you see, settles it.”

Peter’s mind blurred again. Ugly foggy thoughts rushed over it. He stopped short, his long gloomy face workhing nervously.

“Good God!” he broke out. “You mean to say – you’re going to let those crooks take you off – to Cuba! Don’t you see…”

There was no object in saying more. Even Peter could see that. For Sue, after one brief look at his sputtering, distorted face, had turned away and was now walking swiftly on up the hill.

“Wait!” he called. “Sue!”

She reached the top of the hill, passed on over the crest. Gradually she disappeared down the farther slope – the tam o’shanter last.

CHAPTER IX – THE NATURE FILM PRODUCING CO. INC

THEN Peter, muttering, talking out loud to the road, the fence, the trees, the sky, turned back to retrace the miles they had covered so lightly and rapidly. His feet and legs hurt him cruelly. He found a rough stick, broke it over a rock and used it for a cane.

He thought of joining Hy and Betty. There would be sympathy there, perhaps. Hy could do something. Hy would have to do something. Where were they, anyway!

Half an hour later he caught a glimpse of them. They were sitting on a boulder on a grassy hillside, some little distance from the road. They appeared to be gazing dreamily off across a valley.

Peter hesitated. They were very close together. They hardly seemed to invite interruption. Then, while he stood, dusty and bedraggled, in real pain, watching them, he saw Betty lean back against the boulder – or was it against Hy’s arm?

Hy seemed to be leaning over her. His head bent lower still. It quite hid hers from view.

He was kissing her!

Blind to the shooting pains in his feet and legs, Peter rushed, stumbling, away. In his profound self-pity, he felt that even Hy had deserted him. He was alone, in a world that had no motive or thought but to do him evil, to pervert his finest motives, to crush him!

Somehow he got back to that railroad. An hour and a half he spent painfully sitting in the country station waiting for a train. There was time to think. There was time for nothing but thinking.

And Peter, as so often when deeply stirred either by joy or misery, found himself passing into a violent and soul-wrenching reaction. It was misery this time. He was a crawling abject thing. People would laugh. Sue would laugh…

But would she! Would she tell? Would Hy and Betty, if they ever did get home, know that she had returned alone?

Those deep-green eyes of hers, the strong little chin… She was Miss Independence herself.

Zanin was signing with Silverstone in the morning! Or as soon as the contracts could be drawn.

The train came rumbling in. Peter, in, physical and spiritual agony, boarded it.

All these painful, exciting experiences of the day were drawing together toward some new unexpected result. He was beaten – yet was he beaten! A news agent walked through the train with a great pile of magazines on his arm.

Peter suddenly thought of the moving-picture periodical he had dropped, so long, long ago, in the Tunnel Station. He bought another copy; and again turned the pages. Then he let it fall to his knees and stared out the window with eyes that saw little.

Zanin – Silverstone – Sue walking alone over a hill!.. Peters little lamp of genius was burning once more. He was thrilled, if frightened, by the ideas that were forming in that curious mind of his.

Shortly after seven o’clock of the same evening Jacob Zanin reached his mean little room in Fourth Street, after a stirring twenty-four hours at Silver-stone’s house at Long Beach and an ineffectual attempt to find Sue in her rooms. Those rooms were dim and silent. No one answered his ring. No one answered his knock when he finally succeeded in following another tenant of the building into the inner hall. Which explains why he was at his room, alone, at a quarter to eight when Peter Ericson Mann called there.

Peter, pale, nerves tense, a feverish glow in his eyes behind the horn-rimmed glasses, leaned heavily on a walking stick in the dark hallway, listening to the sound of heavy footsteps coming across the creaking boards on the other side of the door. Then the door opened; and Zanin, coatless, collarless, hair rumpled over his ears on either side of his head, stood there; a hulking figure of a man, full of force, not untouched with inner fire; a little grim; his face, that of a vigorously intellectual Russian peasant, scarred perceptibly by racial and personal hardship.

“Oh, hello, Mann!” said he. “Come in.” Then, observing the stick: “What’s the matter?”

“A little arch trouble. Nothing at all.” And Peter limped in.

Peter, as on former occasions, felt the power of the fellow. It was altogether in character that he should exhibit no surprise, though Peter Ericson Mann had never before appeared before him at that door. (He would never know that it was Peter’s seventh call within an hour and a half.)

Peter was at his calmest and most effective.