|THE spectacle stopped Peter's brain. Among all the wild pictures that
had rushed helter skelter through his overwrought mind of late there had
been nothing like this. Why, it was only a matter of days since he and
Zanin had pummeled each other to an accompaniment of broken chairs,
overturned tables, wrecked china, torn clothing, actual blood. He had
pictured Sue, a confused disillusioned girl, rushing back to her home;
Zanin a marked man, even in the Village, cowering away from his fellows.
But this!
They passed the corner. With a great gulp of sheer emotion Peter
followed, almost running. They turned into the Parisian---but not into
the familiar basement. Instead they mounted the wide front steps, as
matter-of-fact as any two Upper West Siders out of a limousine. Peter
pressed his hands to his eyes. He looked again. They had vanished within
the building.
Peter walked back and forth. He told himself that he must think. But
the fact clear even to his overwhelmed consciousness was that he was not
thinking and that there was no immediate prospect of his being able to
think. He went a whole block up the side street, stemming the thick tide
of Jewish working girls from University Place and the lower Broadway
district and men in overalls--muttering aloud, catching himself,
compressing his lips, then muttering again. “She played with me!” So ran
the muttering. “She is utterly lacking in responsibility, in any
sense of obligation. She lacks spirituality. That is it, she lacks
spirituality. She has no fineness. She is hard--hard! She is
drifting like a leaf on these crazy Village currents of irrepressible
self-indulgence. I tried to save her--God knows I tried! I did my best!
I can't be blamed if she goes to pieces now! I can do no more--I must
let her go!” But even while he spoke he gulped again; his face, nearly
gray now, twisting painfully. He suddenly turned and rushed back to the
Parisian.
He paused at the side doorway and peered in. Hy was not in evidence.
A later glance, from within the barroom, disclosed that slightly
illuminated young man in the corner room of the restaurant hanging over
the table at which the taciturn Sumner Smith was still trying to read
_Le Sourire_.
Peter went on into the crooked passage, passed the open doors of two
eating rooms where only the first early diners had as yet drifted in,
found himself at the door of the barber shop, stopped short, then seeing
the familiar figure of Maria Tonifetti approaching her table in the
corner, dodged back and into the washroom. Here the boy named Anatole
said, “Good evening, Meester Mann,” and filled a basin for him. Peter
dipped his hands into the warm water and washed them. He was surprised
to find his forehead dripping with sweat. He dried his hands, removed
his glasses and scrubbed his face. He turned on the cold water, wet a
towel and pressed it to his temples and the back of his head, taking
care not to wet his collar. His hands were trembling. And that impulse
to talk aloud was rising uncontrollably. He went back to the corridor;
stood motionless, breathing deeply; recalled with the force of an
inspiration that Napoleon had feared nothing, not even the ladies
with whose lives his own had become so painfully entangled and walked
deliberately, staring straight before him, past that barber shop door.
At the foot of the crooked stairway he paused again. And again his face
was twisting. “I've got to make the one more effort,” he said. “It isn't
for myself, God knows! I gave her my love--I pledged her my life--I have
suffered for her--I would have saved her if she had played fair! I've
got to make this last effort!”
He mounted the stairs, crowded past the telephone booths, staging at
them as he went. They conveyed a suggestion to his mind. He stepped
cautiously to the restaurant door, nodded to the maître d'hôtel and
glanced in. The nearer room was empty; but beyond the second doorway,
Zanin's shoulder and profile were visible. Sue he could not see, but
she must be sitting there. Yes, Zanin was leaning forward, was speaking,
even smiling, in that offhand way of his!
Peter, flushing now, turned away; confronted the boy called Raoul;
pressed a silver quarter into his palm. “Page, Miss Wilde,” he breathed
huskily. “Tell her she is wanted on the phone.”
The boy named Raoul obeyed. At the Parisian it is not regarded as
surprising that a gentleman should wish to speak to a lady.
Peter rushed around the turn and Waited at the farther end of the row of
booths.
Finally he heard her step.
When she saw him she stopped. “Oh,” she said, “Peter!” And she frowned a
very little.
“It was a deception,” he broke out, “but I had to see you, Sue! I know
you are with Zanin. I saw you come in. I don't see how you can do it,
but we'll let that pass. I--”
“What is it, Peter? What do you want with me?”
“Oh, Sue! Are you as hard as that? What do I want of you! Good God! When
I see you, after all I have suffered for your sake, plunging back into
this life--taking up with that crock Zanin as if nothing had happened,
as if--Why, he--”
Sue grew a little white about the mouth and temples. She glanced back at
the empty passage.
“Peter,” she said, curiously quiet, “if you think it fair to follow me
into a public place, if you really mean to make another hideous scene,
you will have to come into the dining-room to do it.”
He reached out, caught her arm. She wrenched away and left him there.
For a long moment he stared out the window at the rush of early evening
traffic on the Avenue, his hands clenched at his sides. Then he hurried
past the office and down to the street.
He stood on the curb and addressed a rattling autobus. “It is
unbearable--unbelievable. The girl has lost all sense of the fitness
of things. She is beside herself. I must act--act! I must act at
once--to-night!”
People were passing. He turned, suddenly aware of the bustlingly
unsympathetic, world about him. Had any one heard his voice? Apparently
none had. All were hurrying on, up-town, down-town. Standing there on
the curb he could see in at the basement window. Sumner Smith was alone
at last and deep in _Le Sourire_. Hy had drifted away--back to the bar,
doubtless.
Peter, you recall, was a genius. As a genius he fed on his emotional
reactions; they were his life. Therefore do not judge him too harshly
for the wild thought that at this point rushed over his consciousness
with a force that left him breathless. He was frightened and by himself.
But there was a barbarous exaltation in his fear. “It'll bring her to
her senses,” he thought. “I've got to do it. Then she'll listen to me.
She'll _have_ to listen to me then.”
Peter appeared in the corner room down-stairs, almost as curiously quiet
as Sue had been in their brief talk. He, too, was rather pale. He came
over to Sumner Smith's table, dropped down opposite the fat journalist,
beckoned a waiter, ordered a light dinner, and, that done, proffered a
cigarette.
“I've got a tip for you, Smith,” he said, “a real one. If _The Evening
Earth_ hasn't lost its vigor you can put it over big.”
The fat man merely lighted his cigarette and looked inscrutably over it
at Peter's drawn face.
“I can't give you the details. You'll have to take my word for them. Did
you ever hear a question raised regarding the Reverend Doctor Wilde?”
Sumner Smith glanced out toward the bar and Hy. The corners of his mouth
twitched. “His boss?”
“Right. Editor of _My Brother's Keeper_. Author of the famous missionary
sermons.”
“There was a little talk last year. You mean the big mission funds he
has raised?”
Peter nodded. His eyes were overbright now. “Nobody has the evidence,
Mann. It isn't news as it stands.”
“Suppose you could _make_ it news--big news.”
“Oh, of course--” the journalist gestured with his cigarette.
“Well, you can. To-night. Go straight to his house--over in Stuyvesant
Square, not five minutes in a taxi, not ten on the cars--and ask him
point-blank to consent to an accounting. Just ask him.” Sumner Smith
mused. “It might be worth trying,” he said.
“Take my word for it.”
The journalist paid his check, rose, nodded to an acquaintance across
the room, said: “I'll think it over, Mann. Much obliged--” and sauntered
out.
This was unsatisfactory. Peter, crestfallen, forgot that Sumner Smith
was hardened to sensations. And peering gloomily after the great
reporter, he only half saw the man pause at the small desk near the bar,
then speak casually to the now somewhat wobbly Hy Lowe: he only half
heard a taxi pull up outside, a door slamming, the sudden grinding of
gears as the taxi darted away. There were so many noises outside: you
hardly noticed one more.
The waiter brought his dinner. He bolted it with unsteady hands. “I must
think this all out,” he told himself. “If Sumner Smith won't do it,
one of the other _Earth_ men will. Or some one on _The Morning
Continental._”
He lit a cigar, sat bark and gazed out at the dim street where dimmer
figures and vehicles moved forever by. It occurred to him that thus
would a man sit and smoke and meditate who was moved by an overmastering
love to enact a tremendous deed. But it was difficult to sustain the
pose with his temples throbbing madly and a lump in his throat. His
heart, too, was skipping beats, he thought. Surreptitiously he felt his
left wrist.
He beckoned the waiter; ordered paper and ink. The lump in his throat
was suddenly almost a pain. He wrote--
“It was wrong of me, of course, Sue, dear. But I really must see you.
Even though your hostile attitude makes it difficult to be myself. There
is trouble impending. It concerns you vitally. If you will only hear me;
meet me for half an hour after dinner, I know I can help you more than
you dream.
“I am not speaking for myself but for you. In all this dreadful trouble
between us, there is little I can ask of you. Only this--give me half an
hour. I will wait down-stairs for an answer. P. E. M.”
He sent this up-stairs. Then followed it as far as the telephones,
called up his old acquaintance, Markham, of _The Morning Continental_,
and whispered darkly to him over the wire.
As he ran down-stairs and dodged past the barber shop door, he became
conscious that the dinner he had eaten felt now like a compact,
insoluble ball in the region of his solar plexus. So he stopped at the
bar and gulped a bicarbonate of soda while buying a highball for Hy Lowe
whom he found confidentially informing the barkeeper of his raise from
forty-five a week to sixty.
Then he resumed his seat by the window in the corner room; tried to find
amusement in the pages of _Le Sourire_; failed; watched the door with
wild eyes, starting up whenever a waiter entered the room, only to sink
back limply at each fresh disappointment.
He wondered suddenly about Sumner Smith. What if he had followed the
trail! This thought brought something like a chill. If he, Peter, an old
newspaper man, were to be caught in the act of passing on an “exclusive”
tip to friends on competing papers--violating the sacred basis of
newspaper ethics! You couldn't tell about Smith. He rarely showed
interest, never emotion, seldom even smiled. He would receive the news
that Emperor William had declared himself King of All the Americas with
that same impassive front.
Peter looked at his watch. It was twenty-five minutes of seven. He had
thought it at least eight.
One thing was certain--he must get his bags out of that awful barber
shop before it closed. Accordingly he had a messenger called to take
them, over to the rooms.