often than not just dressing up ungoverned desires in sociological language, that she’s leaping at the chance to experiment with emotions that women have had to suppress for ages. Back of it is the new Russianism they live and breathe – to know no right or wrong, trust your instincts, respond to your emotions, bow to your desires… Well, now, here’s Sue Wilde. She looks like a regular little radical. And acts it. Breaks away from her folks – lives with the regular bunch in the Village – takes up public dancing and acting – smokes her cigarettes – knows her Strindberg and Freud – yet… well, I’ve dined with her once, lunched with her once, spent five hours in her apartment talking Isadora Duncan as against Pavlowa, even walked the streets half a night arguing about what she calls the Truth… and we haven’t got around to ‘the complete life’ yet.”
“How do you dope it out?” asked Hy.
“Well” – the Worm deliberately thought out his reply – “I think she’s so. Most of ‘em aren’t so. She’s a real natural oasis in a desert of poseurs. Probably that’s why I worry about her.”
“Why worry?” From Hy.
“True enough. But I do. It’s the situation she has drifted into, I suppose. If she was really mature you’d let her look out for herself. It’s the old he protective instinct in me, I suppose. The one thing on earth she would resent more than anything else. But this fellow Zanin…”
He painstakingly made a smoke ring and sent it toward the tarnished brass hook on the window-frame. It missed. He tried again.
Peter stirred uncomfortably, there on the couch. “What has she told you about Zanin?” he asked, desperately controlling his voice.
“She doesn’t know that she has told me much of anything. But she has talked her work and prospects. And the real story comes through. Just this afternoon since I left her, it has been piecing itself together. She is frank, you know.”
Peter suppressed a groan. She was frank! “Zanin is in love with her. He has been for a year or more. He wrote Any Street for her, incorporated some of her own ideas in it. He has been tireless at helping her work up her dancing and pantomime. Why, as near as I can see, the man has been downright devoting his life to her, all this time. It’s rather impressive. But then, Zanin is impressive.”
Peter broke out now. “Does he expect to marry her – Zanin?”
“Marry her? Oh, no.”
“‘Oh, no!’ Good God then – ”
“Oh, come, Pete, you surely know Zanin’s attitude toward marriage. He has written enough on the subject. And lectured – and put it in those little plays of his.”
“What is his attitude?”
“That marriage is immoral. Worse than immoral – vicious. He has expounded that stuff for years.”
“And what does she say to all this?” This question came from Hy, for Peter was speechless.
“Simply that he doesn’t rouse any emotional response in her. I’m not sure that she isn’t a little sorry he doesn’t. She would be honest you know. And that’s the thing about Sue – my guess about her, at least – that she won’t approach love as an experiment or an experience. It will have to be the real thing.”
He tried again, in his slow calm way, to hang a smoke ring on the brass hook.
“Proceed,” said Hy. “Your narrative interests me strangely.”
“Well,” said the Worm slowly, “Zanin is about ready to put over his big scheme. He has contrived at last to get one of the managers interested. And it hangs on Sue’s personality. The way he has worked it out with her, planning it as a concrete expression of that half wild, natural self of hers, I doubt if it, this particular thing, could be done without her. It is Sue – an expressed, interpreted Sue.”
“This must be the thing he is trying to get Pete in on.”
“The same. Zanin knows that where he fails is on the side of popularity. He has intelligence, but he hasn’t the trick of reaching the crowd. And he is smart enough to see what he needs and go after it.”
“He is going after the crowd, then?”
“Absolutely.”
“And what becomes of the noble artistic standards he’s been bleeding and dying for?”
“I don’t know. He really has been bleeding and dying. You have to admit that. He lives in one mean room, over there in Fourth Street. A good deal of the little he eats he cooks with his own hands on a kerosene stove. Those girls are always taking him in and feeding him up. He works twenty and thirty hours at a stretch over his productions at the Crossroads. Must have the constitution of a bull elephant. If it was just a matter of picking up money, he could easily go back into newspaper work or the press-agent game… I’m not sure that the man isn’t full of a struggling genius that hasn’t really begun to find expression. If he is, it will drive him into bigger and bigger things. He won’t worry about consistency – he’ll just do what every genius does. he’ll fight his way through to complete self-expression, blindly, madly, using everything that comes in his way, trampling on everything that he can’t use.”
Peter, twitching with irritation, sat up and snorted out:
“For God’s sake, what’s the scheme!”
The Worm regarded Peter thoughtfully and not unhumorously, as if reflecting further over his observations on genius. Then he explained:
“He’s going to preach the Greenwich Village freedom on every little moving-picture screen in America – shout the new naturalism to a hypocritical world.”
“Has he worked out his story?” asked Hy.
“In the rough, I think. But he wants a practical theatrical man to give it form and put it over. That’s where Pete comes in… Get it? It’s during stuff. He’ll use Sue’s finest quality, her faith, as well as her grace of body. What I could get out of it sounds a good deal like the Garden of Eden story without the moral. An Artzibasheff paradise. Sue says that she’ll have to wear a pretty primitive costume.”
“Which doesn’t bother her, I imagine,” said Hy.
“Not a bit.”
Peter, leaning back on stiff arms, staring at the opposite wall, suddenly found repictured to his mind’s eye a dramatic little scene: In the Crossroads Theater, out by the ticket entrance; the audience in their seats, old Wilde, the Walrus himself, in his oddly primitive’, early Methodist dress – long black coat, white bow tie, narrow strip of whisker on each grim cheek; Sue in her newsboy costume, hair cut short under the ragged felt hat, face painted for the stage, her deep-green eyes blazing. The father had said: “You have no shame, then – appearing like this?” To which the daughter had replied: “No – none!”
Hy was speaking again. “You don’t mean to say that Zanin will be able to put this scheme over on Sue?”
The Worm nodded, very thoughtful. “Yes, she is going into it, I think.”
Peter broke cut again: “But – but – but – but…
“You fellows want to get this thing straight in your heads,” the Worm continued, ignoring Peter. “Her reasons aren’t by any means
