“front.” In the personal letters, accompanying their stories and
articles and poems, they told matters about themselves which their
manuscripts did not. They knew this one and that; they had influential
friends who had said this and that about their writing. Parlorfuls
of friends “had been quite carried away by the inclosed.”... Others
hadn’t wanted to write. They had rebelled long; even as Saul, they had
kicked against the pricks; but for the good of others, for the message
it would carry to the world, they had given in at last and written
their story which was inclosed.... “This is a true story,” one personal
letter accompanying said.... “This story may be finished differently,”
another wrote. “I have thought out a happy ending, if the public is not
ready to stand this human one.”... Here was a sales manager who wrote
his personal letter with a jovial laugh: “I have just tossed these few
experiences into a story which my friends insist belongs to you....
I wouldn’t think of it, but I can’t help seeing what a rotten lot of
stuff the magazines publish!”... This one had decided to write stories
because she was a widow and had no other means of support, and had
heard that writing was “the pleasantest of professions.”... And here
was one who had sent in story after story to rejection for six years.
“Some time I will win,” came the thin tired cry.
Pidge had fatigued her body in the mill. She tired her heart in the
office of _The Public Square_, reaching Harrow Street with something in
her breast all sore and shamed. This was the queer strenuous part--the
shame of it all. She, too, had fallen into expressing herself, and they
had been kind. Miss Claes had been kind and she knew. But Dicky Cobden
and John Higgins had been kind, though they hadn’t known the author of
the _Lance_. (They would never know.) They had said that the writer
had the fine freedom of youth--“the freedom of ignorance.”
Pidge knew even better now what that meant. She saw the freedom of
ignorance in the rape of many type machines.... The worst of it was,
she herself wasn’t through. She knew the time would come when a new
story would form within her, and begin its knocking for life.... And
this was New York, the market place; and John Higgins sat near, and
always he held his face nearer the manuscripts toward the end of the
days, his eyes more tired and dim in the late hours....
“Miss Musser,” he called one afternoon at the end of the first month.
“I wish you would go out and see what this Rufus Melton really has to
say. We took a story of his some months ago. We had great hopes for
him, but now he’s sent in a raft of junk. Kid stuff, this must be, he’s
trying to work off. I don’t feel like seeing him right now.”
In the reception room, a young man arose to meet her, as she spoke the
name, “Mr. Melton.” It was a face you would expect to see on one of the
cars of Hollywood Boulevard, among the movie plants. There was a catch
in Pidge’s throat as she said:
“Mr. Higgins asked me to tell you he was occupied, Mr. Melton. His
report will go to you in a day or two.”
He was looking down at her, the young man who had written the little
twisted fury of a tale called _Dr. Filter_, which Dicky had brought
to Harrow Street for her to read. She sensed that he regarded her as
an office girl, not as a reader. He couldn’t have been more than
twenty-three or four. He knew that her words portended an evil fate for
his present offerings. It was not hurt alone in his eyes, but rage, too.
Now Pidge’s mind whirled back to a pair of eyes in a baby carriage at
Santa Monica; eyes of a male infant, said to be the handsomest of that
locality where the hills and mesas break off abruptly for a sea wall.
Large, still, steady blue-black eyes of an actor that had become calm
because they were used to seeing faces wilt before them; long, curving
coal-black lashes. Pidge hadn’t liked them in the infant; at least,
they roused her unpleasantly somehow; and she didn’t like them now. The
resemblance was deeper and more essential than that of family, but what
held Pidge really was something she recognized, or fancied she did,
something that had to do with being broke and threatened with hunger
in New York. His clothing was fine, but had been long used. She had a
positive divination for poverty.
Now his gaze was lost in her hair, as if he found hope there. Story
failures and New York, fear, and its tough core of hunger, these
amounted to one thing--but red hair was another. The astonishing part
was the constant changing of expressions in his eye. They reflected
every mood and whim of him, for one who could read; that is, when he
forgot to veil them for purposes of his own. Just now he seemed to be
wondering if he had better go any further with this red hair--if he had
time to play. He didn’t seem to consider whether Pidge wanted to play
or not, only whether the game were worth the while of one whose law was
not to let any real chance slip. Pidge had forgotten the hurt of her
message from John Higgins. She had a pronounced feeling that she wanted
to hurt Melton some way herself....
“So I can’t see Mr. Higgins?”
“He’s been unusually rushed to-day.”
He laughed a little bitterly as if he understood all that. “Are
you--are you his secretary?”
“No, an under reader.”
“I see. Have you been through any of my stuff?”
Pidge glanced at him resentfully; she felt he wouldn’t have asked such
a question of a man.
“This is a sort of show-down with me,” he went on. “I’m leaving New
York. I really hoped to see Mr. Higgins.”
His dilemma seemed real. It pulled her out from herself.
“I’m sorry----”
“Perhaps you--I’d have to know before to-morrow,” he said jerkily.
“Perhaps you’d look at another story just finished? If you would read
it--there is just a chance you might want to get it to Mr. Higgins
before I go.”
“Have you the story with you?”
“No. I was hoping for good word from one of the others first. This new
one is my last wallop. Might I bring it to you, anywhere you say, this
evening?”
“You may leave it with Miss Claes at 54 Harrow Street.”
“Are you Miss Claes?”
“No, but she will give it to me.”
“Could I call later in the evening also, for your answer? It is only
four or five thousand words.”
“You know, my reading is merely--I mean Mr. Higgins would have to
decide.”
“But it would help--if the story pleased you--help to pass the night!”
“You may leave it with Miss Claes at the basement entrance and call a
little later.”
Pidge found herself walking on tiptoe back to her desk, the catch still
in her throat.
XII
UNDER THE SAME LAMP
THE manuscript was delivered while Pidge was out to supper. She took
it upstairs to Cobden’s “parlor” and read with a nervous interest, and
an uncomfortable feeling that Rufus Melton was looking down at her
all the time. She didn’t lose herself in the story, but the feeling
persisted that she might have done so, another time--especially if the
manuscript had come to her in the usual way at the office. Certainly it
was different and distinctive, compared to the run of the unsolicited.
It was artful, if not art.... She heard Nagar’s quiet steady step as he
passed up to his room. She had an impulse to ask him to read, but he
wouldn’t say anything. Anyway, he was gone now.
This was a story of the Tunisian sands, written, she decided, by one
who hadn’t been there; one who saw the desert as the average American
reader would expect, but with additional flatfooted bits of color
tramped down with audacity. Moonlight was different in Tunisia, and
morals were different--freer than here. There was the glitter of the
snake’s eye through the pages, for Pidge Musser. It made her think of a
sick man in a gorgeous robe.
She had inferred from Melton’s talk that this story was new; in
fact, that it was still hot from his machine. Yet the manuscript
didn’t feel new; the front and back pages showed wear. Could she
have misunderstood?... It had freedom; not the freedom of ignorance,
but the freedom of a drifting ship. Its anchor dragged, its compass
was uncentered. It cried out, “My God, I am free!” and it was, as a
derelict is free.
At a quarter of ten, she heard the bell in the basement hall; heard
Miss Claes directing Melton to the next floor. Pidge would not have
had it this way, but people of the house were in the basement. He came
up out of the dim stairway, walking wide, his soft cap crumpled in his
hand, elbows out. He must have learned her name from Miss Claes.
“You mustn’t think, Miss Musser, that I don’t know how much I am
asking--this favor of yours to-night.”
There was a sort of lift and draw to the way he took her hand; at the
same time his shoulders and head bent down upon her. This thing that
he was playing to-night was college boy--clumsy subtlety of a big boy
coming home and greeting his sister--seeing in her, at the moment of
greeting, something of the charm other boys might see. He walked around
her under the light, laughing, apologizing, making a humorous picture
of his own tension at _The Public Square_ that afternoon.
“I went there like an anarchist,” he laughed. “I was prepared to get my
answer or blow up the place. I had to laugh afterwards the way I seized
upon you.”
“I read the Tunis story,” she said. “Of course, you know it’s really
unimportant what I think. I liked it well enough, but wasn’t carried
away. I felt the color; in fact, color is the main asset of the story,
but it seemed a bit thick----”
He laughed aloud. He was bending to her again, and most benignly,
college big brother still in his manner and voice.
“I could tone that down, of course. The trouble is to get a thing like
that straight, when you know that part of Africa as I do. I ought to
have kept off Tunis, that’s the truth of it.”
“You have really been there?”
“That’s the worst of it, Miss Musser,” he laughed. “I went through hell
for that story. Too much feeling to write with, you understand.”
Pidge was awed at her own error. She had been so convinced that the
color was faked that she had judged the whole story on that basis.
“I’ve already asked too much of you. I’m sorry,” he added ingenuously.
“One can’t force his things through this way. Why, I’d have given the
whole six stories to _The Public Square_ for a hundred dollars, and
taken the cheapening that comes to an author from a trick like that.
That’s how I needed an answer.”
He had glanced up at the light as he spoke, a white, haggard smile,
that bloodless look around the mouth. Pity caught and controlled her.
She had done him an injustice already.
“You spoke of leaving New York for the west,” she said.
He laughed and shrugged, palms held upward.
“How far? I mean where is your home?”
He pointed to his cap lying on the arm of a chair, as if to say that
were his home.
“I’ve got an aunt in Cleveland who wants me,” he added. “A little quiet
house away out on one of the cross streets off Euclid, where there’s a
room and eats and a place to write. I’ll start to walk, I guess.”
“Where are you staying in New York?”
He was laughing at her. “A little den up in Union Square--just a
skylight. It’s a cell, Miss Musser, and even there, I have to stay out
until midnight to sneak in without meeting the landlady.... Did you
ever sleep in a room that had no window?”
“Mine has a window,” Pidge said.
“Then this isn’t yours?” He pointed to the closed folding doors of the
inner room.
“Oh, no. Mine’s up higher, but it has a window. This is just a sitting
room we sometimes use--Miss Claes and I--the lodger being away.”
“Oh,” he said queerly; then added with his haggard smile: “So the color
was put on too thick--that’s too bad.”
“Does Mr. Higgins know that you have been over there in Tunis?” Pidge
asked.
“I figured he would, but maybe he will decide, as you did, that I sat
here in New York and stabbed at that setting.”
“I’ll place the story before him to-morrow. I could say to him that
you’ve been to the desert----”
“Oh, I wouldn’t. Don’t tell him that. I was hoping, though, that you
could tell him you liked it.”
Pidge now looked up into a smile almost childlike in its eager purpose.
“Couldn’t you tell him that? Couldn’t you tell him that--just for what
others may find in the story?”
The catch was in her throat again. His hand rested lightly upon her
shoulder; his smile was altogether disarming in its wistfulness. She
thought he couldn’t mean what he said. She thought of the face in the
baby carriage in Santa Monica; of this tortured child of whims and
imaginations, in a room with no window, and the pallor around his
mouth. She didn’t like any of it, but did not feel exactly separate
from it. She thought of a little box upstairs in her own room, of the
check her father had sent, which she had so far refused to cash. She
was in a blur, her sense of belonging to Melton’s dilemma over all.
“You can’t mean for me to tell Mr. Higgins what I don’t believe,” she
said. “I’ll ask him to read the story to-morrow. If he’s against it, I
could--I might help you to pay for the room in Union Square, or--enough
to get to Cleveland.”
Then the thing happened which she would have apprehended, except for
her pity and personal involvement in his trouble. She was drawn in
between the open flaps of his coat, and held there against the soft
shirt which he wore. And all through her were his whispers--soft
delighted laughter from lips that pressed into her hair and cheeks,
searching for hers.
She had finally pushed him from her, and they stood apart under the
lamp. For a moment, they stared. Then it seemed as if he studied her,
as one who suddenly revalues, doubles the value of an object. It was
the queerest, intensest scrutiny, his head cocked to one side, the
light and laughter returning to his eyes and lips.
“I knew I wasn’t safe to come here,” he said. “I knew if you did
like the story, I wasn’t safe to hear the verdict. It was the idea
of getting enough money to escape from that room, to get back into
Cleveland and find myself----”
Still she stared at him.
“I don’t suppose you can ever forgive me, but it broke me wide open,
Miss Musser--to find what a ripping sport you are!”
“That’s about enough words,” she said.
He looked down.
“To-morrow,” she went on in a dreary tone, “you may come here--I mean
to the basement entrance, at seven in the evening, and I’ll tell you
Mr. Higgins’ decision. If it’s against the story, I’ll do as I said
about your room rent and the fare to Cleveland.”
His hands went out to her.
“After what I did--you still want to do that?”
“Yes, and now please go.”
Pidge was up in her own room minutes afterward, before she realized
that it had happened under that white lamp of Cobden’s “parlor.”
XIII
“MOTHER”
“A MAN’S a fool before he learns technic,” John Higgins said, as he
leaned back from a manuscript the next afternoon. “He’s a cripple while
he’s learning it. When he’s learned it and forgotten he’s learned
it--he begins to be a workman. That’s the freedom of knowledge.... As
for this Tunis story of young Melton’s--it’s a subtle sort of botch.”
Rufus Melton came to the basement entrance at seven. Even if Miss Claes
had not gone out to dinner, Pidge would not have taken him upstairs. He
looked older, his back had a curious droop. He glanced at her ruefully,
and around the room. Pidge stood beside the table.
“Mr. Higgins didn’t care for your story,” she said. “It has happened
unluckily all around.”
His head had bowed before she began to speak. His eyes came up to her
now, full of contrition and pain.
“I think the hardest thing I ever did was to come here to-night. Only
one thing made it possible. I’d have started west, only New York is a
curious old dump.”
“How is that?” she asked warily.
“You have to go north to go west. I mean the only way out is north, for
a pedestrian.”
“You haven’t enough for the ferry or tube?”
Their eyes met.
“What I said last night holds good, you know,” she said with effort.
He turned slowly to the door as if in indecision, and Pidge watched.
She knew she could make him take the money, but she wanted him to be
ready to die first.
“There was nothing in the other stories, either--from Higgins’ point of
view?” he asked.
Pidge was white. She felt like an executioner. “The package was mailed
back to you to-day.”
For just an instant his head was bowed again, half turned to the door.
Then he veered around and his hand came out to hers.
“Good night,” he said.
“Good night. But you--that quiet room in Cleveland----”
He shook his head with a slow, dawning smile.
“It’s great to know you. I’ve heard about such people being here in the
Village, but it’s--‘It’s fourteen miles from Schenectady to Troy.’”
“It’s a long way to Albany before that,” she said.
“It’s a long way to One-Hundred-and-Tenth Street, Miss Musser, but it
is easier than taking money from a girl.”
She breathed relief. “I came to fight it out here in New York on the
same terms you did,” she said. “You can pay me back.”
Now his back was toward her, his face uplifted. She saw his hand grope
for the knob of the door, and his shoulders rock weakly. She caught his
arm and pulled him back to a chair.
“You see, you really couldn’t get away.”
He had suffered her to lead him to a dining-room chair, and sat very
still, his head tilted back, eyes closed. She took the little package
of bills from her dress and tucked it into his hand. There were voices
in the hall; a vague frown crossed his white temples.
“What is it?” he said queerly.
“You are faint. I’ll go with you to a near place for something to eat.
That’s all you need. Come--if you can walk a little way.”
He stood in a sort of confusion, holding the folded bills in his hand
as one would hold a card.
“Put that in your pocket,” she said, but he did not seem to comprehend.
They were in the street, her hand steadying him. They found a dim
restaurant with a counter and a few tables. He did not speak until
the waiter came; then asked for coffee. Pidge had taken the money and
thrust it into his coat pocket. Now she was tormented with the fear
that he would lose the small roll, not knowing that he had it. She had
not brought her own purse. He would be forced to pay; then he would
have to see what he had.
He drank the coffee first, then ate sparingly.
“I learned that in the desert,” he said at last.
“Learned what, please?”
“Not to go mad over the taste of food when one has been without.”
The girl who waited on the table looked devotedly into Melton’s profile
as she served. Twice as he started to speak, the Sixth Avenue elevated
crashed by outside and he seemed to forget what he meant to say. It
seemed more true here in the restaurant than it had been in the house
in Harrow Street, that he was wonderfully good to look upon. The
realization held a small tumult for Pidge. She was altogether different
with him than with any one else. They had finished, and still he
lingered.
“I’m sorry. I hadn’t intended to come out. I left my bag upstairs. Will
you please pay?”
To his illness, a look of embarrassment was now added.
“It’s in your pocket. Right there----”
She pointed to his coat, and he drew out the bills wonderingly.
“Oh, I remember,” he said dully.
While the waitress was away bringing the change, he shoved the rest of
the money across the table to Pidge, but she pushed it back, saying
quietly:
“I want you to fix up the room rent and get a night train west. We’ll
say no more.”
His lips whitened under a curious tightening.
“Let’s get out in the dark,” he said roughly.
They walked back to Eighth Street and over to the Avenue, entering the
Square that way. The sooty grass was soft and damp; the faintest trace
of fog among the trees.
“You’ve got something on me,” he was saying strangely. “You’re not like
a girl, but like a woman and a pal, too. You had something on me last
night, or I wouldn’t have fallen for you that way.”
“When you get back to that Cleveland room--perhaps a real story will
come of all this.”
“A real story,” he repeated.
His eyes were bright and the pallor of his face intense enough to be
visible. She was conscious of his inimitable charm as his head inclined
to her and she heard his words in the lowest possible tone:
“Meeting you--that is the real story.”
She pushed away his hand that had lifted to hers.
“You’re all right now. I’m going back. Good night and good luck.”
He made no attempt to detain her.
That night Pidge lay for a long time without sleep. She was forlorn
and troubled and restless, but underneath it all there was a queer
little throb of happiness, like the recent night of the two letters. It
would not be stifled. Every time she could get still enough, she was
conscious of it, like the song of a bird that kept on and on, but was
only audible in the lulls of almost unbroken traffic. She awoke in the
night with the thought of him speeding westward on his train.
The next night when she came home there was another letter from
Los Angeles, another check dropped out, and a clipping, which she
read first--the wedding announcement of “Adolph Musser, the noted
metaphysician, and Mrs. Hastings, wealthy widow of the late Rab Gaunt
Hastings, firearms manufacturer of New England, at the Byzantine,” etc.
Pidge didn’t have her guard up. The choke and the shame were too swift
for her self-control. For the first time in many days the tears broke,
the extra scaldy sort. If she had only been permitted to keep that
first check uncashed for a few days longer!...
The next was a day of dullness and misery, a May day of rain. Crossing
Broadway, as she hurried to luncheon, she passed Rufus Melton in the
crowd. Her lips parted to call, but she checked in time. He hadn’t seen
her. She found herself standing loosely in the traffic, her hand to her
mouth, until a taxi driver roared at her, and she swung into the stream
of people again and reached the curb.
XIV
ISOLATION
PIDGE was leveled with personal shame. Try as she would, she was as
lacking in the ability to detach herself from Melton, as from the
influence of her father. She had felt the boy’s power over her, and
knew innately that she would feel it again; that this sort of thing
wasn’t a mere touch and go; that meetings like this, which appear
sporadic on the surface, have twined roots beneath. She had been taught
from a child that nothing merely happens. The incentive that made her
lend him the fifty dollars, which she had held uncashed for nearly
a month, did not mean to her now a mere impulsive mistake. It was a
symbol of a giving to this boy--of a blind but eager something out of
the depths of her heart.
Late in June a letter came to her from Dicky Cobden, who was at
Coquihatville on the Equator, where as he said, “the sun’s rays fall as
straight as a tile from a roof.”
... Oh, yes, you and Miss Claes knew a lot more than I did that
night at Tara Subramini’s. I shot off a lot of words afterwards.
Never again. But I’m going to stay with it, Pidge.... I’ve just had
ten days here in the jungles, back on one of the tributaries of the
Kong. If I stayed long here, I would see it all as these exiled white
men do; that God is a rubber man with ivory legs; that the natives
are vermin, not only to be walked over, but to be stamped into the
ground. They whimper so. It’s too hot here to be whimpered at.... I
think so much about you. Of course, this isn’t news to you, but I
say it, because it is so different from what I thought it would be.
Something snapped when I got to the Kong.... All fat and decoration
are sweated off down here. I reach out to you just the same. Only
in New York I thought that we were both wrapt in the same sort of
film, a tinted filmy sort of glamour that stretched out as we went
different ways. That film was stretched too hard. When I reached the
River it snapped. I think I’ll never get over feeling this awful
isolation of being a separate creature from everybody, worst of all
from you....
... Next morning in the office John Higgins called her in to his desk.
“Dicky has sent in some stuff. We begin to publish in August.”
He took off his spectacles and wiped them on the flap of his necktie.
His eyes looked watery, as if the light had run out in tears.
“I’ve always heard that the Cobdens were honest,” he went on, “three
generations of honest men. They’ve built something, Miss Musser. Not a
business, that’s well enough, but they’ve built a man. Listen----”
He opened the pages at random and began to read. It was like the stuff
in her letter.
“It’s so for pages and pages,” he continued. “Every word standing out,
if you get the hang of it. No tint, no art; just words, pain-born,
separate like boulders in a field. He has no hopes, yet he writes what
he sees.... Something seems to have happened to our Dicky, besides
Africa.... He watches the string of natives coming in with their tusks;
he watches the crocodiles coming up to the blinding surface water; he
watches the big monkeys that live in twos, and the little monkeys that
live in troops. I don’t know what the world’ll get out of this, but I
know what I get out of it----”
She saw that John Higgins was merely thinking out loud. A few moments
later he finished:
“This stuff amounts to the most subtle and incredible rearraignment of
imperialistic cruelty, but Dicky doesn’t mean it that way. He keeps
repeating with devilish calm that it isn’t so bad as it was. It’s no
particular nation, but all whites. He writes from the standpoint of
a white man who remembers Cortez in Mexico, Pizarro in Peru, Warren
Hastings in India, Cecil Rhodes in Africa and our own dear religious
settlers bringing Yankee wits and rum and disease to the red Indians.
He turns over the pages of all patriotic histories with a long stick
as you would poke the leaves from the face of a corpse you had made
yourself. His face tries to turn away; his stomach retches, but he
knows each man and each nation must bury his own dead.”
“‘Something seems to have happened to our Dicky, besides Africa,’”
Pidge repeated, when she was alone.