nights hot. Pidge was used to the “high sky” of Southern California
where every inch of shadow meant coolness, where cool night fell
quickly no matter how hot it had been in the sun, where there were no
afterglows, nor afterheats, and you wanted a wrap the instant the sun
went down. The meaning of summer in New York became a cruel meaning, in
the little room off the area. It gave her an astonishing grasp of what
people suffered in the tenements.
Two weeks after the copy arrived from Africa, the galleys came up on
the Cobden articles, and Pidge asked permission to take a set home to
show two friends of Dicky’s in Harrow Street. John Higgins acquiesced.
Pidge delivered these to Miss Claes and forgot all about it, until the
next night when she returned to the house after dinner, and Miss Claes
called her from the door of Cobden’s “parlor.”
“Come in, Pidge, and we’ll shut everything out.”
Nagar was within and the galleys were stretched out under the
light. Pidge had never seen Miss Claes and Nagar quite like this.
They appeared happy over something they had found in Dicky Cobden’s
isolation and melancholy--happy as in the news of a legacy.
“Why, don’t you see?” said Miss Claes strangely. “He’s pondering on
Life! He thinks he’s reporting--when really he is giving himself
to Life. The world stretches out before his eyes without glamour,
stripped. He offers himself to it, but his writing contains a
confession with the weariness of the ages on it, that he has nothing
to give--that he is a sham like all the rest. There’s not a self-pose
in all his pages.”
Nagar had slipped out. Miss Claes came close and added softly:
“Richard is finer than we knew, Pidge. What happened here in this house
has prepared him--always the wrecker before the builder.”
“You mean, I’m the wrecker?”
“You couldn’t have done differently.... Too bad he isn’t to see
Mohandas Gandhi. Nagar has received word that the Little Man is
returning to India. Richard didn’t go to Natal first.”
“He’ll be so sorry,” Pidge said. “It was Nagar’s story that drew him to
Africa----”
Their eyes met; no need to amplify.
“Dicky’s so deadly in earnest,” Pidge went on. “He sees what he sees
the same at ten in the morning and at ten at night. His coming to
Harrow Street didn’t mean a whim. His part that night of our Punjabi
dinner didn’t mean a whim. Oh, but I’m so glad he hasn’t started out to
save the world!”
“He’s preparing to work better than that.”
“I feel so ungrateful for not missing him more,” Pidge added
unsteadily, “for not being more interested in this that pleases you.
I can appreciate, but oh, Miss Claes, I don’t belong to your way of
seeing things. I’ll always be Dicky Cobden’s hangman, always hurting
myself more!”
They were standing close together.
“Nothing matters to me but myself!” Pidge moaned. “I’m hopelessly lost
in myself--that’s what’s the matter! What room have I for Africa or the
world? There’s more to me in the struggle of John Higgins not to get
drunk--in the body hunger and body love of Fanny Gallup--in the lies of
Rufus Melton! I can understand this world-service thing--oh, I can see
the nations like chessmen on the table!--but I can’t fix Fanny Gallup
or John Higgins, I can’t fix Rufus Melton. I can’t fix myself!”
XV
THE COBDEN INTERIOR
PIDGE heard about the assassinations in Bosnia as wearily as of a
murder in little Sicily. She heard rumors of war in Europe with
ennui--how could there be energy enough left in the human race to make
war? She met Nagar in the lower hall at Harrow Street on the evening
that war became a fact. He looked like a dead man walking in the
twilight. She didn’t see Miss Claes at all that night. The next day in
the office war began to show its personal aspects to Pidge Musser of
Los Angeles. John Higgins was hours late in returning from lunch. She
saw that he wouldn’t be down at all to-morrow. He looked old. He had
on a black frock coat, as if dressed for pallbearing, though his face
looked as if he were about to be borne himself. The little office was
fumy, sweetish.
“Our blessed Savior moves in mysterious ways,” he remarked.
Pidge lingered at the door to get any significance that this might have
for her.
“The Lord gives and the Lord takes away,” he added, sitting back
straight in his chair.
He removed his spectacles and reached for the flare of his tie to
polish them off, but no tie dangled to-day. It was a little black
store-made bow, fastened with a clip over the collar button. Pidge
still lingered, her hand on the knob.
“Blessed be the name of the Lord,” said John Higgins, “but it’s hell on
us.”
She started out, but was called back.
“I need an audience, Miss Musser. I need a female ear. I need ladylike
sympathy. It isn’t sweet of you to run off.”
“What’s the matter?”
The editor looked at her, squinted, put on his spectacles and looked
again.
“Do you mean to say you don’t know what’s the matter?”
“Everything is the matter,” said Pidge. “But what’s new?”
His hand nearest her lifted and rested upon a pile of page proof on his
desk.
“Dicky Cobden hasn’t written a line from the Kong that we can publish.
We’ve cabled him to come in, though he’s probably started. You’ll
recall that Belgium lies between France and Germany. She’s holding the
Germans off from Paris, giving France and England a chance to get set.
Belgium’s the world’s public square right now, the one vortexical spot
on the face of the earth. Doesn’t it occur to you that even a new angle
on her sins in the heart of Africa is about as much in time and place
right now, as Paul Revere’s ride?”
... Three weeks later, she heard that Richard Cobden was in town; that
John Higgins had seen him the night before. All that day at the office
she kept listening for his step and voice, but he didn’t come. His car
was in front of the Harrow Street house, however, when she reached
there, and a light showed between the doors from his “parlor.” She lost
some of the sense of suffocation when she saw that, a curious gladness
for a moment. She tapped the door with her finger tip, pulled the
curtain aside ever so little and said:
“Hello.”
A quick step in the inner room; then he was before her in the doorway,
drawing her in under the light.
“Pidge--Pidge,” he repeated.
The boyish look was gone from him. He might have been taken for ten
years older. The thing had happened that takes place abruptly in many
Americans, more among business men than artists: Youth had been put
away, its trace of divine humor exchanged for adult seriousness.
“Why didn’t you come to the office to-day, Dicky?” she asked.
“I wanted to see you here--like this.”
They were standing under the light.
“Why, you’re different,” she said.
“John Higgins said that. They told me so at home, uptown. I feel
different, but it isn’t an improvement. And you, Pidge, you’re taller.
And John Higgins says you’re doing so well.”
“I’m thanking you every day for that----”
She kept thinking about the change in him. If this were selflessness,
she liked him better before. He had been quite unselfish enough, she
thought. She didn’t see the fight in him, because it was so subtly
identified with herself. She only knew that he seemed without fight.
“Keep on your things, Pidge. We’ll go out somewhere----”
* * * * *
That was the beginning of strange days and evenings. They played at
the old game of _Comrades_. Often they lunched together, occasionally
with John Higgins for a third. At such times it seemed that they took
_The Public Square_ with them, subscribers, advertisers, contributors,
policies. It was that curious time in America when the personal and
national meaning of the European war was breaking through with all its
paralyzing ramifications; when all who were sensitive at all reflected
division and strife in themselves, as a deep leveling sickness.
Pidge was taken to the Cobden home, a new and terrifically complicated
modern apartment in East Fiftieth Street, but the furnishings, the
household ceremonials, the people themselves, suggested prints of New
York interiors in 1870--respectable, established, grim. The gradual
speeding up of the world for a half century to the explosive point of
1914 ended with the click of the key in this hall door, and you were
in the world of another day, with a spinster aunt, a widowed mother,
an unmarried sister, a slowly disintegrating grandfather, and Dicky
himself, not in a different guise at all--the same courteous, sincere
Dicky, but now to Pidge Musser’s western eyes, utterly, revealingly
comprehensible. This was the place that had made him. This was his
reason for being.
Here life was life. Here was the family unit, the family a globe,
all human society moving outside like the water around a bubble;
a closed globe reflecting all else in curious unreality. Here
three-score-and-ten was life, and a very long time. Life wasn’t a
spiritual experiment, in matter; not an extension in matter of souls
that had made innumerable such experiments, but straight work-a-day
three-score-and-ten with oblivion at the birth end, and heaven or hell
at the other. Here was All Time, in which it behooved man and woman
to gather worldly goods and religious goods and love one another and
hang together--for the rest was with God. Here senility was dear. The
heavy-bodied, dim-minded grandfather was still grandfather, not the
vanishing spirit of him. They would weep when the body passed. They
would look to his place in the cemetery and say, “Here he lies.”
Pidge Musser wanted to scream, not at the limitations, but at the
kindness which was showered upon her. They were ready to perform the
great transaction of taking her in, opening their hearts and house
to a maiden, who would bring respectable additions to the Cobden
line--sharing wealth, well-being, gentleness, the Cobden name which had
been kept clean and useable and virile, and the Cobden God, who stood
on the other side of death with angelic associates and rewards in His
hands.
Pidge continually felt that her next word would ruin everything; yet
they unswervingly regarded her as becoming one with themselves; the
process of assimilation already begun. They were patient, knowing of
old that a new maiden would have incrustations of the world to check
off, inequalities to be planed down. They set about not adjusting to
her, but as she fancied, assimilating her, as the changeless Chinese
assimilate a weaker race, breaking down the foreigner in themselves.
She would become theirs to them with the years.
“Oh, Dicky,” Pidge said, when they were in his car again. “I see. I
understand. How did you dare to open those doors to me!”
“I spoke of you at home, Pidge. They wouldn’t have understood if I
hadn’t brought you soon. They were prepared to open their arms to you.
They have their laws----”
“But they are your laws. Dicky--how did you dare? Is it because you
don’t know me, don’t see me at all? Do you see something which you want
to see, that has nothing to do with me?”
“What is it that troubles you so?”
“Myself--always and forever myself! Oh, don’t you see I have nothing
to do with them? Why, you’re comfortable, Dicky--your people are
comfortable! _This_ is life to you--this, here and now! It isn’t to me.
Life’s an exile to me, a banishment and coldness and pain. In all New
York there are not two such opposites. My God is far away. Yours is
here--a Person.”
He answered hopelessly: “I can see how it would strike you, but I
couldn’t cover up on account of that. I belong to them. I’m of them.
Any front I might put on wouldn’t wear. You had to see us, Pidge----”
Another time she might have seen the fine thing back of those words,
but she took such finenesses of Richard Cobden for granted, while he
rarely could understand that she saw anything but his faults.
“It’s queer,” he said, in the same dull hopeless way. “I stand to
you as the most staid and changeless person, but to my family I am
dangerous, a fulminant. They love and trust me, but watch me with
fierce concern. Already I’ve broken more Cobden convictions in
twenty-five years than all my relatives in all their years.”
His face glanced wearily toward her from the lights of the street, as
he drove.
“You’ve let me understand too much for one Sunday afternoon,” she said
in an awed voice, “and it feels colder and lonelier than ever before.
I even see something of the coming years, Dicky. I see that it means
Fate, when you say ‘yes’ or ‘no.’ I see that you turn to a girl to
stay. I see you don’t cheat. I see that I’m volatile compared; that my
honesty is a fierce effort, a deadly self-conscious effort, and yours
is an established habit. I’m clumsy at my honesty. I love it terribly,
but it is still on the outside of me--something to attain.”
She sank back, laughing. “I wonder if it will stay as deadly clear as
this?”
“You are not making it quite clear to me,” he said.
“I must. Oh, I must. Dicky, please open your soul and listen to
me--hard, hard! While it’s clear, I must talk. You’ve chosen to be my
friend. You’ve chosen not to take the easier course of hating me. I
understand all that better now than the night of the Punjabi dinner.”
“I do, too,” said Cobden, and bitterness of the African rivers was in
his words.
“Do I have to begin by saying how dear you are--how kind, how utterly
good it is to know you; what it means to have faith and trust in one
man?”
“Please not, Pidge.”
“But never forget it, Dicky. It’s the pedestal upon which everything’s
builded. Always remember that I know you underneath; that I turn to you
in trouble--not like a brother or father or lover, but what our word
_comrade_ means--what it will sometime mean to many people! That’s you.
But, Dicky, because I know you--I can look away! Don’t you see--you’re
like something done! Having found you, I can turn to other things.”
“I’ll try to see that, but most people find each other differently, to
stay----”
“It’s because they don’t find what I’ve found. I don’t know what I
want, only I know there are terrible undone things in me, that other
people stir to life. I’m lost in persons. Miss Claes and Nagar lose
themselves in nations. You’re getting to be like them, but I see it
all in the personal!... Listen, Dicky, if you were to get a woman to
take to your house--one ready to go in and be a Cobden and a mother of
Cobdens--I could love her! I could hold to you just as close, though
secretly. I would expect you to be my _comrade_ just the same--I mean
just between us--never on the outside, perhaps. What I mean is, it
wouldn’t hurt me--not the thing we have together.”
His car had come to a stand in the stillness of Harrow Street, but
still they sat.
“What you mean is--you haven’t any place for me as a lover or a
husband.”
“That’s like you, but that’s it.... Dicky, you mean to me something
done, something found. I don’t dare to turn to you and rest. The savage
undone things in me _won’t_ rest! They demand experiences, life--and no
one knows better, that they mean pain ... and oh--under your lamp--it’s
horrible to tell it, but you’ll forgive me later, when you see that it
had to be told----”
“What are you talking about, Pidge?”
“Under your lamp--in there! He came about a manuscript. He was broke
and needed help--all his stories refused. He asked to see me that
night. Miss Claes’ basement was occupied. She sent him up. We talked.
He wanted something, money, everything. Under your light--he took me
to him, his coat open----”
Cobden startled her, as he cleared his throat. The silence between them
had been so deep.
“It meant nothing to him! He was used to it. It was only his way to
get something--money most, he wanted. It was just as he might take a
waitress or hall maid--used to having girls ‘fall for’ him. This is
what I mean--though I understand him, a theatrical mind, a liar--life
meant something to me that instant, that it never meant before.
Something I must do, something calling--pain, but something I haven’t
done!”
“You mean--you mean--it isn’t over?”
“Just that, Dicky, and oh, forgive me! I may not see _him_ ever again,
but _something in me_ isn’t ‘over.’ I had to tell you--to be honest, to
learn to be honest. You’ll be glad some day!”
XVI
DICKY FEELS A SLUMP
IT was nearly a week afterward when Pidge heard sounds, not of meeting
only, but of mauling, from over the partitions of Richard Cobden’s
office at _The Public Square_. Her desk was now in John Higgins’ room.
The racket was “young”--something of the sort you expect in a college
fraternity house, rather than in the editorial rooms of a magazine of
dignified social protest and short story ideals. John Higgins winced
and glared. Now the stranger’s voice was upraised:
“You’re not seedy, Dick--you’re decayed! If Africa treats a man like
that, I’m off the Sahara for life.”
Pidge heard this with something of the sense of personal arraignment.
The ugly part was that it was true, and it hadn’t been the truth a week
before. Dicky had been changed when he arrived, but the change since
their ride home from his mother’s apartment in Fiftieth Street was
more definitely disturbing. She found John Higgins’ eyes upon her and
started guiltily. He leaned forward to whisper:
“It’s a fact. Something’s eating our Dicky. He’s losing his bounce.”
For once, Pidge did not altogether blame herself. There had been no
two ways about telling him what had happened under the light. She had
been challenged to speak on their first evening together after his
return, challenged every hour of the week afterward; and yet it was not
until after the words were out, spoken in her particularly ruthless and
unequivocal way, that she actually saw the power of their hurt.
In Africa Dicky had stripped himself of hope, in the most complete
way he knew. Africa is said to have a way of helping a man in this.
Doubtless he had winnowed this hope down to a semi-impersonal concept,
that straight, clean devotion would win its reward. But Africa alone
was one thing, and New York with Pidge was another. He had been
entirely innocent of the possibilities of pain his heart was capable of.
Still they went out together. They tried, furiously tried, but the star
toward which they had held their eyes, the star named _Camaraderie_,
was for the present out of their sky. She tried to give herself in
interest to his particular studies of world politics. His views had
nothing to do with intuition or prophecy. Dicky gripped affairs on an
academic basis of economics, and the only light he had to work with
in relation to the turmoil in Europe was from the same friction that
had furnished his sparks in Africa--the pain of his own heart. He told
her of the delicate and dangerous adjustments between the nations, as
he saw them; the organic play, the push and pull on every national
boundary; the draw of Russia upon India, for instance; the grim hold of
the British bulldog; the interatomic play of India, Ireland and Egypt;
the poison vats of the Balkans, the frowning menaces of the Levant. One
night he spoke of Italy’s inner and outer stresses, and of her age-old
hatred for Austria.
“And Pidge,” he said quietly, “you won’t mind my saying it, will you?
I see it all so clearly when I talk to you. I know you’ll tell me that
you don’t know anything about these things. You always tell me that,
but you certainly make me know them better.”
And another time when they were going out together in the evening and
she had come down from the upper floor with her wrap which he took for
a moment:
“I’m sure you won’t mind, Pidge,” he said, “if I tell you that the
little things you wear quite take me over. They actually hurt, and I
never saw you look quite like to-night.”
This was the quality--more like the words of an older man; a touch of
sentimentality upon them, as if he were diminished in her presence,
something in him so whipped it did not dare appear on the surface.
This was unpleasant to Pidge. The changeless want in his heart
suffocated her at times; then her affection changed to revolt. She
became irritable and uncentered, her temper hard to govern. She wanted
freedom--freedom for something utterly undelineated, but freedom to
Life (in Miss Claes’ meaning of that word of words) and she saw him in
such times as one who stood in her way.
One night in the little upper room, in her own particular time of
self-revelation, as Pidge lay on the borderland between sleep and
waking, she saw herself like an ogre, and Dicky Cobden like a terrified
child in a great house, and she was driving him from one room to
another, from one floor to another, to an inevitable cornering in the
farthest wing.
Finally an early October evening, and again his car had halted before
54 Harrow Street. Pidge sat beside him, but Dicky had not opened the
door.
“Pidge,” he said suddenly, “I’ve got to the end of my rope. I’m not
making good. I’m all blurred on what we’re trying to do. It’s--it’s too
much for me here.... I don’t want France or Flanders. I’m going into
the Near East for _The Public Square_ and a newspaper syndicate.”
“I knew it. I felt it coming, at least,” she said. “And I’ve failed,
too, all the time. But, Dicky, back of everything, I know there must
be somebody laughing at our seriousness and stupidity. We’ll see the
puzzle straight some time. You’ll see.”
They both were sitting straight up.
“Nobody’s--nobody’s shoulder?” he asked with terrible effort.
“No, Dicky. It would only fog us up--all the more.”
XVII
NEW LODGERS FOR HARROW STREET
PIDGE MUSSER was ending her second year in the editorial rooms of
_The Public Square_, when a short story came in from Rufus Melton.
Meanwhile, his work had begun to appear in magazines of large popular
appeal. This manuscript, called _The Boarded Door_, had doubtless not
fitted into any of them. The chief thing about the story to Pidge was
that her cheeks burned as she read.
This made her angry. Another thing, the story was so familiar to her.
She seemed to be in and out of Melton’s mind, hearing his typewriter,
understanding even his corrections. But also she saw what the author
could not--his fluctuations of fancy, which uncentered the tale.
“He’s beginning to be read,” said John Higgins. “It’s not a bad story.
We’d better take it.”
“It is not his best work. There’s a cavity in it,” said Pidge. “If it
were by a new name altogether, we’d write the author suggesting that he
work over the weak part.”
“Do it,” said John Higgins.
Pidge laughed nervously. “He won’t like it,” she said.
“Don’t mind that. Rufus Melton can write. He’ll have his hour, but go
ahead and scuttle the ship, young woman. We don’t care about pleasing
our passengers.”
Back at her own desk, Pidge was smitten with the idea that she wasn’t
being fair. In the course of reading Melton’s story, she had not once
forgotten that he had failed to pay back that fifty dollars. Not only
that, Rufus Melton hadn’t mentioned it; and he was said to be making
money right now. She had to write the letter to Melton three times.
Films of ice formed on the sentences and had to be skimmed off, in
spite of her most rigid effort. She carried the sheet, signed by “The
Editors,” to John Higgins, with a restless feeling that damage was done.
“That’s just like what Dicky Cobden would say,” he remarked, handing it
back. “Send it along with the manuscript.”
Pidge wasn’t allowed to forget Dicky Cobden, though Richard, himself,
was across the world and remained across, apparently groping to find
the exact antipodes from Washington Square, New York. Between Miss
Claes’ affection for him and John Higgins’ and Nagar’s; considering her
occasional use of his “parlor” in Harrow Street and her daily use of
his old desk in the office, to say nothing of the position she occupied
through his kindness and care--no, she wasn’t being allowed to forget.
About the same time that Rufus Melton’s story came in to the office, a
dingy bit of white paper came to Harrow Street for Pidge. It was like
a paper you would see in the street around a public school building.
Pidge was awed at the unfailing magic of the post-office authorities,
that the letter had ever been delivered. It was from Fanny Gallup, who
had married Albert and left the pasting table shortly after Pidge’s
change of fortune. Pidge had seen Fanny but once in the meantime, but
had asked her to write or telephone in case of need.