very beginning. “I’ve always meant to write, since the day I learned
that print wasn’t done above the clouds somehow, like Moses’ tablets,
and had to be written all out first by human beings. But I’m not ready
to begin----” and she silently added the word “again” for her own
composure.
“But they tell me on my floor when you first came, you hammered a
typemill day and night. Was it commercial work?” Dicky asked.
“It was _not_,” said Pidge, with such emphasis that she felt her secret
endangered again and hastened to add, “That was before I started to
work in the factory. Likely they heard Nagar’s machine part of the
time.”
“But you seem to know yarns--like one who works with them--tries to do
them, I mean,” he remarked.
Her face was flushed. Evasion irritated and diminished her. She coldly
explained her father’s professional interest in the short story.
“He isn’t an artist, but he teaches how, you know,” she finished.
Dicky pondered long on how much Pidge meant by this. He had been
brought up to revere his parents. Surely, he thought, she must know
that one can’t be taught except by life itself to do a real story.
One rainy Sunday forenoon in February, they were sitting together in
his “parlor,” the front of his two rooms on the second floor. This room
opened through a single door to the main hall, and through folding
doors to his sleeping quarters. Dicky had brought some few additional
furnishings from his mother’s house in East Fiftieth Street. The place
made Pidge feel uncomfortable, but Miss Claes’ basement front was often
in use and subject to constant interruption.
“I want to read you something I’ve brought from the office,” Dicky
said. “I’m not saying a word--until afterward.”
It was a little story called _Dr. Filter_, by an unknown young
man, named Rufus Melton. It had come to _The Public Square_ among
the unsolicited manuscripts. Pidge listened with extraordinary
restlessness. She seemed to know so much about this story, its
processes and the thing it told, that her mind was unpleasantly
crowded. It wasn’t a matter of like or dislike. _Dr. Filter_ was here
in the world, a live thing. It had to be met and dealt with.
“Not more than once a year, one comes in as live as this,” Dicky said.
“Yet it’s like something from a different world from Nagar’s Little Man
story.”
“It isn’t whether you like _Dr. Filter_, or not, but you can’t get away
from it--like a relative who comes to live in your house,” said Pidge.
“That’s a center shot,” Dicky thoughtfully remarked.
She found herself asking about Rufus Melton. Dicky didn’t know much,
but was intensely pleased over her reaction to his latest artistic
find.... Pidge never lacked opinions, even verdicts, nor the energy
to express them when Dicky was around. They forgot Rufus Melton, and
out-generaled time in discussing Miss Claes.
“Every little while as she talks, I feel as if I were going through a
tunnel,” he said. “Of course, I admire her, and all that, but sometimes
I can’t help asking myself, like the others, if she is really right----”
“The more ignorant one is, the more crazy he thinks Miss Claes,” Pidge
observed.
“Another bull’s-eye. Wait till I set up the target again, Pidge. But is
it because she’s Hindu--that she’s so different?”
“She isn’t Hindu. She’s English.”
“I asked her.”
“So did I.”
“She’ll have to referee this herself,” Dicky hastily put in.
Then they were silent awhile, until Pidge said:
“Maybe I heard her wrong. I’m sure she’s had a lot of Hindu training.
But that’s not what draws me to her. It’s because she’s not taking
it out in talk. She knows about plumbing and cooking and streets and
common things. Best of all, she pays her bills!”
But Dicky, who had never known other than financial ease and financial
integrity, was more interested in the other side of their landlady.
“Can one get books--on her sort of thing?” he asked.
“You’re always getting me into this lately,” Pidge complained. “I don’t
like to talk about it. I floated up through zones of Hindu stuff from a
child. Better leave it alone, Dicky. Stay in your head--stay down.”
“What do you mean, ‘Stay in your head,’ please?”
“Any one who amounts to anything stays in his head. He’s not
complicated by _souls_. All the comfortable, solid world calls you
absurd for what you say and the way you look, when this Eastern stuff
starts you going. You get so absorbed that you lose all touch with
things down here, the things you are really here to do. You stop making
money and go around saying the Lord will provide. You don’t really let
Him, you let other people support you and call it God’s work. You call
yourself the Elect, and yet you can’t do the things that average people
do. Mainly, you talk. You stop work to talk. You settle heaven and God
and the soul with talk!... Oh, Dicky, that’s why I hate it all so;
that’s why I’d rather be a factory girl; that’s why I’m all lame and
tired about ‘ideals’ and ‘supermen’ and ‘abstractions’--because I’ve
heard so much talk.... It’s the first thing I remember. Lying in the
crib--I began to hear my father’s voice.”
“But you’ve got all this stuff, Pidge. That’s what makes you--makes
you----”
“It is what makes me nothing! It is what keeps me from being an
honest-to-God mill girl. It is what keeps me from everything that means
something to other mill girls. It is what keeps me from taking life
as I find it. It’s what spoils me from really knowing Miss Claes or
Nagar--or what they are about--because so many words have been dinned
into my ears before coming to New York.”
The hardest thing on Dicky these days was that Pidge had to work in
a factory. This thought was never far from the central arena of his
mind. It chafed and irked. There was very little of the philanderer in
his breed. Mostly, the Cobdens had chosen their women carefully, after
long, cool, studious courtship. Having decided, courted and married,
nothing short of death could break in. Doubtless Dicky’s fidelity
was as stable as that of his relatives, even though his heart had
not turned so cautiously to his light of day. Pidge had risen in his
heavens and possessed them like the rising sun. There were not two suns
in his system.
He had meant to live lean down in Harrow Street, but his idea of that
wasn’t native to the locality. His ramifications for keeping clean were
considerable and very disturbing to Pidge Musser, who had been brought
up in Southern California to wear a few white garments which she could
wash herself. Washing was impossible in her room, and wasn’t at all
easy in the hall below where Miss Claes had told her to get her water.
Dicky Cobden was the first _gentleman_ Pidge had ever known. She had
met several boys with a streak of genius showing; boys who had come
to her father to learn how to write and had taken away something, if
not that. Practically all those boys had been “on a shoe string,”
and trained to get along without many things that Cobden would have
considered actual necessities, including an established routine of
order and cleanliness in one’s person and quarters. Pidge had also
met many of the “queer” ones of Hollywood and vicinity--men and women
who ate this way and that, bathed this way and that, in running waters
and still, in sea waters and rain waters, in mud and sunlight, using
unctions and ointments, but they were bathing their souls.
Dicky Cobden bathed frequently, carefully, believing beyond cavil that
New York and the processes of life grimed him on the outside, that life
itself was a constant war against grime, requiring an ever accessible
tub, much soap, hot water, changes of clothing, laundry bags, rugs,
brushes. Not that Dicky gave any thought to this. It was as if he
supposed everybody did the same. Since everybody didn’t and couldn’t;
and since everybody didn’t have as much money to spend for bread and
meat and tea, as Mr. Cobden did for laundry alone--Pidge was miserably
rebellious.
Always as she sat in the presence of Dicky’s altogether thoughtless
freshness; sat in her apple-butter colored wool dress which had
contained the emotional hurl and thresh of the romantic _Lance_--always
Miss Musser had a hard time to forget herself and was frequently on the
verge of becoming defiant and bad-tempered for reasons he didn’t dream.
She suffered, because every evening almost, Dicky invited her out to
dine, and not once in four times could she pass the frowning negatives
of her own soul. He chose to regard her as superbly honest and
unaffected. She really needed those dinners, too. All the future novels
and heart throbs needed them. Occasionally she met him after dinner
for a walk or a picture, and once she had been lured to an uptown
theater. Just once--never again in the brown wool dress!
She felt, as she entered the theater lights that night, that she had
been betrayed. She felt also like something Mr. Cobden had found in
the street, or that she was helping him make good on a first of April
bet. Pidge hadn’t been to more than three “talking shows” in all her
nineteen years; to her a show house was a place of darkness, except the
screen.
Alone in her room afterward that night, she made a great vow: that when
the torrent of American dollars turned loose on her (as it was bound to
some time) she would buy outright chests full of lingerie, cabinets of
hats, shelves of shoes, and a book of orders for frocks to be delivered
at future dates. She would keep clean then if a Santa Ana sandstorm
settled on New York and lasted a year.
One raw and cold week-night, Pidge was about done up when she reached
Harrow Street. She tried to slip softly past his hall door, but Dicky
was there.
“Hard day?” he called.
“Yes,” she said, pushing on. “Everybody’s tired and cross the whole
length of New York, like a sore spine.”
“You haven’t had dinner?”
“No, but I don’t think I’ll go out----”
“I’ve been waiting, Pidge. There’s a little place near, where I used to
come from uptown, thinking it an excursion--just a neighbor of ours
now, _The Hob and Hook_, where they make a stew like Dickens tells of
in the old English inns--smoking in the pot for twenty-four hours; and
there’s tea for tired folks, and no end of scones and honey----”
“Oh, please----” said Pidge. Then she added stubbornly, “No, I’m not
going out again to-night.”
“It is a trifle wintry,” Dicky observed. “We’ll have supper here. I’ll
go out and get an armful, and Nagar will make us a pot of tea. Oh, I
say, Pidge, have a little thought of somebody else.”
She weakened. Alone upstairs a minute afterward, she lit the gas and
stood before the mirror that waved.
“If I turned loose just once and ate all I wanted, he’d never speak to
me again!”
VII
“THE FREEDOM OF IGNORANCE”
PIDGE was gone from Harrow Street from seven in the morning to seven
at night. She had been absolutely blurred with fatigue at the end
of the first days, but her hands were hardening, her back adjusting
to the monotonous work at the big pasting table. She was actually
learning like the other girls the trick of sinking into a sort of coma
for an hour or more at a time. Sometimes (as one under the influence
of a prying drug, which opens scenes, as from a past life) she would
remember the palisades of Santa Monica, the ocean pressing its white
fringes up against the gray sand; tirelessly pressing again and again,
but never leaving its white lines of foam, unless the water was sick
from the big sewer of El Segundo. Rarely a sail on that great sunny
bay, but many wings--pelicans, sandpipers, gulls in hundreds, feeding
out beyond the surf lines, or gathered in conference on the beaten
sand--three strange and ancient bird types, gathered together in one
vast audience facing the sea.
This was but one of her pictures. Other times she roamed the canyons,
Santa Monica and Topango, and the cheerful and solitary mesas.... “Yes,
that same creature--Pan Musser,” she once said, half aloud.... Then
she would think of New York and Miss Claes and Richard Cobden; of the
book she had actually written, and pretty nearly died for, the book
around which there was a conspiracy of silence. In spite of the coma
at the pasting table, and the moments of memory drift, the stimulated
laughter in the washroom, or in the half hour for lunch as they heated
their tea pails over the radiators at noon; in spite of the clatter of
tins passing from left to right around the big table, and the tireless
goading of Fanny Gallup’s cheerful boy-talk--the brown wool dress
contained plentiful hells of the human heart.... And to-morrow would be
Thursday, the next day Friday, the next day Saturday, and then sleep,
and this was also New York.
The first Sunday afternoon of March was the afternoon of the new frock,
a cheap little one-piece dress, bought on Seventh Avenue, neither
wool nor brown. It had a tissuey and boxy smell. It was rapturously,
adventurously new. Pidge had an omen as she put it on, that this was
a sort of hour of all her life, that never another frock would mean
quite the same. She was alone with Miss Claes when Dicky Cobden came
for her at six, according to a plan made early in the week. They were
to cross to Staten Island and find an old Georgian mammy, whom he knew,
somewhere back of Stapleton on the wet roads, a mammy who could cook
chicken and beaten biscuit.
Dicky seemed only to see her face. A great wonderment came up in
Pidge’s heart, not disappointment exactly, but a sort of soul-deep
wonder, that Dicky didn’t appear to see the new frock. Could it be
possible that a man who managed the details of his own attire with
such practiced art had never known what she suffered in the brown wool
dress, in all that tragedy of shabbiness and dirt? Had he really not
felt ashamed of her that night under the lights in the uptown theater?
He turned to her now:
“You won’t mind, Pidge, just a moment or two, if I speak of a little
matter to Miss Claes. Oh, I don’t mean for you to leave; in fact, I’d
rather not. It is just a report about a long story that should have
been made before.”
Then out of the inmost heart of innocence, Pidge was jerked with a
crush. Before his next words she realized what she must face; she,
sitting aside from them in the new frock.
“... About that book manuscript,” Dicky went on. “I have ordered
it sent back to you, Miss Claes--doubtless it will be in the post
to-morrow. I have read it, and John Higgins has read it. We’re both
agreed on this particular manuscript--that it isn’t for _The Public
Square_.”
Pidge stared at him like a child being whipped for the first time. All
that was left of the meaning of the book in her own body and mind, and
all hope concerning it, had suddenly been put to death. But the rest
of her remained alive in a stupor of suffering; her eyes stared. She
saw Richard Cobden as never before, saw him as a workman; as they saw
him in the office. This was a bit of week-day that he was showing now,
sincerely speaking to Miss Claes, having at length done the best he
could in regard to the task which she had imposed.
“The thing is _young_, Miss Claes,” he went on. “There is fling and
fire to it, but its freedom is the freedom of ignorance. This love and
this sort of man-stuff would only do for the great unsophisticated. I’m
not saying that some publisher couldn’t take hold of it and make a go.
In fact, I’ve seen stuff like it in covers mount up to big sales, but
the human male isn’t handled in it, Miss Claes. This is sort of a young
girl’s dream of what men are. They drink and fight and love and die and
all that, but----”
“There, there, Mr. Cobden. Don’t try so hard,” Miss Claes said
laughingly. “I’m sure you’ve given the book its chance.”
But Dicky meant to finish his report.
“That’s just the point,” he said; “its chance with _The Public Square_
is all I’m talking about. This is a shopgirl’s book, and there are
myriads of shopgirls. _The Public Square_ would like to have their
patronage; yet one pays a price for that. John Higgins--this is the
best thing that can be said about one of the best men I’ve known--John
Higgins has never yet consented to pay that price.”
Pidge Musser found her head turning from side to side as one who tries
to find in which neck muscle a troubling lameness lies. She stopped
that. She glanced up at Cobden, who was pressing on his left glove
with his bare right hand. Before she turned, she realized that Miss
Claes’ eyes were waiting for hers. It wasn’t pity she saw in them,
nor friendship, nor loyalty, nor laughter; it was something of each of
these, yet something more. Only one word in English even suggests the
thing that was pouring upon her through Miss Claes’ eyes--and that word
is _compassion_.
Its power could not find her heart with its healing, but it seemed to
gather around like a cloak, waiting for entrance. Pidge wanted to be
alone with Miss Claes now. The ache was so deep that she felt it would
be worth a life if she could go into Miss Claes’ arms and break. That
was it, an utter break was the only thing that could ease this pain.
Then she became aware of Cobden standing at her side. In a moment he
would speak. She did not wait for the moment, but arose.
“Shall we start down toward the ferry?” she asked.
“Yes, all ready, Pidge.”
In the silence that followed, Dicky did not seem to notice anything
wrong. At the door Miss Claes’ hand raised and hovered above Pidge’s
shoulder, but did not touch. Pidge was grateful for that.
VIII
SOMEBODY’S SHOULDER
IT was early April, a dark and rainy afternoon. Pidge had been in the
tin factory three months. For four weeks the manuscript of the _Lance_
had lain in the bureau drawer of the little upper room in Harrow
Street, not being given a second submittal. The secret was still kept.
Richard Cobden had not spoken of the story since his report that Sunday
afternoon to Miss Claes. There seemed an astonishing cruelty in the
fact that he could forget. He had spoken of everything else....
Pidge had just left the factory and was running in her rubbers through
the blur of rain toward a downtown subway entrance. A sort of mocking
laughter was in her ears, “and this is New York,” the burden of it.
In the dim light of the passage down into the tube she saw the gray
gleaming patches of wear on the steel steps, slippery now from the
rain. There was a shudder and gasp from a girl beside her; a parting of
the hurrying ones ahead to avoid clotted pools of blood on two or three
steps below.
Farther down in the area, a man lay propped in the arms of a stranger.
His face was very white. A few minutes before he had been hurrying down
those steel steps that the rain had made slippery--hurrying perhaps in
the same confusion of fatigue and hunger that she had known.... A pause
had come to him from all that hurry. His white face was more peaceful
than any of the bystanders. A hospital ambulance clanged above, as
she lingered. Attendants came down with the stretcher. The body of
the unconscious man was swept up by one of the swift city brooms.
The stream of ticket buyers filed on as before, the downtown express
crashed in.
Pidge sat in her cane seat. The main crowd of the city was coming
uptown at this hour. At least, she was spared that packing. She
breathed the dense tired air, and recalled that on a night or two
before she had slipped on the steel stairs, but had not fallen. It was
borne upon her that in some way this man had fallen for her, fallen for
every one who saw him or the puddles of blood he left. Every one had
walked more carefully afterward, reaching for the rails. And he had
lost the sense of hurry--that unmitigated madness which drove them all
from dawn to dark.
Her old wonder of New York came back, as she thought that she was being
flashed fifty miles an hour from the junction at Ninety-sixth Street
down to Forty-second Street, under the busiest streets and corners of
America. Mere men could manage much. Then the old agony stole in--“the
freedom of ignorance.” Surely no one had ever been punished for doing
a book as she had been punished: that it was so poor, as to prove a
temptation for John Higgins to publish it, because of its chance of
falling exactly into the fancy of these--the myriad of shopgirls in
the uptown locals and expresses, crashing by in thick ropes of white
light. As for the public taste, Dicky Cobden had told her that John
Higgins had confessed, speaking wearily and with a smile that had lost
its sting of reproach, that for thirty years he had been choosing
stories for people to read, and every year he had been forced to lower
his estimate as to what the public taste was. Even so, John Higgins
had said he was far from the level; that only a trade mind could get
stories banal enough. But hers might interest that public.
She was so tired.... For somebody’s shoulder to lean against! Pidge
knew what Fanny Gallup felt, what the other factory girls felt, when
they pushed out so brazenly toward men--in very clumsiness from hard
pressure, spoiling their chances of being treated on the square. Yes,
she was really learning what the girls felt, as they hunted their
own in the masses of men they passed--how tired, hungry, blurred,
unsatisfied their hearts--anything to escape the withering grind of
the mills and the counters and the shops. She knew the secret bloom
they felt, the terrible brief drive of it--childhood, girlhood and
youth, all passing like the uptown trains--a home, a man, a child of
their own, the one chance for a breath of life. Of course, they talked
of nothing else, in the closets and dressing rooms, in the cars and
streets; and read nothing else. Certainly their dreams had to come
true in books and plays, even if they didn’t in life. Life would break
the dream soon enough. The best life could do didn’t compare with the
lowliest dream; for the dream of a girl has glamour, and the life of a
woman is stripped. But that was no reason why books and plays should
tear off the glamour ahead of time.
It wasn’t that Pidge loved shopgirls and mill girls. She didn’t love
herself for sharing their lot. She wasn’t sentimental at all. She
recognized bad management somewhere that forced her to this work. She
had to have bread, and outer and under clothing. She paid the price,
but there was nothing good nor virtuous about it. She didn’t hate Dicky
Cobden when he spoke of “shopgirl literature”; she knew how rotten
it was, but there was something in her that belonged to it, or she
wouldn’t have been in the factory; moreover, that something had helped
to write the _Lance_.
... Somebody’s shoulder. Three months of tin cans was teaching that
very well.... And there was a shoulder, straight and steady--a kind
of mockery about it, because it was so fine. None of the girls at the
big table where she worked would have asked more. It meant books and
pictures and all the dining tables of New York; plays and dresses,
cleanliness, and all the little coaxing cushions and covers of this
arrogant modern hour. It meant all the old solid established joys of
place and plenty; all the writing she liked; a leisurely winning of her
way through magazines and publishing houses; nothing of Grub Street and
the conspiracy against an unknown outsider....
And this life of the factory--hadn’t she earned release? What more
could come of the grinding monotony of the days but a more passionate
agony to escape, through the under world, or the upper world, through
any route at all, even death itself? Was there a further lesson than
this?... Somebody’s shoulder. He had the native kindness of clean
breeding; also that consideration for others of one who is brought up
in a large house. He had an ardent interest in books and life. He was
warmly established in the hearts of other men--first and last, a man’s
man, which it behooves a woman to inquire into.
There was a tired smile on Pidge’s lips as the car halted at
Thirty-second street.... The only blunders he had ever made were in her
presence, because he cared so much. He seemed continually in awe and
wonder before the thing he fancied she was, as if he had never really
looked at a woman before. Of course, another man might act that way,
but it was different the way Dicky did it. He had been at school late,
and for nearly four years in the office of _The Public Square_ he had
bored steadily, craftily toward the center of the life of letters.
Work had been his passion up to that day in which he had called to see
Nagar, and fell under the spell of Miss Claes and Harrow Street....
There was enough of the artist and dreamer in him to keep life from
being tame, yet not enough to make life a maze and a madness. He had
health. Money was to him like an old custom, so established as to be
forgotten....