The Trufflers: A Story — Key Ideas to Explore

Peter was a playwright of three early (and partial) successes, and two more recent failures. He was thirty-three years old; and a typical New Yorker, born in Iowa, he dressed conspicuously, well, making it a principle when in funds to stock up against lean seasons to come. He worried a good deal and kept his savings of nearly six thousand dollars (to the existence of which sum he never by any chance alluded) in five different savings banks. He wore large horn-rimmed eyeglasses (not spectacles) with a heavy black ribbon attached, and took his Art almost as seriously as himself. You know him publicly as Eric Mann.

For six months Peter had been writing words where ideas were imperatively demanded. Lately he had torn up the last of these words. He had waited in vain for the divine uprush; there had come no tingle of delighted nerves, no humming vitality, no punch. And as for his big scene, in Act III, it was a morass of sodden, tangled, dramatic concepts.

His theme this year was the modern bachelor girl; but to save his life he couldn't present her convincingly as a character in a play--perhaps because these advanced, outspoken young women irritated him too deeply to permit of close observation. Really, they frightened him. He believed in marriage, the old-fashioned woman, the home.

It had reached the point, a month back, where he could no longer even react to stimulants. He had revived an old affair with a pretty manicure girl without stirring so much as a flutter of excitement within himself. This was Maria Tonifetti, of the sanitary barber shop of Marius in the basement of the Parisian Restaurant. He had tried getting drunk; which made him ill and induced new depths of melancholy.

No one ever saw his name any more. No one, he felt certain, ever would see it. He could look back now on the few years of his success in a spirit of awful calm. He felt that he had had genius. But the genius had burned out. All that remained to him was to live for a year or two (or three) watching that total of nearly six thousand dollars shrink---shrink---and then the end of everything. Well, he would not be the first....

One faint faded joy had lately been left to Peter, one sorry reminder of the days when the magical words, the strangely hypnotic words, “Eric Mann,” had spoken, sung, shouted from half the bill-boards in town. Over beyond Sixth Avenue, hardly five minutes' walk through the odd tangle of wandering streets, the tenements and ancient landmarks and subway excavations and little triangular breathing places that make up the Greenwich Village of to-day, there had lingered one faded, torn twenty-four-sheet poster, advertising “The Buzzard, by Eric Mann.”

When he was bluest lately, Peter had occasionally walked over there and stood for a while gazing at this lingering vestige of his name.

He went over there now, in soft hat and light overcoat, and carrying his heavy cane--hurried over there, in fact--across the Square and on under the Sixth Avenue elevated into that quaint section of the great city which socialists, anarchists, feminists, Freudian psycho-analysts of self, magazine writers, Jewish intellectuals, sculptors and painters of all nationalities and grades, sex hygiene enthusiasts, theatrical press-agents and various sorts of youthful experimenters in living share with the merely poor.

He stopped at a familiar spot on the curb by a familiar battered lamp-post and peered across the street.

Then he started--and stared. Surprise ran into bewilderment, bewilderment into utter dejection.

The faded, torn twenty-four-sheet poster had vanished.

A new brand of cut plug tobacco was advertised there now.

Ragged children of the merely poor, cluttering pavement and sidewalk, fell against him in their play. Irritably he brushed them aside.

It was indeed the end.

A young woman was crossing the street toward him, nimbly dodging behind a push cart and in front of a coal truck. Deep in self, he lowered his gaze and watched her. So intent was his stare that the girl stopped short, one foot on the curb, slowly lowered the apple she was eating, and looked straight at him.

She was shaped like a boy, he decided--good shoulders, no hips, fine hands (she wore no gloves, though the March air was crisp) and trim feet in small, fiat-heeled tan boots. Her hair, he thought, was cut short. He was not certain, for her “artistic” tarn o'shanter covered it and hung low on her neck behind. He moved a step to one side and looked more closely. Yes, it was short. Not docked, in the current fashion, but cut close to her head, like a boy's.