|SUE felt that the woman was about to speak, and suddenly she knew that
she could not listen. Fighting down the rather terrifying force of her
emotions, fighting tears even, she rushed to the door, mutely brushed
Mrs. Wilde aside and ran down the stairs. Sue let herself out on the
front porch, closed the screen door and leaned hack against it, clinging
to the knob, breathless, unstrung. The eyes of the Street would be on
her, of course. She thought of this and dropped into one of the porch
chairs.
A man turned the corner--a tall, rather young man who wore a shapeless
suit of gray, a limp collar, a flowing bow tie, a soft hat; and who had
a trick of throwing his leg out and around as he walked and toeing in
with the right font.
He turned in, grinning cheerfully and waving a lean hand. He mounted the
steps. Sue sat erect, gripping the arms of her chair, eyes bright, and
laughed nervously.
“Henry,” she cred, “you're hopeless! Where's the new suit? You're not a
bit respectable.”
He seated himself on the porch railing and gazed ruefully downward.
“Sue, I'm sorry. Plum forgot. And I swore I'd never disgrace you again.
I _am_ hopeless. You're right.” Then he laughed--irresponsibly, happily,
like a boy.
She stared at him. “What is it, Henry?”
“Everything, child! You see before you the man who has just conquered
the world. All of it. And no worlds left. Mr. Alexander H. Bates.”
“Oh,” said she, thinking swiftly back--“your novel!”
“Right. My novel.”
“But it isn't finished, Henry.”
“Not quite half done.”
“Then, how can--”
He raised a long hand and rose. He gazed down benignly at her. “The
greatest publisher in these U. S. has had the good fortune to read the
first fourteen chapters. A whisper blew to me yesterday of the way
things were going--before I wrote you. But the word this morning was not
a whisper. Susan. It was an ear-splitting yell. Mister Greatest
Publisher personally sent for me. Told me he had been looking for
me--exactly me!--these twenty-eight years. And here I am. Money now if I
need it. And do I need it? God, do I need it! And fame later--when I get
the book done. Now, child, tell me how glad you are. At once.”
He walked the porch; came back and stood before her; grinned and
grinned.
She could not find words. Soberly her eyes followed him. Her set mouth
softened. Her tightened muscles relaxed until she was leaning back limp
in the chair.
“Isn't it the devil, Sue!” said he. “The one thing my heart was set on
was to wear that good suit. Sue, I was going to put it all over this
suburb of yours--just smear 'em! And look--I have to go and forget.
Nothing comes out to see you but the same disgraceful old gipsy. How
could I?”
Sue leaned forward. “Henry, I'm glad. I love this old suit. But there's
a button coming loose--there, on your coat.”
“I know, Sue. I sewed at it, but it doesn't hold. I'm meaning to stop at
a tailor's, next time I'm over toward Sixth Avenue.”
She was studying his face now. “You're happy, Henry,” she said.
“Well--in a sense! In a sense!”
“It is a good thing you came. I was forgetting about happiness.”
“I know. One does.” He consulted his watch. “It's five-twenty-two now,
Sue. And we're catching the five-thirty-eight back to town.”
She did not speak. But her eyes met his, squarely; held to them. It
was a forthright eye-to-eye gaze, of the sort that rarely occurs, even
between friends, and that is not soon forgotten. Sue had been white,
sitting there, when he came and after. Now her color returned.
He bent over and took her elbow. The touch of his hand was a luxury. Her
lids drooped; her color rose and rose. She let him almost lift her from
the chair. Then she went in for her hat and coat; still silent. They
caught the five-thirty-eight.
“What are we going in for?” she asked, listless again, when they had
found a seat in the train.
“Oh, come! You know! To see the almost famous Sue Wilde of Greenwich
Village--”
“Not of the Village now, Henry!”
“--in the film sensation of the decade. _Nature_, suggested and directed
by Jacob Zanin, written by Eric Mann, presented by the Nature Film
Producing Company, Adolph Silverstone, President. You see, I've been
getting you up, Sue.”
She was staring cut the window gloomily.
“I swore I wouldn't go, Henry.”
“But that would be a shame.”
“I know--of course. But--Henry, you don't understand. Nobody
understands! I'm not sure I can stand it to sit there and see myself
doing those things--and have to talk with people I know, and--”
“I think I could smuggle you in,” said he, thoughtful. “This isn't a
little movie house, you know. It's a regular theater. There ought to be
a separate gallery entrance. That would make it easy.”
She changed the subject. “Where shall we eat, Henry?”
“The Parisian?”
She shook her head. “Let's go to Jim's.”
To Jim's they went; and it seemed to him whimsically watchful eyes
that she had an occasional moment of being her old girlish self as they
strolled through the wandering streets of Greenwich Village and stepped
down into the basement oyster and chop house that had made its name a
full generation before Socialism was more than a foreign-sounding
word and two generations before cubism, futurism, vorticism, imagism,
Nietzsche, the I. W. W., Feminism and the Russians had swept in among
the old houses and tenements to engage in the verbal battle royal that
has since converted the quaint old quarter from a haunt of rather
gently artistic bohemianism into a shambles of dead and dismembered and
bleeding theories. Jim's alone had not changed. Even the old waiter
who so far as any one knew had always been there, shuffled through the
sprinkling of sawdust on the floor; and the familiar fat grandson of the
original Jim was still to be seen standing by the open grill that was
set in the wall at the rear end of the oyster bar.
The Worm suggested thick mutton chops and the hugely delectable baked
potatoes without which Jim's would not have been Jim's. Sue smiled
rather wanly and assented. Her air of depression disturbed him; his own
buoyancy sagged; he found it necessary now and then to manufacture talk.
This was so foreign to the quality of their friendship that he finally
laid down his knife and fork, rested his elbows on the table and
considered her.
“Sue,” he remarked, “it's getting to you, isn't it--the old Village.”
She tried to smile, and looked off toward the glowing grill.
“Why don't you come around and have a look at the rooms? I haven't
changed them. Only your pictures are gone. Even your books are on the
mantel where you used to keep them. It might hook things up for us,
so we could get to feeling and talking like ourselves. What do you
say--could you stand it?”
She tried to look at him, tried to be her old frank self; but without
marked success. The tears were close. She had to compress her lips and
study the table-cloth for a long moment before she could speak.
“I couldn't, Henry.” Then with an impulse that was more like the Sue
that he knew, she reached out and rested her hand on his arm. “Try not
to mind me, Henry. I can't help it--whatever it is. I don't seem to have
much fight left in me. It's plain enough that I shouldn't have tried to
come in. It was just a crazy reaction, anyway. You caught me when I had
been hurt. I was all mixed....”
She was excluding him from her little world now; and this was least like
her of all the things she had been saying and doing. But if the Worm was
hurt he did not show it. He merely said:
“Sue, of course, you've been going through a nervous crisis, and it has
taken a lot out of you.”
“A lot, Henry,” she murmured.
“One thing strikes me--superficial, of course--I doubt if you've had
enough exercise this summer.”
“I know,” said she. “To-day I tried a few steps--that--old Russian
dance, you know--”
“I'd love to see you do it, Sue.”
She shook her head. “I've lost it--everything.”
“You were stiff, of course.”
“It was painful. I just couldn't dance. I don't like to think of it,
Henry.”
He smiled. “One thing--I've decided to make you walk to the theater.
It's two miles. That'll stir your pulse a bit. And we'll start now.”
She looked soberly at him. “You've lost nothing, Henry. The work you've
done hasn't taken it out of you.”
“Not a hit. On the contrary, Sue.”
“I know. I feel it.”
“No more of the old aimlessness, Susan. No more books--except a look at
yours now and then, because they were yours. God, girl, I'm creating!
I'm living! I'm saying something. And I really seem to have it to say.
That's what stirs you, puts a tingle into your blood.”
She studied him a moment longer, then lowered her eyes. “Let's be
starting,” she said.
“Up Fifth Avenue, Sue?”
“Oh, yes, Henry!”
They walked eastward on Waverly Place, across Sixth Avenue. She paused
here and looked up almost fondly at the ugly, shadowy elevated structure
in the twilight. A train roared by.
“I haven't seen the city for two months,” she said.
“That's a long time---for a live person,” said he.
The dusty foliage of Washington Square appeared ahead. Above it like a
ghost of the historic beauty of the old Square, loomed the marble arch.
The lights of early evening twinkled from street poles and shone warmly
from windows.
They turned up the Avenue whose history is the history of a century of
New York life. Through the wide canyon darted the taxis and limousines
that marked the beginnings of the city's night activity. The walks were
thronged with late workers hurrying to their homes in the tenements to
the south and west.
The Parisian restaurant was bright with silver, linen and electric
lights behind the long French windows. He caught Sue giving the old
place a sober, almost wistful glance.
At Fourteenth Street they encountered the ebb of the turbid human tide
that at nightfall flows east and west across the great Avenue and picked
their way through.
Above Fourteenth Street they entered the deep dim canyon of loft
buildings. The sweatshops were here from which every noon and every
night poured forth the thousands upon thousands of toilers--underfed,
undersized, prominent of nose, cheek-bones and lips, gesticulating,
spreading and shambling of gait, filling the great Avenue with a low
roar of voluble talk in a strange guttural tongue--crowding so densely
that a chance pedestrian could no more than drift with the slow current.
The nightly torrent was well over when Sue and the Worm walked through
the blighted district, but each was familiar with the problem; each
had played some small part in the strikes that stirred the region at
intervals. Sue indeed pointed out the spot, just below Twenty-third
Street where she had been arrested for picketing. And the Worm noted
that she had steadied perceptibly as the old associations bit by bit
reasserted their claims on her life. She was chatting with him now,
nearly in the old, easy, forthright way. By the time the huge white
facade of the Public Library came into view, with its steps, terraces,
railings and misty trees, and the crosstown cars were clanging by
just ahead at Forty-second Street, and they were meeting an occasional
bachelor diner-out hurrying past in dinner-coat and straw hat, the Worm
found himself chuckling again. They turned west on Forty-second
Street, crossing Sixth Avenue, Broadway and Seventh Avenue, passing
the glittering hotel on a famous corner and heading for the riotously
whirling, darting, blazing devices in colored light by means of which
each theater of the congested group sought to thrust itself most
violently upon the bewildered optic nerves of the passer-by.
Opposite one of these the Worm took Sue's arm, very gently, and halted
her on the curb. The evening throng brushed past, heedless of the simply
dressed girl who yet was oddly, boyishly slim and graceful of body, and
who was striking of countenance despite the weariness evident about
the rather strongly modeled mouth and the large, thoughtful green eyes;
heedless, as well, of the lank, shabbily dressed young man who held
her arm and bent earnestly over her. They were atoms in the careering
metropolis, uncounted polyps in the blind, swarming, infinitely
laborious structure that is New York. And they thought themselves, each,
the center of the universe.
“Sue, dear,” said he, “here we are. You're about to see yourself. It
will be an experience. And it won't be what you're thinking and--yes,
dreading. I've seen it--”
She glanced up in surprise.
“Last night--an exhibition to the newspaper men.” The emotion in his
voice was evident. She glanced up again, something puzzled. “It was
last night--afterward--that I decided on bringing you in. I wouldn't for
anything in the world have missed having you here to-night. Though,
at that, if Mr. Greatest Publisher hadn't warmed my soul with that
wonderful blast of hot air I probably shouldn't have had the nerve. Of
course I knew it would be an ordeal. It's been on my conscience every
minute. But I had to bring you, and I believe you'll understand why, two
hours from now. I'm hoping you will, Sue.”
He hesitated. She waited. Suddenly then, he hurried her across the busy
street and into the dim shelter of the gallery entrance.
“Zanin was out in front,” said he, “With some of the newspaper boys, but
I got you by.”
Many individuals and groups were detaching themselves from the endless
human stream and turning in between the six-foot lithographs at the
main entrance to the theater. More and more steadily as Sue and the Worm
stood in the shadow of the lesser doorway they had chosen, the crowds
poured in. Others were turning in here toward the gallery and tramping
up the long twisting stairway.
“Big house!” chuckled the Worm. “Oh, they'll put it across, Sue. You
wait! Zanin's publicity has been wonderful. It would have disturbed you,
girl--but it's rather a shame you haven't followed it.”
Sue seemed not to hear him. She was leaning out from the doorway, trying
to make out the subjects of the two big lithographs. She finally slipped
across to the curb and studied them a moment. Both were of herself,
half-clad in the simple garment of an island savage; over each picture
was the one word, “NATURE,” under each the two words, “SUE WILDE.”
She hurried back and started up the stairs. The Worm saw that she was
flushing again and that her mouth wore the set look.
On a landing, holding her back from a group ahead, he said: “Do you
know, Sue, part of the disturbance you feel is just a shrinking from
conspicuousness, from the effective thing. Self-consciousness! Isn't it,
now?”
But she turned away and kept on.