|HE caught up with her at the corner nearest Jim's--the same Sue he had
first met, here in the Village, on a curbstone, eating an apple--wearing
her old tarn o'shanter; good shoulders, no hips, well-shaped hands and
feet; odd, honest deep-green eyes.
She was a wreck from endless rehearsing she told him smilingly and
ordered a big English chop and a bigger baked potato. These were good at
Jim's. She ate them like a hungry boy.
He offered her with inner hesitation, a cigarette. She shook her head.
“Zanin won't let me,” she explained. “He says it's going to be a big
hard job, coming right on top of all the work at the Crossroads, and I
must keep fit.”
“Zanin! Zanin!...” But Peter maintained his studied calm. “I've got the
scenario in my pocket,” he announced, “I want to read it to you. And if
you don't mind I'll tell you just why I want to.”
“Of course I don't mind,” said she, with just one half-covert glance.
“Tell me.”
“Please hear me out,” said he.
Her lids did droop a little now. This was the Eric Mann whose plays she
had seen in past years and who had pounced on her so suddenly with a
crazy avowal of love.... A man she hardly knew!
He spoke quietly now and patiently; even with dignity.
“We--you and Zanin and I--are starting a serious job.”
“Yes, I know.”
“Well, I began all wrong by taking a personal attitude toward you, and
we quarreled rather absurdly...”
“We won't speak of that,” said she.
“Only to this extent: Any little personal misunderstandings--well, we've
got to be businesslike and frank.... I'll tell you. This afternoon--just
now, in fact--when I suggested to Zanin that I read it to the two of
you, he objected. In fact he told me in so many words that you disliked
me and didn't trust my understanding and that it would be necessary for
him to act as a buffer between you and me.”
“Oh,” said she quickly, “that's absurd, of course!”
“Of course. He rather insisted on taking the scenario and reading it to
you himself. Now that won't do.”
“I don't care who reads it to me,” said Sue coolly.
“Certainly not. Now, if you'll agree with me that there's nothing
personal between us, that we're just whole-hearted workmen on a job, I...”
She raised her eyebrows a little, waking.
“...I came here with the idea of asking you to hunt Zanin up with
me--making it a matter of company business, right now.”
“Oh,” said she, her independent spirt stirred, “I don't see that that's
necessary. Why don't you go ahead--just read it to me?” She looked about
the smoky busy room. “But it's noisy here. And people you know come in
and want to talk. I'd ask you around to the rooms, only...”
“Only, Hy Lowe will be there.” Peter, feeling new ground under his feet,
smiled.
Sue smiled a little herself.
“How about your place?” she asked them.
The question took Peter's breath. She said it in unmistakable good
faith, like a man. But never, never, in Peter's whole adult life, had a
woman said such a thing to him. That women came occasionally; into the
old bachelor apartment building, he knew. But the implications! What
would Hamer-ton, across the hall, think of him were he to meet them
together in the elevator? What would John the night man think? Above all
(this thought came second) what would they think of Sue?
“Oh,” observed Sue, with real good humor, “I remember! That's the
building where women callers can't stay after eleven at night.”
Peter nearly succeeded in fighting back the flush that came.
“Which,” Sue continued, “has always seemed to me the final comment on
conventional morality. It's the best bit of perfectly unconscious humor
in New York.”
Peter was thinking--in flashes and leaps, like Napoleon--startled by
his own daring, yet athrill with new determination. The Worm was out of
town; Hy very much engaged.... Besides, Sue was honest and right.
This was the sincere note in the New Russianism. Being yourself,
straight-out. He must rise to it, now or never, if he was not to lose
Sue for good.
So he smiled. “It's only eight,” he said. “I can read you the whole
thing and we can discuss it within a couple of hours. And we won't be
interrupted there.”
Walking straight into that building with Sue at his side, nodding with
his usual casual friendliness to John the night man, chatting while the
elevator crawled endlessly upward to the seventh floor, overcoming the
impulse to run past the doors of the other apartments, carrying it all
off with easy sophistication; this was unquestionably the bravest single
act in the whole life of Peter Ericson Mann.
Peter could be a pleasant host. He lighted the old gas-burning student
lamp on the desk; started a fire; threw all the cushions in one large
pile on the couch.
Sue threw aside her coat and tarn o'shanter, smoothed her hair a little,
then curled up on the couch with her feet under her where she could
watch the fire; and where (as it happened) the firelight played softly
on her alert face. She filled the dingy old room with a new and very
human warmth.
Peter settled back in the Morris chair and after one long look at her
plunged with a sudden fever of energy into the reading of the scenario.
It was the thing Peter did best. He read rapidly; moved forward in his
chair and gestured now and then for emphasis with his long hands; threw
more than a little sense of movement and power into it.
Sue listened rather idly at first; then, as Peter's trained, nicely
modulated voice swept on, lifted her head, leaned forward, watched his
face. Peter felt her gaze but dared not return it. Once he stopped,
flushed and hoarse, and telephoned down for ice-water. Those eyes, all
alight, followed him as he rushed past her to the door and returned with
the clinking water pitcher. He snatched up the manuscript and finished
it--nearly half an hour of it--standing. Then he threw it on the desk
with a noise that made Sue jump, and himself strode to the fireplace and
stood there, mopping his face, still avoiding her eyes. She was still
leaning eagerly forward.
“Well,” said he now, with a rather weak effort at casualness, “what do
you think of it? Of course it's a rough draft--”
“Of course it is no such thing,” said she.
She got up; moved to the table: took up the manuscript and turned the
first pages. Then she came to the other side of the hearth with it,
“What I want to know is--How did you do it?”
“Oh, it's Zanin's ideas, of course; but they needed rearranging and
pointing up.”
“This isn't a rearrangement,” said she; and now he awoke to
consciousness of the suppressed stirring quality in her voice, a quality
he had not heard in it before. “It isn't a rearrangement. It's a created
thing.”
“Oh,” he cried, “you really think that!”
“It carries the big idea. It's the very spirit of freedom. It's a--a
sort of battle-cry--” She gave a little laugh--“Of course it isn't
that, exactly; it's really a big vital drama. I'm talking rather wildly.
But--” She confronted him; he looked past her hair at the wall. She
stamped her foot. “Don't make me go on saying these inane things,
please! You know as well as I do what you've done.”
“What have I done?”
“You've stated our faith with a force and a fineness that Zanin, even,
could never get. You've said it all for us.... Oh, I owe you an apology!
Zanin told you part of the truth. I didn't dream--from your plays and
things you have said--that you could do this.”
Peter looked at her now with breathless solemnity. “I've changed,” he
said.
“Something has happened.”
“I'm not ashamed of changing.”
She smiled.
“Or of growing, even.”
“Of course not,” said she. “But listen! You don't know what you've done.
Do you suppose I've been looking forward to this job--making myself
sensationally conspicuous, working with commercial-minded people? Oh,
how I've dreaded that side of it! And worrying all the time because the
scenario wasn't good. It just wasn't. It wasn't real people, feeling and
living; it was ideas--nothing but ideas--stalking around. That's Zanin,
of course. He's a big man, he has got the ideas, but he hasn't got
_people_, quite; he just doesn't understand women,... Don't you see,”
she threw out her hands--“the only reason, the only excuse, really,
for going through with this ordeal is to help make people everywhere
understand Truth. And I've known--it's been discouraging--that we
couldn't possibly do that unless it was clearly expressed for us.... Now
do you see what you've done? It's _that!_ And it's pretty exciting.”
“Zanin may not take it this way.”
“Oh, he will! He'll have to. It means so much to him. That man has lost
everything at the Crossroads, you know. And now he is staking all he
has left--his intelligence, his strength, his courage, on this. It means
literally everything to him.”
Peter stared at her. “And what do you suppose it means to me!”
“Why--I don't know, of course...”
Peter strode to the desk, unlocked the middle drawer next the wall, drew
out the six little bank books, and almost threw them into her lap.
“Look at those,” he said--“all of them!”
“Why--” she hesitated.
“Go through them, please! Add them up.”
Half smiling, she did so. Then said: “It seems to come to almost seven
thousand dollars.”
“That's the money that's going to work out your dream.”
She glanced up at him, then down at the books.
“It's all I've got in the world--all--all! That, and the three per cent,
it brings in. My play--they're going to produce it in the fall. You
won't like it. It's the old ideas, the old Broadway stuff.”
“But you've changed.”
“Yes. Since I wrote it. It doesn't matter. It may bring money, it may
not. Likely not. Ninety per cent, of 'em fail, you know. This is all
I've got--every cent All my energy and what courage I've got goes after
it--into The Nature Film Producing Company. Please understand that! I'm
leading up to something.”
She looked a thought disturbed. He rushed on.
“Zanin's got it into his head that he's going to take you south to do
all the outdoor scenes.”
“I haven't agreed to that. He feels that it's necessary.”
“Yes, he does. He's sincere enough. Remember, I'm talking impersonally.
As I told you, we've got to be businesslike--and frank. We've got to!”
“Of course,” said she.
“I'm beginning to see that Zanin is just as much of a hero with other
people's money as he is with his own.”
“That goes with the temperament, I suppose.”
“Undoubtedly. But now, see! That trip south--taking actors and camera
man and outfit--staying around at hotels--railway fares--it will cost a
fortune.”
“Oh,” said she, very grave, “I hadn't realized that.”
“If we can just keep our heads---more carefully--spend the money where
it will really show on the film--don't you see, we can swing it, and
when we've done it, it won't belong to the Interstellar people--or to
Silverstone; it'll be ours. And that means it'll be what we--you--want
it to be and not something vulgar and--and nasty. The other way, it we
give Zanin his head and begin spending money magnificently, we'll run
out, and then the price of a little more money, if we can get it at all,
will be, the control.”
Re reached down for the books, threw them back into the drawer, slammed
it and locked it.
“Yes,” he said, “that's all I've got. I pledge it all, here and now,
to the dream you've dreamed. All I ask is, keep in mind what may happen
when it's gone.”
She rose now; stood thinking; then drew on her lam o'shanter and reached
for her coat.
“Let me think this over,” she said soberly.
“We must be businesslike,” said he. “Impersonal.”
“Yes,” said she, and stepped over to the fire, low-burning now with a
mass of red coals.
Peter's eyes, deep, gloomy behind the big glasses, followed her. He came
slowly and stood by her.
“I must go,” she said gently. “It'll he eleven first thing we known It
would be a bit too amusing to be put out.”
They lingered.
Then Peter found himself lifting his arms. He tried to keep them down,
but up, up they came--very slowly, he thought.
He caught her shoulders, swung her around, drew her close. It seemed to
him afterward, during one of the thousand efforts he made to construct
a mental picture of the scene, that she must have been resisting him and
that he must have been using his strength; but if this was so it made no
difference. Her head was in the hollow' of his arm. He bent down, drew
her head up, kissed, as it happened, her nose; forced her face about and
at the second effort kissed her lips. If she was struggling--and Peter
will never be quite clear on that point--she was unable to resist him.
He kissed her again. And then again. A triumphant fury was upon him.
But suddenly it passed. He almost pushed her away from him; left her
standing, limp and breathless, by the mantel, while he threw himself on
the couch and plunged his face into his hands.
“You'll hate me,” he groaned. “You won't ever speak to me again. You'll
think I'm that sort of man, and you'll be right in thinking so. What's
worse, you'll believe I thought you were the sort to let me do it. And
all the time I love you more than--Oh God, what made me do it! What
could I have been thinking of! I was mad!”
Then the room was still.