He studied her, through narrowed eyes. “The poor kid is going through it!” he thought. “I had no idea!” Deliberately, with the coldness, the detachment, of his race, he considered the problem. At length he said:
“I’ll tell you my main errand, Sue. I’ve got an enormous new production on. It’s in my hands, too, as director. Silverstone gives me carte blanche – that’s his way. Big man. Now I’ve got an eye in my head. I’ve seen our Nature run off. And I happen to know that the big movie star of to-morrow, the sensation of them all, is Miss Sue Wilde. You don’t realize that, of course. All right! Don’t try to. But do try to get this. I want you for my new production. And I can offer you more money than you ever saw in all your life. Not two thousand a week, like Mabel Wakeford, but a lot. And still you’ll be cheaper to my company than women not half so good who have built up a market value in the film business. It will be a bargain for us. I brought out a contract ready for you to sign. Salary begins to-morrow if you say the word. Would you like to read it over?”
Her hands were still over her eyes. She shook her head.
Instead of pressing his business he went on quietly studying her. He studied the house, too; and the street. After a time he consulted a time-table and his watch.
“Sue,” he said then, “I’m disappointed.”
“I’m sorry, Jacob.” She looked up now and threw out her hands. “But you couldn’t understand. I couldn’t look at that film, at myself doing those things. It’s a thing that’s – well, Jacob, it is repellent to me now. It’s a thing I wish I hadn’t done. I thought I believed it – your theory of freedom, naturalness, all that. I don’t believe it. But all the same I’m on record there. The most conspicuous girl in the United States – from what you say – ’
“Easily that, Sue. By to-morrow.”
“ – picturing a philosophy I don’t believe in. I’ve been daring almost to forget it. Now you’re bringing it home to me. It is branded on me now. God knows what it is going to mean! Of course it will follow me into my home here. And you know what people will think and say – these, people” – she indicated the orderly street with a sweep of a fine arm and hand – “they’ll think and talk of me as a girl who has done what no decent girl can do and stay decent – ”
She stopped, choking. He was still coolly observing her.
“Yes,” he said again, “I’m disappointed. I’m afraid it’s just as well for you to give up. You’ve lost something, Sue.”
He rose. And she let him go in silence; stood looking after him until he disappeared around the corner. Then she went up to her room.
The children were still there, serenely happy in unheard-of mischief. They had all her dancing clothes spread out on the bed.
She closed the door. The girls giggled nervously; she hardly saw them. She lifted up the Russian costume and fingered the bright-colored silk. Dreams came to her mind’s eye. She looked at the little boots of red leather.
“I wonder,” she murmured.
“Please dance for us,” begged Miriam shyly, at her side. She hardly heard.
She moved to the side of the room, then leaped out in that bounding, crouching Russian step. She was stiff, awkward. She stepped back and tried it again.
The children laughed in sheer excitement and clapped their hands. Becky tried to imitate the step, fell over and rolled, convulsed with laughter, on the floor.
The door opened and Mrs. Wilde stood on the threshold. She was a tall thin woman, all in black, with a heavy humorless mouth, pallid skin, flat pouches under her eyes.
“Miriam! Becky!” she cried. “Come here instantly!”
Becky got up. The two children, crestfallen, between sulkiness and a measure of fear, moved slowly toward the door. The mother stood aside, ushered them out, then confronted the younger woman. There was a tired sort of anger in her eyes. The almost impenetrable egotism of her widowhood had been touched and stirred by the merry little scene.
“You hold your promises lightly,” she said.
Sue bit her lip, threw out her hands. “It isn’t that – ”
“Then what is it?” Mrs. Wilde moved into the room and closed the door. “I don’t quite see what we are to do, Sue. I can’t have this sort of temptation put before them right here, in their home. You know what I have taught them and what I expect of them. You know’ I wish to be kind to you, but this isn’t fair. He – he…” She carried a handkerchief, heavily bordered with black. This she pressed to her eyes.
A hot temper blazed in Sue. She struggled with it. Sharp words rushed to her tongue. She drove them back.
It occurred to her that she must be considerate; the woman’s life had been torn from its roots, what mind she had was of course overwhelmed. Sue stood there, her hands clenched at her sides, groping desperately for some point of mental contact with the woman who had married her father – forgetting that there had never been a print of mental contact. Suddenly she recalled a few hot phrases of the Worm’s, spoken in regard to this very matter of her attempt to confine her life within this gloomy home – “It’s Puritan against Cavalier – both right, both wrong! It’s the Greeks against the Greatest of Jews – both right, both wrong! Beauty against duty, the instinct to express against the instinct to serve – both right, both wrong!”… Was Henry Bates right? Was the gulf between her natural self and this home unbridgeable? Motionless, tense, she tried, all in an instant, to think this through – and failed. A wave of emotion overwhelmed her, an uprushing of egotism as blind as the egotism of the woman in black who stood stiffly against the closed door. It was a clash – not of wills, for Sue’s will was to serve – but of natures.
CHAPTER XXXIV – ONE DOES FORGET ABOUT HAPPINESS
SUE felt that the woman was about to speak, and suddenly she knew that she could not listen. Fighting down the rather terrifying force of her emotions, fighting tears even, she rushed to the door, mutely brushed Mrs. Wilde aside and ran down the stairs. Sue let herself out on the front porch, closed the screen door and leaned hack against it, clinging to the knob, breathless, unstrung. The eyes of the Street would be on her, of course. She thought of this and dropped into one of the porch chairs.
A man turned the corner – a tall, rather young man who wore a shapeless suit of gray, a limp collar, a flowing bow tie, a soft hat; and who had a trick of throwing his leg out and around as he walked and toeing in with the right font.
He turned in, grinning cheerfully and waving a lean hand. He mounted the steps. Sue sat erect, gripping the arms of her chair, eyes bright, and laughed nervously.
“Henry,” she cred, “you’re hopeless! Where’s the new suit? You’re not a bit respectable.”
He seated himself on the porch railing and gazed ruefully downward.
“Sue, I’m sorry. Plum forgot. And I swore I’d never disgrace you again. I am hopeless. You’re right.” Then he laughed – irresponsibly, happily, like a boy.
She stared at him. “What is it, Henry?”
“Everything, child! You see before you the man who has just conquered the world. All of it. And no worlds left. Mr. Alexander H. Bates.”
“Oh,” said she, thinking swiftly back – “your novel!”
“Right. My novel.”
“But it isn’t finished, Henry.”
“Not quite half done.”
“Then, how can – ”
He raised a long hand and rose. He gazed down benignly at her. “The greatest publisher in these U. S. has had the good fortune to read the first fourteen chapters. A whisper blew to me yesterday of the way things were going – before I wrote you. But the word this morning was not a whisper. Susan. It was an ear-splitting yell. Mister Greatest Publisher personally sent for me. Told me he had been looking for me – exactly me! – these twenty-eight years. And here I am. Money now if I need it. And do I need it? God, do I need it! And fame later – when I get the book done. Now, child, tell me how glad you are. At once.”
He walked the porch; came back and stood before her; grinned and grinned.
She could not find words. Soberly her eyes followed him. Her set mouth softened. Her tightened muscles relaxed until she was leaning back limp in the chair.
“Isn’t it the devil, Sue!” said he. “The one thing my heart was set on was to wear that good suit. Sue, I was going to put it all over this suburb of yours – just smear ‘em! And look – I have to go and forget. Nothing comes out to see you but the same disgraceful old gipsy. How could I?”
Sue leaned forward. “Henry, I’m glad. I love this old suit. But there’s a button coming loose – there, on your coat.”
“I know, Sue. I sewed at it, but it doesn’t hold. I’m meaning to stop at a tailor’s, next time I’m over toward Sixth Avenue.”
She was studying his face now. “You’re happy, Henry,” she said.
“Well – in a sense! In a sense!”
“It is a good thing you came. I was forgetting about happiness.”
“I know. One does.” He consulted his watch. “It’s five-twenty-two now, Sue. And we’re catching the five-thirty-eight back to town.”
She did not speak. But her eyes met his, squarely; held to them. It was a forthright eye-to-eye gaze, of the sort that rarely occurs, even between friends, and that is not soon forgotten. Sue had been white, sitting there, when he came and after. Now her color returned.
He bent over and took her elbow. The touch of his hand was a luxury. Her lids drooped; her color rose and rose. She let him almost lift her from the chair. Then she went in for her hat and coat; still silent. They caught the five-thirty-eight.
“What are we going in for?” she asked, listless again, when they had found a seat in the train.
“Oh, come! You know! To see the almost famous Sue Wilde of Greenwich Village – ”
“Not of the Village now, Henry!”
“ – in the film sensation of the decade. Nature, suggested and directed by Jacob Zanin, written by Eric Mann, presented by the Nature Film Producing Company, Adolph Silverstone, President. You see, I’ve been getting you up, Sue.”
She was staring cut the window gloomily.
“I swore I wouldn’t go, Henry.”
“But that would be a shame.”
“I know – of course. But – Henry, you don’t understand. Nobody understands! I’m not sure I can stand it to sit there and see myself doing those things – and have to talk with people I know, and – ”
“I think I could smuggle you in,” said he, thoughtful. “This isn’t a little movie house, you know. It’s a regular theater. There ought to be a separate gallery entrance. That would make it easy.”
She changed the subject. “Where shall we eat, Henry?”
“The Parisian?”
She shook her head. “Let’s go to Jim’s.”
To Jim’s they went; and it seemed to him whimsically watchful eyes that she had an occasional moment of being her old girlish self as they strolled through the wandering streets of Greenwich Village and stepped down into the basement oyster and chop house that had made its name a full generation before Socialism was more than a foreign-sounding word and two generations before cubism, futurism, vorticism, imagism, Nietzsche, the I. W. W., Feminism and the Russians had swept in among the old houses and tenements to engage in the verbal battle royal that has since converted the quaint old quarter from a haunt of rather gently artistic bohemianism into a shambles of dead and dismembered and bleeding theories. Jim’s alone had not changed. Even the old waiter who so far as any one knew had always been there, shuffled through the sprinkling of sawdust on the floor; and the familiar fat grandson of the original Jim was still to be seen standing by the open grill that was set in the wall at the rear end of the oyster bar.
The Worm suggested thick mutton chops and the hugely delectable baked potatoes without which Jim’s would not have been Jim’s. Sue smiled rather wanly and assented. Her air of depression disturbed him; his own buoyancy sagged; he found it necessary now and then to manufacture talk. This was so foreign to the quality of their friendship that he finally laid down his knife and fork, rested his elbows on the table and considered her.
“Sue,” he remarked, “it’s getting to you, isn’t it – the old Village.”
She tried to smile, and looked off toward the glowing grill.
“Why don’t you come around and have a look at the rooms? I haven’t changed them. Only your pictures are gone. Even your books are on the mantel where you used to keep them. It might hook things up for us, so we could get to feeling and talking like ourselves. What do you say – could you stand it?”
She tried to look at him, tried to be her old frank self; but without marked success. The tears were close. She had to compress her lips and study the table-cloth for a long moment before she could speak.
“I couldn’t, Henry.” Then with an impulse that was more like the Sue that he knew, she reached out and rested her hand on his arm. “Try not to mind me, Henry. I can’t help it – whatever it is. I don’t seem to have much fight left in me. It’s plain enough that I shouldn’t have tried to come in. It was just a crazy reaction, anyway. You caught me when I had been hurt. I was all mixed…”
She was excluding him from her little world now; and this was least like her of all the things she had been saying and doing. But if the Worm was hurt he did not show it. He merely said:
“Sue, of course, you’ve been going through a nervous crisis, and it has taken a lot out of you.”
“A lot, Henry,” she murmured.
“One thing strikes me – superficial, of course – I doubt if you’ve had enough exercise this summer.”
“I know,” said she. “To-day I tried a few steps – that – old Russian dance, you know – ”
“I’d love to see you do it, Sue.”
She shook her head. “I’ve lost it – everything.”
“You were stiff, of course.”
“It was painful. I just couldn’t dance. I don’t like to think of it, Henry.”
He smiled. “One thing – I’ve decided to make you walk to the theater. It’s two miles. That’ll stir your pulse a bit. And we’ll start now.”
She looked soberly at him. “You’ve lost nothing, Henry. The work you’ve done hasn’t taken it out of you.”
“Not a hit. On the contrary, Sue.”
“I know. I feel it.”
“No more of the old aimlessness, Susan. No more books – except a look at yours now and then, because they were yours. God, girl, I’m creating! I’m living! I’m saying something. And I really seem to have it to say. That’s what stirs you, puts a tingle into your blood.”
She studied him a moment longer, then lowered her eyes. “Let’s be starting,” she said.
“Up Fifth Avenue, Sue?”
“Oh, yes, Henry!”
They walked eastward on Waverly Place, across Sixth Avenue. She paused here and looked up almost fondly at the ugly, shadowy elevated structure in the twilight. A train roared by.
“I haven’t seen the city for two months,” she said.
“That’s a long time – for a live person,” said he.
The dusty foliage of Washington Square appeared ahead. Above it like a ghost of the historic beauty of the old Square, loomed the marble arch. The lights of early evening twinkled from street poles and shone warmly from windows.
They turned up the Avenue whose history is the history of a century of New York life. Through the wide canyon darted the taxis and limousines that marked the beginnings of the city’s night activity. The walks were thronged with late workers hurrying to their homes in the tenements to the south and west.
The Parisian restaurant was bright with silver, linen and electric lights behind the long French windows. He caught Sue giving the old place a sober, almost wistful glance.
At Fourteenth Street they encountered the ebb of the turbid human tide that at nightfall flows east and west across the great Avenue and picked their way through.
Above Fourteenth Street they entered the deep dim canyon of loft buildings. The sweatshops were here from which every noon and every night poured forth the thousands upon thousands of toilers – underfed, undersized, prominent of nose, cheek-bones and lips, gesticulating, spreading and shambling of gait, filling the great Avenue with a low roar of voluble talk in a strange guttural tongue – crowding so densely that a chance pedestrian could no more than drift with the slow current.
The nightly torrent was well over when Sue and the Worm walked through the blighted district, but each was familiar with the problem; each had played some small part in the strikes that stirred the region at intervals. Sue indeed pointed out the spot, just below Twenty-third Street where she had been arrested for picketing. And the Worm noted that she had steadied perceptibly as the old associations bit by bit reasserted their claims on her life. She was chatting with him now, nearly in the old, easy, forthright way. By the time the huge white facade of the Public Library came into view, with its steps, terraces, railings and misty trees, and the crosstown cars were clanging by just ahead at Forty-second Street, and they were meeting an occasional bachelor diner-out hurrying past in dinner-coat and straw hat, the Worm found himself chuckling again. They turned west on Forty-second Street, crossing Sixth Avenue, Broadway and Seventh Avenue, passing the glittering hotel on a famous corner and heading for the riotously whirling, darting, blazing devices in colored light by means of which each theater of the congested group sought to thrust itself most violently upon the bewildered optic nerves of the passer-by.
Opposite one of these the Worm took Sue’s arm, very gently, and halted her on the curb. The evening throng brushed past, heedless of the simply dressed girl who yet was oddly, boyishly slim and graceful of body, and who was striking of countenance despite the weariness evident about the rather strongly modeled mouth and the large, thoughtful green eyes; heedless, as well, of the lank, shabbily dressed young man who held her arm and bent earnestly over her. They were atoms in the careering metropolis, uncounted polyps in the blind, swarming, infinitely laborious structure that is New York. And they thought themselves, each, the center of the universe.
“Sue, dear,” said he, “here we are. You’re about to see yourself. It will be an experience. And it won’t be what you’re thinking and – yes, dreading. I’ve seen it – ”
She glanced up in surprise.
“Last night – an exhibition to the newspaper men.” The emotion in his voice was evident. She glanced up again, something puzzled. “It was last night – afterward – that I decided on bringing you in. I wouldn’t for anything in the world have missed having you here to-night. Though, at that, if Mr. Greatest Publisher hadn’t warmed my soul with that wonderful blast of hot air I probably shouldn’t have had the nerve. Of course I knew it would be an ordeal. It’s been on my conscience every minute. But I had to bring you, and I believe you’ll understand why, two hours from now. I’m hoping you will, Sue.”
He hesitated. She waited. Suddenly then, he hurried her across the busy street and into the dim shelter of the gallery entrance.
“Zanin was out in front,” said he, “With some of the newspaper boys, but I got you by.”
Many individuals and groups were detaching themselves from the endless human stream and turning in between the six-foot lithographs at the main entrance to the theater. More and more steadily as Sue and the Worm stood in the shadow of the lesser doorway they had chosen, the crowds poured in. Others were turning in here toward the gallery and tramping up the long twisting stairway.
“Big house!” chuckled the Worm. “Oh, they’ll put it across, Sue. You wait! Zanin’s publicity has been wonderful. It would have disturbed you, girl – but it’s rather a shame you haven’t followed it.”
Sue seemed not to hear him. She was leaning out from the doorway, trying to make out the subjects of the two big lithographs. She finally slipped across to the curb and studied them a moment. Both were of herself, half-clad in the simple garment of an island savage; over each picture was the one word, “NATURE,” under each the two words, “SUE WILDE.”
She hurried back and started up the stairs. The Worm saw that she was flushing again and that her mouth wore the set look.
On a landing, holding her back from a group ahead, he said: “Do you know, Sue, part of the disturbance you feel is just a shrinking from conspicuousness, from the effective thing. Self-consciousness! Isn’t it, now?”
But she turned away and kept on.