|IT was the opening of Peter Ericson (“Eric”,) Mann's new play, _The
Truffler_, at the Astoria Theater on Broadway where the signs never fail
and where to have your name blazoned in electric lights above a theater
entrance is to be advertised to a restless but numerically impressive
world. Peter's name was up there now. It was, you might have supposed,
his big night. But Peter was not among the eight or nine hundred
correctly dressed men and women that pressed in expectantly through the
wide doorway. Instead, clad in his every-day garments, an expression
of ill-controlled irritation on his lung face, moody dark eyes peering
resentfully out through his large horn-rimmed glasses, he sat alone in
the gallery, second row from the front, on the aisle.
Four rows behind him and a little off to the left, sat a good-looking
young woman, an Italian girl apparently, who stared down at him in some
agitation. She, too, was alone. He had not seen her when he came in; he
did not know that she was there.
The two seats in the front row across the aisle were vacant until just
before the musicians climbed from the mysterious region beneath the
stage into the orchestra pit down front and the asbestos curtain slid
upward and out of sight. Then a rather casually dressed young couple
came down the aisle and took them.
Peter, when he saw who they were, stiffened, bit his lip, turned away
and partly hid his face with his program. The girl was Sue Wilde, the
one person on earth who had the power of at once rousing and irritating
him merely by appearing within his range of vision. Particularly when
she appeared smiling, alert and alive with health and spirit, in the
company of another man. When a girl has played with your deepest
feelings, has actually engaged herself to marry you, only to slip out of
your life without so much as consulting you, when she has forced you to
take stern measures to bring her to her senses--only to turn up, after
all, radiant, just where you have stolen to be alone with your otherwise
turbulent emotions--well, it may easily be disturbing.
The other man, on this occasion, was the Worm.
Peter knew that the Worm, like Hy, had disapproved of the steps he had
taken to waken the truffling Sue to a sense of duty, the steps he had
been forced to take. It is not pleasant to be disapproved of by old
companions; particularly when you were so clearly, scrupulously right in
all you have done. Still more unpleasant is it when one of the
disapprovers appears with the girl whose selfish irresponsibility caused
all the trouble. Sue's evident happiness was the climax. It seemed to
Peter that she might at least have the decency to look--well, chastened.
I spoke a moment back of other disturbances within Peter's highly
temperamental breast. They had to do with the play. The featured
actress, Grace Derring, also was potentially a disturber. If you have
followed Peter's emotionally tortuous career, you will recall Grace.
With his kisses warm on her lips, protesting her love for him, she had
rewritten his play behind his back, tearing it to pieces, introducing
new and quite false episodes, altering the very natures of his
painstakingly wrought out characters, obliterating whatever of himself
had, at the start, been in the piece. He had been forced to wash his
hands of the whole thing. He had kept away from Neuerman and
Grace Derring all these painful months. He had answered neither
Neuerman's business letters nor Grace's one or two guarded little notes.
It had perturbed turn to see his name used lavishly (Neuerman was
a persistent and powerful advertiser) on the bill-boards and in the
papers. It had perturbed him to-night to see it on the street in blazing
light. And now it was on the program in his hand!... To be sure he had
not taken steps to prevent this use of his name. He had explained to
himself that Neuerman had the right under the contract and could hardly
be restrained. But he was perturbed.
So here was the great night! Down there on the stage, in a few minutes
now, Grace Derring, whose life had twisted so painfully close to his,
would begin enacting the play she and Neuerman had rebuilt from his own
inspired outburst. Up here in the gallery, across the aisle, one row
down, sat at this moment, the girl who had unwittingly inspired him to
write it; She was smiling happily now, that girl. She did not know
that the original play--_The Trufiler_ as he had conceived and written
it--was aimed straight at herself. It was nothing if not a picture
of the irresponsible, selfish bachelor girl who by her insistence on
“living her own life” wrecks the home of her parents. Peter's mouth set
rather grimly as he thought of this now. As he saw it, Sue had done just
that. Suddenly--he was looking from behind his hand at her shapely
head; her hair had grown to an almost manageable length--a warm thought
fluttered to life in his heart. Perhaps it wasn't, even yet, too late!
Perhaps enough of his original message had survived the machinations
of Neuerman and Grace Derring to strike through and touch this girl's
heart--sober her--make her think! It might even work out that... he had
to set his teeth hard on the thoughts that came rushing now. It was as
if a door had opened, letting loose the old forces, the old dreams (that
is, the particular lot that had concerned his relations with Sue) that
he had thought dead, long since, of inanition.... Confused with
all these dreams and hopes, these resentments and indignations, was a
thought that had been thrusting itself upon him of late as he followed
Neuerman's publicity. It was that the play might succeed. However bad
Grace had made it, it might succeed. This would mean money, a little
fame, a thrilling sense of position and power.
Sue glanced around. Her elbow gently pressed that of the Worm. “It's
Peter,” she said low. “He doesn't see us.”
The Worm glanced around now. They were both looking at Peter, rather
eagerly, smiling. The eminent playwright gazed steadily off across the
house.
“He looks all in,” observed the Worm.
“Poor Peter”--this from Sue--“these first nights are a frightful
strain.”
“Pete!” the Worm called softly.
He had to see them now. He came across the aisle, shook hands, peered
gloomily, self-consciously down at them.
“Hiding?” asked Sue, all smiles.
Peter's gloom deepened. “Oh, no,” he replied.
“Evidently you're not figuring on taking the author's call,” said the
Worm, surveying Peter's business suit.
The playwright raised his hand, moved it lightly as if tossing away an
inconsiderable thing.
“Why should I? I'm not interested. It's not my play.”
The Worm was smiling. What was the matter with them--grinning like
monkeys! Couldn't they at least show a decent respect for his feelings?
“There is a rather wide-spread notion to the contrary,” said the Worm.
“Oh, yes”--again that gesture from Peter---“my name is on it. But it is
not my play.”
“Whose is it then?”
Peter shrugged. “How should I know? Haven't been near them for five
months. They were all rewriting it then. They never grasped it.
Neuerman, to this day, I'm sure, has no idea what it is about. Can't say
I'm eager to view the remains.”
The orchestra struck up. Peter dropped back into his seat. He raised his
program again, and again watched Sue from behind it. He had managed to
keep up a calm front, but at considerable cost to his already racked
nervous system. Sue's smile, her fresh olive skin, her extraordinary
green eyes, the subtly pleasing poise of her head on her perfect neck,
touched again a certain group of associated emotions that had slumbered
of late. Surely she had not forgotten---the few disturbed, thrilling
days of their engagement--their first kiss, that had so surprised them
both, up in his rooms....
She couldn't have forgotten! Perhaps his mutilated message _might_ touch
and stir her. Perhaps again....
Suddenly Peter's program fluttered to the aisle. He drew an envelope
from one pocket, a pencil from another; stared a moment, openly, at her
hair and the curve of her cheek; and wrote, furiously, a sonnet.
He crossed out, interlined, rephrased. It was a passionate enough little
uprush of emotion, expressing very well what he felt on seeing again,
after long absence, a woman he had loved--hearing her voice, looking
at her hair and the shadows of it on her temple and cheek--remembering,
suddenly, with a stab of pain, the old yearnings, torments and
exaltations. Peter couldn't possibly have been so excited as he was
to-night without writing some-thing. His emotions had to come out.
The lights went down. The music was hushed. There was a moment of
dim silence; then the curtain slowly rose. The sophisticated,
sensation-hungry nine hundred settled back in their seats and dared the
play to interest them.
I have always thought that there was a touch of pure genius in the job
Grace Derring did with _The Truffler_. Particularly in her rewriting
of the principal part. On the side of acting, it was unquestionably
the best thing she had done--perhaps the best she will ever do. The
situation was odd, at the start. Peter--writing, preaching, shouting at
Sue---had let his personal irritation creep everywhere into the structure
of the play. He was telling her what he thought she was--a truffler, a
selfish girl, avoiding all of life's sober duties, interested only in
the pursuit of dainties, experimenting with pleasurable emotions. He had
written with heat and force; the structure of the piece was effective
enough. The difficulty (which Grace had been quick to divine) was
that he had made an unsympathetic character of his girl. The practical
difficulty, I mean. I am not sure that the girl as Peter originally
drew her was not a really brilliant bit of characterization. But on
the American stage, as in the American novel, you must choose, always,
between artistic honesty and “sympathy.” The part of commercial wisdom
is to choose the latter. You may draw a harsh but noble character,
a weak but likable character, you may picture cruelty and vice as a
preliminary to Wesleyan conviction of sin and reformation; but never
the unregenerate article. You may never be “unpleasant.” All this, of
course, Peter knew. The adroit manipulating of sympathy was the thing,
really, he did best. But when he wrote _The Truffler_ he was too excited
over Sue and too irritated to write anything but his real thoughts.
Therefore the play had more power, more of freshness and the surface
sense of life, than anything else he had written up to that time. And
therefore it was commercially impossible.
Now Grace Herring was a bachelor girl herself.
She knew the life. She had foregone the traditional duties--marriage,
home-building, motherhood--in order to express her own life and gifts.
She had loved--unwisely, too well--Peter. Like Peter, she approached the
play in a state of nerves. As a practical player she knew that the
girl would never win her audience unless grounds could be found for
the audience to like her despite her Nietzschean philosophy. What she
perhaps saw less clearly was that in her conception of the part she had
to frame an answer to Peter's charges. Probably, almost certainly,
she supposed the play something of a personal attack on her own life.
Therefore she added her view of the girl to Peter's, and played her as
a counter attack. If it had been real in the writing to Peter, it was
quite as real in the playing to Grace. The result of this conflict of
two aroused emotional natures was a brilliant theatrical success. Though
I am not sure that the play, in its final form, meant anything. I am
not sure. It was rather a baffling thing. But it stirred you, and in the
third act, made you cry. Everybody cried in the third act.
The curtain came slowly down on the first act. The lights came slowly
up. A house that had been profoundly still, absorbed in the clean-cut
presentment of apparently real people, stirred, rustled, got up, moved
into the aisles, burst into talk that rapidly swelled into a low roar.
The applause came a little late, almost as if it were an after-thought,
and then ran wild. There were seven curtain calls.
Down-stairs, two critics--blasé young men, wandered out into the lobby.
“Derring's good,” observed one. “This piece may land her solid on
Broadway.”
“First act's all right,” replied the other casually, lighting a
cigarette. “I didn't suppose Pete Mann could do it.”
Up in the gallery, Sue, looking around, pressed suddenly close to the
Worm, and whispered, “Henry--quick! Look at Peter!”
The playwright stood before his aisle seat, staring with wild eyes up at
the half-draped plaster ladies on the proscenium arch. A line of persons
in his row were pressing toward the aisle. A young woman, next to him,
touched his arm and said, “Excuse me, please!” Sue and the Worm heard
her but not Peter. He continued to stare--a tall conspicuous man, in
black-rimmed glasses, a black ribbon hanging from them down his long
face. His hand raised to his chest, clutched what appeared to be an
envelope, folded the long way. Plainly he was beside himself.
The crowd in the aisle saw him now and stared. There was whispering.
Some one laughed.
Again the young woman touched his arm.
He turned, saw that he was blocking the row, noted the eyes on him.
became suddenly red, and stuffing the folded envelope into his pocket
and seizing his hat, rapidly elbowed his way up the aisle.
Immediately following this incident attention was shifted to another.
A good-looking young woman, apparently an Italian, who had been sitting
four rows behind Peter and oft to the left, was struggling, in some
evident excitement, to get out and up the aisle. Her impetuosity made
her as conspicuous as Peter had been.
Sue, still watching the crowd that had closed in behind the flying
Peter, noted the fresh commotion.
“Quite an evening!” she said cheerfully. “Seems to be a lady playwright
in our midst, as well.”
The Worm regarded the new center of interest and grew thoughtful. He
knew the girl. It was Maria Tonifetti, manicurist at the sanitary barber
shop of Marius. He happened, too, to be aware that Peter knew Maria. He
had seen Pete in there getting his nails done. Once, this past summer,
he had observed them together on a Fifth Avenue bus. And on a Sunday
evening he had met them face to face at Coney Island, and Peter had gone
red and hurried by. Now he watched Maria slipping swiftly up the aisle,
where Peter had disappeared only a moment before. He did not tell Sue
that he knew who she was.