with a rush at the second, pulling a growl from the gateman as she sped
out.... Dicky was standing at the head of the stairs on the second
floor of the Harrow Street house.
“Hello, Pidge,” he said.
“Hello,” she answered, pushing past, but he caught her arm.
“Let me go, please! I haven’t washed yet----”
But he drew her by the hand toward the open door to his front room. The
brighter light from there streamed out into the dim hall.
“My hands are sticky from the paste. I’ll come back. I’d rather come
back.”
“It’s about that--about your hands, Pidge. I’ve waited as long as I
can.”
... Somebody’s shoulder. She wasn’t safe to be trusted right now, yet
she couldn’t pull away. If she ever got upstairs--even for a minute
in her own little place, before the mirror that waved, she would see
it all clearly, but here and now she didn’t want to see clearly. She
wanted to give up and rest. She wanted what he wanted--wanted to give
him what he wanted, which was the tiredest, most hopeless girl in
New York to-night. She was dying of all its strains and failures and
rigidities and fightings, and he wanted to take the load.
They were standing under the hanging lamp in his room. The light was
white; his face was white. It was leaner than ever before, more of a
man in it, more of a boy in it. His will was working furiously to make
him speak.
He held her right hand up between them.
“It’s about your hands, Pidge, about the factory. Listen, you make
me feel like a tout or a sot--as if you were out killing yourself to
support me. I’ve been home two hours and you just coming in.”
“There’s half a million girls in New York--just coming in.”
“I know. We’ll get to them later, but now there’s only one--only one
Pidge. I want her home to stay. I want to make a home for her. Why,
Pidge, I’ll let you alone, if you just let me do that----”
“I believe you would.”
She was looking up at him hard. She didn’t fully understand, but the
boyish cleanliness of him struck her fully that moment. The power of
his will which she felt was mainly the fierceness of his decision to
speak. It wasn’t the burn of terrible hunger for her. He was young as a
playmate: that’s what shook her now. He wanted to fix her place, to let
her hands soften again, wanted to let her rest and breathe--not what
the other girls laughed about.
“Why, Pidge, I’ve got to take care of you. I’ve got to straighten you
out--if it’s only to marry you and go away.”
Something in her heart cracked like a mirror, and a sob broke out of
her. It was as if a car that had been running along by itself suddenly
left the road and went into a cliff--a warm, kind cliff. Somebody’s
shoulder, and she was sobbing:
“I told you I was so tired! I told you I wasn’t safe----”
“Ah, little Pidge----” he was patting her arm and pressing her close.
It had come. This was it. It _was_ rest. The other girls knew. The
awful cold ache was broken--warmth of life pouring out of her--heavenly
ease in the flood of tears, and something of the dearness of dreams was
in his passion, not for her--but to do something for her.
The first whip stroke fell, when Pidge remembered how she looked when
she cried. But if she could keep her face covered! She didn’t stir....
Was this the fullness of days? All the consummate essences of ease, he
brought--no hunger, no dirt--and really she had fought long and hard.
“... Everything you want, Pidge,” he was whispering. “I’ll take you to
my mother. She’s a regular sport, Pidge----”
“She’d have to be,” came from the incorrigible heart in his arms, but
not aloud.
The second whip stroke--_The Lance of the Rivernais_. She had failed,
and the failure wasn’t the book, but herself, the thing in his arms.
She didn’t stir, but there was coldness of calculation to her thinking
now--that he meant ease and rest and expediency, not the ripping,
rioting, invincible man force that was to come one day and carry her
off her feet.
This was the third whip stroke: that he meant propinquity--the nearest,
the easiest way.
She started up and pushed him from her.
“I’m not washed,” she said. “I don’t mean from the mills. I’m not
washed, or I couldn’t have--couldn’t have----! I’m just like the
rest--dying for a shoulder to cry on. You’re all right, Dicky, so right
and fine that I’m ashamed. I’ll always care for you. I’ll always be
warm at the thought of you. I’ll always remember how I went to you--how
dear you are--but you can’t give me freedom. You can’t give me peace.
My soul would rot in ease and peace and plenty. I’ve got to earn my
own.”
She looked up into his face and her own took a fright from it.
“I know I’ll suffer hells for hurting you--but I can’t help it. I had
to know. If I have to spend a life in misery--I had to know that there
isn’t anything you can give that will satisfy----”
His mouth was partly open, his head twisted peculiarly, and lowered, as
if his shoulder and neck were deformed. He was shockingly white under
the lamp.
“Oh, I’m such a beast and I’m so sorry. I really wanted terribly to
stay.... But, Dicky Cobden--it wasn’t for you. It wasn’t for you that I
wanted to stay--it was for what you have--more.”
IX
“YOU BOTH HAVE KEYS”
DICKY kept his quarters in Harrow Street, but for days at a time did
not appear. Pidge Musser at first fancied this was easier. There was a
faint cackle of derision from somewhere in her depths, as this idea of
it being easier repeated itself in her mind; in fact, there were many
conflicting mysteries in Pidge’s deep places. “I laid my head on his
shoulder,” she once said to herself, “but thought better of it. Now we
are to be strangers.”
At unexpected moments when she was busy at the pasting bench; or
nights and mornings, passing in and out of sleep, the faint note of
mockery would sound. When she passed Dicky in the halls, or met him
at one of Miss Claes’ little tea parties, and he would bow distantly
or indulge in formal commonplaces, the mockery would stir itself in
Pidge’s profundities, indicating that something somewhere was decidedly
idiotic. He looked positively diminished as he kept up his formalities,
and she liked and respected him too much to feel pleasant about this.
She heard that he was interested in Africa. It was to be observed that
he sought Nagar; in fact, several times she heard these two together
through the partition.
Finally Pidge heard that Dicky was going to South Africa, possibly to
hunt up Nagar’s Little Man, whose name was Gandhi, and who had been
Nagar’s friend and teacher both in India and Natal. Also Dicky was to
do some letters for _The Public Square_.
On the night before he was to sail for the Mediterranean, he was
invited with Pidge by Miss Claes for dinner at Tara Subramini’s Punjabi
Fireplace down on Sixth Avenue near Fourth Street. This was also the
night Pidge smelled Spring in New York for the first time.
Mid-April; there had been rain. Pidge hadn’t caught the Spring magic
coming home from the factory, but now as they walked down Sixth Avenue
under the momentary crashes of the Elevated--it stole up out of the
pavements as if she were in a meadow--that untellable sweetness
which seems the breath of Mother Nature herself, a breath made of
all the perfumes of all the flowers, without accentuating one, and a
sublimation of all the passions of the human heart as well. Her left
hand burrowed under the hanging sleeve of Miss Claes’ wrap. The bare
elbow there closed upon it. They both laughed, and Mr. Richard, walking
sedately, was altogether out of the question.
Tara Subramini served her Punjabi dinners on great individual plates
which were none too hot. She discussed modern dancing with Miss Claes
at easy length, when Pidge was served and Richard Cobden was not. The
rice cooled, the lamb cooled, even if the peppery curry held its fire.
The vast plate had curious little crevices on the side for conserves
and glutinous vegetables and various watery leaves. Pidge became
prejudiced at once against the Punjab. The great leisure of Asia, which
she had heard about from a child and which had tempted her alluringly
in the more intense pressures of her own life, lost something of its
charm as Tara Subramini conversed with all concerned and the contents
of the troughs congealed.
Food is food, but talk is merely talk. Besides, Pidge was hungry.
Subramini had things to say, but also an oriental delight in the use of
English. Mr. Cobden was unreservedly courteous. Pidge always wondered
if he really knew what hunger was. She could get so hungry that her
hands trembled, and New York had shown her deeper mysteries of the
hunger lesson that she would be slow to forget.
“It must be great to be a gentleman,” she thought.
She positively yearned for Dicky to wake up. If this were poise, this
moveless calm of his, this unvarying quiet and courtesy, this inability
to be stretched even in laughter--Pidge felt she was ready to drop the
hunt; also she was tempted to test out Dicky’s poise to see how much
it could really stand.... India bored her, as well as America. Miss
Claes could eat and talk at the same time, and drop neither words nor
food.... A lone Hindu arose to depart from another table. Subramini
helped him with his coat and followed him to the door. Pidge thought
once that Subramini was about to spread herself on the doorstep and let
him walk over her. Punjab didn’t rise in her regard. Pidge suddenly
burst out into a kind of merriment that had nothing to do with anybody
present.
“It is because we’re such idiots!” she said brokenly. “Oh, I don’t mean
you, Miss Claes. I mean myself and--_Mr._ Cobden. It is the way things
are done in the world--so utterly silly. Why should we be strange and
embarrassed, avoiding each other for days and weeks--when we should be
more than ever friends, and----”
Richard Cobden bent forward attentively. Pidge was turned from him.
“You don’t mean, Pidge, that you fail to see a reason for this
strangeness?” Miss Claes asked. “You----”
Pidge stared at her a second in surprise.
“There can’t be any sense to it, can there?” she said slowly.
The other regarded her with a calm that irritated Pidge just now.
Everything irritated her, Dicky sitting by, Miss Claes’ familiarity
with Subramini, and the look of knowing and not speaking, back of the
smile on Miss Claes’ lips. But most of all, peculiarly at this moment,
arose in Pidge’s mind the two conflicting stories of nationality.
“Did I hear you wrongly that you said you were English, Miss Claes?”
she asked abruptly.
“No, dear.”
“But Dicky said you told him you were Hindu----”
“I did. I am both. I am half-caste, supposed to unite in myself the
worst of English and Indian.”
Pidge burned with contrition, less at her questioning than at the bad
temper that prompted it. The two women were ready to go, but Dicky
wasn’t.
“You seemed to have something to say, Miss Claes, to set us--to set me
straight on all this,” he began.
“You see, Richard, one cannot speak without being drawn in. I hesitated
on that account.”
“But I’d like to hear.”
Pidge flushed a little as she watched him. Tara Subramini, still afar
off, was engaged in words.
“... My house in Harrow Street is just a symbol,” Miss Claes was
saying. “To come into one’s house really should mean to come into
one’s heart. You both have keys.... What was in my mind to say was
that people in your trouble act as strangers for good reasons. If they
cannot have each other--they sometimes rush to the other extreme to
save themselves the pain of watching another come between.”
Dicky Cobden essayed to light a cigarette. The match broke in his
fingers. He did not try again. Miss Claes amplified without apparent
feeling:
“Sometimes one who cannot have what he wants--gives way to hatred for
a time to ease his wound.... Pidge, what have you to give for the
friendship and association of one who wants more?”
“I don’t know that I have anything. I see how selfish I was. It came to
me that we, of all people, should be friends, but I didn’t look at the
other side.”
“You can be friends, if you are brave enough. You can be, if you dare
to come and go and set each other free utterly, but that means long and
bitter work.”
The harrowing thing to Pidge was that Miss Claes talked as if Dicky and
herself were one in condition and purpose and dilemma, when in reality
all the hard part seemed to go to him. She wished Miss Claes would
stop, but the words continued with a smooth predestined force:
“The best the world knows, even in books and art, is the kingdom of
two; but love doesn’t end in that--at least, not for those who are
brave enough and strong enough to sunder their tight little kingdom of
each other and let the earth rush in between....”
Tara Subramini’s slippered feet crept in. She stood behind Miss Claes’
shoulders and began to speak of a book of poetic obituaries. The paying
of the bill seemed an interminable process.
Cobden looked dazed.
“If Pidge thinks it’s silly to act as strangers--and I can see that it
is--I’m for trying the other way,” he repeated, when they reached the
street.
The whole talk had been subject to most stubborn and perverse
distractions. On Sixth Avenue the racket of traffic had become
incessant. Apparently Miss Claes had decided to say no more. Callers
waited for her in the basement room at Harrow Street, so Pidge followed
Dicky to his “parlor,” which she had not entered since the night of
Somebody’s Shoulder.
He seemed possessed to talk of what he had heard, as a youth fascinated
by a new course to take. He spoke of a man being big enough to stand
by and set a woman free; of a man big enough to wait and watch and be
a friend, a comrade. And Pidge, who had brought it all about, listened
in a sort of terror which only a woman could understand. This thing
which she had aroused in him, this answer of his deep, but still vague
powers, to her thoughtless challenge, frightened her now that it had
come.
“Don’t, oh, don’t let’s talk any more!” she said at last. “It’s talk,
Dicky, just talk. The doing is different, the doing is harder! What
do we know of what life will fix for us to do day by day through the
years? This thing is so hard that Miss Claes herself hated to let it
out. It belongs to you differently than it belongs to me. I haven’t
anything to give for your friendship and association. I mean you’ll
always want more than I can give.”
He looked at her steadily for an instant.
“I don’t want to be strangers again, Pidge. I want to stand by and
wait.”
“You won’t know better than to build pictures while you wait. No one
would. You will wait--while you’re away in Africa, making pictures
about me, pictures of what I am _not_! I don’t know why I’m chosen to
hurt you. If I hadn’t been so utterly lost in myself, I never could
have brought this on. I feel that I’ve started a new set of conditions
to bring you to another moment--another gash--like in this room the
last time we were here. And oh, Dicky Cobden, I don’t want to! To be
strangers! To be common and hateful and avoid each other is so much
more simple and easy.”
“I’ll stop talking, Pidge,” he said quietly. “It may be easier to be
strangers, but it doesn’t look rosy to me. Don’t you worry about it. It
is my job and I’ll take a chance.”
“You don’t know what you’re saying!”
“Perhaps not. We won’t talk about that any more.... Now, Pidge, I’m
keeping these rooms while I’m away. Wouldn’t you--wouldn’t you for
me--look after them--look in on them and keep them alive while I’m
gone?... It would make me feel like--great, you know.”
X
APRIL BREATHES AGAIN
THREE nights later, when she reached Harrow Street from the factory,
Pidge found two letters. One was from John Higgins of _The Public
Square_. This she opened first.
... At the suggestion of Mr. Cobden, just before he left for
South Africa, I am offering you a position here as reader of the
unsolicited manuscripts. Mr. Cobden hints that you know enough about
_The Public Square_ to realize we cannot be lavish in salaries, but
think we can at least pay you what you are getting now, to begin
with--and the work will be different.
“Oh, Dicky Cobden,” she whispered, alone in the upper room.
She sat in the center of her cot as of old, breathing the sweetness of
the release from the factory.... Friendliness like this art of Dicky’s
was good.... It made her eyes smart now--the new work. It was easier to
take it from him--away. It was a soft cloak that she could nestle in,
because he wouldn’t see.... Miss Claes knocked. Pidge read in her eyes
that she already knew.
“No one can ever tell you anything.”
“I’m so glad you want it, Pidge. I couldn’t tell him for sure that
you’d take it.”
“They really need somebody, don’t they?”
“Mr. Cobden said you wouldn’t be in doubt about that after you got
there.”
“I’m going to take it,” Pidge said soberly. “I know it means something
more than it looks--but I’m going to take it. I’m so sick of myself
which fights everything. Also, I’m going down after supper--and sit
there--in his ‘parlor.’ I haven’t entered since----”
Miss Claes was called from below. Pidge felt the second letter in her
hand. It was from Los Angeles, her father’s writing. A check dropped
out on the cot. By powerful effort of will, Pidge left it there, until
she had read the note:
... At this time it seems well for me to send you money. Hard as it
has been for me to refrain, I felt before this that it was best for
you to face New York alone, unaided. As there is a New Generation, my
child, there is a New Fatherhood which dares--dares even to allow the
heart’s darling to struggle alone; dares to say “hands off” to all
the untransmuted emotions which rush forth to shield the fledgling
from the world----
Fifty dollars. Pidge sank back and softly batted her pillow with
one loose arm. She laughed in a smothery uncertain way that was not
of joy.... It was as if she heard his voice in the room--the new
parenthood, the new generation, the adjustment of motive to moment!
The sort of thing in this letter always shook and tortured Pidge. It
was a part of her. She was bred of it. She had been half as old as now
when she first realized it. Then in every thought and act, she had
rushed to the other extreme. It was true that her father had taught
her the deepest things in books. In his study, she had caught hints of
the inner meanings of inaccessible literatures, before she had learned
to spell simple words of English. Because his eyes hurt, she had read
aloud for hours, day after day, tomes out of Asia which she had no
care nor thought to understand, but from which, volatile fairylike
impressions came to rest in the depths of her heart. She had loved the
few central springs of books in a house of books, until she realized
that her father read, but lived them not; that he expounded, exhorted
upon the doctrines--but his life was his own twisted rag. That was when
Pidge’s heavens cracked--and she had set out to be honest and erect, if
only as tall as a gnome.
The thought that came at this moment had come before. It was the
passion to be what her father was not that had made her rush forth to
be straight in her own head--to refuse to lie to herself--to go to the
other extreme of fierceness and bleakness and ill-temper, rather than
lie to herself--to be plain and true, if she had to be a man-hater and
poison face. Yet Pidge sat up straight with a bitter thought. Like it
or not, she saw right now that it was her father who had prepared her
to accept and make good, possibly, in this position with _The Public
Square_....
“But where did he get the money?” she muttered at last.
She crossed to the open window. April breathed up to her from the stone
floor of the area to-night; magic April, breathing up through the
trampled earth and the degraded pavements. Suddenly a soft love stole
over her. It was love of the April dark.
She heard the sounds of the city over the buildings, over into the
stillness of Harrow Street, like the far tread and clatter of a
pageant. Mother Nature was actually perceptible in this soft air, and
something that Pidge answered to as never before in New York. Her hands
stretched out to touch the casings of the window; the old wood gave
her an additional warmth. It belonged to this house of Miss Claes,
this house of the mystery of kindness. She was free at this moment of
the fear of accepting too much, having come up to breathe, at least,
out of the ruck of fighting everything and everybody. She had been
utterly graceless and narrow in her acceptances, fighting against
favors, when she knew all the time that to receive is the other part
of giving. A shiver passed over her, nevertheless, as she remembered
the subtle mendicancy that she had known in her father’s house, the
calm acceptance of gifts and favors from others in the belief that one
was evolved enough to give the ineffable in exchange for materials. No
wonder she had run from that.
This of Miss Claes’ was a house with a heart. This was her house. She
could breathe in it now, at least, for a little. The numbness and
dumbness of the factory had fallen away. The softness stole over her
toward Fanny Gallup and the other girls who must still stay at the
bench. She would never forget. She had earned an understanding of them,
and had been released; _released_ was the word. But something would
carry her back to them one day, something born in that slow madness of
monotony.
She crossed the room and opened the door into the hall. Supper smells
came up to her, the murmur of voices behind the shut doors. The prima
donna person was singing, not practicing this time, but singing....
“One comes up through great tribulation to learn to sing,” Miss Claes
had once said, “and others share it.”
The warmth stole into her from the halls. Everybody was hungry
to-night, the spring hunger, and everybody celebrated, as a festival.
April seemed breathing in the halls, too. April was breathing in
herself; that was why she was awake to this outer delight. If she
could only keep it. It would always be in externals, if she could only
keep this springtime alive within. She laughed a little bitterly. Of
course, she was elated because the factor had dropped away, because
the new position had opened, because the check had come (though she
felt something queer about that), because Richard Cobden and Miss Claes
were fashioned of unswerving kindnesses, which she suddenly realized as
never before.
“It’s money and place, and I’m ‘falling for’ it, venturing to be
pleased with myself----” She laughed again. “But, oh, it is so
cheerful, so restful to feel New York like this, just for to-night!”
XI
THE BABY CARRIAGE
PIDGE read manuscripts in the office of _The Public Square_. She saw
them first. The large part of them were seen by no one else. It was
like being a telephone girl in a way, dipping into the secrets of a
thousand houses. But it was much more subtle than that; the secrets
more soulful and revelatory. She saw the hopelessness of life. She saw
love, hopelessly uninviting love--puppy love, and much of the “kidding”
clever love that is made in America, and proud of itself for that.
But over all, there seemed an anguish on the part of male and female,
old and young, _to express_. Before her were secrets of those dying
for expression; in her hands, the progeny. She loathed the desire
everywhere, because she had the same desire herself.