“No,” he said, “not exactly. You see—everything's gone to smash. The creditors of the paper won't keep me on. They'll put in a country preacher with a string tie, and he'll bring his own staff. That's what Pete's done to me! That's what he's done. I wouldn't go off this way, right now, if it wasn't for the awful depression I feel. I didn't sleep a wink last night. Honest, not a wink! A man's got to have some sympathy in his life. Damn it, in a crisis like this—”
“Perhaps you can tell me with even greater lucidity when you are coming back,” said the Worm dryly.
Hy gulped, stared blankly at his friend, uttered explosively the one word, “Monday!” Then he glanced at his watch and hurried out of the building.
The Worm slowly shook his head and took the elevator.
The long dim studio was quite as usual, with its soft-toned walls, dilapidated but comfortable furniture, Hy's piano, the decrepit flat-top desk, the two front windows from which you could see all of the Square and the mile of roofs beyond it, and still beyond, the heights of New Jersey. The coffee percolator stood on the bookcase—on the empty bookcase where once had been the Worm's library. In this room he had studied and written the hundreds of futile book reviews that nobody ever heard of, that had got him precisely nowhere. In this room he had lived in a state of soul near serenity until he met Sue Wilde. Now it brought heartache. Merely to push open the door and step within was to stir poignantly haunting memories of a day that was sharply gone. It was like opening old letters. The scent of a thoughtlessly happy past was faintly there.
Something else was there—a human object, sprawled abjectly in the Morris chair, garbed in slippers and bathrobe, hair disheveled, but black-rimmed eye-glasses still on his nose, the conspicuous black ribbon still hanging from them down the long face. It was that well-known playwright, Peter Ericson Mann, author of The Buzzard, Odd Change and Anchored; and, more recently, of the scenario for Jacob Zanin's Nature him. Author, too, of the new satirical comedy. The Triffler, written at Sue Wilde and booked for production in September at the Astoria Theater.
The Worm had not told Hy that he had just seen Sue. Now, standing motionless, the thousand memory-threads that bound the old rooms to his heart clinging there like leafless ivy, he looked down at the white-faced man in the Morris chair and knew that he was even less likely to mention the fact to Peter. He thought—“Why, we're not friends! That's what it means!”
Peter's hollow eyes were on him.
“You, Worm!” he said huskily, and tried to smile. “I'm rather ill, I think. It's shock. You know a shock can do it.”
“What shocked you?” asked Henry Bates rather shortly, turning to the window.