The Trufflers. Merwin Samuel

      “And leave everything to me, Mann. As it stands now, here she is, keen, all ready, once she’s solid in her mind about the right spirit of the scenario, to start south with me…”

      Peter waved the poker in a series of small circles and figure eights; then held it motionless and sighted along it with squinted-up eyes.

      “Why go south?” he asked.

      Zanin gave a start and stared at him; then controlled himself, for the expenses of that little trip, two-thirds of them, at least, must be paid out of the funds entered in Peter’s six little bank books.

      “Why go south?” Zanin repeated, gropingly; then came back at Peter with a rush of words. “Good lord, Mann, don’t you see that we’re putting over a big piece of symbolism – the most delicate and difficult job on earth. This isn’t Shore Acres! It isn’t the Doll’s House! It’s a realized dream, and it’s got to be put across with such quality and power that it will fire a new dream in the public mind. I propose to spring right out at ‘em, startle ‘em – yes, shock ‘em; and all the time keep it where they can’t lay their vulgar hands on it. We can’t show our Nature effects – primitive, half-nude people – against a background of a New Jersey farm land with a chestnut tree and a couple of oaks in the middle distance!”

      “Pretty fine trees, those!” observed Peter.

      “Not for a minute!” Zanin sprang to his feet; his voice rang. “Got to be remote, exotic – dream quality, fantasy all through. Florida or California – palm trees and such. Damn it, the thing’s a poem! It’s got to be done as a poem.”

      He strode down the room and back.

      Peter got up, very calm, rather white about the mouth and watched him… Dream quality? His thoughts were woven through and through with it at this moment. A voice at his inner ear, a voice curiously like Hy’s, was murmuring over and over: “Sure! Kiss her.”

      “Don’t you see?” cried Zanin, confronting him, and spreading out those big hands. Peter wished wildly that he would keep them in his pockets, put them behind his back – anything to get them out of sight!.. “Lets be sensible, Maun. As you said, we’re business men, you and I. You let me take the scenario. I’m to see Sue this evening – I’ll read it to her. I’m sure it’s good. It’ll reassure her. And it will help me to hold her enthusiasm and pave the way for a better understanding between her and you.”

      Quite unforeseen by either, the little matter of reading the scenario had struck up an issue between them. All was not harmony within the directorate of The Nature Film Producing Co., Inc., Jacob Zanin, Pres’t.

      “No,” said Peter. “I won’t let you have it now.”

      “But – good lord! – ”

      “I will think it over.”

      Magnificent was the word. Zanin gulped down a temperamental explosion and left.

      Peter, as he came slowly back from the elevator to the apartment, discovered that he still held the poker tightly in his right hand, like a sword. He thought again of Napoleon and Henry V.

      He stood motionless, by the window, staring out; moved by the histrionic emotionalism that was almost his soul to stiffen his shoulders like a king’s. Out there – beyond old Washington Square where the first buds of spring tipped the trees – beyond the glimpse, down a red-brick vista of the Sixth Avenue Elevated – still beyond and on, were, he knew, the dusty wandering streets, the crumbling houses with pasts, the flimsy apartment buildings decorated in front with rococo fire escapes, the bleak little three-cornered parks, the devastating subway excavations of Greenwich Village. Somewhere in that welter of poverty and art, at this very moment (unless she had walked up-town) was Sue Wilde. He tried to imagine just where. Perhaps in the dim little rear apartment she shared with Betty Deane, waiting for Zarin.