for the men they had told him about in school and college--the men who
make history, and are said to contain in themselves the greatness of
their race. He sailed with sailors, talked with the diploma-ed talkers,
rode with soldiers. He found men who would do for their countries what
they wouldn’t do for themselves, but the energy of their fidelity to
their countries was balanced by their enmity toward other countries.
They gave themselves to the heresy of fighting one part of the human
family for the alleged enhancement of another. It took Dicky a long
time to change the brain tracks made in school and college, that the
names of history might _not_ be the names of men who walked with God,
whose intellects pained from sheer power. Nor was he spared from the
suspicion in all his discoveries, that he was the one who was wrong,
that he had become softly insane in the midst of new ideas.
* * * * *
When he essayed the thing Miss Claes spoke of at the Punjabi dinner--he
started something which he meant to live up to. The fact that it was
harder than he dreamed; an effort, in fact, involving dreary years,
hadn’t broken his resolution so far. One of the terms of the Punjabi
dinner covenant, for such it had become to him, was not to lose himself
in the easy way of hatred, nor to help himself to forgetfulness by
casting Pidge Musser’s image out. He knew that the “one” she had spoken
of was Rufus Melton. Through months, covering two years, the figure of
this young story-writer rose higher and higher in his consciousness,
as the person of the Enemy, himself. It was Melton, all unknowing, who
vanquished Dicky in his weaknesses, and at best was only kept at bay
in his strength. Not to cast her out, not to hate; to know the slow,
steady burning of the heart that is focalized upon a woman, and to
realize that this woman may be turning to another!
There were really extraordinary days of service in Arabia with young
Tom Lawrence, whose fame Dicky Cobden helped to make; desert days of
camel back and Turk fighting; desert nights of smoke and tea in such
starry stillnesses, that one almost expected the Christ to appear;
then, after many weeks, mail at Mecca, and one letter from John
Higgins, which was read several times:
... You have done several good things for _The Public Square_; but
you never did a better thing than wishing Miss Pidge Musser on our
editorial rooms. She’s brand new every morning. She’s honest, and a
worker. She has brains and a whole lot of psychic viscera, sometimes
designated as Soul.... Also she’s a stenographer. Never whispered
it until one morning when Maneatin’ Dollie was ill with the flu.
My letters were piled up. “Give them to me,” she said. I did that
thing, and I’ve been dictating my editorials ever since. It’s like
talking to an intelligent audience. When I get opinionated and lose
my balance, not seeing the other side of a question, this child sits
up and looks disturbed.... I’m sending you separately our Brooklyn
Bridge contemporary with a story called _The Salt Pit_. If it isn’t a
little man of a story--I don’t know one. Hers.... Of course, you know
why she didn’t give it to us. She thought I’d take it on her account
and not for the story.... And still we stay out of the War. They’re
sending over one big imperialist after another from London, trying to
get us in, and all that’s flunkey in Washington, rocks--but so far,
we’re only sinning commercially.... Give us more of the inky desert
nights, Dicky, and young Lawrence.
Dicky reached Bombay from Aden in the spring of 1917. He was now on his
way home, the long way around. He had told no one, but it had grown
upon him of late that he could relish a bit of New York after more than
two years. He coldly ignored in himself the tendency to thrill at the
thought of seeing Pidge Musser again. He had made a bit of a name for
himself as a reporter, but was known more as a first-class fact-getter
than a feature writer among newspaper men. Facts were sometimes so
bleak in his work that one had to possess real understanding and real
love for honest materials to find the inherent beauty and order. His
knowledge of international politics was now granted by all classes of
newspaper men, but he was known especially from his articles in _The
Public Square_ as one who exerted a steady pressure against America
entering the war.
To be cool was said to be Cobden’s religion. The stuff that he wrote
was cool and the words that he said. “I am a reporter, only,” he
occasionally explained. “I write what I see, not my own reactions nor
opinions.” He had come far in this doctrine, far enough to be trusted
by white men of place in Turkey and the Holy Land, in spite of his
curious scorn for war. He was somewhat slower now to get enthused over
human actions than he was when he left New York; his boyish humor had
become grim. He had seen the worst things men do, and written a few
of them. Though he had been through as much hard riding in two years
as any empire-building Englishman, he seemed to retain no personal
relation to his adventures.
Other men talked about him, however. There was something about the
American that made it easy for others to “sketch at him.” Tales of his
far chances with Tom Lawrence in El Hejas, for instance, had followed
him up into Turkey, but no one knew his tendency to nausea in a pinch.
Dicky had written a lot of big newspaper stories, but they were
stories of the day. He had packed the films of tense and frightening
and humorous moments away somewhere deep in his brain, to the end of
massing them all into one--one day doing the Big Story, that had to
do with finding a Man. That dream had held since the day he first saw
Nagar. But in his heart of hearts everything was a side issue--world
politics, world wars, newspaper stories, magazine stories, even the Big
Story of all--compared to the war in himself over a girl named Pidge.
He still had night sweats over the name of Rufus Melton.... A quiet
voice, a tired smile, a face darkened and dusty looking from exposure,
even after a clean shave--out of this face, usually shadowed by a big
cake-basket helmet of cork, shone a pair of steady eyes in a fine mesh
of dusty brown wrinkles--Dicky at twenty-eight.
He had scarcely stepped ashore at Bombay when he heard that the States
had entered the war. He touched the sleeve of an Englishman who was
looking up at the promenade deck of the ship with eyes and mouth wide
open.
“Tell me, I hadn’t heard,” Dicky said hoarsely.
“She’s in, but I must say, sir, she took a long time about it.”
“But that cannot be!” Dicky answered.
Now the Englishman stared, this being the peerless rebuke. Moreover,
he observed that the American had a sudden withered look, and presumed
that he was a mere upstart person. Accordingly, the Englishman refixed
his triple focus on the ship’s promenade deck, and Cobden tunneled into
the bus for the _King George_. There he verified the news. He went to
his room a bit whipped, quite a little bit whipped. He wanted to be
alone. For two years he had written and felt for America as only an
exile can. He had believed in her luck and native horse sense in the
midst of the mess other countries were making of their national lives.
Something snapped when he had been alone in his room for a while. It
was Dicky’s romantic allegiance to the country of his school histories.
For the present he was a man without national gravity, and a sick man
since some hot, hard-held part of himself had been ripped out.
He had missed his mail in Aden and left word for it to be forwarded to
Bombay on the next steamer. A cablegram from his newspaper connection,
rewired from Aden, not only counseled him to make haste to double back
to France (to be on the spot to greet the first American military
arrivals), but accepted it as settled that there was nothing else for a
man of his equipment now to do. The message was actually elate with the
“doings” ahead, but Dicky Cobden didn’t see it that way. The fact is,
he was sore, personally sore, at what had happened and didn’t care who
knew it. The following ship brought his mail, including a letter from
Pidge Musser, which he opened with an old and ugly fear, and in this
letter the worst that he had ever feared fell upon him:
... Oh, Dicky, there is no other way. I’ve tried to dodge it, but it
has to be told now, that I have taken Rufus Melton. Why did I do it?
I don’t know, unless it is that I am evil and unfinished and answer
to the evil and unfinished in him. He draws me terribly, but at the
same time, I am not deluded. There is never a moment with him that is
not unmixed with pain.... I wonder if you can believe that I did not
do this thing for happiness; that the happiest moments I have ever
known have come from my work with John Higgins and my friendship with
you? And can you ever believe that I am no farther from you now, in
that mysterious comrade way?... Oh, Life is not like books, Dicky,
not at all like what we are taught it is. I have a relation to him.
I answer some terrible drawing need--like a child crying for me.
But I have a relation to you, too, only different. You mean rest,
something done. He means the unfinished. He brings a mirror to me,
and says, “Look!” I want to scream, because the mirror brings out
all my defects. That’s what his presence means.... This is one true
thing, Dicky. The one who can rouse the most hell in your breast is
the one to whom you belong for the time. At least, that is true to
me.... Have I not been grateful for your stability? And have I not
been proud for your moving so quietly up and down the East, keeping
your surfaces clean for the world events to be pictured there without
twist or falsehood?... A strange door was opened in my being when I
was a child. In and out that door, whether I will or not, you often
come and go. “He is my friend,” I whisper, “my friend”----and repeat
it a thousand times.
XXIII
THE RED ROOM
LINE by line the thing was killing him. He got up and crossed the heavy
red carpet to the hall door and turned the key in the lock. He was
afraid some one would come in and find him. He had the strange power
of partly seeing himself, as the sullen horrors of hatred and revolt
boiled up in his breast. Vaguely, but quite well enough, he could watch
the man called Richard Cobden in the dim hotel room, the shoulders
hunched, the mouth stretched and crooked; unable to sit still, the face
wet with poisonous sweat.
The love had gone out of him, and with it, all the light he had. He
thought he had known pain and loneliness since leaving New York, but
all he had known was humming content compared to now, because there
had been a laughing idolatry for all her ways and words, a reliance
upon her that he had dared to call absolute. “Understand, understand!”
she had cried all through the letter.... Oh yes, he could understand.
She wasn’t what he had made her out to be--that was clear enough. He
had built upon something which wasn’t there. He had believed her to
be--built into himself the conviction--that she was the honestest thing
alive, and here she was----
His thought shot back to the night of the Punjabi dinner. That little
basement room was devastated before his mind, the table overturned,
the face of Miss Claes a mockery, the face of Pidge Musser--that of an
American girl found out. Into the center of his consciousness was now
flung his old promise not to hate.... He heard his own laughter. He saw
his own stretched and twisted mouth from which it came. Like a couple
of sly schoolgirls, they looked at him now--Pidge and Miss Claes--slyly
pulling together and duping a fat boy....
He saw his room key upon the table. Number Five, it was, the fifth
floor. He looked around the dim papered wall--whitish-red like the
pulp of raspberries--the deep upholstered chairs, the seats slightly
crushed, the full-length mirror, the ash tray, the silver flask on the
writing table, his own things here and there orderly enough--all but
himself, a sort of maniacal Mr. Hyde. Number Five. He would remember
this room where he had fought it out, too, about America entering
the war. He poured brandy into a whisky glass. The stuff eased him a
little. It made the pain all the more poignant, like a stove getting
hotter, but also it seemed to give him the power to move back a little
from the stove.... He stood up in the dark and shook himself.
“Oh, you ass!” he muttered. “You awful ass!”
In the light of a match, as he lit a cigarette long afterward, he saw
the rest of his mail on the table, one letter from Miss Claes. He
couldn’t get head nor tail out of that at first. She seemed to be
talking about something he had said about finding a Man. Oh, yes. He
had written from Mecca, mentioning Tom Lawrence and his search for a
Man. He snickered now at himself through the fogs of his own past and
present. Then a line seemed to stand up before his eyes. “... If you go
to India, go to Ahmedabad. Nagar is there. You are in danger of finding
your Man.” Later that night, still in the dark, his back straightened.
He laughed and said aloud, failing altogether for the moment to see the
absurdity of himself.
“Number Five--queer little old musty room, I wonder who died here?...
Good night, Pidge; good night, dear America--grand pair to tie to!”
The next day he cabled to his newspaper connection that he was not
returning to France for the opening campaign, at least; and wrote
to John Higgins that he didn’t expect to send in much stuff for the
present. “I may stay awhile in India--just looking around. She smells
like a typhoid ward, and needs orderlies.... I’ll, of course, let you
know what comes of my _spectating_.”
Still he did not start at once for Ahmedabad. He locked himself in
Number Five through the days and walked the streets of Bombay at night,
walked like a man in a strait-jacket. He wasn’t conscious of this at
first, until he began to feel an ache from the tension of his neck
and shoulder muscles and tightened elbows. When he forced himself to
relax, however, the torture of his thoughts was accentuated. He had
been holding himself rigidly to help fend off the destroying rush
of mental images. He walked himself into one sweat after another for
the nights were hot and humid. The point of all his fighting was to
keep Pidge Musser out of mind. Of course, he could not succeed. She
came in by every door. She came in softly, she came in scornfully, she
came in singing, scolding. Mostly she came in saying, “Why, don’t you
see, Dicky, I am nearer and clearer than ever?” Then it was as if an
isolated bit of shrapnel would explode in his brain.
His whole fabric of world politics was demolished. It looked to him
like a tapestry that has been hooked up out of a sewer--all that
careful weaving and balanced pigmentation! Before the day of the letter
he had prided himself that his building in the past two years was good
and strong. Now he faced the pitiful discovery that every block of his
building had been placed upon this platform: That even if he couldn’t
have her, no one else could. This smelled to him now. Forever after, it
smelled to him like the sewage lanes of old Bombay.
Dicky had a good body. After two weeks his physical vitality began to
steal back. The love was gone, but out of the debris of Subramini’s
Punjabi Fireplace, the face of Miss Claes came up faintly smiling
again. Another letter came from her, which he read in dismal irony
several times on the day before he took the train for Ahmedabad--the
last day in Number Five, with its wall paper of raspberry crush. He
couldn’t make sense out of the letter. She seemed to love Pidge, even
to respect her. Miss Claes wrote, “It gives me quiet joy to know
that Nagar is near you. It will be good for him and good for you. A
great dearness for you both goes from this house, as you sit and walk
together.” Miss Claes also repeated in her letter that “love never
faileth”----
All very pretty and possible, no doubt; it sounded good, but it was
no longer his sort of a project. This wasn’t for the product of three
generations of hardware merchants and manufacturers. Funny, he thought,
how he had ever accepted visionary stuff like this. He would write Miss
Claes some time how he had failed, but not now. On the night train, he
felt India closing about him really for the first time. Once when the
train stopped, he smelled the altogether indescribable earthiness of
hills that had been sun baked all day, now letting it be known through
the moistness of the night. It was vaguely like home to him; not home
in America, but home on earth again, the faintest symptom of his
reallegiance to life here, only known to one coming up out of sickness.
In the early morning he lay for a while after awakening in a sort of
bodily peace. It was as if he had really rested a little, as if he had
left behind some utterly miserable part of himself in the red room at
Bombay.
“A bit questionable,” he muttered whimsically, with the trace of a
smile, “a bit shabby and questionable to leave a bundle, a black bundle
like that, in Number Five--for some one else to stumble over.”
He fell asleep again and reawoke with a curious sentence on his lips;
something that he had forgotten a long time, something that Miss Claes
used to say: “Nobody knows Nagar--nobody.”
“Nobody ever will,” he added, “if he doesn’t talk any more than he used
to.”
Again at breakfast the faintest little quiver of organic ease stole
into him. The earth was very bright outside and the pot of tea that had
been brought tasted actually sane. He had the feeling of being on the
way somewhere, of having escaped something, as he watched India slip
by from the window of his compartment.... Then Ahmedabad, the station,
a Hindu in white garments, almost taking him in his arms--laughing,
talking like an American--Nagar talking!
XXIV
MISS CLAES SPEAKS
ONE Sunday morning about three weeks after the luncheon with John
Higgins, during which Rufus Melton came to the Chop House, Pidge found
Miss Claes alone in the basement front.
“We’d like to come here to live. Is there any chance?” she asked.
“Yes, it can be managed, I think.”
Pidge regarded her with a kind of cold fixity and added: “We were
married night before last. Rufe seems willing enough to come here. I
hate to leave this house, but I didn’t think you had the rooms.”
“I’ll make a place for you; a little place, at least. But, Pidge----”
“Yes?”
“Why haven’t you come to me all this time?”
“I know how fond you are of Dicky Cobden. I haven’t hoped any one could
understand.”
“Being fond of Richard Cobden doesn’t make me less fond of you.”
“How could I expect you to understand me, when I can’t understand
myself?” Pidge demanded. “I am two people, and they are at war.... No
use lying about it. I fell for him, knowing him all the time. Not for
a minute did I lose track of what he is. But I wanted him. Something in
me answered--that’s all.”
“I’ve always loved that honest Pidge,” said Miss Claes.
“Think, if you like, that it’s part of the evil in me that talks this
way about him, but I am talking about myself, too.”
“You could never see all this clearly--without ‘falling for’ him,
Pidge.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean it would remain a hopeless, unfinished puzzle--if you had run
away from Rufus Melton.”
“I couldn’t run away. I wanted him,” Pidge repeated. “But there’s
another side. There’s something in him that I seem to have known from
the beginning--something like a little child that I left somewhere ages
ago. It keeps calling to me from his eyes, and I leave everything to go
to it--everything that Dicky means and the world, even writing--I leave
all that. And yet when I go, when I go to his arms, I lose the purpose.
It’s as if the child that I run to--the irresistible thing that calls
to me from his eyes--stops crying and stops needing me! Then I suddenly
know that it must need me and not be gratified, ever to be helped. Oh,
no one on earth could understand that. It’s insane.”
“But, Pidge, I do understand.”
“How can you?”
“Because I have loved like that, because I have had experience. I loved
an English boy in the same way--oh, long ago. I love him still, but I
could not stay with him, because he--why, Pidge, it is just the same.
He needs to cry for some one, for something, otherwise he remains
asleep in life.”
“You’re saying this to help me.”
“What I’ve lived through _should_ help you. It was the hardest thing
I’ve ever known--that I couldn’t forget everything and have him, just
two alone in the world. But when I went to him, he was satisfied and
looked elsewhere. I almost died of revolt.”
Pidge’s eyes were very wide. “And when you didn’t go to him?” she said
in slow tones. “What happened then?”
“It was then that he remembered and reminded me that I was half-caste.
Also he looked elsewhere, just the same.”
“And you still love him?”
“Deep underneath--that is not changed.”
“But what is Nagar?”
“Nagar means the other world, Pidge--a new heaven and a new earth. He
means the not-wanting love, the willing-to-wait love----”
“I’m not like that,” Pidge said with old bitterness. “I want love in a
room! I want to shut the world out. I don’t want the love of the world,
but love that’s all mine. And I can’t--I can’t have it!”
She was breathing deeply, staring at the fire.
Miss Claes glanced at her wistfully a moment, her lips faintly smiling.
The girl’s face had never been so lovely to her. It was like land
that has had its rains after long waiting--soft blooms starting, an
earthy sweetness rising in the washed sunlight. The beginnings of both
laughter and tears were in Pidge’s wide eyes; her red-brown hair, from
which the henna was long forgotten, had an easy restful gleam in its
coils.
“Why, Pidge,” Miss Claes said at last, “you’re like one who has been
born again. It’s wonderful. I had almost forgotten what that love does
to a woman, at first--for a little, little time.”
“And you knew that kind of love--with the English boy?”
“Yes.”
“And Nagar knows.”
“Yes.”
Pidge shivered.
“... Rufe brings the fight to me, makes every undone thing rise
and live! He brings the most terrible disappointments, the crudest
disorder, yet that which would pay for it all, if I were just a simple
peasant woman, is denied. Why can’t we shut the door and just live? Why
can’t there be a kingdom for two?”
The form was soft and gliding in Miss Claes’ arms. The
square-shouldered little figure of the mill and office girl had
become almost eloquent with its emotional power. After a moment Pidge
straightened, her face staring into Miss Claes’.
“Why don’t you answer?”
“I can only say, Pidge, you are called to learn the next step, the next
lesson in what love means. You want the love that has two ends, but the
Triangle is ready for you. Oh, many are learning the mystery of the
Triangle. It hurts so at first, but it lets the world in--the bigger
meanings of life.”
Pidge shivered again. “Is it blasphemy,” she asked, “that I feel just
as close to Dicky Cobden--as ever?”
“No more than the finding of bread would spoil your taste for water.”
* * * * *
Pidge said at last:
“Oh, I don’t want to leave this house, Miss Claes. He says he’ll come
here, too.”
“I’ve been thinking of putting a bathroom on the third floor. There’s a
tiny empty room like yours across the hall. The bath shall be installed
there. You know I’ve kept Nagar’s room empty. It is pleasant and larger
than yours. I’ll have a door cut through the partition, and with a bath
across the hall you will do well enough for a time.”
“You would give us Nagar’s room?”
“Nagar has the key to the whole house,” said Miss Claes.
* * * * *
Moments afterward, Pidge’s strong fingers closed over the hands of the
other.
“No one can know how it hurts me--to think of Dicky----”
“He is with Nagar now.”
“Do you think--can it be possible that Nagar will help him--as you help
me?”
“Nagar and the Little Man,” said Miss Claes.
XXV
“BE IT EVER SO HUMBLE”