The Trufflers: A Story

|THE Worm worked hard all of this particular day at the Public Library, up at Forty-second Street and Fifth Avenue. At five o'clock he came out, paused on the vast incline of ma...

|THE pleasant days of quiet reading and whimsical reflection were over for the Worm, poor devil! Life caught him up without warning--that complex fascinating life of which he ha...

The Worm, thinking quickly, bitterness in his heart against the selfish lightness of the Village, bed. “Haven't seen her. Waited for her to come in. Finally decided I'd better n...

Before dropping on the stiff walnut chair Sue had closed the door; ruffled by the feeling that it must be closed, conscious even of guilt. For it was a tenet of Aunt Matilda's,...

|SUE and the Worm had no more than seated themselves at the Muscovy when Zanin came briskly in, hat in hand--still in the wrinkled old suit, still wearing the gray sweater for a...

|PETER came stealthily into the rooms on the seventh floor of the old bachelor apartment building in Washington Square. His right hand, deep in a pocket of his spring overcoat,...

|THE Worm met Sue Wilde one afternoon as she stepped down from a Seventh Avenue car--carried it off with a quite successful air of easy surprise. He couldn't see that it harmed...

Another wave of the cigarette. “Slow down. Be kind to her. If she's a cross old thing, forgive her. Let her see that you're a regular fellow, even if you did start from third ba...

Hy hurried on this as on every working morning eastward across Broadway and through Astor Place to the large five-story structure, a block in length, near the heart of the Bower...

|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...

|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 blazone...

|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...

|PETER rushed like a wild man down the stairs to the street. He looked up street and down for a cruising taxi; saw one at the opposite curb; dodged across, behind automobiles an...

|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...

|THE familiar person of the Worm came in through the bar, stood in the doorway, looked about with quiet keen eyes--tall, carelessly dressed, sandy of hair but mild and reflectiv...

|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 sho...

He got up, walked to one of the front windows of the dingy old studio and peered gloomily out at the bare trees and brown grass patches of Washington Square.

|WHERE was Betty, anyway! And why hadn't she called up the office. It began to seem to him that she might have done that after her little effort of the morning. Hitherto, before...

|HE walked rapidly back to the rooms. For his bachelor girl play was swiftly, like magic, working itself out all new in his mind, actually taking form from moment to moment, arr...

|THE maid, Minna, sprang up, dropping her sewing and giving a throaty little shriek. Peter, steadying himself with an effort, softly closed the doer, leaned back against it, and...

|THE Worm sat on a wooden chair, an expression of puzzled gravity on his usually whimsical face. The room was a small kitchen. The two screened windows gave a view of a suburban...

|HALF an hour later Peter tiptoed over and closed the door. Then he sat down at his typewriter, removed the paper he had left in it, put in a new sheet and struck off a word.

|AT that time no moving picture had been given the setting that Jacob Zanin devised for the Nature film. Zanin had altered the interior of the building to make it as little as p...

|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 w...

|THEN Peter, muttering, talking out loud to the road, the fence, the trees, the sky, turned back to retrace the miles they had covered so lightly and rapidly. His feet and legs...

|SUE was in her half-furnished living-room--not curled comfortably on the couch-bed, as she would have been a month or two earlier, but sitting rather stiffly in a chair, a phot...

|THE Crossroads Theater was nothing more than an old store, with a shallow stage built in at the rear and a rough foyer boarded off at the front. The seats were rows of undertak...

The company wandered across New York State into Pennsylvania; Peter, by day and night, rewriting that unhappy act. The famous producer, Max Neuerman, fat but tireless, called en...

|IT is not a simple matter to record in any detail the violent emotional reaction through which Peter now passed. Peter had the gift of creative imagination, the egotism to driv...

Peter was there--a gloomy intense figure, bent over the desk at the farther end of the nearly dark studio, his long face, the three little pasteboard bank books before him, the...

|PETER sat alone in the corner room downstairs. Mechanically he turned the pages of _Le Sourire_--turned them forward and back, tried to see what lay before his eyes, tried inde...

A slim girl was there at the inquiry desk, very attractively dressed. His pulse bounded. She turned a forlornly pretty face and he saw that it was Hilda Hansen of Wisconsin.

Hy mused. “They're great hands to take tramps in the country, those two. Most every Sunday.... If I could arrange a little party of four.... See here! Betty's going to have dinn...

|YOU are to picture Washington Square at the beginning of June. Very early in the morning--to be accurate, eight-fifty. Without the old bachelor apartment building, fresh green...

|SLOWLY the crowd in the gallery moved out and down the twisting flights of stairs. Sue slipped her arm through the Worm's and silently clung to him. They were very close in spi...

|ZANIN came in quietly, for him; matter of fact; dropped his hat on the couch; stood with his hands in his pockets and looked down at Sue who was filling her alcohol lamp.

He was dressed, at the top, in a soft gray hat from England. Next beneath was a collar that had cost him forty cents. The four-in-hand scarf was an imported foulard, of a flower...

|NOT until he was crossing Sixth Avenue, under the elevated road, did it occur to him that she had deliberately broken her rehearsal appointment to have tea with him and then as...

|PETER tried to think. He could not lie there indefinitely with his face in his hands. But he couldn't think. His mind had stopped running.... At last he must face her. He remem...

Friends were there from Greenwich Village. There was a high buzz of excitement. Jaded critics were smiling with pleasure; it was a relief, now and then, to be spared boredom. Pe...

stage. Therefore she had no knowledge of what was taking place in her dressing-room. Whether Peter came back with any coherent intention of finding Grace. I can not say. It is n...