it was the opening of peter ericson (“eric”,) mann's new play, the truffler, at the astoria theater on broadway where the signs never fail and where to have your name blazoned in electric lights above a theater entrance is to be advertised to a restless but numerically impressive world. peter's name was up there now. it was, you might have supposed, his big night. but peter was not among the eight or nine hundred correctly dressed men and women that pressed in expectantly through the wide doorway. instead, clad in his every-day garments, an expression of ill-controlled irritation on his lung face, moody dark eyes peering resentfully out through his large horn-rimmed glasses, he sat alone in the gallery, second row from the front, on the aisle.
four rows behind him and a little off to the left, sat a good-looking young woman, an italian girl apparently, who stared down at him in some agitation. she, too, was alone. he had not seen her when he came in; he did not know that she was there.
the two seats in the front row across the aisle were vacant until just before the musicians climbed from the mysterious region beneath the stage into the orchestra pit down front and the asbestos curtain slid upward and out of sight. then a rather casually dressed young couple came down the aisle and took them.
peter, when he saw who they were, stiffened, bit his lip, turned away and partly hid his face with his program. the girl was sue wilde, the one person on earth who had the power of at once rousing and irritating him merely by appearing within his range of vision. particularly when she appeared smiling, alert and alive with health and spirit, in the company of another man. when a girl has played with your deepest feelings, has actually engaged herself to marry you, only to slip out of your life without so much as consulting you, when she has forced you to take stern measures to bring her to her senses—only to turn up, after all, radiant, just where you have stolen to be alone with your otherwise turbulent emotions—well, it may easily be disturbing.
the other man, on this occasion, was the worm.
peter knew that the worm, like hy, had disapproved of the steps he had taken to waken the truffling sue to a sense of duty, the steps he had been forced to take. it is not pleasant to be disapproved of by old companions; particularly when you were so clearly, scrupulously right in all you have done. still more unpleasant is it when one of the disapprovers appears with the girl whose selfish irresponsibility caused all the trouble. sue's evident happiness was the climax. it seemed to peter that she might at least have the decency to look—well, chastened.
i spoke a moment back of other disturbances within peter's highly temperamental breast. they had to do with the play. the featured actress, grace derring, also was potentially a disturber. if you have followed peter's emotionally tortuous career, you will recall grace. with his kisses warm on her lips, protesting her love for him, she had rewritten his play behind his back, tearing it to pieces, introducing new and quite false episodes, altering the very natures of his painstakingly wrought out characters, obliterating whatever of himself had, at the start, been in the piece. he had been forced to wash his hands of the whole thing. he had kept away from neuerman and grace derring all these painful months. he had answered neither neuerman's business letters nor grace's one or two guarded little notes. it had perturbed turn to see his name used lavishly (neuerman was a persistent and powerful advertiser) on the bill-boards and in the papers. it had perturbed him to-night to see it on the street in blazing light. and now it was on the program in his hand!... to be sure he had not taken steps to prevent this use of his name. he had explained to himself that neuerman had the right under the contract and could hardly be restrained. but he was perturbed.
so here was the great night! down there on the stage, in a few minutes now, grace derring, whose life had twisted so painfully close to his, would begin enacting the play she and neuerman had rebuilt from his own inspired outburst. up here in the gallery, across the aisle, one row down, sat at this moment, the girl who had unwittingly inspired him to write it; she was smiling happily now, that girl. she did not know that the original play—the trufiler as he had conceived and written it—was aimed straight at herself. it was nothing if not a picture of the irresponsible, selfish bachelor girl who by her insistence on “living her own life” wrecks the home of her parents. peter's mouth set rather grimly as he thought of this now. as he saw it, sue had done just that. suddenly—he was looking from behind his hand at her shapely head; her hair had grown to an almost manageable length—a warm thought fluttered to life in his heart. perhaps it wasn't, even yet, too late! perhaps enough of his original message had survived the machinations of neuerman and grace derring to strike through and touch this girl's heart—sober her—make her think! it might even work out that... he had to set his teeth hard on the thoughts that came rushing now. it was as if a door had opened, letting loose the old forces, the old dreams (that is, the particular lot that had concerned his relations with sue) that he had thought dead, long since, of inanition.... confused with all these dreams and hopes, these resentments and indignations, was a thought that had been thrusting itself upon him of late as he followed neuerman's publicity. it was that the play might succeed. however bad grace had made it, it might succeed. this would mean money, a little fame, a thrilling sense of position and power.
sue glanced around. her elbow gently pressed that of the worm. “it's peter,” she said low. “he doesn't see us.”
the worm glanced around now. they were both looking at peter, rather eagerly, smiling. the eminent playwright gazed steadily off across the house.
“he looks all in,” observed the worm.
“poor peter”—this from sue—“these first nights are a frightful strain.”
“pete!” the worm called softly.
he had to see them now. he came across the aisle, shook hands, peered gloomily, self-consciously down at them.
“hiding?” asked sue, all smiles.
peter's gloom deepened. “oh, no,” he replied.
“evidently you're not figuring on taking the author's call,” said the worm, surveying peter's business suit.
the playwright raised his hand, moved it lightly as if tossing away an inconsiderable thing.
“why should i? i'm not interested. it's not my play.”
the worm was smiling. what was the matter with them—grinning like monkeys! couldn't they at least show a decent respect for his feelings?
“there is a rather wide-spread notion to the contrary,” said the worm.
“oh, yes”—again that gesture from peter—-“my name is on it. but it is not my play.”
“whose is it then?”
peter shrugged. “how should i know? haven't been near them for five months. they were all rewriting it then. they never grasped it. neuerman, to this day, i'm sure, has no idea what it is about. can't say i'm eager to view the remains.”
the orchestra struck up. peter dropped back into his seat. he raised his program again, and again watched sue from behind it. he had managed to keep up a calm front, but at considerable cost to his already racked nervous system. sue's smile, her fresh olive skin, her extraordinary green eyes, the subtly pleasing poise of her head on her perfect neck, touched again a certain group of associated emotions that had slumbered of late. surely she had not forgotten—-the few disturbed, thrilling days of their engagement—their first kiss, that had so surprised them both, up in his rooms....
she couldn't have forgotten! perhaps his mutilated message might touch and stir her. perhaps again....
suddenly peter's program fluttered to the aisle. he drew an envelope from one pocket, a pencil from another; stared a moment, openly, at her hair and the curve of her cheek; and wrote, furiously, a sonnet.
he crossed out, interlined, rephrased. it was a passionate enough little uprush of emotion, expressing very well what he felt on seeing again, after long absence, a woman he had loved—hearing her voice, looking at her hair and the shadows of it on her temple and cheek—remembering, suddenly, with a stab of pain, the old yearnings, torments and exaltations. peter couldn't possibly have been so excited as he was to-night without writing some-thing. his emotions had to come out.
the lights went down. the music was hushed. there was a moment of dim silence; then the curtain slowly rose. the sophisticated, sensation-hungry nine hundred settled back in their seats and dared the play to interest them.
i have always thought that there was a touch of pure genius in the job grace derring did with the truffler. particularly in her rewriting of the principal part. on the side of acting, it was unquestionably the best thing she had done—perhaps the best she will ever do. the situation was odd, at the start. peter—writing, preaching, shouting at sue—-had let his personal irritation creep everywhere into the structure of the play. he was telling her what he thought she was—a truffler, a selfish girl, avoiding all of life's sober duties, interested only in the pursuit of dainties, experimenting with pleasurable emotions. he had written with heat and force; the structure of the piece was effective enough. the difficulty (which grace had been quick to divine) was that he had made an unsympathetic character of his girl. the practical difficulty, i mean. i am not sure that the girl as peter originally drew her was not a really brilliant bit of characterization. but on the american stage, as in the american novel, you must choose, always, between artistic honesty and “sympathy.” the part of commercial wisdom is to choose the latter. you may draw a harsh but noble character, a weak but likable character, you may picture cruelty and vice as a preliminary to wesleyan conviction of sin and reformation; but never the unregenerate article. you may never be “unpleasant.” all this, of course, peter knew. the adroit manipulating of sympathy was the thing, really, he did best. but when he wrote the truffler he was too excited over sue and too irritated to write anything but his real thoughts. therefore the play had more power, more of freshness and the surface sense of life, than anything else he had written up to that time. and therefore it was commercially impossible.
now grace herring was a bachelor girl herself.
she knew the life. she had foregone the traditional duties—marriage, home-building, motherhood—in order to express her own life and gifts. she had loved—unwisely, too well—peter. like peter, she approached the play in a state of nerves. as a practical player she knew that the girl would never win her audience unless grounds could be found for the audience to like her despite her nietzschean philosophy. what she perhaps saw less clearly was that in her conception of the part she had to frame an answer to peter's charges. probably, almost certainly, she supposed the play something of a personal attack on her own life. therefore she added her view of the girl to peter's, and played her as a counter attack. if it had been real in the writing to peter, it was quite as real in the playing to grace. the result of this conflict of two aroused emotional natures was a brilliant theatrical success. though i am not sure that the play, in its final form, meant anything. i am not sure. it was rather a baffling thing. but it stirred you, and in the third act, made you cry. everybody cried in the third act.
the curtain came slowly down on the first act. the lights came slowly up. a house that had been profoundly still, absorbed in the clean-cut presentment of apparently real people, stirred, rustled, got up, moved into the aisles, burst into talk that rapidly swelled into a low roar. the applause came a little late, almost as if it were an after-thought, and then ran wild. there were seven curtain calls.
down-stairs, two critics—blasé young men, wandered out into the lobby.
“derring's good,” observed one. “this piece may land her solid on broadway.”
“first act's all right,” replied the other casually, lighting a cigarette. “i didn't suppose pete mann could do it.”
up in the gallery, sue, looking around, pressed suddenly close to the worm, and whispered, “henry—quick! look at peter!”
the playwright stood before his aisle seat, staring with wild eyes up at the half-draped plaster ladies on the proscenium arch. a line of persons in his row were pressing toward the aisle. a young woman, next to him, touched his arm and said, “excuse me, please!” sue and the worm heard her but not peter. he continued to stare—a tall conspicuous man, in black-rimmed glasses, a black ribbon hanging from them down his long face. his hand raised to his chest, clutched what appeared to be an envelope, folded the long way. plainly he was beside himself.
the crowd in the aisle saw him now and stared. there was whispering. some one laughed.
again the young woman touched his arm.
he turned, saw that he was blocking the row, noted the eyes on him. became suddenly red, and stuffing the folded envelope into his pocket and seizing his hat, rapidly elbowed his way up the aisle.
immediately following this incident attention was shifted to another. a good-looking young woman, apparently an italian, who had been sitting four rows behind peter and oft to the left, was struggling, in some evident excitement, to get out and up the aisle. her impetuosity made her as conspicuous as peter had been.
sue, still watching the crowd that had closed in behind the flying peter, noted the fresh commotion.
“quite an evening!” she said cheerfully. “seems to be a lady playwright in our midst, as well.”
the worm regarded the new center of interest and grew thoughtful. he knew the girl. it was maria tonifetti, manicurist at the sanitary barber shop of marius. he happened, too, to be aware that peter knew maria. he had seen pete in there getting his nails done. once, this past summer, he had observed them together on a fifth avenue bus. and on a sunday evening he had met them face to face at coney island, and peter had gone red and hurried by. now he watched maria slipping swiftly up the aisle, where peter had disappeared only a moment before. he did not tell sue that he knew who she was.
