|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.