“Hy. He's crazy, I think. It's the only possible explanation. He said I was a”—Peter's expressive voice dropped, more huskily still, into the tragic mood—“a murderer. It was a frightful experience. The boy has gone batty. It's his fear of losing his job, of course. But the experience has had a curious effect on me. My heart is palpitating.” His right hand was feeling for the pulse in his left wrist. “And I have some, difficulty in breathing.” Now he pressed both hands to his chest.
The Worm stared out the window. Peter would act until his dying day; even then. One pose would follow another, prompted by the unstable emotions of genius, guided only by an egotism so strong that it would almost certainly weather every storm of brain or soul. In a very indirect way Pete had murdered the old boy. No getting around that. An odd sort of murder—sending Sumner Smith to ask that question. Peter himself, away down under his egotism, knew it. Hence the play for sympathy.
Peter was still talking. “It really came out of a clear sky. Until very lately I should have said that Hy and I were friends. As you know, we had many points of contact. Last fall, when—”
The Worm turned. “Passing lightly over the next eight months,” he remarked, “what do you propose to do now?”
Peter shrank back a little. The Worm's manner was hardly ingratiating. “Why—” he said, “why, I suppose I'll stay on here. You and I have always got on, Henry. We've been comfortable here. And to tell the truth, I've been getting tired of listening to the history in detail of Hy's amours. He wants to look out, that fellow. He's had a few too many of 'em. He's getting careless. Now you and I, we're both sober, quiet. We were the backbone of the Seventh-Story Men. We can go on—”
The Worm, though given to dry and sometimes cryptic ways, was never rude. That is he never had been. But at this point he walked out of the apartment and closed the door behind him. He had come in with the intention of using the telephone. Instead now he walked swiftly through the Square and on across Sixth Avenue, under the elevated road into Greenwich Village, where the streets twist curiously, and the hopeless poor swarm in the little triangular parks, and writers and painters and sculptors and agitators and idea-venders swarm in the quaint tumble-down old houses and the less quaint apartment buildings.
He entered one of the latter, pressed one of a row of buttons under a row of brass mouthpieces. The door clicked. He opened it; walked through to the rear door on the right.
This door opened slowly, disclosing a tall young woman, very light in coloring, of a softly curving outline, seeming to bend and sway even as she stood quietly there; charming to the eye even in the half-light, fresh of skin, slow, non-committal in speech and of quietly yielding ways; a young woman with large, almost beautiful, inexpressive eyes. She wore hat and gloves and carried a light coat.
“You just caught me,” she said.
On the floor by the wall was a hand-bag. Henry Bates eyed this. “Oh,” he murmured, distrait, “going away!”