|NOT until he was crossing Sixth Avenue, under the elevated road, did it
occur to him that she had deliberately broken her rehearsal appointment
to have tea with him and then as deliberately, had left him for the
rehearsal. He had interested her; then, all at once, he had ceased to
interest her. It was not the first time Peter had had this experience
with women, though none of the others had been so frank about it.
Frank, she certainly was!
Resentments rose. Why on earth had he sat there so meekly and let her go
on like that--he, the more or less well-known Eric Mann! Had he no force
of character at all? No dignity?
Suppose she had to write plays to suit the whims of penny-splitting
Broadway managers who had never heard of Andreyev and Tchekov, were
bored by Shaw and Shakespeare and thought an optimist was an eye
doctor--where would _she_ get off!
During the short block between Sixth Avenue and the Square, anger
conquered depression. When he entered the old brick apartment building
he was muttering. When he left the elevator and walked along the dark
corridor to the rooms he was considering reprisals.
Peter shared the dim old seventh-floor apartment with two fellow
bachelors, Henry Sidenham Lowe and the Worm. The three were sometimes
known as the Seventh-Story Men. The phrase was Hy Lowe's and referred
to the newspaper stories of that absurd kidnaping escapade--the Esther
MacLeod case, it was--back in 1913. The three were a bit younger then.
Hy Lowe was a slim young man with small features that appeared to be
gathered in the middle of his face. His job might have been thought
odd anywhere save in the Greenwich Village region. After some years
of newspaper work he had settled down to the managing editorship of
a missionary weekly known as _My Brother's Keeper_. Hy was
uncommunicative, even irreverent regarding his means of livelihood,
usually referring to the paper as his meal ticket, and to his employer,
the Reverend Doctor Hubbell Harkness Wilde (if at all) as the Walrus. In
leisure moments, perhaps as a chronic reaction from the moral strain of
his job, Hy affected slang, musical comedy and girls. The partly skinned
old upright piano in the studio was his. And he had a small gift at
juggling plates.
The Worm was a philosopher; about Peter's age, sandy in coloring but
mild in nature, reflective to the point of self-effacement. He read
interminably, in more than one foreign language and was supposed to
write book reviews. He had lived in odd corners of the earth and knew
Gorki personally. His name was Henry Bates.
Peter came slowly into the studio, threw off coat and hat and stood, the
beginnings of a complacent smile on his face.
“I've got my girl,” he announced.
“Now that you've got her, what you gonna do with her?” queried Hy Lowe,
without turning from the new song hit he was picking out on the piano.
“What am I gonna do with her?” mused Peter, hands deep in pockets, more
and more pleased with his new attitude of mind--“I'm gonna vivisect her,
of course.”
“Ah, cruel one!” hummed Hy.
“Well, why not!” cried Peter, rousing. “If a girl leaves her home
and strikes out for the self-expression thing, doesn't she forfeit the
consideration of decent people? Isn't she fair game?”
Over in the corner by a window, his attention caught by this outbreak,
the Worm looked up at Peter and reflected for a moment. He was deep in
a Morris chair, the Worm, clad only in striped pajamas that were not
over-equipped with buttons, and one slipper of Chinese straw that
dangled from an elevated foot.
“Hey, Pete--get this!” cried Hy, and burst into song.
Peter leaned over his shoulder and sang the choppy refrain with him.
In the interest of accuracy the two sang it again, The third rendition
brought them to the borders of harmony.
The Worm looked up again and studied Peter's back, rather absently as if
puzzling him out and classifying him. He knit his brows. Then his eyes
lighted, and he turned back in his book, fingering the pages with a mild
eagerness. Finding what he sought, he read thoughtfully and smiled. He
closed his book; hitched forward to the old flat-top desk that stood
between the windows; lighted a caked brier pipe; and after considerable
scribbling on scraps of paper appeared to hit upon an arrangement of
phrases that pleased him. These phrases he printed out painstakingly on
the back of a calling card which he tacked up (with a hair-brush) on
the outer side of the apartment door. Then he went into the bedroom to
dress.
“Who is she?” asked Hy in a low voice. The two were fond of the Worm,
but they never talked with him about their girls.
“That's the interesting thing,” said Peter. “I don't know. She's plumb
mysterious. All she'd tell was that she is playing a boy at that little
Crossroads Theater of Zanin's, and that I'd have to go there to find her
out. Going to-night. Want to come along?”
“What kind of a looking girl?”
“Oh--pretty. Extraordinary eyes, green with brown in 'em--but green. And
built like a boy. Very graceful.”
“Hm!” mused Hy.
“Do you know her?”
“Sounds like Sue Wilde.”
“Not--”
“Yes, the Walrus's child.”
“What's _she_ doing, playing around the Village?”
“Oh, that's an old story. She left home--walked right out. Calls herself
modern. She's the original lady highbrow, if you ask me. Sure I'll go to
see her. Even if she never could see me.”
Later, Hy remarked: “The old boy asked me yesterday if I had her
address. You see he knows we live down here where the Village crowds
circulate.”
“Give it to him?”
“No. Easy enough to get, of course, but I ducked... I'm going to hop
into the bathtub. There's time enough. Then we can eat at the Parisian.”
Peter settled down to read the sporting page of the evening paper.
Shortly the Worm, clad now, drifted back to the Morris chair.
They heard Hy shuffle out in his bath slippers and close the outer
door after him. Then he opened the door and came back, He stood in the
doorway, holding his bathrobe together with one hand and swinging his
towel with the ether; and chuckling.
“You worm!” he observed. “Why Bolbo _cee_ras?”
The Worm looked up with mild eyes. “Not bolboceeras,” he corrected.
“Bolbo_es_eras. As in cow.”
“But why?”
The Worm merely shrugged his shoulders and resumed his book.
Peter paid little heed to this brief conversation. And when he and Hy
went out, half an hour later, he gave only a passing glance to the card
on the door. He was occupied with thoughts of a slim girl with green
eyes who had fascinated and angered him in a most confusing way.
The card read as follows:
DO NOT FEED OR ANNOY!
BOLBOCERAS AMERICANUS MULS
HABITAT HERE!