Chapter LIII: The White Light Again 315 (4)

“But there’s nothing Fanny can do, unless the two children are taken from her. I mean she’s held to the room with them now, and they’ve been crying so long that they can’t stop. They both cry at once, and she doesn’t hear them; they look and listen for a second and then go on crying. If one stops, he hears the other. The place smelled like a sty, and the packages of food I brought got wet and spoiled before they were opened.”

“Forget about them until to-morrow, Pidge, and then get a taxicab and bring them here. I’ve got a second-floor room toward the back.”

XVIII

AN OUTER CHANGE

MISS CLAES standing by the table in her own room heard a step upon an upper stairway; not on the immediate basement stairs, but of one descending from the second to the first landing. The tread was deliberate. She heard it now in the hall directly above. Miss Claes moved to the door, her hand against her cheek; then back to stand by the table again. Now the step was on the basement stairs. A fire was burning in her grate, and that was the main light of the room, for the winter morning was very gray. The table was prepared for one--plate and cup of ruddy gold, a cutting of white hyacinth in a purple vase. The footsteps approached in the basement hall; a heavy bag was placed down outside Miss Claes’ door; then Nagar appeared, a dark hat and an overcoat upon his arm. He came forward, and the two stood together for a moment.

“At least this once, I can serve you,” Miss Claes said.

Nagar smiled as he sat down to the table. Miss Claes went into the kitchen and presently brought a pot of tea in a Chinese basket and a covered dish. She filled a goblet from the water bottle, and stood behind his chair while Nagar ate. The house was strangely silent.

Nagar arose. They stood together again for a moment by the mantel. He spoke in Hindi, and she listened, like one already weary, hearing of more things to do. Not until she smiled, did he turn away. She did not follow to the door, nor look toward the window, as he passed up the steps to the street. After a long time, she stepped to the cabinet for a cigarette and lit it standing by the fireplace.

XIX

FANNY DRIES HER TEARS

FANNY GALLUP was taking life easy. She had not been separated from her children, but relieved for the present from the hunger drive to support them. Pidge helped to pay Fanny’s room and board, but didn’t miss the fact that the main expense fell upon Miss Claes.

“There is a little fund back of me for just such cases, Pidge,” Miss Claes said. “I rarely divulge the fact, but there is no reason in the world why you should be inconvenienced.”

“Except that I brought her here----”

“I asked you to.”

“Except that she called on _me_ in her trouble, and I worked elbow to elbow with her for four months, and she pulls out the very devil from me every time I see her.”

“Your feeling of responsibility is what makes you what you are--I never miss that, Pidge. If you weren’t so hard and straight on all the tricky little matters of dollars and cents, you can be very sure I’d never tell you my secret of secrets, about the fund.”

“I’ll have to pay what I can, if only because I hate to so. But I can never pay for bringing her to your house.”

Miss Claes laughed. “That is only the way you see it. Fanny isn’t heavy on us here. Not at all. It’s the dear, possessive Pidge that is hurt. Do you suppose I am torn by what goes on in the rooms and halls? Not torn beyond repair from day to day, at least. Fanny’s only a little more simple than most, a little less secretive.”

“She’s unmoral,” Pidge declared solemnly. “The awful thing is, she doesn’t learn. Life passes through her like a sieve, leaves its muck on her, and she doesn’t learn.”

Philosophy seldom helped Pidge; she had heard too much of it, and money was invariably a serious affair. In the California life there had never been enough money for all needs. Adolph Musser was unable to do without what he wanted, even though the immediate tradespeople of the neighborhood were frequently forced to. The metaphysician relied upon the Law of Providence to take care of them; and this had hacked and hewed into Pidge’s disposition; this had meant red war to her soul up to the last hour in her father’s house.

Here in New York the fight had been different. Even with Miss Claes mysteriously back of her from the beginning, she had faced, in her first few months in New York, the ugly candor of starvation. There was established in Pidge both from Los Angeles and New York experiences, a determination to fix herself unrockingly on her own feet in a financial way; and now, just as she might have gotten a bit ahead, was the expense of Albert’s children, and the claims of their mother, which were getting to look as interminable to Pidge as a ninety-nine years’ lease.

Another trouble was that Fanny was beginning to show fresh traces of her sense of the “fun of the thing.” Her spine was stiffening a little with good food and rest, and curious little suggestions of starch showed in lips and hair and breast that had been utterly draggled. She was often seen hanging over the banisters; sure indication of renewal of life and hope. She didn’t weep over the departed Albert; in fact, Pidge Musser observed, as an added revelation of the hatefulness of life, that Fanny was back on the scene looking for a man--not earnestly, not passionately, but without compunction and entirely unwhipped. Fanny granted that she was nobody, that she never had been; but that was no sign why she should pass up anything that was going by. Pain and hunger were forgotten like a sickness.

One night as she was coming in, Pidge heard Fanny’s low laugh on the floor above, as she ran upstairs in time to shoo a lodger from Fanny’s arms in the doorway. Then she followed into the littered room and a light was made. The two women faced. The laugh remained unwithered on Fanny’s cheerful face.

“Oh, Musser, you look so cross,” she panted.

“Don’t you remember--?” Pidge began.

“Remember wot?”

“What you were in that beast’s nest in Foley Street?”

“That’s what you always want, Musser, always want me to keep rememberin’, just as I’m getting straightened out.”

The fashion of Fanny’s straightening out settled upon Pidge, as she looked around the room. Its awfulness was beyond tears to her, even beyond laughter.

“Fanny Gallup, if you bring another baby here, I’ll--I’ll----”

“There ain’t going to be no other baby here, Musser. I ain’t nobody’s chicken like that.”

XX

THEY WALK IN CIRCLES

ONE day just as Pidge was finishing luncheon with John Higgins, she was startled to hear Melton’s voice. He moved around their table with a fling of his coat tails and held out both his hands. It actually sounded, though she never was sure, as if he said something like, “I’ve been looking everywhere for you.”

Pidge fancied a sort of rueful wonder on the old editor’s face, as he announced his haste to get back to the office, and bolted out.... She was recalling the baby carriage in Santa Monica. Melton’s face was slightly broader, she thought, and the poise of young success was upon it. One thing she had never known before was how remarkably well his curly head was placed upon its shoulders. The neck was not merely a nexus, but a thing of worth in itself, with arch and movement which made him look taller and intimated something light and fleet, touching memories which Pidge could not quite grip.

They were together in the street. Melton had asked her to walk with him to his bank. He seemed on both sides of her at once, his hand drawing her deftly this way and that through the crowd, his chat and laughter in her ears, and an old indescribable weariness and helplessness in herself.

“... Sure, I could have hunted you up. In fact, I would have done it eventually, but I haven’t been in New York all the time; running back west to get my stuff up, now and then.”

“I thought you lived in New York,” Pidge said.

“I keep an apartment in East Twenty-fourth Street,” he granted.

A lull for just an instant before he went on:

“You see, it’s handy to my publishers, and my bank is only a square or two away.”

Pidge wished she could accept him for just what he seemed--the upstart American in literature. She wished to forget everything else, save the youth who said, in effect, “This is my bank, this is my solicitor, this is my publisher.” But she could not smile her scorn and pass on. She felt like the parent of a child showing off. Back of the tinkle and flush of these big days of his, which he seemed to be drinking in so breathlessly, she felt more than ever that thing about him which was imprisoned. A thing it was that called to her, kept calling beseechingly.

“I’ll never forget,” he said, speaking of the fifty dollars--“I’ll never forget that night, when I left you--and the fog in the Square. Everything was different, after that.”

“You didn’t go to Cleveland that night, as you said,” she declared, watching the curve of his black lashes.

The eyes darted her way.

“Lucky, I didn’t,” he said. “God! How I wanted to! New York had me bluffed that night, before you came to the rescue.”

“Why didn’t you go?”

“I was up close to Grand Central with my bag, when the idea struck me--the idea that has since come out in the story series that has caught on. I could hardly realize that I had your money. I kept it in my hand--the hand in my pocket. That was a turning point in a life. New York had frightened me pretty nearly to death--the hunger thing, you know. All I wanted on earth was to crawl into that train for Cleveland, but it was as if you were calling on me to stay.”

She turned in pain and amazement. He was looking straight ahead and talking softly. She saw every twist and drive of his mind as he dramatized the situation unfolding to him. He was deeply absorbed in the pictures which his fertile brain uncovered one by one. It hurt her like the uncovering of something perverted in herself.

“Don’t go on like that,” she said. “You’re not working now. You are just walking in the street. You mustn’t make stories when you talk.”

He glanced at her sorrowfully, as one realizing in himself a truth so big that he is willing to wait for it to be believed.

“It is God’s truth,” he said. “That was the turning point in my career--that night--the night I turned back from the train. It was as if you were calling me, and it was as if the idea came from you. I knew I had to stay on and do the work here, close to the markets.”

She looked into his face and laughed.

“And you could forget me--forget the fifty dollars for nearly a year!”

“I don’t blame you for talking that way. I expect to be misunderstood--not me, but the thing I stand for.”

She was hushed. Could he mean that he suffered in conscious conflict? Could it be that he was aware at all of that imprisoned thing she saw back of his eyes? He had halted, and now she turned again for him to go on.

“I hoped that you, you of all, might understand,” he said. “Why, it was from you that the whole thing started.”

He seemed actually to be making himself believe it. She felt herself trying to give him the benefit of the doubt.

“Do you know you’re changed?” he said, in sudden exultation. “Do you know you’re five times as charming? What’s happened?”

“Nothing has happened,” said Pidge.

“It was the strangest shock, in the restaurant when I saw you. I knew it was you, and yet you’ve put on something--out of the ordinary.”

“Oh, don’t.... I must go back to the office now.”

“The bank is just half a block. We’ve been walking in circles. I hadn’t a check in my pocket.... I wanted to walk with you anyway. Do you really have to get back to the office?”

“Oh, yes.”

“Couldn’t you--couldn’t we go down on the river or to a show somewhere? I know what you’re thinking: that if this meant so much to me, how could I let it go for nearly a year. But you’ll understand. You’ll see what I mean and what I’m up against. The thing was too big for me to rush in. I had to wait. But now that you’ve come, I can’t let you go.”

“I must go back.”

“To-night then. Couldn’t I meet you at _The Public Square_ at five and have supper?”

“Oh no. I must go home--first.”

“May I call for you at Harrow Street, say at seven, or before that? Say, couldn’t we go to that old restaurant where we went that night?”

This idea had come to Pidge before he spoke; exactly, perhaps, as it caught his fancy.

“Yes, I could----” Pidge cleared her voice, and spoke again above the roar of the street. “Yes, I could.”

Then because she had lifted her voice, she seemed to hear her own tones unforgetably, as if her soul echoed back the words.

“But I must hurry back now,” she added.

“Let’s get this bank thing finished.”

But when they reached the door of the bank they found it closed for the rest of the day.

XXI

THE DINNER COAT

JOHN HIGGINS came up through the newspapers and magazine editorial rooms in those brave days when a typewriter did not always go with a man’s desk, but a cuspidor nearly always. Even yet, the editor of _The Public Square_ tucked a piece of fine-cut between his cheek and lower jaw after breakfast in the morning, and forgot about it just so long as it was there. The fact that he smoked from time to time caused no inconvenience to the wad of shredded leaf. He complained of indigestion and gave himself wholeheartedly to various forms of diet.

He kept Pidge Musser close at hand during these trying war days. His former stenographer languished. John Higgins found a singular peace in working with Pidge and was innocent enough to discuss it. He was an old integer so far as women were concerned, never getting beyond the rare confession (when a few drinks ripened his mind) that he had had a mother once. He didn’t hate women; nothing like that. He had just merely walked around them as you walk around the shore of an ocean. He wasn’t born with a bathing suit and the idea of taking off his shoes and stockings made him hoarse with fright. Pidge, however, had crept in through the business door, and John Higgins awoke to find her at his side.

Pidge found him like a somber relative of the elder generation, when she returned from her hectic walk with Melton that afternoon, but for once she could forget John Higgins easily. Twenty times in her mind, at least, Pidge went over the talk and walk with Melton, her face often turned away to the window with a sad but scornful smile. She thought it out with hard sophistication, all that he had said of receiving inspiration from her, but underneath she wanted it to be so; and deep among the secrets of herself, she felt that what he said was possibly truer than he knew.

Had he known that the bank would be closed? She would soon learn about that, for he had promised to bring the check to-night. Even if he didn’t, she could never forget that _calling_ to her, back of his actor eyes--calling like a child of her own. New York whirled by below; the manuscripts were piled high in front and side. A Mecca letter came in from Richard Cobden, intimating that he might go to India. Even that did not arouse John Higgins, nor startle Pidge Musser from the painful web she was in.

Melton was at the basement entrance at seven. As Pidge went down to meet him, Fanny Gallup was coming up. They met in the second hall. Fanny stood in the gaslight, her arms open wide, her dress open at the breast, her eyes laughing.

“I saw him, Redhead. He’s a God-awful, that boy. Don’t you bring no little baby to this house! I won’t stand for it.”

* * * * *

Melton wore a black cape coat, a dinner coat beneath. Pidge felt as if she had left all her light in the second hall. She was exasperated with herself for pushing past Fanny and not taking the joke gracefully, exasperated with Melton for togging up to come to Harrow Street, to take her to that old eating house. Couldn’t he resist showing off for just one hour?

Some awe seemed to have fallen upon him, or rather between them. In silence they rounded the almost empty curve of Harrow Street, and presently entered the crowds and lights and crashes of trestled Sixth Avenue. On the corner, as they crossed Eighth Street, Pidge heard a newsboy behind say, “There goes a movie actor.” Pidge deeply knew what that grimed child-face had seen.... It troubled Melton to find the restaurant, and she didn’t help, though she had located it a score of times since that other night. At the table, while they waited, he took a fifty-dollar check from his pocket and handed it over, saying that the real part of the favor he would try to pay bit by bit through the years.

“Because I’ll never get very far from you again,” he added queerly. “Find it very funny, don’t you? Sit there chuckling, don’t you? You can laugh, but it’s true.”

Now Melton began to ask for things which weren’t on the bill-of-fare. He told the waitress how things should be prepared and served--this in a side-street eating house, that specialized in beans and encouraged counter trade. There were hard lines around the mouth of the waitress which Melton commented upon, as she turned her back. Pidge had a warning to hold her temper, and yet she would have died first.

“I’ve never worked in a restaurant,” she said, “but I’ve worked in a factory, and I know what those lines come from. They come from dealing with people like you, people who forget where they are, forget what they come for.”

“How do I forget where I am?” he asked.

“Because you don’t know that this is a place where they serve ‘eats.’ ‘Eats’ are cooked all one way. ‘Eats’ are served fast in business hours, and the waiters sit around and gasp the other times, trying to catch up with themselves. And you don’t know where you are, because you try to show these people and me that you’ve seen how it was done in uptown hotels.”

A trace of sullenness showed in his eyes, and then a warmth of almost incredible delight.

“It’s great! I never was scolded in my life!”

“It wasn’t for supper alone--that wasn’t why I fell into the idea of coming here,” she said. “You forget it entirely. You dare to come in a dress suit--here--here!”

“Listen,” he begged, “don’t run away with that idea. I thought we might go to a theater afterward. I didn’t think so much about where we were going as I did that I was coming to you. I didn’t have anything better than this to put on, and so I came this way.”

A moment before it had seemed the most righteous and perfect thing under heaven to vent a few scathing remarks, but now she felt twisted and diminished. Long and religiously she had tried to keep her rages to herself. Neither spoke while the plates were being served, and then he said:

“I was horribly out of true, in telling these people how to do it, but I wanted it good for you,” he added simply.

She looked at him hard, but the intensity of her trying that instant kept her from reading what was really back of his eyes.

“It’s plenty good enough for me,” she said. “I came here once when I had only twenty cents to live on that day--I remember the stool, that fifth stool, I sat on. I spent my twenty cents all at once,” she added, “and the grub was so good that I could have wept in the arms of the woman on the other side of the counter.”

“Was that when you were working in the factory?” he asked.

“No,” said Pidge, “it was before I got the job. I ate regularly after that.”

“Where was the factory?”

“Oh, way up in the other end of town. I labeled tins, salmon tins, baking powder tins, cocoa tins.”

“To get local color?” he asked.

“To get food. I sat at a big table with a lot of girls, and in the hours and hours, in the monotony of the days, I found out how easy it is to get hard lines around the mouth. I learned to understand just enough to learn that I know nothing, and that’s a lot.”

She was thinking of what a tension she had been in to escape from Fanny Gallup.

“I worked on a ranch in Wyoming,” Melton observed, “cattle ranch.”

“What were you doing on the Tunisian sands?”

“Just ramming around the world. I got in bad with an Arab sheik. It was while running away from him that I got lost in the desert.”

She saw his eyes kindle in the prospect of narration, his faculties forming a fresh tale, which she could not bear to hear that moment. She forestalled his fruitfulness.

They were in the streets.

“No, I don’t want to go uptown,” said Pidge. “I don’t feel like the theater to-night----”

“Wouldn’t you like a ride on the harbor? The ferries are empty this time of night.”

“No, we’ll cross over to Harrow Street.”

“May I come in? There’s so much to say. It’s just--finding you again--Pan.”

“Not to-night. I want to be alone.”

He didn’t answer. She felt a little better after that. She had thought it might be harder to have her way. There seemed always something he could not say behind his words. It wasn’t _all_ lies. It became clear for a moment that he would follow after her--so long as she could run ahead; that he would only turn away and forget when she paused to breathe or play.

“I feel strange,” he said in the silence of Harrow Street. “It is strange to-night. It’s like finding the house one has been looking for so long--the house, even the door, but not the key. Pan,” he said suddenly, “give it to me. Give me the key. It’s you--it’s yours----”

His strength was without strain, the strength that is effortless, the strength of laughter. He had taken her to him suddenly, and she dwelt in it, though resisting; something ecstatic, even in holding out.... She heard voices in herself and faces flashed through her mind--Cobden’s, Fanny Gallup’s--but her arms and shoulders and breast knew a terrible sweetness from his strength. It wasn’t hateful. It was like her own boy, not a stranger. His laughing face was nearer. It was coming to hers. In the dark she could see it, eyes and eyelids, curving nostrils and laughing lips. She knew something would die in her when it touched ... that she was dying now of the slowness of its coming. She ceased to struggle, and all that she had known and been arose within her to meet his lips.

* * * * *

She was on the second flight of stairs. She almost prayed that Fanny’s door would not open. She wanted to be in her own little room, the smaller the better to-night--no touch or voice upon her. The key turned in her trembling hand. She was safe, the door locked again. She stood in the dark. Her lips moved audibly:

“Am I--is it because I am my father’s child?”

XXII

A LETTER FROM PIDGE

RICHARD COBDEN moved up and down the Near East for a long time, looking for the men they had told him about in school and college--the men who make history, and are said to contain in themselves the greatness of their race. He sailed with sailors, talked with the diploma-ed talkers, rode with soldiers. He found men who would do for their countries what they wouldn’t do for themselves, but the energy of their fidelity to their countries was balanced by their enmity toward other countries. They gave themselves to the heresy of fighting one part of the human family for the alleged enhancement of another. It took Dicky a long time to change the brain tracks made in school and college, that the names of history might _not_ be the names of men who walked with God, whose intellects pained from sheer power. Nor was he spared from the suspicion in all his discoveries, that he was the one who was wrong, that he had become softly insane in the midst of new ideas.

* * * * *

When he essayed the thing Miss Claes spoke of at the Punjabi dinner--he started something which he meant to live up to. The fact that it was harder than he dreamed; an effort, in fact, involving dreary years, hadn’t broken his resolution so far. One of the terms of the Punjabi dinner covenant, for such it had become to him, was not to lose himself in the easy way of hatred, nor to help himself to forgetfulness by casting Pidge Musser’s image out. He knew that the “one” she had spoken of was Rufus Melton. Through months, covering two years, the figure of this young story-writer rose higher and higher in his consciousness, as the person of the Enemy, himself. It was Melton, all unknowing, who vanquished Dicky in his weaknesses, and at best was only kept at bay in his strength. Not to cast her out, not to hate; to know the slow, steady burning of the heart that is focalized upon a woman, and to realize that this woman may be turning to another!

There were really extraordinary days of service in Arabia with young Tom Lawrence, whose fame Dicky Cobden helped to make; desert days of camel back and Turk fighting; desert nights of smoke and tea in such starry stillnesses, that one almost expected the Christ to appear; then, after many weeks, mail at Mecca, and one letter from John Higgins, which was read several times:

... You have done several good things for _The Public Square_; but
you never did a better thing than wishing Miss Pidge Musser on our
editorial rooms. She’s brand new every morning. She’s honest, and a
worker. She has brains and a whole lot of psychic viscera, sometimes
designated as Soul.... Also she’s a stenographer. Never whispered
it until one morning when Maneatin’ Dollie was ill with the flu.
My letters were piled up. “Give them to me,” she said. I did that
thing, and I’ve been dictating my editorials ever since. It’s like
talking to an intelligent audience. When I get opinionated and lose
my balance, not seeing the other side of a question, this child sits
up and looks disturbed.... I’m sending you separately our Brooklyn
Bridge contemporary with a story called _The Salt Pit_. If it isn’t a
little man of a story--I don’t know one. Hers.... Of course, you know
why she didn’t give it to us. She thought I’d take it on her account
and not for the story.... And still we stay out of the War. They’re
sending over one big imperialist after another from London, trying to
get us in, and all that’s flunkey in Washington, rocks--but so far,
we’re only sinning commercially.... Give us more of the inky desert
nights, Dicky, and young Lawrence.

Dicky reached Bombay from Aden in the spring of 1917. He was now on his way home, the long way around. He had told no one, but it had grown upon him of late that he could relish a bit of New York after more than two years. He coldly ignored in himself the tendency to thrill at the thought of seeing Pidge Musser again. He had made a bit of a name for himself as a reporter, but was known more as a first-class fact-getter than a feature writer among newspaper men. Facts were sometimes so bleak in his work that one had to possess real understanding and real love for honest materials to find the inherent beauty and order. His knowledge of international politics was now granted by all classes of newspaper men, but he was known especially from his articles in _The Public Square_ as one who exerted a steady pressure against America entering the war.

To be cool was said to be Cobden’s religion. The stuff that he wrote was cool and the words that he said. “I am a reporter, only,” he occasionally explained. “I write what I see, not my own reactions nor opinions.” He had come far in this doctrine, far enough to be trusted by white men of place in Turkey and the Holy Land, in spite of his curious scorn for war. He was somewhat slower now to get enthused over human actions than he was when he left New York; his boyish humor had become grim. He had seen the worst things men do, and written a few of them. Though he had been through as much hard riding in two years as any empire-building Englishman, he seemed to retain no personal relation to his adventures.

Other men talked about him, however. There was something about the American that made it easy for others to “sketch at him.” Tales of his far chances with Tom Lawrence in El Hejas, for instance, had followed him up into Turkey, but no one knew his tendency to nausea in a pinch.

Dicky had written a lot of big newspaper stories, but they were stories of the day. He had packed the films of tense and frightening and humorous moments away somewhere deep in his brain, to the end of massing them all into one--one day doing the Big Story, that had to do with finding a Man. That dream had held since the day he first saw Nagar. But in his heart of hearts everything was a side issue--world politics, world wars, newspaper stories, magazine stories, even the Big Story of all--compared to the war in himself over a girl named Pidge. He still had night sweats over the name of Rufus Melton.... A quiet voice, a tired smile, a face darkened and dusty looking from exposure, even after a clean shave--out of this face, usually shadowed by a big cake-basket helmet of cork, shone a pair of steady eyes in a fine mesh of dusty brown wrinkles--Dicky at twenty-eight.

He had scarcely stepped ashore at Bombay when he heard that the States had entered the war. He touched the sleeve of an Englishman who was looking up at the promenade deck of the ship with eyes and mouth wide open.

“Tell me, I hadn’t heard,” Dicky said hoarsely.

“She’s in, but I must say, sir, she took a long time about it.”

“But that cannot be!” Dicky answered.

Now the Englishman stared, this being the peerless rebuke. Moreover, he observed that the American had a sudden withered look, and presumed that he was a mere upstart person. Accordingly, the Englishman refixed his triple focus on the ship’s promenade deck, and Cobden tunneled into the bus for the _King George_. There he verified the news. He went to his room a bit whipped, quite a little bit whipped. He wanted to be alone. For two years he had written and felt for America as only an exile can. He had believed in her luck and native horse sense in the midst of the mess other countries were making of their national lives.

Something snapped when he had been alone in his room for a while. It was Dicky’s romantic allegiance to the country of his school histories. For the present he was a man without national gravity, and a sick man since some hot, hard-held part of himself had been ripped out.

He had missed his mail in Aden and left word for it to be forwarded to Bombay on the next steamer. A cablegram from his newspaper connection, rewired from Aden, not only counseled him to make haste to double back to France (to be on the spot to greet the first American military arrivals), but accepted it as settled that there was nothing else for a man of his equipment now to do. The message was actually elate with the “doings” ahead, but Dicky Cobden didn’t see it that way. The fact is, he was sore, personally sore, at what had happened and didn’t care who knew it. The following ship brought his mail, including a letter from Pidge Musser, which he opened with an old and ugly fear, and in this letter the worst that he had ever feared fell upon him:

... Oh, Dicky, there is no other way. I’ve tried to dodge it, but it
has to be told now, that I have taken Rufus Melton. Why did I do it?
I don’t know, unless it is that I am evil and unfinished and answer
to the evil and unfinished in him. He draws me terribly, but at the
same time, I am not deluded. There is never a moment with him that is
not unmixed with pain.... I wonder if you can believe that I did not
do this thing for happiness; that the happiest moments I have ever
known have come from my work with John Higgins and my friendship with
you? And can you ever believe that I am no farther from you now, in
that mysterious comrade way?... Oh, Life is not like books, Dicky,
not at all like what we are taught it is. I have a relation to him.
I answer some terrible drawing need--like a child crying for me.
But I have a relation to you, too, only different. You mean rest,
something done. He means the unfinished. He brings a mirror to me,
and says, “Look!” I want to scream, because the mirror brings out
all my defects. That’s what his presence means.... This is one true
thing, Dicky. The one who can rouse the most hell in your breast is
the one to whom you belong for the time. At least, that is true to
me.... Have I not been grateful for your stability? And have I not
been proud for your moving so quietly up and down the East, keeping
your surfaces clean for the world events to be pictured there without
twist or falsehood?... A strange door was opened in my being when I
was a child. In and out that door, whether I will or not, you often
come and go. “He is my friend,” I whisper, “my friend”----and repeat
it a thousand times.

XXIII

THE RED ROOM

LINE by line the thing was killing him. He got up and crossed the heavy red carpet to the hall door and turned the key in the lock. He was afraid some one would come in and find him. He had the strange power of partly seeing himself, as the sullen horrors of hatred and revolt boiled up in his breast. Vaguely, but quite well enough, he could watch the man called Richard Cobden in the dim hotel room, the shoulders hunched, the mouth stretched and crooked; unable to sit still, the face wet with poisonous sweat.

The love had gone out of him, and with it, all the light he had. He thought he had known pain and loneliness since leaving New York, but all he had known was humming content compared to now, because there had been a laughing idolatry for all her ways and words, a reliance upon her that he had dared to call absolute. “Understand, understand!” she had cried all through the letter.... Oh yes, he could understand. She wasn’t what he had made her out to be--that was clear enough. He had built upon something which wasn’t there. He had believed her to be--built into himself the conviction--that she was the honestest thing alive, and here she was----

His thought shot back to the night of the Punjabi dinner. That little basement room was devastated before his mind, the table overturned, the face of Miss Claes a mockery, the face of Pidge Musser--that of an American girl found out. Into the center of his consciousness was now flung his old promise not to hate.... He heard his own laughter. He saw his own stretched and twisted mouth from which it came. Like a couple of sly schoolgirls, they looked at him now--Pidge and Miss Claes--slyly pulling together and duping a fat boy....

He saw his room key upon the table. Number Five, it was, the fifth floor. He looked around the dim papered wall--whitish-red like the pulp of raspberries--the deep upholstered chairs, the seats slightly crushed, the full-length mirror, the ash tray, the silver flask on the writing table, his own things here and there orderly enough--all but himself, a sort of maniacal Mr. Hyde. Number Five. He would remember this room where he had fought it out, too, about America entering the war. He poured brandy into a whisky glass. The stuff eased him a little. It made the pain all the more poignant, like a stove getting hotter, but also it seemed to give him the power to move back a little from the stove.... He stood up in the dark and shook himself.

“Oh, you ass!” he muttered. “You awful ass!”

In the light of a match, as he lit a cigarette long afterward, he saw the rest of his mail on the table, one letter from Miss Claes. He couldn’t get head nor tail out of that at first. She seemed to be talking about something he had said about finding a Man. Oh, yes. He had written from Mecca, mentioning Tom Lawrence and his search for a Man. He snickered now at himself through the fogs of his own past and present. Then a line seemed to stand up before his eyes. “... If you go to India, go to Ahmedabad. Nagar is there. You are in danger of finding your Man.” Later that night, still in the dark, his back straightened. He laughed and said aloud, failing altogether for the moment to see the absurdity of himself.

“Number Five--queer little old musty room, I wonder who died here?... Good night, Pidge; good night, dear America--grand pair to tie to!”

The next day he cabled to his newspaper connection that he was not returning to France for the opening campaign, at least; and wrote to John Higgins that he didn’t expect to send in much stuff for the present. “I may stay awhile in India--just looking around. She smells like a typhoid ward, and needs orderlies.... I’ll, of course, let you know what comes of my _spectating_.”

Still he did not start at once for Ahmedabad. He locked himself in Number Five through the days and walked the streets of Bombay at night, walked like a man in a strait-jacket. He wasn’t conscious of this at first, until he began to feel an ache from the tension of his neck and shoulder muscles and tightened elbows. When he forced himself to relax, however, the torture of his thoughts was accentuated. He had been holding himself rigidly to help fend off the destroying rush of mental images. He walked himself into one sweat after another for the nights were hot and humid. The point of all his fighting was to keep Pidge Musser out of mind. Of course, he could not succeed. She came in by every door. She came in softly, she came in scornfully, she came in singing, scolding. Mostly she came in saying, “Why, don’t you see, Dicky, I am nearer and clearer than ever?” Then it was as if an isolated bit of shrapnel would explode in his brain.

His whole fabric of world politics was demolished. It looked to him like a tapestry that has been hooked up out of a sewer--all that careful weaving and balanced pigmentation! Before the day of the letter he had prided himself that his building in the past two years was good and strong. Now he faced the pitiful discovery that every block of his building had been placed upon this platform: That even if he couldn’t have her, no one else could. This smelled to him now. Forever after, it smelled to him like the sewage lanes of old Bombay.

Dicky had a good body. After two weeks his physical vitality began to steal back. The love was gone, but out of the debris of Subramini’s Punjabi Fireplace, the face of Miss Claes came up faintly smiling again. Another letter came from her, which he read in dismal irony several times on the day before he took the train for Ahmedabad--the last day in Number Five, with its wall paper of raspberry crush. He couldn’t make sense out of the letter. She seemed to love Pidge, even to respect her. Miss Claes wrote, “It gives me quiet joy to know that Nagar is near you. It will be good for him and good for you. A great dearness for you both goes from this house, as you sit and walk together.” Miss Claes also repeated in her letter that “love never faileth”----

All very pretty and possible, no doubt; it sounded good, but it was no longer his sort of a project. This wasn’t for the product of three generations of hardware merchants and manufacturers. Funny, he thought, how he had ever accepted visionary stuff like this. He would write Miss Claes some time how he had failed, but not now. On the night train, he felt India closing about him really for the first time. Once when the train stopped, he smelled the altogether indescribable earthiness of hills that had been sun baked all day, now letting it be known through the moistness of the night. It was vaguely like home to him; not home in America, but home on earth again, the faintest symptom of his reallegiance to life here, only known to one coming up out of sickness. In the early morning he lay for a while after awakening in a sort of bodily peace. It was as if he had really rested a little, as if he had left behind some utterly miserable part of himself in the red room at Bombay.

“A bit questionable,” he muttered whimsically, with the trace of a smile, “a bit shabby and questionable to leave a bundle, a black bundle like that, in Number Five--for some one else to stumble over.”

He fell asleep again and reawoke with a curious sentence on his lips; something that he had forgotten a long time, something that Miss Claes used to say: “Nobody knows Nagar--nobody.”

“Nobody ever will,” he added, “if he doesn’t talk any more than he used to.”

Again at breakfast the faintest little quiver of organic ease stole into him. The earth was very bright outside and the pot of tea that had been brought tasted actually sane. He had the feeling of being on the way somewhere, of having escaped something, as he watched India slip by from the window of his compartment.... Then Ahmedabad, the station, a Hindu in white garments, almost taking him in his arms--laughing, talking like an American--Nagar talking!

XXIV

MISS CLAES SPEAKS

ONE Sunday morning about three weeks after the luncheon with John Higgins, during which Rufus Melton came to the Chop House, Pidge found Miss Claes alone in the basement front.

“We’d like to come here to live. Is there any chance?” she asked.

“Yes, it can be managed, I think.”

Pidge regarded her with a kind of cold fixity and added: “We were married night before last. Rufe seems willing enough to come here. I hate to leave this house, but I didn’t think you had the rooms.”

“I’ll make a place for you; a little place, at least. But, Pidge----”

“Yes?”

“Why haven’t you come to me all this time?”

“I know how fond you are of Dicky Cobden. I haven’t hoped any one could understand.”

“Being fond of Richard Cobden doesn’t make me less fond of you.”

“How could I expect you to understand me, when I can’t understand myself?” Pidge demanded. “I am two people, and they are at war.... No use lying about it. I fell for him, knowing him all the time. Not for a minute did I lose track of what he is. But I wanted him. Something in me answered--that’s all.”

“I’ve always loved that honest Pidge,” said Miss Claes.

“Think, if you like, that it’s part of the evil in me that talks this way about him, but I am talking about myself, too.”

“You could never see all this clearly--without ‘falling for’ him, Pidge.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean it would remain a hopeless, unfinished puzzle--if you had run away from Rufus Melton.”

“I couldn’t run away. I wanted him,” Pidge repeated. “But there’s another side. There’s something in him that I seem to have known from the beginning--something like a little child that I left somewhere ages ago. It keeps calling to me from his eyes, and I leave everything to go to it--everything that Dicky means and the world, even writing--I leave all that. And yet when I go, when I go to his arms, I lose the purpose. It’s as if the child that I run to--the irresistible thing that calls to me from his eyes--stops crying and stops needing me! Then I suddenly know that it must need me and not be gratified, ever to be helped. Oh, no one on earth could understand that. It’s insane.”

“But, Pidge, I do understand.”

“How can you?”

“Because I have loved like that, because I have had experience. I loved an English boy in the same way--oh, long ago. I love him still, but I could not stay with him, because he--why, Pidge, it is just the same. He needs to cry for some one, for something, otherwise he remains asleep in life.”

“You’re saying this to help me.”

“What I’ve lived through _should_ help you. It was the hardest thing I’ve ever known--that I couldn’t forget everything and have him, just two alone in the world. But when I went to him, he was satisfied and looked elsewhere. I almost died of revolt.”

Pidge’s eyes were very wide. “And when you didn’t go to him?” she said in slow tones. “What happened then?”

“It was then that he remembered and reminded me that I was half-caste. Also he looked elsewhere, just the same.”

“And you still love him?”

“Deep underneath--that is not changed.”

“But what is Nagar?”

“Nagar means the other world, Pidge--a new heaven and a new earth. He means the not-wanting love, the willing-to-wait love----”

“I’m not like that,” Pidge said with old bitterness. “I want love in a room! I want to shut the world out. I don’t want the love of the world, but love that’s all mine. And I can’t--I can’t have it!”

She was breathing deeply, staring at the fire.

Miss Claes glanced at her wistfully a moment, her lips faintly smiling. The girl’s face had never been so lovely to her. It was like land that has had its rains after long waiting--soft blooms starting, an earthy sweetness rising in the washed sunlight. The beginnings of both laughter and tears were in Pidge’s wide eyes; her red-brown hair, from which the henna was long forgotten, had an easy restful gleam in its coils.

“Why, Pidge,” Miss Claes said at last, “you’re like one who has been born again. It’s wonderful. I had almost forgotten what that love does to a woman, at first--for a little, little time.”

“And you knew that kind of love--with the English boy?”

“Yes.”

“And Nagar knows.”

“Yes.”

Pidge shivered.

“... Rufe brings the fight to me, makes every undone thing rise and live! He brings the most terrible disappointments, the crudest disorder, yet that which would pay for it all, if I were just a simple peasant woman, is denied. Why can’t we shut the door and just live? Why can’t there be a kingdom for two?”

The form was soft and gliding in Miss Claes’ arms. The square-shouldered little figure of the mill and office girl had become almost eloquent with its emotional power. After a moment Pidge straightened, her face staring into Miss Claes’.

“Why don’t you answer?”

“I can only say, Pidge, you are called to learn the next step, the next lesson in what love means. You want the love that has two ends, but the Triangle is ready for you. Oh, many are learning the mystery of the Triangle. It hurts so at first, but it lets the world in--the bigger meanings of life.”

Pidge shivered again. “Is it blasphemy,” she asked, “that I feel just as close to Dicky Cobden--as ever?”

“No more than the finding of bread would spoil your taste for water.”

* * * * *

Pidge said at last:

“Oh, I don’t want to leave this house, Miss Claes. He says he’ll come here, too.”

“I’ve been thinking of putting a bathroom on the third floor. There’s a tiny empty room like yours across the hall. The bath shall be installed there. You know I’ve kept Nagar’s room empty. It is pleasant and larger than yours. I’ll have a door cut through the partition, and with a bath across the hall you will do well enough for a time.”

“You would give us Nagar’s room?”

“Nagar has the key to the whole house,” said Miss Claes.

* * * * *

Moments afterward, Pidge’s strong fingers closed over the hands of the other.

“No one can know how it hurts me--to think of Dicky----”

“He is with Nagar now.”

“Do you think--can it be possible that Nagar will help him--as you help me?”

“Nagar and the Little Man,” said Miss Claes.

XXV

“BE IT EVER SO HUMBLE”

THEY were ensconced in the two upper rooms. Pidge kept up her work at _The Public Square_, and did not come home for luncheon. She had told John Higgins of her marriage but the subject was not mentioned afterward. The old chief vanished for three days following the news, and when he came back there was a new dignity on his part for Pidge to cope with. She found her position a trifle uncentered. His old stenographer took his letters, and he wrote his editorials on his own machine as aforetime. John Higgins said little, but found flaws in her judgments that had not appeared before. He no longer risked availing himself of her entire equipment; this change being apparently on the basis that he dare not get used to it all over again. He seemed to hold the idea that it was only a question of days at most before a married woman would forget place and town entirely and rush off to pick up pieces of wool and thread for a nest.

Pidge had built so much of herself into her work that there was emphatic pain in the new conditions. She needed the work more than ever now, but _The Public Square_ was falling into sorry days and ways. There was nothing to say but War, and if you didn’t like War, didn’t see the divine uses of War and say so, you had better say nothing. There was no field in the world at this time for a magazine of dignified or any other kind of protest, and in the steady loss of money week after week, the struggle became one of great simplicity--to stay alive.

“Higgins is a rotten old knocker anyway,” said Rufus Melton. “This is a time for Americans to stand together and not criticize the government. He never did pay any real money for his stuff, but was always ready to tell you where you fell down. They’re telling him a word or two now.”

So Pidge didn’t speak much of _The Public Square_ at home.