“Very good, sir. And you go to bed. Your nerves are a mess.”
Into Peter's brain as he hurried toward the Tunnel Station, the next morning, darted an uninvited, startling thought.
Here was Zanin, idealist in the drama, prophet of the new Russianism, deserting the stage for the screen!
What was it the Worm had represented him as saying to Sue... that she would be enabled to express her ideals to millions where Isadora Duncan could reach only thousands?
Millions in place of thousands!
His imagination pounced on the thought. He stopped short on the street to consider it—until a small boy laughed; then he hurried on.
He looked with new eyes at the bill-boards he passed. Two-thirds of them flaunted moving-picture features.... He had been passing such posters for a year or more without once reading out of them a meaning personal to himself. He had been sticking blindly, doggedly to plays—ninety per cent, of which, of all plays, failed utterly. It suddenly came home to him that the greatest dramatists, like the greatest actors and actresses, were working for the camera. All but himself, apparently!... The theaters were fighting for the barest existence where they were not surrendering outright. Why, he himself patronized movies more often than plays! Yet he had stupidly refused to catch the significance of it.... The Truffler would fail, of course; just as the two before it had failed. Still he had, until this actual minute, clung to it as his one hope.
Millions for thousands!
He was thinking now not of persons but of dollars.
Millions for thousands.