confided: “I need the experience, too, you know, because I’ve never
been to Europe----”
It was out before she thought: “But how did you get to the Tunisian
sands?”
“I mean I’ve never stayed long enough to look around. Of course, I’ve
passed through.”
He grouched for the rest of the evening, but she felt worse about this
than he did. She had thought she was through nailing him like that.
It had done no good, merely an additional breaking out of her abysmal
temper.... On the night before he left, Rufe was at his best--the
playboy she loved so much; and, of course, she was pressed harder and
harder into the realms of the Arctic Princess, which was by no means
her natural habitat. At last, he had her crying, which was something,
because it hadn’t happened often.
“Going to miss your Rufie,” he whispered, “sorry he’s going away?”
“Oh, it isn’t that!”
“What is it, Pan?” he demanded in the tone of the head of a household.
“Get it off your mind--don’t keep anything from me.”
That started her to laughing. “It’s noth-nothing, Rufe. I’m all right
now,” she said brokenly. “I’m only hurt because I haven’t done it
better----”
“What?”
“Us.”
“Forget it,” he said. “I never hold a grudge.”
XXXI
TWO LETTERS FROM INDIA
LATER in July, Miss Claes received letters from Dicky Cobden and Nagar.
Each, it appeared, had been mainly interested in writing about the
other. She read Dicky’s first:
... I think I’ve seen the Man you wrote of, but I’m more interested
in our own Nagar--altogether different in his native dress. I never
knew how civilized clothes could slow up a man’s looks. If a white
man in New York were as good-looking as Nagar is here, the movie
folk would kidnap him, if necessary, for the screen.... Things look
differently over here. Sitting in this plain house of the one they
call Mahatma-ji, I seem to understand things that would appear absurd
in New York.... Nagar has opened up. He talks freely and laughs. He
is human, and his American years show in fine light. Try to think how
startling all this was to one coming up from Bombay, expecting the
old sphinx of your basement and halls.... I find myself frequently
at the _Ashrama_--a houseful of saints--young men and women devoted
to the Mahatma-ji, like Nagar, and who apparently have taken vows
covering self-sacrifices unlimited. Gandhi is a bit of old brass with
a mustache; terribly battered, only fifty they say, but he shows the
wear of greater years. I seemed to feel that he had been frozen,
that he had been whipped, that he had been burned. Some of his teeth
are gone.... He tells us that you can’t fight back and expect to get
anywhere. He says to answer a hurt with a hurt is to prepare for hurt
again. He says you never can understand your enemy by hating him. He
says that India can only triumph by returning into herself. Imagine
such unearthly affairs from a barrister educated in Middle Temple,
London! And Nagar appears to understand all this.... I haven’t the
organs to believe much. My training hasn’t prepared me easily to
accept miracles--more later, when I cool down. But Nagar is great to
me in himself. I think I find him more interesting, even than Gandhi.
Sometimes he seems to contain Gandhi. But it would smash everything I
have to work with, if I gave either one of them my entire belief. Yet
I dread the thought of going away....
The letter from Nagar was then read slowly twice, and the smile on the
face of Miss Claes gradually lost itself in a blur of white, as if
twilight had crept into the basement room.
... The American whom we know never speaks directly of the one he
loves; it does not seem to occur to him that we have sympathy that
enfolds his secrets. He asks questions--asks questions. He shakes his
head. His college-trained intellect does not reach up, does not hold
up its cup to receive the synthesis. It moves wearily from one to
another of its separate analyses, with only rarely a connective flash
of intuition. But his heart keeps burning, yearning all the time,
and as he learns, he acts. So he seems very safe.... I have wished so
often that he were going to you, instead of to his work in Europe,
but that, of course, is selfish. He has his work there. We must hold
him between us. He knows already that he will not be able to see and
feel in France, as he does here. It is his ordeal. I have told him
many times; every day, in fact, that what he sees and feels here, he
must remember there, and hold to, until it is made working knowledge
within him.... Our work is merely preparing. The Little Man, as
Richard calls him affectionately from that old story, realizes that
the hour is not yet. We work in the midst of many shades of darkness
and obliquity and inhibition. We are marking time, marking time....
Our American will return to India in time to see the Day break. I
have promised to keep him informed. As Paul Richard says, “We must
prepare in ourselves that magnificent day.”
Miss Claes sat in silence. Then she seemed to become aware that voices
above vaguely distracted. She went to the door, and listened. Fanny
Gallup was crying, with little care who heard.
XXXII
FRANCE, 1918. THE YANK
DICKY hadn’t had his clothes off for several days. He was in the
“Oregon” Forest with Colonel Boulding who was no sort of man to tie
to for one who felt that a clean washrag was one of the necessities
of life. Dicky hadn’t cared for strenuous field work but it had
come to him in France; not the actions of the big fields so much as
the extraordinary little back-line dramas that break the laws of
perspective by rising more clearly, as days drew on. Four days before,
on his way in to Paris, he had met Boulding, who was taking out several
fresh battalions to relieve a hard-pressed front at St. Aignan.
“I’ve got an extra horse,” said Boulding, “good old Yorick, steady as a
tram-car, and we’ll be back in three days.”
Dicky stood in the twilight, half rain, half snow--one of the
interminable waits for order, Boulding back in the ranks somewhere. The
firing had died down and Dicky dropped his bridle rein to bang his arms
about to get some blood stirring in them. One of the problems of life
just now was why wet snow soaked through leather quicker than straight
rain water; another was why letters from home always dragged around
the wrong fronts before being delivered; another was how long was IT
going to last; another was hot coffee.
His mount had turned gently away in the thickening dusk, turned on
his toe corks through the slush to follow a wind-blown leaf. Plop--a
water-soaked trench-siding gave way, and Yorick disappeared into an
unused pit. Dicky stared down into the inky dark. The beast snorted.
A flashlamp was procured from one of Boulding’s lieutenants and Dicky
found his way down into the trench.
It became clear why Yorick couldn’t rise, even if unhurt. The trench
bottom was a six-inch paste of water and clay. Holding the flashlight
in front of him, Dicky approached the sprawled beast. Yorick looked
like a monster in the process of being born out of the mud. There was
something both humorous and hopeless about the gaunt lifted head that
came up into the ray. And now Dicky discovered that Yorick’s left
foreleg below the knee veered off suddenly to the left, at a decided
angle from the way it should lie. Dicky felt alone in a harrowing
under world. The leaf that had caused it all, or possibly one like it,
protruded from the snaffle ring. Yorick had come up to his leaf all
right, and then forgotten what he had gone after.
“Pretty lucky old boy, you are,” Dicky said. “Work done, war over for
you, nice warm ditch to lie up in at the last, and I’ve got to take all
the responsibility.”
He drew the pistol from his belt and placed it on the little twist of
hair halfway between the eyes.
“I ought to take the saddle off first, but I’m not going to. So long,
old kid, and best luck.”
The pistol banged in the dugout like a cannon cracker under a flower
pot, and the voice of an American sentry above was heard to say:
“Some fool’s blowed his head off, down there. Why in hell can’t a man
be patient!”
Dicky climbed up on the level ground, no sicker than before, but a
trifle more tired.... He was chafed. Yorick had done some of it in the
last four days, but not all. He was chafed in and out and over, chafed
from his boots and belt and helmet, but especially from his key ring.
This last had ground into him all day. He took it out now, as he waited
for coffee. Meanwhile he edged as near as possible (without murdering
anybody) to the trench stove Boulding’s cook had got going.
There was the key to his mother’s house in Fiftieth Street--a thick
brass stubby affair that belonged to the door of a house where hardware
was well understood. This key couldn’t be thrown away. Though it was
practically unthinkable--a man might some time get home. It had been
done. There was a key to 54 Harrow Street. The woman who ran the place
had told him to keep it with him, because it was a symbol of something
which he had professed at the time to understand. Then there was a
long, old-fashioned inside door key, black and a little bent--the
meanest of all to dig into a man’s hip--this to the hall door of
certain rooms in the same Harrow Street house. Its duplicate was in
the hands of a girl he used to know. She had said she would look in
on the apartment while he was gone, but she was married now. No use
keeping it any longer.
He took it off the ring, but put it back again.
Certain things were good, but hard to get. Brandy was good. Coffee was
good, especially hot. Saddle-horse stew was good. Porkpie, pork and
beans, pork sausage and pancakes were reasonable and of good report,
but keys on key rings that gored a man while he rode or slept, and
stretched back into meanings of the Utterly Absurd that a man couldn’t
get straight in Paris, much less in this slaughterhouse of the Western
Front--keys on key rings were sheer perversities, especially when a man
wasn’t game to toss them into any one of these open sewers....
They were saying at home that his stuff was blurred and unconvincing.
Even John Higgins had been singularly silent of late. Chris Heidt, the
managing editor of his newspaper connection, had recently written:
“We miss that fine patriotic ring that we have come to expect from
our correspondent. Your stuff shows subtleties and innuendoes and the
dissatisfaction of the boys--the little things back of the lines that
make for disorganization, rather than the big doings at the front.”
It was dawning on Dicky that there were two kinds of American patriots,
soldier and civilian; and that for keenness and fire-eating zest, the
man in the zone of advance was not to be compared to the paper-fed
folk at home. In fact, there were only two ways for a writer to
please the firesides of America, as the hot flames of Hun-hatred and
world-correcting benefactions went up the chimney. One was to stay at
home and write the war as you supposed it to be, and the other was to
remember how you felt, how the war seemed to you, before you reached
France, and write it from that angle.
Blurred, all right, and chafed. One thing he was getting to understand
a little, and to have an affection for. That was the American
soldier--not officer, so much, but the ruffian in the ranks, _dogus
bogus Americanus_--the fellow fused of Irish, Scotch and Jew, of
German, English, Russian and French; something of each in the solution,
something of all. In the first place, this Yank was the funniest thing
ever turned loose on the planet. His officers were occasionally funny
in a different way.
Dicky vaguely perceived that an abyss was slowly but surely forming
between this Yank and the patriots at home--an abyss only to be bridged
by silence. Quite as slowly but surely Dicky’s heart opened to this
enlisted man. One has to love something. Once or twice, things he saw
this laughing maniac from America do made him very much ashamed of his
own mental antics in a certain red room of Bombay.
XXXIII
PARIS, 1918--HADDON AND AMES
SO far as Dicky was concerned, the things of great moment in his
experience in France all happened in the fall of 1918. He was in Paris
at the end of that shocking summer, and found a letter from Nagar
which reiterated that the curtain could not rise on the Drama of India
until Great Britain was through fighting in France and the land of the
Euphrates.... He was stopping at the _Garonne_. There was a knock at
his room door one afternoon and voices outside. It was Haddon and Ames,
correspondents out of New York, and they wanted money. Haddon talked
first:
“... He’s off his head and in a mess. He mentioned your name. He says
he sniffed some gas out in the vineyards somewhere in April, and can’t
get over it. Either that, or the family he’s fouled up with is feeding
him ground glass.”
“Who’s this you’re talking about?” Cobden asked, though he had heard
the name.
“Melton--done some magazine stories,” said Haddon.
“You say he mentioned my name?”
“His French father-in-law picked on me first,” Ames put in. “Just
happened. I’m at the _Charente_, where a lot of Americans are putting
up. Told me a long story of wrongs to his only child--a female child
now married to Author Melton. Mentioned your name----”
“He was gassed?” Dicky repeated.
“He says he was,” said Haddon. “It’s an operation case, all right.
Melton will have to be cut out of that French house.”
“I don’t know whether it’s gas in my case or not,” Dicky said, “but the
fact is I am not rightly aboard this conversation.”
“The idea is to get aboard with some American currency,” said Ames.
“American in trouble--fellows all willing to help a little. Up to
somebody to get the fool out. Father picked on me----”
“Let me get this straight,” Dicky heard himself saying, though all he
wanted under heaven at this moment was to be alone.
Ames was one of the best Washington correspondents in the American
press, a fact-getter extraordinary, who had a semi-inspired way now and
then of putting down his stuff. He was fifty, a friend of John Higgins
and weathered to a fuzzy gray like a fence board. Just now he bluffed
out his embarrassment by speaking of one of Melton’s stories which
Dicky was professionally familiar with:
“A short story in one of the weeklies--called _Dr. Filter_--hell of a
good story.... It’s nothing to me,” Ames finished. “Only the kid’s an
American, and he’s tight up against one of Paris’ prettiest ways.”
Haddon took up the tale:
“The Frenchman’s name is Ducier. Melton’s been living at his
house--mixed with the daughter--forced to marry. Now Parent Ducier says
the least he can do is to get a living for himself out of it--hard
times.”
“Actually married?” Dicky asked.
“Showed me the passport,” said Ames. “I couldn’t get a word alone with
Melton. He can’t leave his bed. One of the family always in the room.”
Dicky was straining so hard that he resisted easy comprehension. It was
an intense moment. There was more talk.
“Of course, whatever you want from me----” Dicky broke in.
“What you can spare,” Haddon said. “The parents ask twenty thousand
francs, but they’ll take half that easy. Just now the boy’s too sick to
escape.”
“Count on me for at least half of whatever it costs,” Dicky said.
Haddon’s eyes widened. Ames looked astonished.
“I’ve heard Cobden is rich, Ames,” Haddon explained.
The gray one came closer and examined Dicky’s face. “I heard it, too,”
he said. “You really mean this?”
“I would give you the amount now, but I understand that you aren’t sure
what it will be. I know Melton. I’m glad to help, of course.”
“I’ve heard you were rich, too,” Ames repeated slowly. “But I didn’t
believe it.”
“Why not?”
“You’re too good a newspaper man,” said Ames. “I didn’t think a man
could have real money and be as good a newspaper man as you.”
Dicky hardly heard the tribute. The two men were leaving. That was the
important thing.... He was alone. An intermittent geyser was at work
within him. Every few minutes a surge of hot hope boiled up in his
breast. It threatened to deluge him. Out of all the year’s work was
netted at this time one bit of working knowledge, as Nagar might have
called it, that he must _not_ be deluded by this hope! He tried to
cork it up; failing in that he stood as still as he could in the midst
of the surges. Gradually, he got the thing in hand, but it was bitter
work, this refusing to take the first real breath of life he had known
for years.
He found himself in twilight. The day had slipped off, while he
struggled alone. His forehead was clammy with the effort going on. To
go back into that dreary hopelessness, and not be able to think out
the reason why! The force that he had to work with now came from the
painful mistake he had made in working for reward before; from the
shock of that realization in the red room, that underneath everything,
he had counted on his virtue being crowned with Pidge somehow coming
across.
Now the fight changed. Persistently in the depths of him grew an
awareness that he had not done the full task called of him merely in
offering Ames money. This point became so ugly and evident--that he had
to laugh. More and more, as moments sped on, it faced him squarely. He
had no sentimentalism to tide him over; his emotions stayed ice cold.
“But it’s like a fool Sunday-school story!” he muttered.
Then again the words broke from him: “But living God, suppose she
doesn’t want the bundle back! Suppose she’s been trying to lose it,
and here I am running after her, saying, ‘You’ve dropped something,
Madame----’”
But he couldn’t budge.
Full dark was in the room when he rung Ames at the _Charente_:
“I’ve been thinking over this thing, Mr. Ames, and I’m asking a
favor----”
“Yes,” came coldly across the town. Ames believed he was trying to
wriggle out of his promise to pay half.
“I’ve come to the conclusion that this thing is up to me--the whole
business, and I’ll thank you very much for Mr. Melton’s present
address.”
“No. 16, Rue de Belville, Villancourt.” The tones had warmed.
“Thanks. I’ll report to you presently,” Cobden said.
“Sure you don’t want me--or one of us to go along with you?” Ames
persisted.
“I’ll see what I can do alone first, if you don’t mind.”
XXXIV
THE HOUSE OF DUCIER
QUEER drama, from eight to twelve that night in the little house of
Ducier. Four hours--as long as an uncut opera! The sick man moaned, and
interrupted everything, calling to Dicky Cobden:
“For the love of God, don’t go ’way and leave me here! I’m done for, if
you leave me alone again.... Oh, Cobden, Cobden----”
The daughter wept. It was her entire part. She had a brown mole upon
her ruddy rounded cheek, and very white small teeth in gums of a red
that Dicky had never seen before except in dental advertisements. She
was made of little curves, and all of them were required in the art of
her weeping.
“What’s the matter?” Dicky asked her, during a halt in the proceedings.
“You are taking him away!”
“I don’t seem to be very successful about it.”
“Oh, but you will--you are taking him away!”
Dicky was glad to hear that he was going to get what he came for, but
the obstacles still looked serious.
“Isn’t that what you want--to be rid and paid?”
“My father--yes--but me--no, no! He is my lover--oh, such an adored!”
It was new to Cobden’s experience just how obdurate an outraged
European can be. M. Ducier reiterated grimly that weeks ago in this
house, he had suddenly discovered a condition which destroyed all his
past and future. He had forced marriage, but that did not suffice.
Dicky turned to the bed at this point.
“How did you happen to stand for marriage, Melton?”
“Nothing to do with it--I was gassed!”
Here the daughter’s cries arose, the hands of the mother were uplifted
to heaven, and the face of the father became more grim. It was against
Dicky’s training and heredity to stand for being bilked, yet he
hesitated to call for help. To start the police at work would mean
the American Legation before he was finished, and incredible delay.
Momentarily Melton made it harder.
“If you go away and leave me after all they have said,” he moaned,
“there won’t be any need for you to come back! I am telling you,
Cobden, they keep me here--just as if my legs were tied.”
Rufe spoke in English, which the mother and father did not understand,
but of which the daughter had plenty to catch the drift. Dicky did
not miss the fact that in the midst of her weeping there were subtle
affairs to confide to her father.... It cost him eighteen hundred
dollars to get Melton clear that night; but, at least, Melton was
thoroughly clear, the marriage certificate and receipt for heartbalm
in full, in his pocket. He watched curiously now to see if the tears
of Daughter Ducier were dried--but no, though Melton spurned her last
proffer of a kiss--at least with her, money was not all.
In the days that followed, Dicky wasn’t able to get any rest from a
sense that he had done well. With every ounce of his returning strength
Rufe Melton yearned to get out of Paris. He had been abused; he was
frightened to depths hitherto unplumbed. He lived in a mortal dread day
and night that the Duciers would come for him again.
“I can’t get a passage for you at a moment’s notice,” Dicky would say.
“Besides, you’re not fit to travel for a few days yet. I don’t want to
send you back to New York looking like a hounded Apache. Let me do this
thing right, Melton, while I’m in on it.”
“But don’t go away and leave me here!” Rufe moaned. “Let me go out with
you when you go.”
“You needn’t have the slightest fear from the Duciers.”
The hands came up and waved hopelessly.
“You don’t know them! You don’t know her!” Rufe moaned. “I want to get
out of here. I want to get on the ship. I don’t want to be left alone.”
And this was what he was getting ready to send back to Pidge! Once,
when Dicky was really hard driven, a sudden chill of rage came over him
and he proceeded this far with a sentence:
“Why, Melton, I really ought to put you----”
The other words--“to death,” he somehow managed to keep from speech.
Dicky suffered especially from the feeling that he was playing the
boob. To be sincerely in wrong was his pet aversion--dating from the
night of the Punjabi dinner. Besides, he was tortured with the thought
that Pidge Musser wouldn’t thank him. Surely, for her sake, his mind
repeated, it would have been better even to put old Ames straight, and
let one American meet Paris unaided. But Rufe had called for him in his
trouble, had mentioned the name of Cobden to the others.
One of the strangest things to Dicky now was that Pidge’s husband could
accept all this--somehow as if it were his due. Like a family affair.
Rufe seldom spoke of Pidge. Apparently getting back to New York meant
her; apparently they weren’t separated. Rufe had the most extraordinary
sense of taking her for granted. If he had any money or resources in
Paris, he didn’t let the fact be known. It was Dicky who purchased
his passage for New York. Again Dicky’s capacity for astonishment
was stretched, because Rufe seemed able to comfort himself with the
fact that he had it all coming. He had never been sick before. His
present infirmity was entirely engrossing. “I was gassed,” covered all
discrepancies of word and deed.
Back in his room, after packing Rufe aboard the steamer, Dicky found
himself nervous, tired and irritable. A servant came and took out the
extra bed Rufe had occupied. The place was stiller than ever, after
that--no moaning, no fears, no complaints; but it wasn’t all relief
as Dicky had fancied it would be. He missed something--the world was
so crazy anyway--something that had taken him out of himself for two
weeks; something at least, that had played upon a different set of
faculties. Suddenly it dawned upon him, though he couldn’t tell why,
that Pidge would be glad after all. If you play orderly and guardian
and benefactor to a child--of course you miss the wretch. And Pidge was
a woman, and she had said--what had she said, about there not being two
ways? Now Dicky felt better. There had not been two ways for him. The
chapter was ended at any rate....
Another event of this fall of 1918, so far as Dicky Cobden was
concerned, was the Armistice. You can tell how inactive hope had become
within him at this time, and within the breasts of tens of thousands
of others, when he hadn’t believed that any other than a state of war
could exist.