SUE and the Worm had no more than seated themselves at the Muscovy when Zanin came briskly in, hat in hand—still in the wrinkled old suit, still wearing the gray sweater for a waistcoat—but keen of face, buoyant even. He threaded his way between the tables, nodding here and there in response to the cries of “Hello, Jacob!”—came straight to Sue, and, with a casual greeting for the Worm, bent over and claimed her ear.
“Sue,” he said low; “I called up, then took a chance on finding you here. I've sent the bill to Peter. And I've told him of the break in our plans. The lawyer for the Interstellar people is coming with the new contract—meets me up-stairs in the club. I've told Peter to be here at eight. But I've got to know about you. Is there any danger that you won't go through—finish the pictures?”
“You mean—in case—”
He nodded. “If Peter and I smash up. Whatever happens. I can't see ahead myself. But the pictures are half done, and they're all you. It would be serious if you—”
Sue silenced him with a nervous glance about; compressed her lips; turned her fork over and over on the table; then slowly nodded. “I'll finish,” she said very soberly.
“All right,” he replied. “I knew you would, of course. But I had to ask. Things have changed so.... I'll be down later.”
Sue watched him, still turning the fork with tense fingers, as he made his way to the door, paused for a word with one of the girl waitresses—an impoverished young writer and idealist, Jewish, rather pretty, who had played with them at the Crossroads—and finally disappeared in the hall, turning back toward the stairway that led up to the rooms of the Free woman's Club.
The Worm was studying the menu. He waited until her eyes and her thoughts returned to the table, then looked up at her with a quiet grin. “How about food, Sue?” said he.
She gazed at him, collected her thoughts, looked down at the card. Then she made an effort to smile.
“Sorry, Henry—I've lost my appetite.” She pressed the edge of the card against her pursed lips. “Henry, let's get out—go over to Jim's.”
He shook his head. “We can't,” he said. Then he saw her gaze narrow intently, over his shoulder—so intently that he turned.
Peter was standing in the doorway, peering about the room—a repressed, elaborately self-contained Peter. His mouth drooped at the corners. The lines that extended downward from his nose were deeper than usual, had something the appearance of being carved in a gray marble face.
Peter's gaze—he seemed to find it difficult to focus his eyes, was laborious about it—finally rested on their table. Slowly he got through the crowd, approaching them. He jostled one of the girl waiters; and turning, apologized with rather extraordinary formality. The girl glanced after him, curious.
The Worm looked around, perceived an unoccupied chair at a neighboring table, lifted it over the heads of his neighbors and set it down beside his own. Peter dropped into it, saying, “I'm sorry to disturb you two... something has come up.” The Worm found it rather uncomfortable. His first impulse was to withdraw and let Peter and Sue talk. But people were looking at them; there were audible whispers; he decided to do nothing conspicuous. He sat back in his chair and studied the menu again. “I'll know the thing by heart pretty soon!” he thought.
Peter leaned forward, toward Sue. She was watching him calmly, the Worm thought; but she was a little hushed. There was no escaping the conversation that followed. Peter managed to keep his voice fairly low; but it was plain that he barely realized where he was. The whole engine of his mind—racing now at several thousand R. P. M.—was headed inward.
“We'll have to quit the pictures, Sue, dear. I can't tell you the whole story now—not here—but Zanin has absolutely broken faith. He has wrecked me... not that I mind that... it's the crookedness of the thing... the ideals he professed... he's sold us out, it's a dirty commercial scheme after all that he's dragged you into.”... The inner pressures were evident now in Peter's voice. It was still low, but it shook and came out jerkily and huskily. He was stopping frequently to swallow.
Sue's fingers strayed toward the fork; turned it slowly. Her eyes followed her fingers. A waitress came toward them, stood unnoticed and turned away, exchanging an amused glance with friends at the next table.
“It's a complete smash,” Peter went on. “Any way you look at it, it's a smash. There's just that last step to take—we must get out.”
“Please—” Sue murmured, “not here!”
“But, Sue—”
“Don't, Peter. We can talk later.”
“But there's nothing to say.” Now the Worm caught in his voice Peter's uncertainty of her. “Is there, Sue?”
She turned and turned the fork. Peter's eyes were fastened on her face, hungrily, abjectly. She slowly nodded.
“But, Sue, you and I—”
She drew a long breath, faced him. “I've got to finish the pictures, Peter.”
“Sue, you can't—”
“I simply won't talk about this out here. But it would wreck Jacob if I stopped now.”
It seemed to the Worm that Peter had to make a desperate effort to comprehend this. His brows were knit, his eyes wandering. Finally he said: “But, Sue, good God! You don't understand. Zanin has wrecked me.”
“I'm not sure about that. If we finish the pictures. If we don't—yes.”
Peter's hands gripped the edge of the table. “Sue—Zanin has been talking with you!”
“Please, Peter—not so loud!”
“Has he? Answer me!”
Slowly she nodded.
“Are you playing fair with me?”
“Oh, Peter—yes! I am.”
“You are still engaged to be my wife?”
“Yes. Please, Peter....”
“Then”—the moment Henry Bates had shrewdly, painfully waited as he watched the man, came now; the suppressions that had been struggling within Peter's breast broke bounds; his voice suddenly rang out—“then, I forbid you to go on!”
Sue paled; seemed to sink down a little in her chair; knit her brows; said nothing.
The room was very still. Even the Greenwich Village group was startled, hushed, by the queer sense of impending drama that filled the room.
During the long hush several girls went out, hurriedly. Others struggled unsuccessfully to make talk. One laughed.
Peter looked around with half-hearted defiance, then dropped his eyes. “Evidently,” he said, addressing the Worm with queer precise formality, “the thing for me to do is to go. I am not desired here.” But he sat motionless.
It was at this point that Zanin came in. He saw Peter, crowded bruskly across the room, laid a legal appearing document on the table at Peter's elbow and said: “Look this over, Peter, and meet me up-stairs a little later. Their man is coming. They give us no choice—we must sign to-night.”
Peter squared around at the first tones of the strong, slightly husky voice, drew in his chin, scowled. It appeared to the Worm that he was making a desperate effort to look dignified. But at the last words, Zanin dropped a large hand on Peter's shoulder. That was what made the tremble; or rather what set it off.
I have explained that the Muscovy occupied a basement. The ceiling was low. The tables—small ones around the walls and two longer ones across the center space with their chairs (common kitchen chairs, they were) filled the room except for an opening near the door. In the opening, at one side of the door, was the small table that served as a cashier's desk. It was covered with slips of paper and little heaps of coin and some bank notes under an iron paper-weight. The whole in charge of a meek girl with big spectacles.
There were twenty-five or thirty persons in the room—mostly women and girls. Of the four or five men, two, in a party near the door, were painters with soft curling beards; the others, young anarchists and talkers, were seated over in the farther corner near one of the barred front windows.
A feature of the scene that Henry Bates will never forget was that Peter first rose, very deliberately, produced an eye-glass case from an inner pocket and carefully put his glasses away. Then he sprang at Zanin—apparently not striking cleanly with clenched fists but clawing and slapping, and shouting breathlessly. I suppose that in every man who has been a boy and a youth there is a strain of vulgarity, innate or acquired. It is exhibited when reason flees. Reason had certainly, at last, fled from Peter. For what he was shouting was this——over and over—“A Jew won't fight! A Jew won't fight!”
In the surprise of this first rush Zanin retreated, sparring ineffectually; backed into the corner of a table; crashed over it; went down with it to the floor amid broken dishes, steaming food and the wreckage of a chair. Two young women were thrown also. One of them screamed; the other appeared to be stunned, and the Worm somehow got to her, lifted her up and supported her out the service door to the kitchen.
0245
When he returned the panic was on. Gasping and shrieking, various hitherto calm young women whom nothing in life could surprise, were fighting past one another for the door. But one young man, pasty-faced, longish hair—name of Waters Coryell—went through the struggling group like a thin tornado, tearing aside the women that blocked his way, symbolizing, in a magnificent burst of unselfconscious energy, the instinct of self-preservation, with a subconscious eye, doubtless to later achievements in self-expression.... The Worm saw his flight and smiled. He had heard Waters Coryell expound the doctrine that a man should do what he wants to do. “He wants to get out,” mused the Worm.
Peter did not at once leap upon the fallen Zanin. He first cast about for a weapon. At Sue's elbow was a large water pitcher. He seized this and for a moment stood over his opponent, blandishing it and again shouting, “A Jew won't fight!” He was in this attitude when the Worm returned from the kitchen.
The room was nearly empty now. Over at the door, the meek little cashier with the big spectacles was calling out in a sharp small voice, “Pay your checks, please! Pay your checks!” And one girl, her eyes glassy with fright, automatically responding to the suggestion, was fumbling in her wrist bag, saying, “I don't seem to have the change.”
The Worm hesitated for a moment between getting Sue out and trying to stop the fight. Sue had pushed back her chair a little way but was still sitting there.
At this moment Zanin, who was trying to draw himself away on his elbows to a point where he could get up in reasonable safety, saw an opportunity to trip Peter. Instantly he put the idea into effect. Peter went down. The water pitcher was shattered on the floor. The two men clinched and rolled over and over among the chairs and against the legs of another table.
The Worm turned to Sue. “You'd better get out,” he said.
She was quite white. “I suppose,” she managed to say, “I'm no use here.”
“Not a bit.”
He took her arm and steadied her until she was clear of the wreckage. Every one else had got out now excepting the girl with the big spectacles. She stood flattened against the wall, apparently all but unable to breathe. As Sue Wilde passed, however, she gasped out, “Check, please!”
The Worm snorted, caught Sue's arm again and rushed her out and up the steps to the sidewalk. Out here most of those who had been in the basement stood about in groups. Others, street children and loungers, were appearing. The situation was ripening swiftly into a street crowd with its inevitable climax of police interference. “Move away!” said the Worm to Sue. “As far as the Square.” And he spoke to others whom he knew. The crowd thinned. Then making a wry face in the dim light, the Worm headed back down the steps, muttering, “Physical prowess is not my specialty, but...”
He carefully shut the street door after him and turned the key. The little cashier was on the stairs now, crouching low against the wall. The Worm half listened for a “Check, please!” as he came down the corridor; but she was silent. There was, too, a suspicious, silence in the dining-room. The Worm hurried to the door.
There, just within the door, stood Peter. His right coat sleeve had been ripped nearly off, at the shoulder seam, and hung down over his hand. He was fumbling at it with the left hand, frantically trying, first to roll it back, then to tear it off. Zanin, over against the farther wall, was getting heavily to his feet. He paused only an instant, then charged straight at Peter.
One glance at the eminent playwright made it plain that his frenzy already was tempered with concern. He had made, it appeared, a vital miscalculation. This particular Jewwouldfight—was, apparently, only just beginning to fight. There was blood on Zanin's cheek, trickling slowly down from a cut just under the eye. His clothes, like Peter's, were covered with the dirt of the floor. His eyes were savage.
Peter again groped blindly for a weapon. His hand, ranging over the cashier's table, closed on the iron paper-weight. He threw it at the onrushing Zanin, missed his head by an inch; caught desperately at a neat little pile of silver quarters; threw these; then Zanin struck him.
The thing was no longer a comedy. Zanin, a turbulent hulk of a man, was roused and dangerous. The Worm caught his arm and shoulder, shouted at him, tried to wrench the two apart. Zanin threw him off with such force that his head struck hard against the wall. The Worm saw stars.
The fighters reeled, locked together, back into the dining-room, knocked over the cashier's table and fell on it. Zanin gave a groan of pain and closed his big hands on Peter's neck.
The Worm ran up the stairs. Three men were sitting, very quiet, in the reading-room of the Free-woman's Club. Waters Coryell dominated.
“For God's sake,” said the Worm quietly, “come down!”
Waters Coryell, who professed anarchism, surveyed him coolly. “The thing to do,” he replied, “obviously, is to telephone the police.”
“Telephone your aunt!” said the Worm, and ran back down-stairs.
Peter and Zanin were still on the floor, at grips. But their strength seemed to have flagged. One fact, noted with relief, was that Zanin had not yet choked Peter to death. They were both purple of face; breathing hard; staring at each other. Some of Zanin's still trickling blood had transferred itself to Peter's face and mixed with the dirt there.
The Worm caught up a chair, swung it over his head and cried, in deadly earnest, “You two get up or I'll smash both your heads!”
They glared at each other for a moment. Then Zanin managed to catch enough breath to say—
“But the man's insane!”
Peter gulped. “I am not insane! Nothing of the kind!”
“Get up,” commanded the Worm.
Very slowly, eying each other, they obeyed. Zanin brushed off his clothes as well as he could with his hands; then, for the first time conscious of the blood on his face, mopped at it with his handkerchief. Peter went off under the low-hanging center chandelier and examined with a pained expression, his ruined coat.
There were steps and voices on the stairs. She of the big spectacles appeared in the doorway.
“I beg your pardon,” observed Peter with breathless formality, “but have you got a pin?”
She stared at him; then at Zanin, finally at the Worm.
“There's a gentleman up-stairs,” she said mechanically in a lifeless voice.
The Worm went up. A businesslike young man was standing in the upper hall, looking about him with mild curiosity.
“Whom did you wish to see?” asked the Worm.
“Mr. Zanin and Mr. Mann.”
“Oh—you must be the attorney for the Interstellar people.”
“I am.”
“Come this way,” said the Worm with calm, and ushered him down the stairs and into the dining-room.
Sue was sitting alone on a bench in Washington Square. She saw Henry Bates approaching and rose hurriedly to meet him.
“It's all over,” said he cheerfully.
“But, Henry—tell me—what on earth!”
“No particular damage beyond what court plaster and Peter's tailor can fix up.”
“But—but—-how is it over so soon? What are they doing?”
“When I left, Zanin was entertaining that attorney chap.”
“And Peter?”
“Down on his hands and knees trying to find the contract.”
“Is he—will he—”
“Sign it? Yes. They want you to sign, too. But I told them you'd do it in the morning. You're to have a ten per cent, interest—Zanin and Peter each fifteen.”
“But I don't want—”
“May as well take it. You've earned it.... Look here, Sue, has it occurred to you that we—you and I—haven't had a morsel to eat yet?”
She started in genuine surprise; looked up at him with an intent expression that he could not, at the moment, fathom; then suddenly threw back her head.
“Henry',” she said, a ring in her voice, “I—I'm not engaged any more—not to anybody! I want—” she gave a slow little laugh—“some oysters.”
“At Jim's!” he cried.
He slipped his arm through hers. Free-hearted as the birds that slumbered in the trees overhead they strolled over to the congenial oyster bar.
So passed The Nature Film Producing Co., Inc., Jacob Zanin, Pres't.
YOU are to picture Washington Square at the beginning of June. Very early in the morning—to be accurate, eight-fifty. Without the old bachelor apartment building, fresh green trees, air steaming and quivering with radiation and evaporation from warm wet asphalt, rumbling autobusses, endless streams of men and girls hurrying eastward and northward to the day's work or turning into the commercial-looking University building at our right, and hard at it, the inevitable hurdy gurdy; within, seventh floor front, large dim studio, Hy Lowe buttoning his collar and singing lustily—
“I want si-imp-athee,
Si-imp-athee, justsymp-ah-thee!”
The collar buttoned, Hy, still roaring, clasped an imaginary partner to his breast and deftly executed the bafflingly simple step of the hesitation waltz over which New York was at the moment, as Hy would put it, dippy. Hy's eyes were heavy and red and decorated with the dark circles of tradition, but his feet moved lightly, blithely. Hy could dance on his own tombstone—and he would dance well.
At one of the two front windows Henry Bates, ofThe Courier, otherwise the Worm, in striped, buttonless pajamas caught across the chest with a safety-pin, gazed down at the Square while feeling absently along the sill for the cream bottle.
The third member of our little group of bachelors, Peter Ericson Mann, was away; down at Atlantic City, working on something. Also nursing a broken heart. For everybody knew now that he and Sue Wilde were not to be married.
The desk served as breakfast table; an old newspaper as cloth. There were flaked cereal in bowls, coffee from the percolator on the bookcase, rolls from a paper sack.
The Worm lingered over his coffee. Hy gulped his, glancing frequently at his watch, propped against the inkstand.
“Oh,” observed the Worm, pausing in his task of cleaning his pipe with a letter opener, “I nearly forgot. A lady called up. While you were in the hath tub.”
“This morning?” Hy's face went discreetly blank.
“Yes, Miss—Miss—sounded like Banana.”
“Miss Sorana.” Hy's eyelids fluttered an instant. Then he lit a cigarette and was again his lightly imperturbable self. “What an ungodly hour!” he murmured, “for Silvia, of all girls. But she knows she mustn't call me at the office.”
The Worm regarded his roommate with discerning, mildly humorous eyes. “Who, may I ask, is Silvia? And what is she?”
Hy missed the allusion. “IfThe Evening Earthwere ever to come into possession of my recent letters which I devoutly hope and trust they won't”—Hy staged a shudder—“they would undoubtedly refer to her as 'an actress.' Just like that. An actress.”
“Hm!” mused the Worm, “it's in writing already, eh!”
Hy shrugged his shoulders. “The old world has to go round,” said he. Then his eyes grew dreamy. “But, my boy, my boy! You should see her—the darling of the gods! Absolutely the darling of the gods! Met her at the Grand Roof. Good lord! figured in cold calendar arithmetic, it isn't eight days. But then, they say eternity is but a moment.”
“A dancing case?” queried the Worm.
Hy nodded. “After ten steps, my son, we knew! Absolutely knew! She knew. I knew. We were helpless—it had to be.”
At this point Hy pocketed his watch and settled back to smoke comfortably. He always bolted his breakfast by the watch; he always chatted or read the paper afterward; he was always late at the office.
The Worm was studying him quizzically. “Hy,” he said, “how do you do it?”
“Do what?” queried Hy, struggling with a smile of self-conscious elation.
“Oh, come! You know. This!” The Worm gestured inclusively with his pipe. “Ten days ago it was that Hilda Hansen person from Wisconsin. Two weeks before that—”
Hy raised his hand. “Go easy with the dead past, my son.”
The Worm pressed on. “Morally, ethically, you are doubtless open to criticism. As are the rest of us. That is neither here nor there. What I want to know is, how do you do it? You're not beautiful. You're not witty—though the younger among 'em might think you were, for the first few hours. But the ladies, God bless 'em!—overlooking many men of character and charm, overlooking even myself—come after you by platoons, regiments, brigades. They fairly break in your door. What is it? How do you do it?”
“It's a gift,” said Hy cheerily, “plus experience.”
The Worm was slowly shaking his head. “It's not experience,” he said. “That's a factor, but that's not it. You hit it the first time. It's a gift—perhaps plus eyelashes.”
“But, my boy, I sometimes fail. Take the case you were about to mention—Betty Deane. I regard Betty as my most notable miscalculation—my Dardanelles.”
“Not for a minute, Hy. As I've heard the story, Betty was afraid of you, ran away, married in a panic. She, a self-expresser of the self-expressers, a seeker of the Newest Freedom, marries a small standpatter who makes gas engines. To escape your hypnotic influence. No—I can't concede it. That, sir, was a tribute to your prowess, no less.”
Hy assumed an expression of modesty. “If you know all about it, why ask me? I don't know. A man like me, reasonably young, reasonably hardworking, reasonably susceptible—well, good lord! I need the feminine—”
“I'm not puzzled about the demand,” said the Worm, “but the supply.”
“Oh, come! There aren't so many. I did have that little flare-tip with Betty. She promised to go away with me on the night boat. She didn't turn up; I took that trip alone.”
“It got as far as that, eh?”
“It did. Whatever her reasons she skipped back to her home town and married the maker of gas engines. The Hilda Hansen matter caught me on the rebound. There couldn't ever have been anything in that, anyway. The girl's a leaner. Hasn't even a protective crust. Some kind uncle ought to take her and her little wall-paper designs back to Wisconsin. But this is—different!” He fumbled rather excitedly in his pocket and produced a letter—pages and pages of it, closely written m a nervous hand that was distinguished mainly by unusually heavy down strokes of a stub pen. He glanced eagerly through it, coloring as his eyes fell on this phrase and that. “You know, I'd almost like to read you a little of it. Damn it, the girl's got something—courage, fire, personality! She's perfectly wild—a pagan woman! She's—”
The Worm raised an arresting pipe. “Don't,” he said dryly. “Never do that! Besides, your defense, while fairly plausible, accounts for only about three months of your life.”
Slightly crestfallen, Hy read on in silence. Then he turned back and started at the beginning. Finally, looking up and catching the Worm's interested, critical eyes on him, he stuffed the document back into his pocket, lit a new cigarette, got up, found his hat and stick, stood a moment in moody silence, sighed deeply and went out.
The telephone rang. As the Worm drew the instrument toward him and lifted the receiver the door opened and Hy came charging back.
The voice was feminine. “Is Mr. Lowe there?” it said.
“Gimme that phone!” breathed Hy, reaching for it.
The Worm swung out of his reach. “No,” he said into the transmitter, “he's gone out. Just a moment ago. Would you like to leave any message?” And dodging behind the desk, he grinned at Hy.
That young man was speechless.
“Who did you say?” Thus the Worm into the telephone. “Mrs. Bixbee?” He spoke swiftly to Hy. “It's funny. I've heard the voice. But Mrs. Bixbee!” Then into the telephone. “Yes, this is Mr. Bates. Oh, you were Betty Deane? Yes, indeed! Wait a moment. I think he has just come in again. I'll call him.”
But at that name Hy bolted. The door slammed after him. The Worm could hear him running along the outer corridor and down the stairs. He had not stopped to ring for the elevator.
“No,” said the Worm now unblushingly, “I was mistaken. He isn't here. That was the floor maid.” As he pushed the instrument back on the desk, he sighed and shook his head. “That's it,” he said aloud, with humility. “It's a gift.”
NEW YORK, as much as Paris or Peking, is the city of bizarre contrasts. One such is modestly illustrated in the life of Hy Lowe.
Hy hurried on this as on every working morning eastward across Broadway and through Astor Place to the large five-story structure, a block in length, near the heart of the Bowery, that had been known for seventy years as Scripture House. Tract societies clustered within the brownstone walls, publishers of hymn books and testaments, lecture bureaus, church extension groups, temperance and anti-cigarette societies, firms of lady typists, and with these, flocks of shorter-lived concerns whose literature was pious and whose aims were profoundly commercial. Long years before, when men wore beavers and stocks and women wore hoopskirts, the building had symbolized the organized evangelical forces that were to galvanize and remake a corrupt world.
But the world had somehow evaded this particular galvanizing process. It had plunged wildly on the little heretical matter of applied science; which in its turn had invaded the building in the form of electric light and power and creakily insecure elevators. The Trusts had come, and Labor Unions and Economic Determinism—even the I. W, W. and the mad Nietzschean propaganda of the Greenwich Village New Russianists. Not to mention War. Life had twisted itself into puzzling shapes. New York had followed farther and farther up-town its elevated roads, subways, steel-built sky-scrapers and amazing palaces of liquors and lobsters, leaving the old building not even the scant privilege of dominating the slums and factories that had crept gradually to and around it. And now as a last negligent insult, a very new generation—a confused generation of Jews, Italians, Irish, Poles, Slavs, serving as bookkeepers, stenographers, messengers, door girls, elevator boys—idled and flirted and enacted their little worldly comedies and tragedies within the very walls of Scripture House—practised a furtive dance step or two in the dim stock rooms, dreamed of broiled lobsters (even of liquors) while patient men with white string neckties and routine minds sat in inner offices and continued the traditional effort to remake that forgotten old world.
But if the vision had failed, many a successful enterprise, then and now, thrived under the cover of Scripture House. One had thrived there for thirty years—the independent missionary weekly known to you asMy Brother's Keeper. This publication was the “meal ticket” to which Hy, at rare intervals, referred. On the ground glass of his office door were the words, lettered in black, “Assistant Editor.” To this altitude had eight years of reporting and editing elevated Hy Lowe. The compensating honorarium was forty-five dollars a week. Not a great amount for one whose nature demanded correct clothing, Broadway dinners, pretty girls and an occasional taxicab; still a bachelor who lives inexpensively as to rooms, breakfasts and lunches and is not too hard on his clothes can go reasonably far on forty-five dollars, even in New York.
On this as on other mornings Hy, after a smile and a wink for the noticeably pretty little telephone girl in the outer office, slid along the inner corridor dose to the wood and glass partition. Though the Walrus' open doorway dominated the corridor, there was always a chance of slipping in unnoted.
He opened and closed his own door very softly; whipped off and hung up his street coat; donned the old black alpaca that was curiously bronzed from the pockets down by thousands of wipings of purple ink: and within twenty seconds was seated at his desk going through the morning's mail.
A buzzer sounded—on the partition just above his head. Hy started; turned and stared at the innocent little electrical machine. His color mounted. He compressed his lips. He picked up the editorial shears and deliberately slipped one blade under the insulated wires that led away from the buzzer.
Again the sound! Hy's fingers relaxed. He snorted, tossed the shears on the desk, strode to the door, paused to compose his features; then wearing the blankly innocent expression that meant forty-five dollars a week, walked quietly into the big room at the end of the corridor where, behind a flat mahogany desk seven feet square, sat the Reverend Hubbell Harkness Wilde, D. D.
On the wall behind him lettered in gold leaf on black enamel, hung the apothegm (not from the eloquent pen of Doctor Wilde)—“It is more blessed to give than to receive.” Beneath, in a long mahogany bookcase, were hundreds of volumes, every one inserted in gratitude and admiration to the editor ofMy Brothers Keeper. The great desk was heaped with books, manuscripts, folders of correspondence. Beside it, pencil warily poised, sat Miss Hardwick, who for more than twenty years had followed Doctor Wilde about these offices—during most of every working day taking down his most trivial utterances, every word, to be transcribed later on the typewriter by her three six-dollar-a-week girls. It was from the resulting mass of verbiage that Miss Hardwick and the doctor dug out and arranged the weekly sermon-editorials that you read when you were a Sunday-school pupil and that your non-citified aunts and uncles are reading in book form to this day. They were a force, these sermons. Make no mistake about that! They had a sensational vigor that you rarely heard from the formal pulpit. The back-cover announcements of feature-sermons to come were stirring in themselves. If your mind be “practical,” scorning all mystical theorizings, let me pass on to you the inside information that through sermons and advertisements of sermons and sensational full-page appeals in display type this man whom Hy light-mindedly dismissed with the title of “the Walrus” had collected more than two million dollars in twenty years for those mission stations of his in Africa or Madagascar (or whenever they were). That is slightly upward of a hundred thousand a year in actual money, as a net average!
We have had a momentary glimpse of Doctor Wilde. That was at the Crossroads Theater, where his runaway daughter was playing a boy in Jacob Zanin's playlet,Any Street. But the Walrus was then out of his proper setting—was merely a grim hint of a forgotten Puritanism in that little Bohemian world of experimental compliance with the Freudian Wish.
We see him in his proper setting here. The old-fashioned woodcut of him that was always in the upper left corner of sermon or announcement was made in 1886—-that square, young, strong face, prominent nose, penetrating eyes. Even then it flattered him. The man now sitting at the enormous desk was twenty-nine years older. The big hooked nose was still there. The pale-green eyes were still a striking feature; but they looked tired now. There was the strip of whisker on each cheek, close-clipped, tinged now with gray. He was heavier in neck and shoulders. There were deep lines about the wide, thin, orator's mouth. Despite the nose and eyes there was something yielding about that mouth; something of the old politician who has learned to temper strength with craft, who has learned, too, that human nature moves and functions within rather narrow limits and is assailed by subtle weaknesses. It was an enigmatic face. Beneath it were low turnover collar, the usual white string tie and a well-worn black frock coat.
Doctor Wilde was nervous this morning. His eyes found it difficult to meet those of his mild-faced assistant in the old alpaca office coat.
“Miss Hardwick—you may go, please!” Thus Doctor Wilde; and he threw out his hands in a nervous gesture.
For an instant, sensing some new tension in the office atmosphere, Hy caught himself thinking of Sue Wilde. She had a trick of throwing out her hands like that. Only she did it with extraordinary grace. In certain ways they were alike, this eccentric gifted man and his eccentric equally gifted daughter. Not in all particulars; for Sue had charm. “Must get it from her mother's side,” mused Hy. He knew that the mother was dead, that the house from which Sue had fled to Greenwich Village and Art and Freedom was now presided over by a second wife who dressed surprisingly well, and whose two children—little girls—were on occasions brought into the office.
His reverie ended abruptly. Miss Hardwick had gathered up her note-books and pencils; was rising now; and as she passed out, released in Hy's direction one look that almost frightened him. It was a barbed shaft of bitter malevolence, oddly confused with trembling, incredible triumph.
“Sit down, please!” It was Doctor Wilde's voice. Hy sat down in the chair that was always kept for him across the huge desk from the doctor. That gentleman had himself risen, creaked over to the door, was closing it securely.
What had that queer look meant? From Miss Hardwick of all people! To Hy she had been hardly more than an office fixture. But in that brief instant she had revealed depths of hatred, malignant jealousy—something!
The doctor sank heavily into his own chair. Hy, mystified, watched him and waited. The man reached for a paper-weight—a brass model of his first mission house from Africa or Madagascar or somewhere—and placed it before him on top of the unopened morning's mail, moved it this way, then a little that way and looked at it critically. Hy, more and more startled, a thought hypnotized, leaned forward on the desk and gazed at that little brass house. Finally the doctor spoke:
“I have an unpleasant duty—but it is not a matter that I can lightly pass over—”
Hy paled a little, knit his brows, stared with increasing intensity at that mission house of brass.
“For a long time, Mr. Lowe, I have felt that your conduct was not—”
“Oh,” thought Hy, in a daze, “my conduct was not—”
“—was not—well, in keeping with your position.”
“With my position.” Hy's numb mind repeated.
“This is not a matter of a particular act or a particular occasion, Mr. Lowe. For a long time it has been known to me that you sought undesirable companions, that you have been repeatedly seen in—in Broadway resorts.”
Hy's mind was stirring awake now, darting this way and that like a frightened mouse. Some one had been talking to the doctor—and very recently. The man was a coward in office matters; he had been goaded to this. The “for a long time,” so heavily repeated, was of course a verbal blind. Could it have been—not Miss Hardwick. Then Hy was surprised to hear his own voice:
“But this is a charge, Doctor Wilde! A charge should be definite.” The words came mechanically. Hy must have read them somewhere. “I surely have a right to know what has bcen said about me.”
“I don't know that it is necessary to be specific,” said the doctor, apparently now that the issue was joined, finding his task easier.
“I must insist!” cried Hy, on his feet now. He was thinking—“What has she told him? What does she know? What does she know!”
“Sit down!” said Doctor Wilde.
Hy sat down. His chief moved the mission house a trifle to square it with the edge of the desk.
“To mention only one occasion,” went on the doctor's voice—“though many are known to me, I am well informed regarding the sort of life you are known to be leading. You see, Mr. Lowe, you must understand that the office atmosphere ofMy Brother's Keeperis above reproach. Ability alone will not carry a man here. There are standards finer and truer than—”
A rhetorical note was creeping into the man's voice. He turned instinctively to sec if Miss Hardwick was catching the precious words as they fell from his lips; then with his eyes on her empty chair he floundered.
The telephone rang. Hy, with alacrity grown out of long practise in fending for his chief, reached for it.
“Oh, Mr. Lowe—” It was the voice of the pretty little telephone girl: “It's a lady! She simply won't be put off! Could you—”
“Tell him,” said Hy with cold solemnity, “that I am in an important Conference.”
“I did tell her that, Mr. Lowe.”
“Very well—ask him to leave his number. I can not be disturbed now.”
He hung up the receiver. “Doctor Wilde,” he said in the same Solemn tone. “I realize of course that you are asking for my resignation. But first I must know the charge against me. There has been an attack on my character. I have the right to demand full knowledge of it.”
“To mention only one occasion,” said the doctor, as if unaware of the interruption, still fussing with the mission house, “you were seen, as recently as last evening, leaving a questionable restaurant in company with a still more questionable young woman.”
So that was all he knew! Hy breathed a very little more easily. Then the telephone rang again, and Hy's overstrained nerves jumped like mad. “Very well,” said he to the pretty telephone girl, “put him on my wire.” And to his chief: “You will have to excuse me, Doctor. This appears to be important.” He rose with extreme dignity and left the room.
Once within his own office he stood clinging to the door-knob, breathing hard. It was all over! He was fired. He must begin life again—like General Grant. His own telephone bell was ringing frantically. At first he hardly heard it. Finally he pulled himself together and moved toward the desk. It would be Betty, of course. She ought to have more sense! Why hadn't she stayed up-state with that new husband of hers, anyway! Wasn't life disastrous enough without a very much entangled, contrite Betty on his own still more entangled hands.
But the voice was not that of Betty. Nor was it the voice of Silvia. It was a soft little voice, melodious, hesitating. It was familiar, yet unfamiliar.
“Oh,” it said, “is that you? I've had such a hard time getting you.”
“I'm sorry!” breathed Hy. Who was she?
“Are you awfully busy?”
Hy hesitated. Deep amid the heaped and smoking runs of his life a little warm thing was stirring. It was the very instinct for adventure. He looked grimly about the room, to be his office no longer. He didn't care particularly what happened now. His own voice even took on something of the strange girl's softness.
“Not so awfully,” said he. Then groping for words added: “Where are you now?”
“Up at the Grand Central.”
“Goodness! You're not going away—now?”
“Yes—going home. I feel awfully bad about it.”
A silence intervened. Then this from Hy:
“You—you're not alone up there?”
“All alone.”
What a charmingly plaintive little voice it was, anyway! The healthy color was returning to Hy's cheeks.
“Well,” said he—“well, say—”
“Yes?” she murmured.
“How long—when does your train go?”
“Oh, could you? I didn't dare ask—you seemed so busy!”
“I could be there in—well, under fifteen minutes.”
“Oh, good. I've got—let me see—nearly half an hour.”
“Be by the clock in the main waiting-room Good-by!”
Hy slammed down the receiver; tore off the alpaca coat and stuffed it into the waste basket; got into his street coat; observed the editorial shears on the desk; seized them, cut the buzzer wires, noted with satisfaction the nick he made in one blade; threw the shears to the floor and rushed from the office.