CHAPTER XXVI – ENTER MARIA TONIFETTI
THOUGH there is no known specific for heartache, there are palliatives. One such Peter Ericson Mann found in the head barber’s chair at the strictly sanitary shop of Manus. The necessity, during all the spring months, of avoiding this shop had irked Peter; for he was given to worry in the matter of bacteria. And he could not himself shave his thin and tender skin without irritating it to the point of eruption.
The shop of Marius was in the basement of that most interesting of New York restaurants, the Parisian. The place is wholly French, from the large trees out front and in their shade the sleepy victorias always waiting at the curb to the Looeys and Sharlses and Gastongs that serve you within. It is there a distinction to be known of the maître d’hôtel, an achievement to nod to the proprietor.
Greenwich Village, when in funds, dines, lunches, breakfasts at the Parisian. Upper West Side, when seeking the quaintly foreign dissociated from squalor, dines there. Upper West Side always goes up the wide front steps and through the busy little office into the airy eating rooms with full length hinged windows. There is music here; a switchboard youth who giftedly blends slang with argot; even, it has been reported, an interior fountain. Greenwich Village now and again ascends those wide front steps; but more often frequents the basement where is neither fountain nor music, merely chairs, tables and ineffable food; these latter in three or four small rooms which you may enter from the Avenue, directly under the steps, or from the side street through the bar. The corner room, nearest the bar, is a haunt of such newspaper men as live in the neighborhood. Also in the basement is a rather obscure and crooked passage extending from the bar past the small rooms and the barber shop of Marius to the equally obscure and crooked stairway that leads by way of telephone booths and a passage to the little office hallway and the upper restaurant. The whole, apparently, was arranged with the mechanics of French farce uppermost in the mind of the architect.
Peter’s large horn-rimmed eye-glasses hung by their heavy black ribbon from the frame of the mirror; his long person lay, relaxed, in the chair. His right foot rested on a bent-wire stand; and kneeling respectfully before it, polishing the shoe, was the boy called Theophile. His left hand lay on the soft palm of Miss Maria Tonifetti who was working soothingly, head bowed, on the thumb nail. Miss Tonifetti was pretty. She happens to be the reason why Peter had kept away from the shop of Marius all spring. These Italian girls, from below Washington Square, were known to be of an impetuous temper. Hy Lowe had on several occasions advised Peter to let them alone. Hy believed that they, carried knives. Now, however, finding Maria so subdued, if gloomily emotional, of eye, experiencing again the old soft thrill as her deft smooth fingers touched and pressed his own, he was seriously considering asking her out to dinner. He had first thought of this while Marius (himself) was plying the razor. (What a hand had Marius!) The notion grew during the drowsily comfortable shampoo that came next. With the face massage, and the steaming towels that followed it – one of these now covered his face, with a minute breathing hole above the nose – came a gentle glow of tenderness toward all the world and particularly toward Miss Tonifetti. After all, he had never intended neglecting her. Life is so complex!
I had hoped to slip through this narrative with no more than an occasional and casual allusion to Maria. But this, it appears, is not possible. She matters. And even at the risk of a descent into unromantic actuality, into what you might call “realism,” she enters at this point.
Peter himself, like most of us, disliked actuality. His plays were all of duty and self-sacrifice and brooding tenderness and that curious structure that is known throughout the theatrical district as Honor. Honor with a very large H – accompanied, usually, with a declamatory gesture and a protruding chest. Sue, at her first meeting with Peter, when she talked out so impulsively, really said the last word about his plays. Peter’s thoughts of himself (and these never flagged) often took the form of recollecting occasions when he had been kind to newsboys or when he had lent a helping hand to needy young women without exacting a quid pro quo. The occasions when he had not been kind took the memory-shape of proper indignation aroused by bitter injustice to himself. He had suffered greatly from injustice as from misunderstanding. Few, indeed, understood him; which fact added incalculably to the difficulties of life.
Now just a word of recent history and we shall get on with our story. When Sue broke her engagement to Peter he took his broken heart away to Atlantic City, where he had before now found diversion and the impulse to work. He had suffered deeply, these nearly two weeks. His food had not set well. The thought of solitary outdoor exercise, even ocean swimming, had been repellent. And until the last two or three nights, his sleeplessness had been so marked as really to worry him. Night after night he had caught himself sitting straight up in bed saying, aloud, harsh things to the penitent weeping Sue of his dreams. Usually after these experiences his thoughts and nerves had proved to be in such a tangle that his only recourse had been to switch on the lights and, with a trembling hand and an ache at the back of his head, plunge into his work. The work, therefore (it was a new play), had gone rather well – so well that when the expensiveness of the life began to appear really alarming he was ready to come back to the old haunts and make the effort to hold up his head. He had got into New York at four-ten and come down to the shop of Marius by taxi. His suit-case and grip were over in the corner by the coat rack.
It was now nearly five-thirty. The face massage was over with; his thick dark hair had been brushed into place by the one barber in New York who did not ask “Wet or dry?” And he was comfortably seated, across the shop, at Miss Tonifetti’s little wire-legged table, for the finishing strokes of the buffer and the final soap-and-water rinsing in the glass bowl. He looked at the bent head and slightly drooping shoulders of the girl. The head was nicely poised. The hair was abundant and exceptionally fine. It massed well. As at certain other moments in the dim past his nature reacted pleasantly to some esthetically pleasing quality in hair, head, shoulders and curve of dark cheek. Just then she glanced up, flushed perceptibly, then dropped her eyes and went on with her work – which consisted at the moment in giving a final polish by-brushing the nails lightly with the palm of her hand.
The glow in Peter’s heart leaped up into something near real warmth. He leaned forward, glanced swiftly about, then said, low: “It has been hard, Maria – not seeing you.”
The dark head bent lower.
“It did seem best. You know.”
The head nodded a very little – doubtfully. “There’s no sense in being too hard on ourselves, Maria. Suppose – oh, come on and have dinner with me.”
Again the head was inclined in assent. And he heard her whisper, “Where?”
Peter thought swiftly. This was not a matter for his acquaintances of the Square and Greenwich Village. Then, too, a gentleman always “protected the girl.” Suddenly he remembered:
“Meet me at the old place – corner of Tenth. We can take the bus up-town. You can’t get off early?” She shook her head.
“All right. Say twenty after to half-past seven. I’ll leave my bags here for the present.”
This, after all, was living! It was best. You had to keep on. And it would be nice to give Maria a good time. She had been exacting in the past, given to unexpected outbursts, a girl of secretive ways, but of violent impulses, that she seemed always struggling to suppress. He had noted before now a passionate sort of gloom in the girl. To-day, though, she was charming, gentle enough for anybody. Yes, for old times’ sake – in memory of certain intense little episodes they two had shared, he would give her a nice evening… With such thoughts he complacently lighted a cigarette, smiled covertly at the girl, who was following him furtively, with her big dark eyes and went back through the crooked corridor to the bar.
Here we find Hy Lowe engaged in buying a drink for Sumner Smith, one of the best-known reporters on that most audaciously unscrupulously brilliant of newspapers, The Evening Earth. Sumner Smith was fat, sleepy-eyed, close-mouthed. He was a man for whom Peter felt profound if cautious respect.
But his thoughts were not now concerned with the locally famous reporter, were not concerned, for the moment, even with himself. He was impressed by the spectacle of Hy Lowe standing treat, casually tossing out a five-dollar bank note; so much so that he promptly and with a grin accepted Hy’s nod as an invitation and settled, after a moment’s thoughtful consideration, on an old-fashioned whisky cocktail.
It was not that Hy was stingy; simply that the task of dressing well, taking in all the new shows and entertaining an apparently inexhaustible army of extraordinarily pretty girls with taxis and even occasional wine was at times too much for the forty-five a week that Hy earned.
Now, as it happened, while Peter thought about Hy, Hy was thinking about Peter. Not six times in the more than three years of his life with Peter and the Worm had Hy seen so jovial an expression on the long face of the well-known playwright.
The man was self-conscious to the point of morbidity. This at all times, dating far, far back of his painful relationship with Sue Wilde, back of his tempestuous affair with Grace Derring, back of the curious little mix-up with that Tonifetti girl. Lately he had been growing worse. Why, it was not yet a fortnight since he had fought Zanin, over at the Muscovy. Then Sue had broken their engagement, and Peter had left town a crushed and desperate man. Hy had gone to the trouble of worrying about him; an exertion which he was now inclined to resent a bit. He had even mentioned his fears to the Worm; which sage young man had smiled and observed dryly and enigmatically, “Peter will never really love anybody else.”… And now, of all times, Peter was grinning!
The journalist left them to read Le Sourire and nibble toast in the corner room. Peter cheerfully regarded Hy’s new homespun suit, his real Panama hat with a colored stripe in the white fluffy band, his flaming new tie and the silk shirt of exclusive pattern beneath it. Hy caught this scrutiny, and returned the grin.
“I’m in soft, Pete,” he murmured. “Got a raise.”
“Not out of old Wilde?”
Hy nodded. “Considerable story, my son. First the old boy fired me. That was at nine-thirty A. m. I went out and made a day of it. Then, of all things, the Worm comes into the office – ”
“The Worm! Henry Bates?”
“Yep. He was on The Courier, you know.”
“Was?”
“Was – and isn’t. They sent him up with a stiff story about the missionary funds we’ve collected through the paper. And what does the old boy do but lock him out and holler through the transom that he’ll eat poison, just like that, unless the Worm goes back and kills the story.”
“And what does the Worm?”
“As per instructions.”
“Kills the story?”
“And his job with it. He’s writing a novel now – like everybody else. Have another,” Hy added cheerfully, “on the old Walrus’ partner in crime.” Peter had another.
“The rest of it is” – this from Hy – “I come in at four-thirty that afternoon to pack up my things, and the Reverend Doctor Wilde hands me a raise. I get sixty now. I am on that famous road to wealth.”
“But what on earth – ”
Hy chuckled. “Worm says the old boy thought I knew.”
“Ah!” breathed Peter. “Ah!”
“Can’t say I wonder at Sue’s leaving home, hitting out for the self-expression thing.” Hy grew more expansive as the liquor spread its glowing warmth within his person. Otherwise he would hardly have spoken of Sue, even on the strength of that genial grin of Peter’s.
Peter leaned an elbow on the mahogany bar and slowly sipped. “I wonder if Sue suspects this.” It was not easy for him to speak her name. But he did speak it, with an apparent casualness worthy of Waters Coryell.
“Probably not. I’ve worked at his elbow for years and never dreamed.” He sighed. “It’s hard to see where a girl of any spirit gets off these days. From my experience with ‘em, I’m convinced that home is the safest place for ‘em, and yet it’s only the dead ones that’ll give up and stay there.”
Peter did not reply. His brows were knit, but not, apparently, in concentration, for his eyes wandered. He said something about getting his bags over to the rooms; started irresolutely down the passage toward the barber shop; stopped; pressed his fingers to his mouth; came back, passing Hy as if he didn’t see him and went on out to the side street. Here he stopped again.
The side street was narrow. A cross-town car shut off most of his view of the Avenue, a few yards away. Then it passed, and he saw a young couple strolling across toward the restaurant. The man – large, heavy of hand and foot, a peasant-like, face curiously lighted by burning eyes, better dressed than usual – was Jacob Zanin. The girl – slim, astonishingly fresh and pretty, not wearing the old tarn o’ shanter and haphazard costume he associated with her, but a simple light suit – was Sue Wilde; the girl who by her hardness and selfishness had hurt Peter irreparably. There they were, chatting casually, quite at ease – Zanin, who didn’t believe in marriage, who had pursued Sue with amazing patience for nearly two years, who had wrecked Peter’s pocket; Sue, who had broken his heart.
CHAPTER XXVII – PETER IS DRIVEN TO ACT
THE spectacle stopped Peter’s brain. Among all the wild pictures that had rushed helter skelter through his overwrought mind of late there had been nothing like this. Why, it was only a matter of days since he and Zanin had pummeled each other to an accompaniment of broken chairs, overturned tables, wrecked china, torn clothing, actual blood. He had pictured Sue, a confused disillusioned girl, rushing back to her home; Zanin a marked man, even in the Village, cowering away from his fellows. But this!
They passed the corner. With a great gulp of sheer emotion Peter followed, almost running. They turned into the Parisian – but not into the familiar basement. Instead they mounted the wide front steps, as matter-of-fact as any two Upper West Siders out of a limousine. Peter pressed his hands to his eyes. He looked again. They had vanished within the building.
Peter walked back and forth. He told himself that he must think. But the fact clear even to his overwhelmed consciousness was that he was not thinking and that there was no immediate prospect of his being able to think. He went a whole block up the side street, stemming the thick tide of Jewish working girls from University Place and the lower Broadway district and men in overalls – muttering aloud, catching himself, compressing his lips, then muttering again. “She played with me!” So ran the muttering. “She is utterly lacking in responsibility, in any sense of obligation. She lacks spirituality. That is it, she lacks spirituality. She has no fineness. She is hard – hard! She is drifting like a leaf on these crazy Village currents of irrepressible self-indulgence. I tried to save her – God knows I tried! I did my best! I can’t be blamed if she goes to pieces now! I can do no more – I must let her go!” But even while he spoke he gulped again; his face, nearly gray now, twisting painfully. He suddenly turned and rushed back to the Parisian.
He paused at the side doorway and peered in. Hy was not in evidence. A later glance, from within the barroom, disclosed that slightly illuminated young man in the corner room of the restaurant hanging over the table at which the taciturn Sumner Smith was still trying to read Le Sourire.
Peter went on into the crooked passage, passed the open doors of two eating rooms where only the first early diners had as yet drifted in, found himself at the door of the barber shop, stopped short, then seeing the familiar figure of Maria Tonifetti approaching her table in the corner, dodged back and into the washroom. Here the boy named Anatole said, “Good evening, Meester Mann,” and filled a basin for him. Peter dipped his hands into the warm water and washed them. He was surprised to find his forehead dripping with sweat. He dried his hands, removed his glasses and scrubbed his face. He turned on the cold water, wet a towel and pressed it to his temples and the back of his head, taking care not to wet his collar. His hands were trembling. And that impulse to talk aloud was rising uncontrollably. He went back to the corridor; stood motionless, breathing deeply; recalled with the force of an inspiration that Napoleon had feared nothing, not even the ladies with whose lives his own had become so painfully entangled and walked deliberately, staring straight before him, past that barber shop door.
At the foot of the crooked stairway he paused again. And again his face was twisting. “I’ve got to make the one more effort,” he said. “It isn’t for myself, God knows! I gave her my love – I pledged her my life – I have suffered for her – I would have saved her if she had played fair! I’ve got to make this last effort!”
He mounted the stairs, crowded past the telephone booths, staging at them as he went. They conveyed a suggestion to his mind. He stepped cautiously to the restaurant door, nodded to the maître d’hôtel and glanced in. The nearer room was empty; but beyond the second doorway, Zanin’s shoulder and profile were visible. Sue he could not see, but she must be sitting there. Yes, Zanin was leaning forward, was speaking, even smiling, in that offhand way of his!
Peter, flushing now, turned away; confronted the boy called Raoul; pressed a silver quarter into his palm. “Page, Miss Wilde,” he breathed huskily. “Tell her she is wanted on the phone.”
The boy named Raoul obeyed. At the Parisian it is not regarded as surprising that a gentleman should wish to speak to a lady.
Peter rushed around the turn and Waited at the farther end of the row of booths.
Finally he heard her step.
When she saw him she stopped. “Oh,” she said, “Peter!” And she frowned a very little.
“It was a deception,” he broke out, “but I had to see you, Sue! I know you are with Zanin. I saw you come in. I don’t see how you can do it, but we’ll let that pass. I – ”
“What is it, Peter? What do you want with me?”
“Oh, Sue! Are you as hard as that? What do I want of you! Good God! When I see you, after all I have suffered for your sake, plunging back into this life – taking up with that crock Zanin as if nothing had happened, as if – Why, he – ”
Sue grew a little white about the mouth and temples. She glanced back at the empty passage.
“Peter,” she said, curiously quiet, “if you think it fair to follow me into a public place, if you really mean to make another hideous scene, you will have to come into the dining-room to do it.”
He reached out, caught her arm. She wrenched away and left him there. For a long moment he stared out the window at the rush of early evening traffic on the Avenue, his hands clenched at his sides. Then he hurried past the office and down to the street.
He stood on the curb and addressed a rattling autobus. “It is unbearable – unbelievable. The girl has lost all sense of the fitness of things. She is beside herself. I must act – act! I must act at once – to-night!”
People were passing. He turned, suddenly aware of the bustlingly unsympathetic, world about him. Had any one heard his voice? Apparently none had. All were hurrying on, up-town, down-town. Standing there on the curb he could see in at the basement window. Sumner Smith was alone at last and deep in Le Sourire. Hy had drifted away – back to the bar, doubtless.
Peter, you recall, was a genius. As a genius he fed on his emotional reactions; they were his life. Therefore do not judge him too harshly for the wild thought that at this point rushed over his consciousness with a force that left him breathless. He was frightened and by himself. But there was a barbarous exaltation in his fear. “It’ll bring her to her senses,” he thought. “I’ve got to do it. Then she’ll listen to me. She’ll have to listen to me then.”
Peter appeared in the corner room down-stairs, almost as curiously quiet as Sue had been in their brief talk. He, too, was rather pale. He came over to Sumner Smith’s table, dropped down opposite the fat journalist, beckoned a waiter, ordered a light dinner, and, that done, proffered a cigarette.
“I’ve got a tip for you, Smith,” he said, “a real one. If The Evening Earth hasn’t lost its vigor you can put it over big.”
The fat man merely lighted his cigarette and looked inscrutably over it at Peter’s drawn face.
“I can’t give you the details. You’ll have to take my word for them. Did you ever hear a question raised regarding the Reverend Doctor Wilde?” Sumner Smith glanced out toward the bar and Hy. The corners of his mouth twitched. “His boss?”
“Right. Editor of My Brother’s Keeper. Author of the famous missionary sermons.”
“There was a little talk last year. You mean the big mission funds he has raised?”
Peter nodded. His eyes were overbright now. “Nobody has the evidence, Mann. It isn’t news as it stands.”
“Suppose you could make it news – big news.”
“Oh, of course – ” the journalist gestured with his cigarette.
“Well, you can. To-night. Go straight to his house – over in Stuyvesant Square, not five minutes in a taxi, not ten on the cars – and ask him point-blank to consent to an accounting. Just ask him.” Sumner Smith mused. “It might be worth trying,” he said.
“Take my word for it.”
The journalist paid his check, rose, nodded to an acquaintance across the room, said: “I’ll think it over, Mann. Much obliged – ” and sauntered out.
This was unsatisfactory. Peter, crestfallen, forgot that Sumner Smith was hardened to sensations. And peering gloomily after the great reporter, he only half saw the man pause at the small desk near the bar, then speak casually to the now somewhat wobbly Hy Lowe: he only half heard a taxi pull up outside, a door slamming, the sudden grinding of gears as the taxi darted away. There were so many noises outside: you hardly noticed one more.
The waiter brought his dinner. He bolted it with unsteady hands. “I must think this all out,” he told himself. “If Sumner Smith won’t do it, one of the other Earth men will. Or some one on The Morning Continental.”
He lit a cigar, sat bark and gazed out at the dim street where dimmer figures and vehicles moved forever by. It occurred to him that thus would a man sit and smoke and meditate who was moved by an overmastering love to enact a tremendous deed. But it was difficult to sustain the pose with his temples throbbing madly and a lump in his throat. His heart, too, was skipping beats, he thought. Surreptitiously he felt his left wrist.
He beckoned the waiter; ordered paper and ink. The lump in his throat was suddenly almost a pain. He wrote —
“It was wrong of me, of course, Sue, dear. But I really must see you. Even though your hostile attitude makes it difficult to be myself. There is trouble impending. It concerns you vitally. If you will only hear me; meet me for half an hour after dinner, I know I can help you more than you dream.
“I am not speaking for myself but for you. In all this dreadful trouble between us, there is little I can ask of you. Only this – give me half an hour. I will wait down-stairs for an answer. P. E. M.”
He sent this up-stairs. Then followed it as far as the telephones, called up his old acquaintance, Markham, of The Morning Continental, and whispered darkly to him over the wire.
As he ran down-stairs and dodged past the barber shop door, he became conscious that the dinner he had eaten felt now like a compact, insoluble ball in the region of his solar plexus. So he stopped at the bar and gulped a bicarbonate of soda while buying a highball for Hy Lowe whom he found confidentially informing the barkeeper of his raise from forty-five a week to sixty.
Then he resumed his seat by the window in the corner room; tried to find amusement in the pages of Le Sourire; failed; watched the door with wild eyes, starting up whenever a waiter entered the room, only to sink back limply at each fresh disappointment.
He wondered suddenly about Sumner Smith. What if he had followed the trail! This thought brought something like a chill. If he, Peter, an old newspaper man, were to be caught in the act of passing on an “exclusive” tip to friends on competing papers – violating the sacred basis of newspaper ethics! You couldn’t tell about Smith. He rarely showed interest, never emotion, seldom even smiled. He would receive the news that Emperor William had declared himself King of All the Americas with that same impassive front.
Peter looked at his watch. It was twenty-five minutes of seven. He had thought it at least eight.
One thing was certain – he must get his bags out of that awful barber shop before it closed. Accordingly he had a messenger called to take them, over to the rooms.