he caught up with her at the corner nearest jim's—the same sue he had first met, here in the village, on a curbstone, eating an apple—wearing her old tarn o'shanter; good shoulders, no hips, well-shaped hands and feet; odd, honest deep-green eyes.
she was a wreck from endless rehearsing she told him smilingly and ordered a big english chop and a bigger baked potato. these were good at jim's. she ate them like a hungry boy.
he offered her with inner hesitation, a cigarette. she shook her head. “zanin won't let me,” she explained. “he says it's going to be a big hard job, coming right on top of all the work at the crossroads, and i must keep fit.”
“zanin! zanin!...” but peter maintained his studied calm. “i've got the scenario in my pocket,” he announced, “i want to read it to you. and if you don't mind i'll tell you just why i want to.”
“of course i don't mind,” said she, with just one half-covert glance. “tell me.”
“please hear me out,” said he.
her lids did droop a little now. this was the eric mann whose plays she had seen in past years and who had pounced on her so suddenly with a crazy avowal of love.... a man she hardly knew!
he spoke quietly now and patiently; even with dignity.
“we—you and zanin and i—are starting a serious job.”
“yes, i know.”
“well, i began all wrong by taking a personal attitude toward you, and we quarreled rather absurdly...”
“we won't speak of that,” said she.
“only to this extent: any little personal misunderstandings—well, we've got to be businesslike and frank.... i'll tell you. this afternoon—just now, in fact—when i suggested to zanin that i read it to the two of you, he objected. in fact he told me in so many words that you disliked me and didn't trust my understanding and that it would be necessary for him to act as a buffer between you and me.”
“oh,” said she quickly, “that's absurd, of course!”
“of course. he rather insisted on taking the scenario and reading it to you himself. now that won't do.”
“i don't care who reads it to me,” said sue coolly.
“certainly not. now, if you'll agree with me that there's nothing personal between us, that we're just whole-hearted workmen on a job, i...”
she raised her eyebrows a little, waking.
“...i came here with the idea of asking you to hunt zanin up with me—making it a matter of company business, right now.”
“oh,” said she, her independent spirt stirred, “i don't see that that's necessary. why don't you go ahead—just read it to me?” she looked about the smoky busy room. “but it's noisy here. and people you know come in and want to talk. i'd ask you around to the rooms, only...”
“only, hy lowe will be there.” peter, feeling new ground under his feet, smiled.
sue smiled a little herself.
“how about your place?” she asked them.
the question took peter's breath. she said it in unmistakable good faith, like a man. but never, never, in peter's whole adult life, had a woman said such a thing to him. that women came occasionally; into the old bachelor apartment building, he knew. but the implications! what would hamer-ton, across the hall, think of him were he to meet them together in the elevator? what would john the night man think? above all (this thought came second) what would they think of sue?
“oh,” observed sue, with real good humor, “i remember! that's the building where women callers can't stay after eleven at night.”
peter nearly succeeded in fighting back the flush that came.
“which,” sue continued, “has always seemed to me the final comment on conventional morality. it's the best bit of perfectly unconscious humor in new york.”
peter was thinking—in flashes and leaps, like napoleon—startled by his own daring, yet athrill with new determination. the worm was out of town; hy very much engaged.... besides, sue was honest and right. this was the sincere note in the new russianism. being yourself, straight-out. he must rise to it, now or never, if he was not to lose sue for good.
so he smiled. “it's only eight,” he said. “i can read you the whole thing and we can discuss it within a couple of hours. and we won't be interrupted there.”
walking straight into that building with sue at his side, nodding with his usual casual friendliness to john the night man, chatting while the elevator crawled endlessly upward to the seventh floor, overcoming the impulse to run past the doors of the other apartments, carrying it all off with easy sophistication; this was unquestionably the bravest single act in the whole life of peter ericson mann.
peter could be a pleasant host. he lighted the old gas-burning student lamp on the desk; started a fire; threw all the cushions in one large pile on the couch.
sue threw aside her coat and tarn o'shanter, smoothed her hair a little, then curled up on the couch with her feet under her where she could watch the fire; and where (as it happened) the firelight played softly on her alert face. she filled the dingy old room with a new and very human warmth.
peter settled back in the morris chair and after one long look at her plunged with a sudden fever of energy into the reading of the scenario.
it was the thing peter did best. he read rapidly; moved forward in his chair and gestured now and then for emphasis with his long hands; threw more than a little sense of movement and power into it.
sue listened rather idly at first; then, as peter's trained, nicely modulated voice swept on, lifted her head, leaned forward, watched his face. peter felt her gaze but dared not return it. once he stopped, flushed and hoarse, and telephoned down for ice-water. those eyes, all alight, followed him as he rushed past her to the door and returned with the clinking water pitcher. he snatched up the manuscript and finished it—nearly half an hour of it—standing. then he threw it on the desk with a noise that made sue jump, and himself strode to the fireplace and stood there, mopping his face, still avoiding her eyes. she was still leaning eagerly forward.
“well,” said he now, with a rather weak effort at casualness, “what do you think of it? of course it's a rough draft—”
“of course it is no such thing,” said she.
she got up; moved to the table: took up the manuscript and turned the first pages. then she came to the other side of the hearth with it, “what i want to know is—how did you do it?”
“oh, it's zanin's ideas, of course; but they needed rearranging and pointing up.”
“this isn't a rearrangement,” said she; and now he awoke to consciousness of the suppressed stirring quality in her voice, a quality he had not heard in it before. “it isn't a rearrangement. it's a created thing.”
“oh,” he cried, “you really think that!”
“it carries the big idea. it's the very spirit of freedom. it's a—a sort of battle-cry—” she gave a little laugh—“of course it isn't that, exactly; it's really a big vital drama. i'm talking rather wildly. but—” she confronted him; he looked past her hair at the wall. she stamped her foot. “don't make me go on saying these inane things, please! you know as well as i do what you've done.”
“what have i done?”
“you've stated our faith with a force and a fineness that zanin, even, could never get. you've said it all for us.... oh, i owe you an apology! zanin told you part of the truth. i didn't dream—from your plays and things you have said—that you could do this.”
peter looked at her now with breathless solemnity. “i've changed,” he said.
“something has happened.”
“i'm not ashamed of changing.”
she smiled.
“or of growing, even.”
“of course not,” said she. “but listen! you don't know what you've done. do you suppose i've been looking forward to this job—making myself sensationally conspicuous, working with commercial-minded people? oh, how i've dreaded that side of it! and worrying all the time because the scenario wasn't good. it just wasn't. it wasn't real people, feeling and living; it was ideas—nothing but ideas—stalking around. that's zanin, of course. he's a big man, he has got the ideas, but he hasn't got people, quite; he just doesn't understand women,... don't you see,” she threw out her hands—“the only reason, the only excuse, really, for going through with this ordeal is to help make people everywhere understand truth. and i've known—it's been discouraging—that we couldn't possibly do that unless it was clearly expressed for us.... now do you see what you've done? it's that! and it's pretty exciting.”
“zanin may not take it this way.”
“oh, he will! he'll have to. it means so much to him. that man has lost everything at the crossroads, you know. and now he is staking all he has left—his intelligence, his strength, his courage, on this. it means literally everything to him.”
peter stared at her. “and what do you suppose it means to me!”
“why—i don't know, of course...”
peter strode to the desk, unlocked the middle drawer next the wall, drew out the six little bank books, and almost threw them into her lap.
“look at those,” he said—“all of them!”
“why—” she hesitated.
“go through them, please! add them up.”
half smiling, she did so. then said: “it seems to come to almost seven thousand dollars.”
“that's the money that's going to work out your dream.”
she glanced up at him, then down at the books.
“it's all i've got in the world—all—all! that, and the three per cent, it brings in. my play—they're going to produce it in the fall. you won't like it. it's the old ideas, the old broadway stuff.”
“but you've changed.”
“yes. since i wrote it. it doesn't matter. it may bring money, it may not. likely not. ninety per cent, of 'em fail, you know. this is all i've got—every cent all my energy and what courage i've got goes after it—into the nature film producing company. please understand that! i'm leading up to something.”
she looked a thought disturbed. he rushed on.
“zanin's got it into his head that he's going to take you south to do all the outdoor scenes.”
“i haven't agreed to that. he feels that it's necessary.”
“yes, he does. he's sincere enough. remember, i'm talking impersonally. as i told you, we've got to be businesslike—and frank. we've got to!”
“of course,” said she.
“i'm beginning to see that zanin is just as much of a hero with other people's money as he is with his own.”
“that goes with the temperament, i suppose.”
“undoubtedly. but now, see! that trip south—taking actors and camera man and outfit—staying around at hotels—railway fares—it will cost a fortune.”
“oh,” said she, very grave, “i hadn't realized that.”
“if we can just keep our heads—-more carefully—spend the money where it will really show on the film—don't you see, we can swing it, and when we've done it, it won't belong to the interstellar people—or to silverstone; it'll be ours. and that means it'll be what we—you—want it to be and not something vulgar and—and nasty. the other way, it we give zanin his head and begin spending money magnificently, we'll run out, and then the price of a little more money, if we can get it at all, will be, the control.”
re reached down for the books, threw them back into the drawer, slammed it and locked it.
“yes,” he said, “that's all i've got. i pledge it all, here and now, to the dream you've dreamed. all i ask is, keep in mind what may happen when it's gone.”
she rose now; stood thinking; then drew on her lam o'shanter and reached for her coat.
“let me think this over,” she said soberly.
“we must be businesslike,” said he. “impersonal.”
“yes,” said she, and stepped over to the fire, low-burning now with a mass of red coals.
peter's eyes, deep, gloomy behind the big glasses, followed her. he came slowly and stood by her.
“i must go,” she said gently. “it'll he eleven first thing we known it would be a bit too amusing to be put out.”
they lingered.
then peter found himself lifting his arms. he tried to keep them down, but up, up they came—very slowly, he thought.
he caught her shoulders, swung her around, drew her close. it seemed to him afterward, during one of the thousand efforts he made to construct a mental picture of the scene, that she must have been resisting him and that he must have been using his strength; but if this was so it made no difference. her head was in the hollow' of his arm. he bent down, drew her head up, kissed, as it happened, her nose; forced her face about and at the second effort kissed her lips. if she was struggling—and peter will never be quite clear on that point—she was unable to resist him. he kissed her again. and then again. a triumphant fury was upon him.
but suddenly it passed. he almost pushed her away from him; left her standing, limp and breathless, by the mantel, while he threw himself on the couch and plunged his face into his hands.
“you'll hate me,” he groaned. “you won't ever speak to me again. you'll think i'm that sort of man, and you'll be right in thinking so. what's worse, you'll believe i thought you were the sort to let me do it. and all the time i love you more than—oh god, what made me do it! what could i have been thinking of! i was mad!”
then the room was still.
