THE
PUBLIC SQUARE
THE
PUBLIC SQUARE
BY
WILL LEVINGTON COMFORT
AUTHOR OF “ROUTLEDGE RIDES ALONE,” ETC.
[Illustration]
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
NEW YORK :: :: MCMXXIII
COPYRIGHT, 1923, BY
WILL LEVINGTON COMFORT
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
TO
DOROTHY MOSHER
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. 54 HARROW STREET 1
II. THE COLORED MAN 10
III. A FISH OMELET 17
IV. LAMBILL KNOCKS 23
V. LUNCHEON AT SHARPE’S 31
VI. ENTER, FANNY GALLUP 36
VII. “THE FREEDOM OF IGNORANCE” 47
VIII. SOMEBODY’S SHOULDER 52
IX. “YOU BOTH HAVE KEYS” 61
X. APRIL BREATHES AGAIN 69
XI. THE BABY CARRIAGE 75
XII. UNDER THE SAME LAMP 81
XIII. “MOTHER” 87
XIV. ISOLATION 93
XV. THE COBDEN INTERIOR 99
XVI. DICKY FEELS A SLUMP 109
XVII. NEW LODGERS FOR HARROW STREET 113
XVIII. AN OUTER CHANGE 118
XIX. FANNY DRIES HER TEARS 120
XX. THEY WALK IN CIRCLES 124
XXI. THE DINNER COAT 129
XXII. A LETTER FROM PIDGE 136
XXIII. THE RED ROOM 143
XXIV. MISS CLAES SPEAKS 149
XXV. “BE IT EVER SO HUMBLE” 154
XXVI. THE HANGING SOCK 161
XXVII. THE MAHATMA AND THE MIRACLE 167
XXVIII. THE RACK OF SEX 175
XXIX. RUFUS’ PLAY DAY 180
XXX. THE HEAD OF THE HOUSE 190
XXXI. TWO LETTERS FROM INDIA 194
XXXII. FRANCE, 1918. THE YANK 197
XXXIII. PARIS, 1918--HADDON AND AMES 202
XXXIV. THE HOUSE OF DUCIER 207
XXXV. FANNY HEARS THE DRUM 214
XXXVI. RUFE HURRIES HOME 218
XXXVII. JOHN HIGGINS’ CODE 219
XXXVIII. AN OFFICE OF THE WORLD 225
XXXIX. SEVEN FLAWLESS DAYS 229
XL. THE YANK DEVELOPED 239
XLI. UNDER THE MANGOES OF CAWNPORE 246
XLII. LALA RELU RAM 249
XLIII. HATHIS LAMENTS 257
XLIV. THE SLATE AND THE SPONGE 263
XLV. AMRITSAR, APRIL 13, 1919 268
XLVI. THE HOOKED MAN 277
XLVII. IN THE WARM DARK 281
XLVIII. “INDIA’S MESSENGER” 288
XLIX. PIDGE TRIES GRAMERCY PARK 292
L. DICKY’S IDEA WORKS 298
LI. “WE LOOK UPON WOMEN AS SACRED” 302
LII. THE OLD FACE 309
LIII. THE WHITE LIGHT AGAIN 315
THE PUBLIC SQUARE
I
54 HARROW STREET
A GIRL of nineteen had just arrived in New York, with one fat bag.
She turned into the curving silence of Harrow Street, which is only
three minutes’ walk from Washington Square, but some trick to find.
Several times she changed her bag from one hand to the other, sometimes
putting it down and stepping around it, until she came to a door with a
room-to-rent sign. This house was painted fresh green, the only thing
that distinguished it from all the other houses of the block, except
the number, which was Fifty-four.
“Here goes me!” she said, starting up the stone steps.
She rang. The door before her didn’t open, but the basement door below
did. A woman’s voice called, “Yes?” in rising inflection.
The girl trailed her bag down to the walk and around the railing to
the lower entrance where a dark-faced woman stood, regarding her with
almost concerned attention--dark eyes that saw too much, the girl
decided. The face was un-American, but its foreign suggestion was
vague. It might even have been East Indian. If her skin was natively
white, it had certainly known the darkening of much sunlight. As the
girl drew near she sensed a curious freshness from the woman; something
hard to name, having to do with the garments as well as the shadowy
olive skin.
“I want to rent a room--a small back room. I saw your sign on the door.”
“I have a room, but it hasn’t much air,” the woman said.
“I don’t need much air----”
“Come and we’ll look. It is on the upper floor, but it is not quite
back. Leave your bag here in the hall.”
It was eleven in the morning, but the smell of coffee was in the dark
basement corridor, and laughing voices were heard behind the shut door
to the right. A man’s voice said in a stimulated tone:
“Believe me, and I’ve been around, Miss Claes is the deepest-dyed sport
I’ve ever met. You could drag her the length of Harrow Street and she’d
come up fresh from the laundry----”
“That reminds me, I’m going to start a laundry,” a woman’s voice
announced.
“I’m going to start something myself----” came another voice.
The girl, following through the corridor, heard a little breathless
sort of chuckle from the woman ahead of her on the dark stairs. The
place smelled like a shut room when it rains--a cigaretty admixture.
They climbed. The next hall was spooky with gaslight; the next was
gay with frying sausages. They climbed. The next was the one, and
it smelled of paint--the same green paint as on the outside of the
house--on one of the doors and doorframes, but the wood was plainly
charred under the paint.
“We had a fire, but we put it out with wash water before the engines
got here, soapy water.”
The girl had a picture of threshing soap about in pails of water before
applying it to the flames.
“This is the one,” the woman said, unlocking the next to last room from
the back on the left. “All the rest are filled just now. Most of my
lodgers never leave, only as they strike it rich----”
“Do they often strike it rich?”
“Oh, yes, dear. New York is quite the most magic place in
America--something for every one who comes, if he only stays on.”
They had crowded into the little room.
“This is fine,” the girl said. “This is what I want. It’s just as I saw
it.”
“You get your water in the hall below,” the woman explained. “There
is no gas plate, so you will have to bring your coffeepot down to my
stove in the basement. The walls are ugly, but I’ll see that the cot is
clean for you. If the wall of the next house across the area were only
painted white, you would get more light.”
The wall spoken of was less than three feet from the window sill.
“What is the price?” the girl asked, with a cough before and after.
“Twelve dollars a month.”
“I will pay for a month now,” she said, with a small part of a big
out-breath.
“When did you come to New York?” the woman asked.
“This morning.”
“First time?”
“Yes. From Los Angeles.”
“And you have had four nights on the train?”
“Six. It was a slow tourist train. I sat up from Chicago----”
“Have you lived in Los Angeles long?”
“Always--in and around.”
“We don’t dare to think of Los Angeles much. To a lot of us here in
New York, it’s a kind of heaven. Southern California--the sea and the
mountains and the ten months of sunlight and the cool morning fogs and
the ripe figs----”
“I’ve wanted New York like that,” the girl said. “I’ve wanted New York
so badly that I was afraid on the train that it wouldn’t stay until I
got here----”
“That’s the way to come,” the landlady said. “New York would wait for
you. Oh, yes, New York waits for your kind. What are you going to do
here?”
“Write.”
“Really?”
The woman sat down on the edge of the cot. Her interest did not seem
an affectation. Her figure was thin but lithe. One wouldn’t know in
these shadows if she were nearer twenty-five or thirty-five. She seemed
altogether without haste, smiling easily, but slow to laugh aloud. Her
eyes looked startlingly knowing as she lit a cigarette--not natural
somehow. At the same time in the matchlight her face had looked tired
and weathered. Her way of speaking was like an English person, or one
educated in England.
“Do you mean stories?” she asked.
“Yes, a book, a long story--set in eighteenth-century France.”
“But you seem so young.”
“I have written for a long time--always written.”
“How old are you, please?”
“Nineteen--but I have lived in a writing house always.”
“Where is your house? I have been to Los Angeles.”
“Back in a canyon near Santa Monica and my father is there now--in his
slippers. He teaches every one how to write----” There was something
baleful in the girl’s blue eyes, or perhaps it was exhaustion, as she
smiled.
“Does he write stories?”
“No, metaphysics, but he knows everything----”
“What is your name?”
“Musser--Pidge Musser. Not Pidge, really. Pandora is my name, but
every one calls me Pidge. My father started it.”
“Is his name Adolph Musser?”
In the dimness, the girl’s face looked like a blur of white; a little
stretched, too, it appeared just now.
“Yes, that’s his name,” she said in a hopeless tone. “So you know him,
too?”
“I heard him lecture once.”
“I suppose you ‘fell for’ him? They all do.”
The woman’s black eyes twinkled. “The lecture was on cosmic
consciousness,” she said. “I remember distinctly that Mr. Musser
outlined four paths of approach.”
“Yes, the mystical, the occult, the mathematical, and the artistic. Did
he talk in bare feet?”
“Yes, and an Eastern robe.”
“That was a camel driver’s robe,” said the girl. “Oh, I didn’t think
I’d hear of him here.”
“You won’t. May I call you Pidge?”
“Yes, what you like. My father names everything.”
“It sounds better than Pandora--at least, to me.... I must go down now.
A little breakfast party is waiting there. Take off your things. I’ll
come back soon. I am Miss Claes and I want to come back already.”
Pidge Musser sat almost in the center of her room, but not quite. At
least, she sat in the center of the stiff little cot. She could touch
two of the walls. The third was across the narrow aisle from the cot.
The fourth was the windowed one, which looked as if it were about to
be bricked up entirely. That was quite a distance.
Her room. She was alone. She looked at the door, arose, brought in the
key and turned it from the inside. Alone, and this was New York. She
could live a month anyway, and write and write on _The Lance of the
Rivernais_. She could be herself and not be told how to live and love
and write and bathe and breathe, and change her polarity and promote
her spirit and govern her temper and appetites, by a man who was
governed by anything but himself.
New York. She had hardly dared to look at it on the way from the train
to Washington Square, where the street car had put her down. She had
come to Washington Square because one of the boys who studied with her
father had said it was the best place to live in all the big town--the
cheapest and friendliest and quietest.... It appeared all true, but
Miss Claes wasn’t like a rooming-house landlady; quite different, in
fact, and astonishing.
“I could hear her talk about New York, forever,” Pidge said half aloud,
and this was a remark of considerable force from one who had known the
maiming of many words.
Presently she would go out and look at New York again; walk about a
bit, keeping a mental string tied to this green house. Besides she had
to rent a typewriter, but there was no rush. It was delicious sitting
here alone in the gloom of midday, making the place her own, locked
in--a chance at last to take a look at herself and see what she was
made of and think of what she was here for.
There was a mirror. It wasn’t cracked, according to tradition, but its
surface had frozen over in a high wind. Everything waved, eternally
waved. It gave the sense of air in the room, and made one look mended.
Pidge hoped she would never shed tears in that mirror. Once she had
caught herself weeping, and she looked so abysmal that she was almost
frightened out of the habit. With these waves added---- Pidge took off
her hat and flipped it over on the cot. Her head didn’t look natural,
but that wasn’t all the mirror’s fault. One of the things she had
wanted to do for months was to make her hair a shade redder than it
was. Of course, she hadn’t dared at home, and she couldn’t manage it on
the train, but there had been six hours to wait in Chicago and a small
hotel room that frightened her yet. She had emerged from that room a
different shade, so Chicago meant henna and rain and a frightful hotel.
It would always be so. She had been against landing in New York one
color and then changing. She had wanted to start life new in New York
and keep it straight, an absolutely new page, a new book.
Her reddened hair waved. It made her face look whiter, and brought out
a red tint to her wool dress that had been brown as apple-butter before.
Everything about her was tired. If she took off her new shoes she
was afraid she would never get them on again to-day, and she had to
think of renting that typewriter. A little later, she sat up straight,
because through the wall from the next room back came the buzz of a
machine. She listened with a thrill. It stopped and went on--unequal
stops and buzzes of rapid typing for several minutes; then a long
sustained buzz, until a sheet was changed. No commercial typewriting.
That was “creative” stuff, as her father would say--a word she had
vowed never to use. At least, some one in there was doing a letter.
All this was before noon on an October day in the good year of 1913,
before anything ever happened to anybody.
II
THE COLORED MAN
Once there was an old sculptor who had apprentices. Townsfolk were
invited on a certain day to look at the work of the young men. One
of the apprentices was greatly worried by the faulty light of the
shop in which his exhibit was placed. He complained about it to his
master, who is said to have answered in these terms: “Never mind,
son, about the light here. It is the light of the public square that
tells the story.”
RICHARD COBDEN was twenty-one in 1910, and fresh from his university,
when he took his first job as reader in the editorial office of _The
Public Square_, a weekly magazine of opinion and protest and qualified
patriotism. This was the publication of old John Higgins, at one time
one of the highest-priced editorial writers in New York; but Higgins’
views had become more and more strenuous, instead of mollifying with
the years, the end of which is to publish for one’s self or subside.
Even in _The Public Square_ he found himself under a pull. He wanted
a living out of his magazine, but did not expect to make money. He
occasionally drank himself ill for a day or two. One of his aspirations
was to publish a distinguished short story in each issue, the shorter
the better.
“But there aren’t fifty a year,” he frequently said. “There aren’t
ten, but we get two or three of them.”
Richard Cobden came of a well-established New York family of merchants
and manufacturers. There was no traceable connection, so far as the
family knew, with the English Cobdens, of whom there had been a brave
Richard of free trade and free speech. Dicky’s great-grandfather was
the Richard Cobden who first made the Cobden trowel, hand-forged in a
little shop up Yonkers way, and made it so well that stone masons used
to drive from far in back country to his shop. The Cobdens had made and
dealt in hardware ever since, but the trowel was the Cobden _cachet_.
Dicky was now twenty-four. His eyes were strong and so were his
enthusiasms. These strengths stood him in good stead against the vast
masses of evil typing and the revelations of human frailty contained
in a myriad manuscript attempts. There was a mere screen between his
desk and the desk of John Higgins. One winter afternoon, Dicky was
interrupted by talk between the chief and the office boy:
“That colored guy in the reception room won’t go ’way,” the boy said.
“What guy is that?” Higgins asked.
“The one I told you about two hours ago when you came back from lunch.”
“What does he want?”
“He’s got a story. He says he’ll wait for you.”
“What’s his name?”
“It ain’t a natcherl name. He says the name doesn’t matter--that you
don’t know him, anyway.”
“Tell him to leave his manuscript.”
“He won’t. Every little while he pulls up his sock.”
“Let him sit a bit longer. It’s a regular park bench out there,
anyway----”
It was the dragging sock that attracted Dicky Cobden--a bit of mindless
art on the part of the office boy that somehow aroused the young man
by the dreary manuscript pile. Dicky’s world was now full of people
who thought they had the story of the age; people who wanted to see
the publisher himself; people afraid to trust their manuscripts to the
mails; a world of such, coming up through great tribulation, but only
here and there a dragging sock. He took a chance now and volunteered
to Higgins to clear that bit of seat space in the reception room, if
possible.
A dark-faced young man arose to meet him outside. Tired--that was
the word that bored into Cobden’s mind with new meaning. There was
something potent in the weariness of the black eyes, a deadly sort of
patience that rarely goes with brilliance. Dicky was slightly above
medium height. The other’s eyes were level with his own. The hanging
sock was not in evidence, but Dicky felt that the stranger didn’t dare
to move fast, for fear his clothes would break.
“Yet he feels clean,” he thought, “yet he feels clean.” This was
important enough to repeat.
“I have a story----”
“Your name?”
“It is Naidu--but not known.”
“Are you from India?”
“Yes.”
“Why not let us have your story to read?”
“It must be read now.”
“This sort of thing isn’t done while one waits, you know.”
“I’m afraid this one will have to be done so.”
“Why, even if it’s promising,” Dicky declared severely, “it would have
to be read several times.”
“I’ll wait.”
“But we have hundreds----”
“I know--may I not see the chief editor?”
Mr. Naidu turned slowly back to the bench, as if to resume his seat.
“You win,” Dicky slowly said. “I’ll take the story and read it now,
though I’m only a deck hand. If it looks good enough, I’ll try to get
Mr. Higgins to look----”
Five minutes after that, Dicky was deep in South Africa. Six thousand
words in neat but faded typing, called _The Little Man_, about a
diminutive Hindu person who appeared to have no other business in life
but to stand up for the under dog. This person would fight anything,
but the British Government was about the size of a foe he liked best--a
cheerful story of most shocking suffering, which the Little Man took
upon himself for the natives of Natal--no, not the natives, but for
the Hindu laborers who had come to Africa to settle. A clear, burning
patience through the pages; everything was carried in solution--all one
breath, sustained. It wasn’t writing. It was living. It slid on with a
soft inevitable rhythm, and it took Dicky along.
More than this, he saw in the story--or in the great stillness which
the story brought him--something of the sort of thing he meant to write
some day. Nothing exactly like this, of course, but the achievement
of this unfettered ease. It made him want to start out at once to
find the Little Man. It made him hear from Africa something like a
personal call. He let himself dream for a moment. Wouldn’t it be
great, his mind-made picture ran, when he had done a real story of
his own--wouldn’t it be great to deliver it like this (or perhaps
sockless) and make it sell itself? Halfway through, he arose and
dumped the sheets he had read before Higgins’ spectacles, saying with
slow-measured calm:
“She breathes. She’s a leaping trout!”
“Get out,” said Higgins softly.
“That’s only half,” said Cobden.
“Where’s the rest?”
“I’ve got it in there--not read yet.”
“And you bring this to me?”
“He’s waiting. This story will finish itself. I know it will march
straight.”
While he read the second half, Dicky heard Higgins thresh and mutter,
and finally call for the rest--old sore-eyed Higgins, who knew a story
when he saw one, who had read his eyes out on poor stories looking for
the Story of the Age....
Dicky went back to the reception room.
“I’ve read it. Mr. Higgins is reading it now. I think he’ll want
it, Mr. Naidu. If you leave your address, we’ll mail you an offer
to-morrow----”
“I will take two hundred dollars for the story, but I must have the
money to-day.”
Dicky laughed quietly. “I’m afraid the countingroom won’t appreciate
that. Countingroom’s not adaptable. It’s intricate, in fact; checks
signed and countersigned.... Besides your price is severe for
us--unknown name and all that. Oh, it’s not too much, only for us, you
know.”
All the time he talked, Dicky knew Mr. Naidu would get his money,
and get it to-day. A man with a story like this could get anything.
He could write it on wood chips and bring the manuscript in a gunny
sack....
“I’ll give him my personal check,” he told Higgins, a moment later.
“The office can reimburse me.”
“I always forget you have a piece of change in your own name,” Higgins
remarked indulgently. “Don’t ever let it interfere with your work,
Dicky.”
“My work to-day is to get that manuscript in our vault. Later,” he
added to himself, “my work is to write a story as good as that.”
“He might take less than two hundred----” John Higgins suggested in
uncertain tone.
“I can’t bring that up--again,” Dicky said.
“I couldn’t either,” said the editor. “Maybe we are both crazy with the
heat--steam heat. But I’ll stand by and see that you get your money.
You’ll have to go out with him to get cash on your personal check.”
Dicky and Mr. Naidu were in the street. It was too late for the bank,
but the son of the trowel makers found a friend of the family with
currency. A rainy dusk in Twenty-third Street near the Avenue, when he
took Mr. Naidu’s hand, having turned over the money.
“I have your address, I may hunt you up. You won’t forget _The Public
Square_, when you have another story as good as this?”
“Oh, no,” said the Hindu, “nor you, Mr. Cobden. Good-by.”
Dicky turned to look after him. He reflected that he hadn’t even
learned if Mr. Naidu were hungry. He wished he had given him his
umbrella. He felt a curious desire to follow; a sense vague, as yet,
that his way, the way of his Big Story, lay after the Oriental, and not
back toward the office.
III
A FISH OMELET
SNOW had drifted into the outer basement stairway of the green house,
and there was a thin frosty bar inside the door of the basement hall.
Miss Claes opened the door and looked out through the iron railings
to the street. Snow was six inches deep and still falling. She took
a deep breath appreciatively, as if she found some faint exquisite
scent in the cold air. Presently she began sweeping at the doorway,
and continued up the stone steps to the walk. Her arms and throat were
bare, and the dark gray dress that she wore was of wool but the fabric
very thin. Apparently Miss Claes chose to enjoy the chill of the winter
morning. When she returned to her living room, the fire in the grate
had been started and a small cup of black coffee was on the table. She
sipped thoughtfully and then lit a cigarette, which she half finished,
standing by the fireplace.
The kindling had ignited the soft coal, but not without having shot out
a spray of cinders over the cement hearth. Miss Claes swept the hearth
unhurriedly. A cabinet of dishes across the room from the fireplace
was full of color now from the light of the coals--vivid greens and
bronzes, pomegranate reds. At length, she opened the door to the
kitchen, where an Oriental stood by the big range.
“May I serve your breakfast?” he asked.
“Put it on a tray with something for Pidge. I’ll take it upstairs and
perhaps she’ll join me. The child starves.”
“Not in this house----”
“She’s troublesome to do anything for, Nagar. She rebels against
accepting any favor. I think she must have been forced to accept many
favors from people outside, when she lived with her father. Was there a
bit of boiled halibut left from last night?”
“Yes.”
“We’ll make a little omelet with a few flakes of fish in it. I’m sure
she isn’t getting any money from her father, but she has kept up her
rent in advance. Did she work all night?”
“Her room was quiet after two, until I came down. Then I heard her
typewriter as I swept the upper hall.”
“It seems to be a race, Nagar, between the child and her book--which
will finish the other? I love her spirit, but she isn’t taking care
of herself.... Yes, we’ll put in these asparagus tips.... I think Mr.
Musser believes that the world owes him a living, but finds it hard to
collect, sometimes, with only metaphysics to offer. And now Pidge has
flung herself to the opposite extreme; talks of earning her living in a
factory, when her book is done. She’s a living protest against talking
and not doing. We must be very good to her, Nagar.”
Miss Claes brought a little creamy porcelain urn, and held it for him
to fill with coffee from the larger pot. Nagar held the door open for
her into the basement hall. A moment later on the top floor, she tapped
at the second last door on the left. Pidge sat at her machine under the
gaslight beyond the head of the cot.
“I can’t make their swords play!” she moaned. “All my swords are stiff
as shinny sticks. The trouble is, I don’t know men, Miss Claes--not red
animal men like they should be in this story. I know pussy men. I know
pious men, salvey and wormy men, monks and mummies and monsters, but I
don’t know honest-to-God _men_! Here they are taunting each other as
they stab, and their talk sounds--like Shakespeare! Oh, dear, you’ve
brought me more coffee and eats!”
“I won’t touch your papers, Pidge, but if you take them off the cot,
I’ll put the tray between us. I haven’t had breakfast.”
Pidge turned the roller of her typemill down so that the most recent
literary revelation might not appear to a roving eye. Then she
crisscrossed different packages of manuscript, placed the mass face
down before the waving glass, and moved the oil stove aside so she
could pass to her place on the cot.
“You always forget to bring your coffeepot down to the range, Pidge----”
The girl turned back to her typemachine. “He’s a jealous old devil when
I leave the room,” she said. “I think the person who rented him before
I did addressed envelopes all day--kept cranking him back and forth
against time. Now I ride a little ways--then let him stop and browse.
We ramble----”
Pidge stopped. Her eyes looked dry and smarting, as if tears were on
the verge.
“Oh, Miss Claes,” she went on, “I’m just as crazy as that--I mean my
figures of speech! Cranking him back and forth, and in the same breath
letting him stop and browse. I wish you wouldn’t bring me this stuff
any more. The coffee’s so good that it hurts--and the eggs. I always
cry when I’m hurt.”
“But, Pidge, think what a privilege it is for me to climb from the
heart of New York to eighteenth-century France, and not leave the
house----”
“But you find a twisted cubist sort of France--part Dumas, part Mexican
Plaza, Los Angeles, and the rest _me_!”
“At least, you’re not carried away with the idea that it’s perfect.”
Pidge regarded the other’s face closely. She could see with uncanny
clearness in this little dark room where she had struggled night and
day for nearly three months; but what she saw now, or was looking for,
she hardly knew herself. Her own face was spooky from sleepless strain.
“I’m eating shamelessly,” she said.
A moment later, she pointed to the rear wall, and whispered the
question:
“Has Nagar stopped writing? I haven’t raced typewriters with him
lately.”
“He hasn’t spoken of changing his work. Did you hear that New York has
touched him with her magic?” Miss Claes asked.
“What do you mean?”
“He has sold a story--a short story for two hundred dollars to _The
Public Square_.”
“Nagar--your servant?”
“He isn’t my servant, Pidge. He just lives here and works with me.”
There was a clicking dryness to the girl’s tongue, as she asked:
“And now is he going away? You said they always do when they strike it
rich.”
“Oh, no. Nagar wouldn’t leave for a little story success. But nobody
quite knows Nagar--nobody.”
* * * * *
Pidge was alone. _The Lance of the Rivernais_ was pricking at her to
get back to work, but she resisted for a few minutes, thinking of Miss
Claes.
“... She may be crazy, but she’s good to look at,” she muttered. “I
believe she can look into me, too.... I wonder what she is?... She
may be crazy, but she’s kind! And, oh, I’m so tired,” she yawned a
moment later. “I’d like--I’d like to be a leaf in the park under the
snow--still snowing, and sleep till spring. Only I’d like some roast
turkey first.”
The recent breakfast had an extraordinary flavor, but it was all
too dainty for one who had eaten little or nothing since yesterday
morning. Her mind trailed off to buns she had seen in bakery windows;
and delicatessen stores with opened sausages, big as one’s head and
colored like tapestries, and little brown birds and deviled eggs, and
sliced filets of fish of amazing tint.
All meats had been anathema in the house of Mr. Adolph Musser. Pidge
had lived in no other house in all her years, before coming to New
York, but since then, she had shocked her young self through various
experiments among the fleshpots of Greenwich. Not so various, for the
narrowness of her purse was ever a limp fact, but these few flavory
adventures were exciting and memorable. There was a tap of a finger
nail upon the panel.
“A letter, Miss Musser,” Nagar said.
She looked at the Hindu with different eyes from ever before. He had
sold a story. She wanted to speak of it, wanted to sit before him and
listen--this anomaly, whose typewriter she had sometimes heard through
the partition, and rarely a low deep hum. She was prejudiced against
Hindus, because her father had affected such a knowledge of them, but
somehow she had been less lonely in New York because of this one. He
was embodied Detachment and Impersonality.... He had turned away.
“Thanks, Nagar,” she called.
The letter was a typewriter bill.
IV
LAMBILL KNOCKS
INSIDE the moonlit castle gardens, across the moat into the
pictured halls, up the marble staircase, driving straight and true,
Lambill Courtenay, a man of the people--artist, swordsman, lover
virgin-hearted, rode--no, ran, for once on his sprightly feet, straight
to a sequestered wing of the ancient and noble castle of the Rivernais,
and with his ungloved hand touched the knocker of its inner sanctuary.
“Who is there?” came the cry like the thin note of violins.
“I----” swelled the deep orchestral answer of Lambill Courtenay,
Frenchiest of the French.
Then the great oaken door from the forests of Savoie opened. Lambill
crossed the threshold. The white arms of Madelaine Rivernais opened and
the heavens opened also--for the great maze of life had been untangled
for these two--and Pidge Musser’s book was done.
Just a book--one of the myriads that you see lying around, like
sloughed snake skins on first or secondhand bookshelves--but it had
been properly wept on and starved for and toiled over, as only youth in
its abandonment can toil for its own ends. It had almost been prayed
for, but not quite. Prayer wasn’t easy for Pidge Musser’s defiant soul.
It was two in the morning. The oil stove smelled as if it were dying.
Of late the wick had hiked up out of the oil a little earlier each
night like a waxing moon, and Pidge had been forced to shake the oil
around to keep the flame. Miss Claes and Nagar did so much for her, she
was ashamed; and you could get a red apple for the price of a wick.
Pidge coughed. It was the most astonishing and cavernous bark. The
silence afterward was painful. She fancied she was keeping _him_
awake--the silent, dark and courteous Nagar, who did prodigies of work
every day and was always willing to do more, and who had come into
Pidge’s direct limelight since his sale of a story to _The Public
Square_. Pidge hadn’t known a cold for years. It actually amazed her,
how unclean it made her feel, and ashamed to have anybody come near.
“I’m going to watch over you very closely, Pidge--you’ll have to
let me, now that the book is done,” Miss Claes said in the morning,
“because it’s really a shock to stop work after the way you have
carried on. The drive--suddenly stopping, you know.”
“I wonder how she knows?” Pidge thought to herself for the thousandth
time in regard to the subtle capacities of Miss Claes.
“I’m tough,” she said aloud.
“That is a true saying, Pidge. On that, everything hinges. Am I to hear
the story?”
“It would--it must be read aloud. It’s terrible to ask, but will you?”
“I’ve wanted to hear it from the beginning. Now tell me, would you like
Nagar to listen, too?”
“Oh, no!”
“Just as you like. Only you’re offering it to the world later----”
“But Nagar _knows_.”
“That’s what you want, isn’t it?”
“Oh, yes, but----”
“He won’t say a word. Nagar rarely talks, except to answer questions.
But, of course, don’t think of it, if you’d rather not.”
“What is Nagar?” Pidge asked suddenly.
“Just a watcher and listener in America, learning to see things
impersonally.”
Pidge contemplated the idea for a few seconds; then her eyes hardened.
“I’ve heard lots of talk about the impersonal--oh, talk to the skies
about the impersonal life in Los Angeles--by people who haven’t yet got
a personality!”
Miss Claes bent in low laughter.
“They start in killing out personality before they get a live one,”
Pidge added sullenly.
“They do, my dear, but have you heard any words about the impersonal
life from Nagar?”
“No. That’s the best thing about him--that he doesn’t explain himself.
But I hate mysteries about Hindus--hate people moving about saying,
‘Shh-sh’--finger on their lips, trying to astonish you with something
they can’t tell. I’m so tired of all that!”
“Still you asked me about Nagar, though really there is nothing to say,
except that he is good to have in the house.”
“I think I’ll let him come and hear the reading, if he’s willing.”
“Good,” said Miss Claes. “We will listen in this room, where the story
came to be.”
* * * * *
... Nagar sat in a straight chair, in the aisle between the cot and the
wall. Pidge sat by the window before her machine. Miss Claes lay on the
cot with her head under the light that Pidge read by, and away they
went. There was an hour or more in the early afternoon when both Miss
Claes and her helper could escape from below, and two hours, at least,
after nine in the evening--this for three days.
Pidge was fagged and ill and frightfully scared. She would begin
hoarsely, and for pages in each reading her cold in the head was
an obstruction hard to pass; besides, she felt she was boring them
horribly and that all the massed effects of her pages dithered away
into nothing or worse. But a moment came in each of the six sessions,
when the last monster of the mind’s outer darkness was passed. And
then, for Pidge, at least, knighthood rose resplendent; days became
stately, indeed, and chivalry bloomed again. At such times the dark
gleaming hair of Miss Claes--which Pidge could have touched with her
hand, became the tresses of Madelaine Rivernais herself, and a little
back to the right in the deep shadows, the face of the Easterner there
took on the magic and glamour of Lambill’s own. The vineyards of old
France stretched beyond from their balcony; the rivers of France flowed
below. The lance of the Rivernais was won back heroically and human
hearts opened to the drama of love and life.
But on the last night of the reading, after the self-consciousness was
passed and all was going well, Pidge, glancing down to Miss Claes’
head under the light, saw gray for the first time, in the depths of
her hair. It hadn’t been combed with any purpose of hiding. The outer
strands were coal black, the strands beneath had turned. This discovery
had the peculiar effect of changing everything around in Pidge’s mind
in the moments that followed.
She couldn’t get into the story as before; and in the very last pages
of her reading, a face persistently crowded in between her mind’s
eye and the rapid flow of the story at its end--a long, humorless
complacent face--the high-browed, self-willed and self-thrilled face
of her father. It was as if he were reading and not herself; reading
with rising expectation, drinking in the silent praise, as if he had
done the writing himself and loved it well. So effectually was Pidge
mastered by this apparition of her own mind, that the last pages of the
manuscript were spoiled entirely. The light had gone out of her and she
said hastily, as the final page was turned down:
“I know how kind you are, but please don’t try to tell me anything
to-night. Not a word, please!”
There was something in Nagar’s smile as he turned and went out that she
knew she would remember again.
“I quite understand,” said Miss Claes, when they were alone. “But say,
Pidge, I do want to say this. To-morrow afternoon, Mr. Richard Cobden,
an editor of _The Public Square_, is coming here to see Nagar. He is
the one who put through Nagar’s story. We’re to have tea at four.
You’ll come down, won’t you?”
“Why, yes, of course.”
“It might be arranged for Mr. Cobden to look at your book. Would you
like that?”
“Ye-es.”
“Do you mind if I suggest something?”
“Please,” said Pidge.
“Don’t let Mr. Cobden know, just yet, that you are the one who has
written the story. Write a new title-page without the name of the
author.”
“All right, but----”
“It’s because you look like such a child, Pidge. No one would be able
to see all that’s in your story--if they saw what a child you are!”
“I’ll do as you say. Thank you, but, Miss Claes----”
“Yes?”
“To-night under the light, I saw your hair--underneath!”
“Yes?”
“It made me see everything differently for a minute. You know I hate
cults and everything that apes India and talks about saving the world;
everybody talking about their souls, but doing the same old secret
selfish things--oh, I’ve almost died of talk about all that--but for a
minute, to-night under the lamp, it seemed that you knew, but had come
down to brass tacks--your feet on the ground--living like the rest of
us, but not ‘falling for’ love or money or fame, as we are. Are you
really through talking about service--just doing it?”
Miss Claes laughed. “Such a lot of words, Pidge--about some gray hair.”
Pidge was intensely serious. “Are you English?” she began again.
“Yes.”
“I know you’ve been in India. Miss Claes--are you really farther along
than I thought? Are you trying for that impersonal thing--trying to
belong to everybody--to enter the stream of humanity, as they call it?”
“Of course, I’m trying, Pidge.”
“You and Nagar working together?”
“Yes, but you and I are working together, too.”
Pidge was not to be turned aside by generalities.
“You--down here in lower New York--keeping a rooming house?”
“Why not?”
“Nothing--only it’s so big, so unexpected. I’ve always believed ’way
down deep that a real person wouldn’t be long-haired or barefooted or
pious, but lost in the crowd something like that--quietly efficient,
moving here and there among people unannounced, only a few ever
dreaming! Oh, it’s too, too big!”
“Don’t try to believe anything, Pidge.”
“I’ve been spoiled for believing anything, by so much talk!”
“Don’t try to settle things ahead of time,” Miss Claes repeated
laughingly. “Let the days--each day tell its story. I’m just living out
life as you are.... And now undress and get into bed. I know you’re
too tired to sleep, but I’m going to fix you in and open your window
and put out your light, and sit with you for a minute, perhaps in the
dark. You’re just to rest--a tired little girl--and not even hear me go
away.”
V
LUNCHEON AT SHARPE’S
RICHARD COBDEN and John Higgins were lunching at Sharpe’s Chop House.
It was one-thirty, and at the height of the day’s business. The tables
were packed close.
“You were telling me about that Asiatic landlady down in the Village,”
Higgins said, lifting his spectacles to wipe his red-rimmed eyes.
“I wasn’t telling you much,” said Dicky. “She’s too deep for me--looks
to thrive on coffee and cigarettes--eyes that have seen too much, a
lot of laughter in them, but no hope.... And what would you think of
a basement room, with flowers in winter and a fireplace with hickory
embers, a Byzantine jar in the corner and a cabinet of porcelain which
I haven’t seen the like of on this side?”
“Go on--don’t mind me,” said John Higgins.
“... Little old Harrow Street,” Dicky mused. “Harrow Street curves,
you know. There is quite a mass of rooming houses on each side, and
number Fifty-four, with a green front, is Miss Claes’ house. And our
Mr. Naidu works there with his hands; only they call him Nagar in that
house--spelled with an ‘a’ but pronounced ‘nog.’... By the way, he
told me twice, yesterday, that it isn’t a fiction story we’ve bought,
but a handling of things that actually happened in Africa--Little Man
an actual human being named Gandhi or something of the sort.”
“Can’t be done. Fiction and life are different,” said John Higgins.
Dicky resumed: “Some of Miss Claes’ lodgers happened in for the tea
party. No one barred apparently. I must have seen most of the houseful:
couple of girl-pals; one works in a restaurant to support the other
who is to become a prima donna; a couple of decayed vaudeville artists
looking for a legacy--a regular houseful, but I don’t believe all of
them pay, as they would have to in other houses.”
“Landlady supports those who can’t?”
“That’s the way I see it. The green front in Harrow Street took hold
of me. I must have stayed over two hours. Our Mr. Naidu made some
coffee to go with that cabinet of porcelain. Also there was a little
girl--from Los Angeles, I think they said--red head, brown wool dress
and eyes of a blue you see on illumined vellum out of Italy----”
“Some cerulean,” said John Higgins.
“They weren’t large, particularly,” Dicky went on at his literary
best, “but that extraordinary blue like the ocean. Ruffled on top, but
calm and still in the depth! Never saw such eyes. They come back to me
now----”
“They do to me, Dicky.”
“You’re not getting all I mean, John. Uptown here, we think we’re
the center of the world, the heart of New York yanking up toward the
Park--but down there those old rooming houses are filling up with the
boys and girls from all the States west, and the second growths from
the families of European immigrants--filling up because they are cheap,
with the boys and girls who will do the surgery ten years from now, and
the painting and writing and acting----”
“I’ve heard about all that,” said John Higgins. “You’ll do a big story
yourself one day.”
“I’m not so sure of it, since yesterday. I couldn’t take their chances.
I couldn’t sit down and do a novel and not know how I was going to
eat my way through. I couldn’t scrub tenement-house floors for the
privilege of writing a book.... Oh, I love books all right. I rise up
and yell when a big short story comes in the office, or breaks out
anywhere. I think I know a real one, but a man’s got to do a whole
lot of appreciating before he gets to doing. I’m not bred somehow as
those people are. I’m the first of the Cobdens to break out of trade.
They call _me_ a dreamer, my people do--yet compared to those boys and
girls in Harrow Street, I’m a basket of fish with only a wiggle at the
bottom----”
“Get out,” said John Higgins. “The first thing you know, you’ll be
going down there again.”
“I will,” said Dicky. “I’m going down there to live.”
“Eh?”
The younger man nodded seriously. “They’re crazy, perhaps, but I’m
convinced from yesterday of one thing: One can’t be sane as I am, and
ever find the Big Story, much less write it.”
“Therefore the first thing to do is to go insane.”
“It isn’t like that,” Dicky said gently. “I’ve been brought up to think
I know New York, belong and breathe in New York. You see, my family
has lived here a hundred years. But yesterday I saw New York for the
first time. She isn’t an old Dutch frump, as we thought, John. She’s a
damsel! She’s a new moon----”
“Blue eyes?” said John Higgins.
“No, that’s the little girl from Los Angeles. It’s the landlady, of
course, who’s the spirit of the place. I figured out afterward that it
was because she was there that I liked everybody and had a good time.
Wouldn’t be surprised to hear she was a priestess of some sort. I asked
if she were Hindu, and she said ‘Yes,’ but she talks as if she were out
of an English convent. Of course, most of her lodgers don’t get her.
One old actor, out of a job, leaned across the table to me yesterday
when Miss Claes left the room. He tapped his forehead, whispering,
‘Lovely, eh, but got the Ophelias.’”
“Is she young?” John Higgins asked presently.
“Moreover,” Dicky added, lost in thought, “I believe Miss Claes knows
that they think her cracked and doesn’t mind.... Young? Say, I don’t
know, John. You don’t think of her with years, somehow--rather as one
who has reached the top of herself and decided to stay there.”
John Higgins leaned back, drained his coffee cup and stared with eyes
that smarted at the steaming ceiling. “Is Naidu going to do us another
story?”
“We didn’t get to that, but they gave me a novel manuscript to read.”
“His?”
“No, I didn’t get it straight whose it was. Miss Claes handed it over,
suggesting I look at it for a serial. Some one in the house had written
it or left it there.”
“We’d better be going back to the office. Have you read into the novel?”
“Started, but didn’t get really going. It’s back-age France stuff, and
I was a little lost last night on the subject of 54 Harrow Street.”
“You’re a little lost yet, Dicky, I should say--for a Cobden.... So
you’re going to lead a double life? Rich young New Yorker, quarters in
Fiftieth Street under the eaves of St. Patrick’s, vanishing into life
down in Greenwich.”
Dicky’s eyes were keen with memory.
VI
ENTER, FANNY GALLUP
_THE Lance of the Rivernais_ had been in the editorial rooms of _The
Public Square_ for almost a month, but there had been no report;
not the slightest mention, in fact, though author and editor were
frequently together. Richard Cobden had come to 54 Harrow Street to
live for the larger part of each week. Pidge had gone to work in a
tin-can factory up Lenox way, pasting labels. She was half sick from
fatigue from the new work and from keeping the secret about her book.
In the days that followed the finishing of the _Lance_, it was as if
her whole body and brain had been a scaffold or matrix for the story,
and it had been taken from her, leaving a galvanism useless as an
eggshell, a sort of afterbirth that persisted in staying alive.
... There was Fanny Gallup, who sat at her right, elbow to elbow at the
pasting bench--Fanny of the intermittent pungencies of scent and the
dreary muck of talk about boys and boys and boys. Fanny was a child
and woman all in one, about Pidge’s age and size, one whom you could
fancy had been a stringy street-kid a year or two ago. But just now,
Fanny was in her brief bloom, red in her lips, a lift to her scant
breast, the earth driving into her and overflowing with such color and
fertility as it could.
For eight hours a day, Pidge dwelt in Fanny’s frequently tropical
aura--hateful, yet marveling. The thing that amazed her was that Fanny
loved life so, loved the feel of her own hands when she rubbed them
together, loved the taste of sweets and the memory of last night’s
kisses--loved fearlessly and without reserve, not a pang of dread for
what was to come, nor a shudder of regret for what had happened to her
mother or sisters or the other girls of Foley Street. Never a thought
in Fanny’s head that she was being hoaxed by Nature; that her body was
being livened and rounded, her face edged and tinted, for an inexorable
purpose; not a suspicion that she was being played for, and must
presently produce.
Fanny lived her brief hour to the full, and Pidge Musser suffered and
revolted for two. Pidge took the dreary monotone of talk into her soul,
as she had taken her father’s, knowing that one day she would be full.
“Oh, you Musser,” Fanny would say. “Why don’t you come over to Foley
Street?... You’re dryin’ up, Redhead. What do you do nights? What do
you do all the time, thinkin’ and listnin’?... Where’s your fulluh,
Redhead? Ain’t got one--wot? Little liar. You’re bad, you are, because
you’re so still.... Come on over to Foley Street to-night. I’ll let you
have a peep at Albert, m’li’l barber--just one peep, Redhead--not too
close. I ain’t sure of him yet, but I’ll let you have one look--aw come
on!”
So it was through the hours, pasting apricot labels, lobster,
asparagus, pimento, peach, and codfish labels. More and more Fanny’s
boys and men folded into one, whose name was Albert.
“I’m gettin’ him goin’--goin’, goin’. Psst! an’ he comes!” Fanny would
say. “But I wouldn’t trust him to you, Musser--not longer than a
hairpin, dam’ little party, you.”
* * * * *
Miss Claes was observing with some concern the result of her suggestion
to Pidge, not to let the young editor know the _Lance_ was hers.
“If it hadn’t been for my tampering, she would have heard about her
book before this,” she said to Nagar. “Pidge looked so young, I felt
it would prejudice Mr. Cobden against her work. He’s fascinated with
Harrow Street, but seems to have no time or thought for a romance of
eighteenth-century France! Yet he would have put through her book in
a week, if he knew, seeing the story with the same eyes he sees the
author.”
“And she doesn’t tell him?”
“No. That’s our Pidge, Nagar. I even suggested that I would speak to
him--let the truth slip out. She caught me in her hands, those hard
little hands, strong as a peasant’s, ‘Not for worlds, Miss Claes!’ she
breathed, and there was a patch of white intensity across her upper
lip, ‘Not for worlds!’”