that I’m coming through with all you could ask. We leave at eleven, Hudson Tunnel, for the Jersey hills – we four. I bring the girls; you meet us at the Tunnel. Zanin is safe at Long Beach. We eat at a country road house. We walk miles in the open country. We drift home in the evening, God knows when!.. Here I hand you, in one neat parcel, pleasant hillsides, purling brooks, twelve mortal hours of the blessed damosel, and” – he caught up the evening paper – “‘fair and warmer’ – and perfect weather. And what do I get? Abuse. Nothing but abuse!”
With this, he deftly juggled his two shoes, caught both in a final flourish, looked across at the abject Peter and grinned.
“Shut up,” muttered Peter wearily.
“Very good, sir. And you go to bed. Your nerves are a mess.”
Into Peter’s brain as he hurried toward the Tunnel Station, the next morning, darted an uninvited, startling thought.
Here was Zanin, idealist in the drama, prophet of the new Russianism, deserting the stage for the screen!
What was it the Worm had represented him as saying to Sue… that she would be enabled to express her ideals to millions where Isadora Duncan could reach only thousands?
Millions in place of thousands!
His imagination pounced on the thought. He stopped short on the street to consider it – until a small boy laughed; then he hurried on.
He looked with new eyes at the bill-boards he passed. Two-thirds of them flaunted moving-picture features… He had been passing such posters for a year or more without once reading out of them a meaning personal to himself. He had been sticking blindly, doggedly to plays – ninety per cent, of which, of all plays, failed utterly. It suddenly came home to him that the greatest dramatists, like the greatest actors and actresses, were working for the camera. All but himself, apparently!.. The theaters were fighting for the barest existence where they were not surrendering outright. Why, he himself patronized movies more often than plays! Yet he had stupidly refused to catch the significance of it… The Truffler would fail, of course; just as the two before it had failed. Still he had, until this actual minute, clung to it as his one hope.
Millions for thousands!
He was thinking now not of persons but of dollars.
Millions for thousands.
He paused at a news stand. Sprawled over it were specimens of the new sort of periodical, the moving-picture magazines. So the publishers, like the theatrical men, were being driven back by the invader.
He bought the fattest, most brightly colored of these publications and turned the pages eagerly as he descended into the station.
He stood half-hidden behind a pillar, his eyes wandering from the magazine to the ticket gate where Hy and the two girls would appear, then back to the magazine. Those pages reeked of enthusiasm, fresh ideas, prosperity. They stirred new depths within his soul.
He saw his little party coming in through the gate.
The two girls wore sweaters. Their skirts were short, their tan shoes low and flat of heel.
They were attractive, each in her individual way; Sue less regular as to features, but brighter, slimmer, more alive. Betty’s more luxurious figure was set off almost too well by the snug sweater. As she moved, swaying a little from the hips, her eyelids drooping rather languidly, the color stirring faintly under her fair fine skin, she was, Peter decided, unconscious neither of the sweater nor of the body within it… Just before the train roared in, while Sue, all alertness, was looking out along the track, Peter saw Hy’s hand brush Betty’s. For an instant their fingers intertwined; then the hands drifted casually apart.
CHAPTER VIII – SUE WALKS OVER A HILL
PETER joined them – a gloomy man, haunted by an anonymous letter. Sue was matter-of-fact. It seemed to Hy that she made some effort to put the well-known playwright more nearly at his ease.
They lurched, an hour’s ride out in Northern New Jersey, at a little motorists’ tavern that Hy guided them to. They sat on a shaded veranda while the men smoked cigars and the girls smoked cigarettes. After which they set forth on what was designed to be a four-hour tramp through the hills to another railroad – Sue and Peter ahead (as it turned out); Hy and Betty lagging behind.
The road curved over hills and down into miniature valleys. There were expanses of plowed fields, groves of tall bare trees, groups of farmhouses. Robins hopped beside the road. The bright sun mitigated the crisp sting in the air. A sense of early spring touched eye and ear and nostril.
Peter felt it; breathed more deeply; actually smiled.
Sue threw back her head and hummed softly.
Hy and Betty dropped farther and farther behind.
Once Sue turned and waved them on; then stood and laughed with sheer good humor at their deliberate, unrhythmical step.
“Come on,” she said to Peter “They don’t get it – the joy of it. You have to walk with a steady swing. It takes you a mile or two, at that, to get going. When I’m in my stride, it carries me along so I hate to stop at all. You know, you can’t pick it up again right off – the real swing. Walking is a game – a fine game!”
Peter didn’t know. He had never thought of walking as a game. He played golf a little, tennis a little less. It had always been difficult for him to hold his mind on these unimportant pursuits. But he found himself responding eagerly.
“You’ve gone in a lot for athletics,” said he, thinking of the lightness, the sheer ease, with which she had moved about the little Crossroads stage.
“Oh, yes – at school and college – basket ball, running, fencing, dancing and this sort of thing. Dancing especially. I’ve really worked some at that, you know.”
“Yes,” said he moodily, “I know.”
They swung down into a valley, over a bridge, up the farther slope, through a notch and out along a little plateau with a stream winding across it.
Peter found himself in some danger of forgetting his earnest purpose. He could fairly taste the fresh spring air. He could not resist occasionally glancing sidelong at his companion and thinking – “She is great in that sweater!” A new soft magic was stealing in everywhere among what he had regarded as his real thoughts and ideas. Once her elbow brushed his; and little flames rose in his spirit… She walked like a boy. She talked like a boy. She actually seemed to think like a boy. The Worm’s remark came to him, with an odd stabbing effect… “We haven’t got around to ‘the complete life’ yet!”
She quite bewildered him. For she distinctly was not a boy. She was a young woman. She couldn’t possibly be so free from thoughts of self and the drama of life, of man and the all-conquering urge of nature! As a dramatist, as a student of women, he knew better. No, she couldn’t – no more than “friend Betty” back there, philandering along with Hy, The Worm had guaranteed her innocence… but the Worm notoriously didn’t understand women. No, it couldn’t be true. For she had broken away from her folks. She did live with the regular bunch in the Village. She did undoubtedly know her Strindberg and Freud. She had taken up public dancing and acting. She did smoke her cigarettes – had smoked one not half an hour back, publicly, on the veranda of a road house! … He felt again the irritation she had on other occasions stirred in him.
He
