Four rows behind him and a little off to the left, sat a good-looking young woman, an Italian girl apparently, who stared down at him in some agitation. She, too, was alone. He had not seen her when he came in; he did not know that she was there.
The two seats in the front row across the aisle were vacant until just before the musicians climbed from the mysterious region beneath the stage into the orchestra pit down front and the asbestos curtain slid upward and out of sight. Then a rather casually dressed young couple came down the aisle and took them.
Peter, when he saw who they were, stiffened, bit his lip, turned away and partly hid his face with his program. The girl was Sue Wilde, the one person on earth who had the power of at once rousing and irritating him merely by appearing within his range of vision. Particularly when she appeared smiling, alert and alive with health and spirit, in the company of another man. When a girl has played with your deepest feelings, has actually engaged herself to marry you, only to slip out of your life without so much as consulting you, when she has forced you to take stern measures to bring her to her senses—only to turn up, after all, radiant, just where you have stolen to be alone with your otherwise turbulent emotions—well, it may easily be disturbing.
The other man, on this occasion, was the Worm.
Peter knew that the Worm, like Hy, had disapproved of the steps he had taken to waken the truffling Sue to a sense of duty, the steps he had been forced to take. It is not pleasant to be disapproved of by old companions; particularly when you were so clearly, scrupulously right in all you have done. Still more unpleasant is it when one of the disapprovers appears with the girl whose selfish irresponsibility caused all the trouble. Sue's evident happiness was the climax. It seemed to Peter that she might at least have the decency to look—well, chastened.
I spoke a moment back of other disturbances within Peter's highly temperamental breast. They had to do with the play. The featured actress, Grace Derring, also was potentially a disturber. If you have followed Peter's emotionally tortuous career, you will recall Grace. With his kisses warm on her lips, protesting her love for him, she had rewritten his play behind his back, tearing it to pieces, introducing new and quite false episodes, altering the very natures of his painstakingly wrought out characters, obliterating whatever of himself had, at the start, been in the piece. He had been forced to wash his hands of the whole thing. He had kept away from Neuerman and Grace Derring all these painful months. He had answered neither Neuerman's business letters nor Grace's one or two guarded little notes. It had perturbed turn to see his name used lavishly (Neuerman was a persistent and powerful advertiser) on the bill-boards and in the papers. It had perturbed him to-night to see it on the street in blazing light. And now it was on the program in his hand!... To be sure he had not taken steps to prevent this use of his name. He had explained to himself that Neuerman had the right under the contract and could hardly be restrained. But he was perturbed.
So here was the great night! Down there on the stage, in a few minutes now, Grace Derring, whose life had twisted so painfully close to his, would begin enacting the play she and Neuerman had rebuilt from his own inspired outburst. Up here in the gallery, across the aisle, one row down, sat at this moment, the girl who had unwittingly inspired him to write it; She was smiling happily now, that girl. She did not know that the original play—The Trufiler as he had conceived and written it—was aimed straight at herself. It was nothing if not a picture of the irresponsible, selfish bachelor girl who by her insistence on “living her own life” wrecks the home of her parents. Peter's mouth set rather grimly as he thought of this now. As he saw it, Sue had done just that. Suddenly—he was looking from behind his hand at her shapely head; her hair had grown to an almost manageable length—a warm thought fluttered to life in his heart. Perhaps it wasn't, even yet, too late! Perhaps enough of his original message had survived the machinations of Neuerman and Grace Derring to strike through and touch this girl's heart—sober her—make her think! It might even work out that... he had to set his teeth hard on the thoughts that came rushing now. It was as if a door had opened, letting loose the old forces, the old dreams (that is, the particular lot that had concerned his relations with Sue) that he had thought dead, long since, of inanition.... Confused with all these dreams and hopes, these resentments and indignations, was a thought that had been thrusting itself upon him of late as he followed Neuerman's publicity. It was that the play might succeed. However bad Grace had made it, it might succeed. This would mean money, a little fame, a thrilling sense of position and power.
Sue glanced around. Her elbow gently pressed that of the Worm. “It's Peter,” she said low. “He doesn't see us.”
The Worm glanced around now. They were both looking at Peter, rather eagerly, smiling. The eminent playwright gazed steadily off across the house.
“He looks all in,” observed the Worm.