Chapter LIII: The White Light Again 315 (3)

Now Pidge’s mind whirled back to a pair of eyes in a baby carriage at Santa Monica; eyes of a male infant, said to be the handsomest of that locality where the hills and mesas break off abruptly for a sea wall. Large, still, steady blue-black eyes of an actor that had become calm because they were used to seeing faces wilt before them; long, curving coal-black lashes. Pidge hadn’t liked them in the infant; at least, they roused her unpleasantly somehow; and she didn’t like them now. The resemblance was deeper and more essential than that of family, but what held Pidge really was something she recognized, or fancied she did, something that had to do with being broke and threatened with hunger in New York. His clothing was fine, but had been long used. She had a positive divination for poverty.

Now his gaze was lost in her hair, as if he found hope there. Story failures and New York, fear, and its tough core of hunger, these amounted to one thing--but red hair was another. The astonishing part was the constant changing of expressions in his eye. They reflected every mood and whim of him, for one who could read; that is, when he forgot to veil them for purposes of his own. Just now he seemed to be wondering if he had better go any further with this red hair--if he had time to play. He didn’t seem to consider whether Pidge wanted to play or not, only whether the game were worth the while of one whose law was not to let any real chance slip. Pidge had forgotten the hurt of her message from John Higgins. She had a pronounced feeling that she wanted to hurt Melton some way herself....

“So I can’t see Mr. Higgins?”

“He’s been unusually rushed to-day.”

He laughed a little bitterly as if he understood all that. “Are you--are you his secretary?”

“No, an under reader.”

“I see. Have you been through any of my stuff?”

Pidge glanced at him resentfully; she felt he wouldn’t have asked such a question of a man.

“This is a sort of show-down with me,” he went on. “I’m leaving New York. I really hoped to see Mr. Higgins.”

His dilemma seemed real. It pulled her out from herself.

“I’m sorry----”

“Perhaps you--I’d have to know before to-morrow,” he said jerkily. “Perhaps you’d look at another story just finished? If you would read it--there is just a chance you might want to get it to Mr. Higgins before I go.”

“Have you the story with you?”

“No. I was hoping for good word from one of the others first. This new one is my last wallop. Might I bring it to you, anywhere you say, this evening?”

“You may leave it with Miss Claes at 54 Harrow Street.”

“Are you Miss Claes?”

“No, but she will give it to me.”

“Could I call later in the evening also, for your answer? It is only four or five thousand words.”

“You know, my reading is merely--I mean Mr. Higgins would have to decide.”

“But it would help--if the story pleased you--help to pass the night!”

“You may leave it with Miss Claes at the basement entrance and call a little later.”

Pidge found herself walking on tiptoe back to her desk, the catch still in her throat.

XII

UNDER THE SAME LAMP

THE manuscript was delivered while Pidge was out to supper. She took it upstairs to Cobden’s “parlor” and read with a nervous interest, and an uncomfortable feeling that Rufus Melton was looking down at her all the time. She didn’t lose herself in the story, but the feeling persisted that she might have done so, another time--especially if the manuscript had come to her in the usual way at the office. Certainly it was different and distinctive, compared to the run of the unsolicited. It was artful, if not art.... She heard Nagar’s quiet steady step as he passed up to his room. She had an impulse to ask him to read, but he wouldn’t say anything. Anyway, he was gone now.

This was a story of the Tunisian sands, written, she decided, by one who hadn’t been there; one who saw the desert as the average American reader would expect, but with additional flatfooted bits of color tramped down with audacity. Moonlight was different in Tunisia, and morals were different--freer than here. There was the glitter of the snake’s eye through the pages, for Pidge Musser. It made her think of a sick man in a gorgeous robe.

She had inferred from Melton’s talk that this story was new; in fact, that it was still hot from his machine. Yet the manuscript didn’t feel new; the front and back pages showed wear. Could she have misunderstood?... It had freedom; not the freedom of ignorance, but the freedom of a drifting ship. Its anchor dragged, its compass was uncentered. It cried out, “My God, I am free!” and it was, as a derelict is free.

At a quarter of ten, she heard the bell in the basement hall; heard Miss Claes directing Melton to the next floor. Pidge would not have had it this way, but people of the house were in the basement. He came up out of the dim stairway, walking wide, his soft cap crumpled in his hand, elbows out. He must have learned her name from Miss Claes.

“You mustn’t think, Miss Musser, that I don’t know how much I am asking--this favor of yours to-night.”

There was a sort of lift and draw to the way he took her hand; at the same time his shoulders and head bent down upon her. This thing that he was playing to-night was college boy--clumsy subtlety of a big boy coming home and greeting his sister--seeing in her, at the moment of greeting, something of the charm other boys might see. He walked around her under the light, laughing, apologizing, making a humorous picture of his own tension at _The Public Square_ that afternoon.

“I went there like an anarchist,” he laughed. “I was prepared to get my answer or blow up the place. I had to laugh afterwards the way I seized upon you.”

“I read the Tunis story,” she said. “Of course, you know it’s really unimportant what I think. I liked it well enough, but wasn’t carried away. I felt the color; in fact, color is the main asset of the story, but it seemed a bit thick----”

He laughed aloud. He was bending to her again, and most benignly, college big brother still in his manner and voice.

“I could tone that down, of course. The trouble is to get a thing like that straight, when you know that part of Africa as I do. I ought to have kept off Tunis, that’s the truth of it.”

“You have really been there?”

“That’s the worst of it, Miss Musser,” he laughed. “I went through hell for that story. Too much feeling to write with, you understand.”

Pidge was awed at her own error. She had been so convinced that the color was faked that she had judged the whole story on that basis.

“I’ve already asked too much of you. I’m sorry,” he added ingenuously. “One can’t force his things through this way. Why, I’d have given the whole six stories to _The Public Square_ for a hundred dollars, and taken the cheapening that comes to an author from a trick like that. That’s how I needed an answer.”

He had glanced up at the light as he spoke, a white, haggard smile, that bloodless look around the mouth. Pity caught and controlled her. She had done him an injustice already.

“You spoke of leaving New York for the west,” she said.

He laughed and shrugged, palms held upward.

“How far? I mean where is your home?”

He pointed to his cap lying on the arm of a chair, as if to say that were his home.

“I’ve got an aunt in Cleveland who wants me,” he added. “A little quiet house away out on one of the cross streets off Euclid, where there’s a room and eats and a place to write. I’ll start to walk, I guess.”

“Where are you staying in New York?”

He was laughing at her. “A little den up in Union Square--just a skylight. It’s a cell, Miss Musser, and even there, I have to stay out until midnight to sneak in without meeting the landlady.... Did you ever sleep in a room that had no window?”

“Mine has a window,” Pidge said.

“Then this isn’t yours?” He pointed to the closed folding doors of the inner room.

“Oh, no. Mine’s up higher, but it has a window. This is just a sitting room we sometimes use--Miss Claes and I--the lodger being away.”

“Oh,” he said queerly; then added with his haggard smile: “So the color was put on too thick--that’s too bad.”

“Does Mr. Higgins know that you have been over there in Tunis?” Pidge asked.

“I figured he would, but maybe he will decide, as you did, that I sat here in New York and stabbed at that setting.”

“I’ll place the story before him to-morrow. I could say to him that you’ve been to the desert----”

“Oh, I wouldn’t. Don’t tell him that. I was hoping, though, that you could tell him you liked it.”

Pidge now looked up into a smile almost childlike in its eager purpose.

“Couldn’t you tell him that? Couldn’t you tell him that--just for what others may find in the story?”

The catch was in her throat again. His hand rested lightly upon her shoulder; his smile was altogether disarming in its wistfulness. She thought he couldn’t mean what he said. She thought of the face in the baby carriage in Santa Monica; of this tortured child of whims and imaginations, in a room with no window, and the pallor around his mouth. She didn’t like any of it, but did not feel exactly separate from it. She thought of a little box upstairs in her own room, of the check her father had sent, which she had so far refused to cash. She was in a blur, her sense of belonging to Melton’s dilemma over all.

“You can’t mean for me to tell Mr. Higgins what I don’t believe,” she said. “I’ll ask him to read the story to-morrow. If he’s against it, I could--I might help you to pay for the room in Union Square, or--enough to get to Cleveland.”

Then the thing happened which she would have apprehended, except for her pity and personal involvement in his trouble. She was drawn in between the open flaps of his coat, and held there against the soft shirt which he wore. And all through her were his whispers--soft delighted laughter from lips that pressed into her hair and cheeks, searching for hers.

She had finally pushed him from her, and they stood apart under the lamp. For a moment, they stared. Then it seemed as if he studied her, as one who suddenly revalues, doubles the value of an object. It was the queerest, intensest scrutiny, his head cocked to one side, the light and laughter returning to his eyes and lips.

“I knew I wasn’t safe to come here,” he said. “I knew if you did like the story, I wasn’t safe to hear the verdict. It was the idea of getting enough money to escape from that room, to get back into Cleveland and find myself----”

Still she stared at him.

“I don’t suppose you can ever forgive me, but it broke me wide open, Miss Musser--to find what a ripping sport you are!”

“That’s about enough words,” she said.

He looked down.

“To-morrow,” she went on in a dreary tone, “you may come here--I mean to the basement entrance, at seven in the evening, and I’ll tell you Mr. Higgins’ decision. If it’s against the story, I’ll do as I said about your room rent and the fare to Cleveland.”

His hands went out to her.

“After what I did--you still want to do that?”

“Yes, and now please go.”

Pidge was up in her own room minutes afterward, before she realized that it had happened under that white lamp of Cobden’s “parlor.”

XIII

“MOTHER”

“A MAN’S a fool before he learns technic,” John Higgins said, as he leaned back from a manuscript the next afternoon. “He’s a cripple while he’s learning it. When he’s learned it and forgotten he’s learned it--he begins to be a workman. That’s the freedom of knowledge.... As for this Tunis story of young Melton’s--it’s a subtle sort of botch.”

Rufus Melton came to the basement entrance at seven. Even if Miss Claes had not gone out to dinner, Pidge would not have taken him upstairs. He looked older, his back had a curious droop. He glanced at her ruefully, and around the room. Pidge stood beside the table.

“Mr. Higgins didn’t care for your story,” she said. “It has happened unluckily all around.”

His head had bowed before she began to speak. His eyes came up to her now, full of contrition and pain.

“I think the hardest thing I ever did was to come here to-night. Only one thing made it possible. I’d have started west, only New York is a curious old dump.”

“How is that?” she asked warily.

“You have to go north to go west. I mean the only way out is north, for a pedestrian.”

“You haven’t enough for the ferry or tube?”

Their eyes met.

“What I said last night holds good, you know,” she said with effort.

He turned slowly to the door as if in indecision, and Pidge watched. She knew she could make him take the money, but she wanted him to be ready to die first.

“There was nothing in the other stories, either--from Higgins’ point of view?” he asked.

Pidge was white. She felt like an executioner. “The package was mailed back to you to-day.”

For just an instant his head was bowed again, half turned to the door. Then he veered around and his hand came out to hers.

“Good night,” he said.

“Good night. But you--that quiet room in Cleveland----”

He shook his head with a slow, dawning smile.

“It’s great to know you. I’ve heard about such people being here in the Village, but it’s--‘It’s fourteen miles from Schenectady to Troy.’”

“It’s a long way to Albany before that,” she said.

“It’s a long way to One-Hundred-and-Tenth Street, Miss Musser, but it is easier than taking money from a girl.”

She breathed relief. “I came to fight it out here in New York on the same terms you did,” she said. “You can pay me back.”

Now his back was toward her, his face uplifted. She saw his hand grope for the knob of the door, and his shoulders rock weakly. She caught his arm and pulled him back to a chair.

“You see, you really couldn’t get away.”

He had suffered her to lead him to a dining-room chair, and sat very still, his head tilted back, eyes closed. She took the little package of bills from her dress and tucked it into his hand. There were voices in the hall; a vague frown crossed his white temples.

“What is it?” he said queerly.

“You are faint. I’ll go with you to a near place for something to eat. That’s all you need. Come--if you can walk a little way.”

He stood in a sort of confusion, holding the folded bills in his hand as one would hold a card.

“Put that in your pocket,” she said, but he did not seem to comprehend.

They were in the street, her hand steadying him. They found a dim restaurant with a counter and a few tables. He did not speak until the waiter came; then asked for coffee. Pidge had taken the money and thrust it into his coat pocket. Now she was tormented with the fear that he would lose the small roll, not knowing that he had it. She had not brought her own purse. He would be forced to pay; then he would have to see what he had.

He drank the coffee first, then ate sparingly.

“I learned that in the desert,” he said at last.

“Learned what, please?”

“Not to go mad over the taste of food when one has been without.”

The girl who waited on the table looked devotedly into Melton’s profile as she served. Twice as he started to speak, the Sixth Avenue elevated crashed by outside and he seemed to forget what he meant to say. It seemed more true here in the restaurant than it had been in the house in Harrow Street, that he was wonderfully good to look upon. The realization held a small tumult for Pidge. She was altogether different with him than with any one else. They had finished, and still he lingered.

“I’m sorry. I hadn’t intended to come out. I left my bag upstairs. Will you please pay?”

To his illness, a look of embarrassment was now added.

“It’s in your pocket. Right there----”

She pointed to his coat, and he drew out the bills wonderingly.

“Oh, I remember,” he said dully.

While the waitress was away bringing the change, he shoved the rest of the money across the table to Pidge, but she pushed it back, saying quietly:

“I want you to fix up the room rent and get a night train west. We’ll say no more.”

His lips whitened under a curious tightening.

“Let’s get out in the dark,” he said roughly.

They walked back to Eighth Street and over to the Avenue, entering the Square that way. The sooty grass was soft and damp; the faintest trace of fog among the trees.

“You’ve got something on me,” he was saying strangely. “You’re not like a girl, but like a woman and a pal, too. You had something on me last night, or I wouldn’t have fallen for you that way.”

“When you get back to that Cleveland room--perhaps a real story will come of all this.”

“A real story,” he repeated.

His eyes were bright and the pallor of his face intense enough to be visible. She was conscious of his inimitable charm as his head inclined to her and she heard his words in the lowest possible tone:

“Meeting you--that is the real story.”

She pushed away his hand that had lifted to hers.

“You’re all right now. I’m going back. Good night and good luck.”

He made no attempt to detain her.

That night Pidge lay for a long time without sleep. She was forlorn and troubled and restless, but underneath it all there was a queer little throb of happiness, like the recent night of the two letters. It would not be stifled. Every time she could get still enough, she was conscious of it, like the song of a bird that kept on and on, but was only audible in the lulls of almost unbroken traffic. She awoke in the night with the thought of him speeding westward on his train.

The next night when she came home there was another letter from Los Angeles, another check dropped out, and a clipping, which she read first--the wedding announcement of “Adolph Musser, the noted metaphysician, and Mrs. Hastings, wealthy widow of the late Rab Gaunt Hastings, firearms manufacturer of New England, at the Byzantine,” etc.

Pidge didn’t have her guard up. The choke and the shame were too swift for her self-control. For the first time in many days the tears broke, the extra scaldy sort. If she had only been permitted to keep that first check uncashed for a few days longer!...

The next was a day of dullness and misery, a May day of rain. Crossing Broadway, as she hurried to luncheon, she passed Rufus Melton in the crowd. Her lips parted to call, but she checked in time. He hadn’t seen her. She found herself standing loosely in the traffic, her hand to her mouth, until a taxi driver roared at her, and she swung into the stream of people again and reached the curb.

XIV

ISOLATION

PIDGE was leveled with personal shame. Try as she would, she was as lacking in the ability to detach herself from Melton, as from the influence of her father. She had felt the boy’s power over her, and knew innately that she would feel it again; that this sort of thing wasn’t a mere touch and go; that meetings like this, which appear sporadic on the surface, have twined roots beneath. She had been taught from a child that nothing merely happens. The incentive that made her lend him the fifty dollars, which she had held uncashed for nearly a month, did not mean to her now a mere impulsive mistake. It was a symbol of a giving to this boy--of a blind but eager something out of the depths of her heart.

Late in June a letter came to her from Dicky Cobden, who was at Coquihatville on the Equator, where as he said, “the sun’s rays fall as straight as a tile from a roof.”

... Oh, yes, you and Miss Claes knew a lot more than I did that
night at Tara Subramini’s. I shot off a lot of words afterwards.
Never again. But I’m going to stay with it, Pidge.... I’ve just had
ten days here in the jungles, back on one of the tributaries of the
Kong. If I stayed long here, I would see it all as these exiled white
men do; that God is a rubber man with ivory legs; that the natives
are vermin, not only to be walked over, but to be stamped into the
ground. They whimper so. It’s too hot here to be whimpered at.... I
think so much about you. Of course, this isn’t news to you, but I
say it, because it is so different from what I thought it would be.
Something snapped when I got to the Kong.... All fat and decoration
are sweated off down here. I reach out to you just the same. Only
in New York I thought that we were both wrapt in the same sort of
film, a tinted filmy sort of glamour that stretched out as we went
different ways. That film was stretched too hard. When I reached the
River it snapped. I think I’ll never get over feeling this awful
isolation of being a separate creature from everybody, worst of all
from you....

... Next morning in the office John Higgins called her in to his desk. “Dicky has sent in some stuff. We begin to publish in August.”

He took off his spectacles and wiped them on the flap of his necktie. His eyes looked watery, as if the light had run out in tears.

“I’ve always heard that the Cobdens were honest,” he went on, “three generations of honest men. They’ve built something, Miss Musser. Not a business, that’s well enough, but they’ve built a man. Listen----”

He opened the pages at random and began to read. It was like the stuff in her letter.

“It’s so for pages and pages,” he continued. “Every word standing out, if you get the hang of it. No tint, no art; just words, pain-born, separate like boulders in a field. He has no hopes, yet he writes what he sees.... Something seems to have happened to our Dicky, besides Africa.... He watches the string of natives coming in with their tusks; he watches the crocodiles coming up to the blinding surface water; he watches the big monkeys that live in twos, and the little monkeys that live in troops. I don’t know what the world’ll get out of this, but I know what I get out of it----”

She saw that John Higgins was merely thinking out loud. A few moments later he finished:

“This stuff amounts to the most subtle and incredible rearraignment of imperialistic cruelty, but Dicky doesn’t mean it that way. He keeps repeating with devilish calm that it isn’t so bad as it was. It’s no particular nation, but all whites. He writes from the standpoint of a white man who remembers Cortez in Mexico, Pizarro in Peru, Warren Hastings in India, Cecil Rhodes in Africa and our own dear religious settlers bringing Yankee wits and rum and disease to the red Indians. He turns over the pages of all patriotic histories with a long stick as you would poke the leaves from the face of a corpse you had made yourself. His face tries to turn away; his stomach retches, but he knows each man and each nation must bury his own dead.”

“‘Something seems to have happened to our Dicky, besides Africa,’” Pidge repeated, when she was alone.

Summer days in New York, sleepy stewy days. The low clouds made the nights hot. Pidge was used to the “high sky” of Southern California where every inch of shadow meant coolness, where cool night fell quickly no matter how hot it had been in the sun, where there were no afterglows, nor afterheats, and you wanted a wrap the instant the sun went down. The meaning of summer in New York became a cruel meaning, in the little room off the area. It gave her an astonishing grasp of what people suffered in the tenements.

Two weeks after the copy arrived from Africa, the galleys came up on the Cobden articles, and Pidge asked permission to take a set home to show two friends of Dicky’s in Harrow Street. John Higgins acquiesced. Pidge delivered these to Miss Claes and forgot all about it, until the next night when she returned to the house after dinner, and Miss Claes called her from the door of Cobden’s “parlor.”

“Come in, Pidge, and we’ll shut everything out.”

Nagar was within and the galleys were stretched out under the light. Pidge had never seen Miss Claes and Nagar quite like this. They appeared happy over something they had found in Dicky Cobden’s isolation and melancholy--happy as in the news of a legacy.

“Why, don’t you see?” said Miss Claes strangely. “He’s pondering on Life! He thinks he’s reporting--when really he is giving himself to Life. The world stretches out before his eyes without glamour, stripped. He offers himself to it, but his writing contains a confession with the weariness of the ages on it, that he has nothing to give--that he is a sham like all the rest. There’s not a self-pose in all his pages.”

Nagar had slipped out. Miss Claes came close and added softly:

“Richard is finer than we knew, Pidge. What happened here in this house has prepared him--always the wrecker before the builder.”

“You mean, I’m the wrecker?”

“You couldn’t have done differently.... Too bad he isn’t to see Mohandas Gandhi. Nagar has received word that the Little Man is returning to India. Richard didn’t go to Natal first.”

“He’ll be so sorry,” Pidge said. “It was Nagar’s story that drew him to Africa----”

Their eyes met; no need to amplify.

“Dicky’s so deadly in earnest,” Pidge went on. “He sees what he sees the same at ten in the morning and at ten at night. His coming to Harrow Street didn’t mean a whim. His part that night of our Punjabi dinner didn’t mean a whim. Oh, but I’m so glad he hasn’t started out to save the world!”

“He’s preparing to work better than that.”

“I feel so ungrateful for not missing him more,” Pidge added unsteadily, “for not being more interested in this that pleases you. I can appreciate, but oh, Miss Claes, I don’t belong to your way of seeing things. I’ll always be Dicky Cobden’s hangman, always hurting myself more!”

They were standing close together.

“Nothing matters to me but myself!” Pidge moaned. “I’m hopelessly lost in myself--that’s what’s the matter! What room have I for Africa or the world? There’s more to me in the struggle of John Higgins not to get drunk--in the body hunger and body love of Fanny Gallup--in the lies of Rufus Melton! I can understand this world-service thing--oh, I can see the nations like chessmen on the table!--but I can’t fix Fanny Gallup or John Higgins, I can’t fix Rufus Melton. I can’t fix myself!”

XV

THE COBDEN INTERIOR

PIDGE heard about the assassinations in Bosnia as wearily as of a murder in little Sicily. She heard rumors of war in Europe with ennui--how could there be energy enough left in the human race to make war? She met Nagar in the lower hall at Harrow Street on the evening that war became a fact. He looked like a dead man walking in the twilight. She didn’t see Miss Claes at all that night. The next day in the office war began to show its personal aspects to Pidge Musser of Los Angeles. John Higgins was hours late in returning from lunch. She saw that he wouldn’t be down at all to-morrow. He looked old. He had on a black frock coat, as if dressed for pallbearing, though his face looked as if he were about to be borne himself. The little office was fumy, sweetish.

“Our blessed Savior moves in mysterious ways,” he remarked.

Pidge lingered at the door to get any significance that this might have for her.

“The Lord gives and the Lord takes away,” he added, sitting back straight in his chair.

He removed his spectacles and reached for the flare of his tie to polish them off, but no tie dangled to-day. It was a little black store-made bow, fastened with a clip over the collar button. Pidge still lingered, her hand on the knob.

“Blessed be the name of the Lord,” said John Higgins, “but it’s hell on us.”

She started out, but was called back.

“I need an audience, Miss Musser. I need a female ear. I need ladylike sympathy. It isn’t sweet of you to run off.”

“What’s the matter?”

The editor looked at her, squinted, put on his spectacles and looked again.

“Do you mean to say you don’t know what’s the matter?”

“Everything is the matter,” said Pidge. “But what’s new?”

His hand nearest her lifted and rested upon a pile of page proof on his desk.

“Dicky Cobden hasn’t written a line from the Kong that we can publish. We’ve cabled him to come in, though he’s probably started. You’ll recall that Belgium lies between France and Germany. She’s holding the Germans off from Paris, giving France and England a chance to get set. Belgium’s the world’s public square right now, the one vortexical spot on the face of the earth. Doesn’t it occur to you that even a new angle on her sins in the heart of Africa is about as much in time and place right now, as Paul Revere’s ride?”

... Three weeks later, she heard that Richard Cobden was in town; that John Higgins had seen him the night before. All that day at the office she kept listening for his step and voice, but he didn’t come. His car was in front of the Harrow Street house, however, when she reached there, and a light showed between the doors from his “parlor.” She lost some of the sense of suffocation when she saw that, a curious gladness for a moment. She tapped the door with her finger tip, pulled the curtain aside ever so little and said:

“Hello.”

A quick step in the inner room; then he was before her in the doorway, drawing her in under the light.

“Pidge--Pidge,” he repeated.

The boyish look was gone from him. He might have been taken for ten years older. The thing had happened that takes place abruptly in many Americans, more among business men than artists: Youth had been put away, its trace of divine humor exchanged for adult seriousness.

“Why didn’t you come to the office to-day, Dicky?” she asked.

“I wanted to see you here--like this.”

They were standing under the light.

“Why, you’re different,” she said.

“John Higgins said that. They told me so at home, uptown. I feel different, but it isn’t an improvement. And you, Pidge, you’re taller. And John Higgins says you’re doing so well.”

“I’m thanking you every day for that----”

She kept thinking about the change in him. If this were selflessness, she liked him better before. He had been quite unselfish enough, she thought. She didn’t see the fight in him, because it was so subtly identified with herself. She only knew that he seemed without fight.

“Keep on your things, Pidge. We’ll go out somewhere----”

* * * * *

That was the beginning of strange days and evenings. They played at the old game of _Comrades_. Often they lunched together, occasionally with John Higgins for a third. At such times it seemed that they took _The Public Square_ with them, subscribers, advertisers, contributors, policies. It was that curious time in America when the personal and national meaning of the European war was breaking through with all its paralyzing ramifications; when all who were sensitive at all reflected division and strife in themselves, as a deep leveling sickness.

Pidge was taken to the Cobden home, a new and terrifically complicated modern apartment in East Fiftieth Street, but the furnishings, the household ceremonials, the people themselves, suggested prints of New York interiors in 1870--respectable, established, grim. The gradual speeding up of the world for a half century to the explosive point of 1914 ended with the click of the key in this hall door, and you were in the world of another day, with a spinster aunt, a widowed mother, an unmarried sister, a slowly disintegrating grandfather, and Dicky himself, not in a different guise at all--the same courteous, sincere Dicky, but now to Pidge Musser’s western eyes, utterly, revealingly comprehensible. This was the place that had made him. This was his reason for being.

Here life was life. Here was the family unit, the family a globe, all human society moving outside like the water around a bubble; a closed globe reflecting all else in curious unreality. Here three-score-and-ten was life, and a very long time. Life wasn’t a spiritual experiment, in matter; not an extension in matter of souls that had made innumerable such experiments, but straight work-a-day three-score-and-ten with oblivion at the birth end, and heaven or hell at the other. Here was All Time, in which it behooved man and woman to gather worldly goods and religious goods and love one another and hang together--for the rest was with God. Here senility was dear. The heavy-bodied, dim-minded grandfather was still grandfather, not the vanishing spirit of him. They would weep when the body passed. They would look to his place in the cemetery and say, “Here he lies.”

Pidge Musser wanted to scream, not at the limitations, but at the kindness which was showered upon her. They were ready to perform the great transaction of taking her in, opening their hearts and house to a maiden, who would bring respectable additions to the Cobden line--sharing wealth, well-being, gentleness, the Cobden name which had been kept clean and useable and virile, and the Cobden God, who stood on the other side of death with angelic associates and rewards in His hands.

Pidge continually felt that her next word would ruin everything; yet they unswervingly regarded her as becoming one with themselves; the process of assimilation already begun. They were patient, knowing of old that a new maiden would have incrustations of the world to check off, inequalities to be planed down. They set about not adjusting to her, but as she fancied, assimilating her, as the changeless Chinese assimilate a weaker race, breaking down the foreigner in themselves. She would become theirs to them with the years.

“Oh, Dicky,” Pidge said, when they were in his car again. “I see. I understand. How did you dare to open those doors to me!”

“I spoke of you at home, Pidge. They wouldn’t have understood if I hadn’t brought you soon. They were prepared to open their arms to you. They have their laws----”

“But they are your laws. Dicky--how did you dare? Is it because you don’t know me, don’t see me at all? Do you see something which you want to see, that has nothing to do with me?”

“What is it that troubles you so?”

“Myself--always and forever myself! Oh, don’t you see I have nothing to do with them? Why, you’re comfortable, Dicky--your people are comfortable! _This_ is life to you--this, here and now! It isn’t to me. Life’s an exile to me, a banishment and coldness and pain. In all New York there are not two such opposites. My God is far away. Yours is here--a Person.”

He answered hopelessly: “I can see how it would strike you, but I couldn’t cover up on account of that. I belong to them. I’m of them. Any front I might put on wouldn’t wear. You had to see us, Pidge----”

Another time she might have seen the fine thing back of those words, but she took such finenesses of Richard Cobden for granted, while he rarely could understand that she saw anything but his faults.

“It’s queer,” he said, in the same dull hopeless way. “I stand to you as the most staid and changeless person, but to my family I am dangerous, a fulminant. They love and trust me, but watch me with fierce concern. Already I’ve broken more Cobden convictions in twenty-five years than all my relatives in all their years.”

His face glanced wearily toward her from the lights of the street, as he drove.

“You’ve let me understand too much for one Sunday afternoon,” she said in an awed voice, “and it feels colder and lonelier than ever before. I even see something of the coming years, Dicky. I see that it means Fate, when you say ‘yes’ or ‘no.’ I see that you turn to a girl to stay. I see you don’t cheat. I see that I’m volatile compared; that my honesty is a fierce effort, a deadly self-conscious effort, and yours is an established habit. I’m clumsy at my honesty. I love it terribly, but it is still on the outside of me--something to attain.”

She sank back, laughing. “I wonder if it will stay as deadly clear as this?”

“You are not making it quite clear to me,” he said.

“I must. Oh, I must. Dicky, please open your soul and listen to me--hard, hard! While it’s clear, I must talk. You’ve chosen to be my friend. You’ve chosen not to take the easier course of hating me. I understand all that better now than the night of the Punjabi dinner.”

“I do, too,” said Cobden, and bitterness of the African rivers was in his words.

“Do I have to begin by saying how dear you are--how kind, how utterly good it is to know you; what it means to have faith and trust in one man?”

“Please not, Pidge.”

“But never forget it, Dicky. It’s the pedestal upon which everything’s builded. Always remember that I know you underneath; that I turn to you in trouble--not like a brother or father or lover, but what our word _comrade_ means--what it will sometime mean to many people! That’s you. But, Dicky, because I know you--I can look away! Don’t you see--you’re like something done! Having found you, I can turn to other things.”

“I’ll try to see that, but most people find each other differently, to stay----”

“It’s because they don’t find what I’ve found. I don’t know what I want, only I know there are terrible undone things in me, that other people stir to life. I’m lost in persons. Miss Claes and Nagar lose themselves in nations. You’re getting to be like them, but I see it all in the personal!... Listen, Dicky, if you were to get a woman to take to your house--one ready to go in and be a Cobden and a mother of Cobdens--I could love her! I could hold to you just as close, though secretly. I would expect you to be my _comrade_ just the same--I mean just between us--never on the outside, perhaps. What I mean is, it wouldn’t hurt me--not the thing we have together.”

His car had come to a stand in the stillness of Harrow Street, but still they sat.

“What you mean is--you haven’t any place for me as a lover or a husband.”

“That’s like you, but that’s it.... Dicky, you mean to me something done, something found. I don’t dare to turn to you and rest. The savage undone things in me _won’t_ rest! They demand experiences, life--and no one knows better, that they mean pain ... and oh--under your lamp--it’s horrible to tell it, but you’ll forgive me later, when you see that it had to be told----”

“What are you talking about, Pidge?”

“Under your lamp--in there! He came about a manuscript. He was broke and needed help--all his stories refused. He asked to see me that night. Miss Claes’ basement was occupied. She sent him up. We talked. He wanted something, money, everything. Under your light--he took me to him, his coat open----”

Cobden startled her, as he cleared his throat. The silence between them had been so deep.

“It meant nothing to him! He was used to it. It was only his way to get something--money most, he wanted. It was just as he might take a waitress or hall maid--used to having girls ‘fall for’ him. This is what I mean--though I understand him, a theatrical mind, a liar--life meant something to me that instant, that it never meant before. Something I must do, something calling--pain, but something I haven’t done!”

“You mean--you mean--it isn’t over?”

“Just that, Dicky, and oh, forgive me! I may not see _him_ ever again, but _something in me_ isn’t ‘over.’ I had to tell you--to be honest, to learn to be honest. You’ll be glad some day!”

XVI

DICKY FEELS A SLUMP

IT was nearly a week afterward when Pidge heard sounds, not of meeting only, but of mauling, from over the partitions of Richard Cobden’s office at _The Public Square_. Her desk was now in John Higgins’ room. The racket was “young”--something of the sort you expect in a college fraternity house, rather than in the editorial rooms of a magazine of dignified social protest and short story ideals. John Higgins winced and glared. Now the stranger’s voice was upraised:

“You’re not seedy, Dick--you’re decayed! If Africa treats a man like that, I’m off the Sahara for life.”

Pidge heard this with something of the sense of personal arraignment. The ugly part was that it was true, and it hadn’t been the truth a week before. Dicky had been changed when he arrived, but the change since their ride home from his mother’s apartment in Fiftieth Street was more definitely disturbing. She found John Higgins’ eyes upon her and started guiltily. He leaned forward to whisper:

“It’s a fact. Something’s eating our Dicky. He’s losing his bounce.”

For once, Pidge did not altogether blame herself. There had been no two ways about telling him what had happened under the light. She had been challenged to speak on their first evening together after his return, challenged every hour of the week afterward; and yet it was not until after the words were out, spoken in her particularly ruthless and unequivocal way, that she actually saw the power of their hurt.

In Africa Dicky had stripped himself of hope, in the most complete way he knew. Africa is said to have a way of helping a man in this. Doubtless he had winnowed this hope down to a semi-impersonal concept, that straight, clean devotion would win its reward. But Africa alone was one thing, and New York with Pidge was another. He had been entirely innocent of the possibilities of pain his heart was capable of.

Still they went out together. They tried, furiously tried, but the star toward which they had held their eyes, the star named _Camaraderie_, was for the present out of their sky. She tried to give herself in interest to his particular studies of world politics. His views had nothing to do with intuition or prophecy. Dicky gripped affairs on an academic basis of economics, and the only light he had to work with in relation to the turmoil in Europe was from the same friction that had furnished his sparks in Africa--the pain of his own heart. He told her of the delicate and dangerous adjustments between the nations, as he saw them; the organic play, the push and pull on every national boundary; the draw of Russia upon India, for instance; the grim hold of the British bulldog; the interatomic play of India, Ireland and Egypt; the poison vats of the Balkans, the frowning menaces of the Levant. One night he spoke of Italy’s inner and outer stresses, and of her age-old hatred for Austria.

“And Pidge,” he said quietly, “you won’t mind my saying it, will you? I see it all so clearly when I talk to you. I know you’ll tell me that you don’t know anything about these things. You always tell me that, but you certainly make me know them better.”

And another time when they were going out together in the evening and she had come down from the upper floor with her wrap which he took for a moment:

“I’m sure you won’t mind, Pidge,” he said, “if I tell you that the little things you wear quite take me over. They actually hurt, and I never saw you look quite like to-night.”

This was the quality--more like the words of an older man; a touch of sentimentality upon them, as if he were diminished in her presence, something in him so whipped it did not dare appear on the surface. This was unpleasant to Pidge. The changeless want in his heart suffocated her at times; then her affection changed to revolt. She became irritable and uncentered, her temper hard to govern. She wanted freedom--freedom for something utterly undelineated, but freedom to Life (in Miss Claes’ meaning of that word of words) and she saw him in such times as one who stood in her way.

One night in the little upper room, in her own particular time of self-revelation, as Pidge lay on the borderland between sleep and waking, she saw herself like an ogre, and Dicky Cobden like a terrified child in a great house, and she was driving him from one room to another, from one floor to another, to an inevitable cornering in the farthest wing.

Finally an early October evening, and again his car had halted before 54 Harrow Street. Pidge sat beside him, but Dicky had not opened the door.

“Pidge,” he said suddenly, “I’ve got to the end of my rope. I’m not making good. I’m all blurred on what we’re trying to do. It’s--it’s too much for me here.... I don’t want France or Flanders. I’m going into the Near East for _The Public Square_ and a newspaper syndicate.”

“I knew it. I felt it coming, at least,” she said. “And I’ve failed, too, all the time. But, Dicky, back of everything, I know there must be somebody laughing at our seriousness and stupidity. We’ll see the puzzle straight some time. You’ll see.”

They both were sitting straight up.

“Nobody’s--nobody’s shoulder?” he asked with terrible effort.

“No, Dicky. It would only fog us up--all the more.”

XVII

NEW LODGERS FOR HARROW STREET

PIDGE MUSSER was ending her second year in the editorial rooms of _The Public Square_, when a short story came in from Rufus Melton. Meanwhile, his work had begun to appear in magazines of large popular appeal. This manuscript, called _The Boarded Door_, had doubtless not fitted into any of them. The chief thing about the story to Pidge was that her cheeks burned as she read.

This made her angry. Another thing, the story was so familiar to her. She seemed to be in and out of Melton’s mind, hearing his typewriter, understanding even his corrections. But also she saw what the author could not--his fluctuations of fancy, which uncentered the tale.

“He’s beginning to be read,” said John Higgins. “It’s not a bad story. We’d better take it.”

“It is not his best work. There’s a cavity in it,” said Pidge. “If it were by a new name altogether, we’d write the author suggesting that he work over the weak part.”

“Do it,” said John Higgins.

Pidge laughed nervously. “He won’t like it,” she said.

“Don’t mind that. Rufus Melton can write. He’ll have his hour, but go ahead and scuttle the ship, young woman. We don’t care about pleasing our passengers.”

Back at her own desk, Pidge was smitten with the idea that she wasn’t being fair. In the course of reading Melton’s story, she had not once forgotten that he had failed to pay back that fifty dollars. Not only that, Rufus Melton hadn’t mentioned it; and he was said to be making money right now. She had to write the letter to Melton three times. Films of ice formed on the sentences and had to be skimmed off, in spite of her most rigid effort. She carried the sheet, signed by “The Editors,” to John Higgins, with a restless feeling that damage was done.

“That’s just like what Dicky Cobden would say,” he remarked, handing it back. “Send it along with the manuscript.”

Pidge wasn’t allowed to forget Dicky Cobden, though Richard, himself, was across the world and remained across, apparently groping to find the exact antipodes from Washington Square, New York. Between Miss Claes’ affection for him and John Higgins’ and Nagar’s; considering her occasional use of his “parlor” in Harrow Street and her daily use of his old desk in the office, to say nothing of the position she occupied through his kindness and care--no, she wasn’t being allowed to forget.

About the same time that Rufus Melton’s story came in to the office, a dingy bit of white paper came to Harrow Street for Pidge. It was like a paper you would see in the street around a public school building. Pidge was awed at the unfailing magic of the post-office authorities, that the letter had ever been delivered. It was from Fanny Gallup, who had married Albert and left the pasting table shortly after Pidge’s change of fortune. Pidge had seen Fanny but once in the meantime, but had asked her to write or telephone in case of need.

Pidge found the hall designated in the third floor of a condemned building in Foley Street, and was directed to a door through which came the sounds of a crying child. Her knock was answered, and the caller gradually realized through the shadows that she was being grinned at. She smiled back, wondering if the shoeless creature were Fanny’s sister or mother. She wore no outer waist and a heavy plaid skirt that was splashed with wash water. An infant shrank into the hollow curve of her body, and another child sat wailing on the wet floor behind.

“I thought you’d come, Musser.”

It was Fanny herself. Pidge had crossed the threshold to look into eyes in which hate and hunger moved in a narrow orbit; narrow like the wet spot on the floor, in which the first-born played. Tired back, draggled hair, merely a stretched and faded vestige of a girl was Fanny Gallup now. Laugh and street talk were gone for the time, at least; gone as Albert, the barber, as much a myth as ever, so far as Pidge was concerned, though the place hypothecated a male parent. These three remaining seemed purposeless bits of life which a perverted scheme permitted to live on.

Pidge hated herself for becoming involved in the complication. For the moment, she hated New York that could not keep itself clean. No rent, no food, somebody else’s washing in the tubs, and the rags of Fanny and her children unwashed.

“... No, it ain’t no good to think of staying, Musser, because they’re tearing the buildin’ down.”

“How much rent do you owe?”

“Five weeks. But it ain’t no good to pay that, because I got to get out anyway. Gawd, Redhead, you look like a doll in a window!”

“Is there any place around here where you can go?”

“It’s hard to get in with the two, and you’d have to pay a month in advance,” Fanny said.

“How soon do you have to leave here?”

“Four days. That’s why I sent the letter.”

“Have you got any--anything to eat?”

“That’s why I sent the letter. That’s why they keep squalling all the time.”

“I’ll be back before dark,” Pidge said, turning into the hall.

“You’ll--sure--come--back?”

“Sure,” called Pidge.

She returned with her arms full of groceries, and went home promising to come back the next afternoon.

* * * * *

“... Bring them here. There is no other way,” Miss Claes said.

“But they’re not clean!” Pidge moaned. “They are too sick to keep clean.”

“We can freshen them up a little,” said Miss Claes.