Part 11

“What’s the use of me looking after my own faults when you’ve got them all in hand like Shetland ponies?”

Pidge arose. Black waters were welling up in her breast. It was so true. His faults were with her day and night, and the greatest of them was his entire irresponsibility. Also it touched her in the sorest quick to have him point out that Fanny lowered the values, not only of the second floor, but of the whole Harrow Street house.

Pidge never passed Fanny’s door but she was pressed by something within to enter; yet her whole personal nature rebelled. Often for hours at her work, there was a gloomy semiconscious activity within her that kept urging its notice up to her mind. When she stopped to think, she would realize that she hadn’t gone into Fanny’s room that day, or that she must drop in to-night. It was so now, only more than ever, because Rufe had located her private horror and brought it to speech. On the second floor, returning from supper, she told Rufe to go on up, that she meant to see Fanny for a few minutes.

“What to--come on, Pan, let’s go to a show somewhere!” he said suddenly.

She shook her head.

“There isn’t a clot of work stirring in my brain pan,” he went on.

“I don’t want to go out. I’ve got to see Fanny----”

He caught her sleeve. “It’s too hot to go up. Let’s go somewhere. Let’s get on a bus and go uptown----”

She was too occupied in the thing she hated to do, to notice his concern. He spoke again:

“I’m not going up there alone. You’re colder than a frog to live with anyway----”

“Go out somewhere, Rufe, if you want to. Don’t mind me.”

She didn’t hear his words, but she heard the crying of Fanny’s children. The door opened. Fanny stood there, but looked past her, over Pidge’s shoulder, and queerly enough Pidge thought of the words, “And Jove nods to Jove.” The hall door was then shut.

“Wot you coming in here for--to scold me some more, Redhead?”

“No, Fanny, to see you and the----”

“I know why you come, all right. To find fault--that’s why, and you needn’t kill yourself, because I’m gettin’ along, so-so. Little old Fanny’s holdin’ her own--and that’s more’n you’re doin’.”

Pidge looked into the crib. A core of fetid vapor hung above it, and Fanny’s words seemed to blend with it.

“Think you can hold your job and hold a man, too, don’t you? Oh, yes, Redhead knows how. Redhead’s got it all worked out. Redhead can tell us all how to do it, oh, yes----”

“What’s the matter, Fanny? Are you scolding, so I won’t start? I didn’t come to start something. Just came to see you. Wouldn’t you like to go out for an hour and have me stay with the--with the----”

Pidge always halted this way.

“Worried--eh? Worried about somethin’?” Fanny piped up. “Well, I’m not tellin’ anything--except you ain’t got your little mastiff tied to no corset string----”

“What are you talking about, Fanny?”

“Like to know. Wouldn’t you?”

Pidge felt cold. She cared to know what the other meant. She didn’t say so, however. She knew a better way--an effective way that seemed to come out of depths within her that knew vast pasts and many lands, all strategies of men and maids, all secrets of tent and purdah, lattice and veil.

“Don’t trouble, Fanny. I just came in to see how you were getting on. I’m so sorry, you know----”

“Sorry----” Fanny laughed.

“So sorry, dear--that you’re penned in this way--and Albert missing!”

“Sorry!” Fanny screamed her mirth.

“Don’t you want me to be sorry for you, dear?” Pidge trailed. “Why, I haven’t been nearly so good as I meant to be----”

“Well, you dam’ little itch-face--talking to me about being sorry. Who’n heller-you to tell me about being sorry? Who’n heller-you to talk to me about me gettin’ penned in an’ Albert missin’, when you can’t keep your own man--when you don’t carry your own babies? Who’n heller-you anyway?”

Then Fanny got down to business and spoke of life in the here and now.

“Never mind, dear,” said Pidge. “We can’t attend to everything. I’m going out to get you some ice cream. I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

She was in the street. She brought back a paper pail without haste. Fanny had begun to cry.

“Don’t feel badly,” Pidge said, washing a saucer and spoon.

Fanny cried on. Pidge served her a large dish, and a smaller one for the older child. Then from the paper, she spooned tiny mouthfuls into the face in the crib--spooned until there was sleep from the novel coolness of the sweet. Then Pidge patted Fanny’s shoulder, as she passed out, promising to come back some time to-morrow.

Upstairs she found Rufe, shirt open at the throat, standing by the back window. The light in the room was heavily shaded. He looked to her covertly, half expectantly.

“Want to read something?” he said in a pleasant tone.

“No. I’m going to bed,” said Pidge.

XXX

THE HEAD OF THE HOUSE

EARLY the next morning in the shadowy back room, Pidge moved softly about as she dressed. She saw the new golf suit, and her lips twisted into a smile. Another toy; another bit of acting. That was all of the game he cared for--the clothes that went with it. She thought of the night on the corner when the newsboy had pointed out Rufe as a movie actor. She saw his desk by the window. It looked like a troubled face. Here she was, as usual, furiously busy with his faults--so occupied that he didn’t have to bother at all, sleeping serenely on. But he didn’t understand, never could understand, that her agony was because she saw them as part of herself; that in her own heart she couldn’t free herself from responsibility; knowing deeply the _dis_-ease that comes from that soul-deep question, “Am I my brother’s keeper?”

And there he was lying on his back, innocent as a child. The pain darted into her heart ... the baby carriage at Santa Monica. His complexion was almost as fresh, his black hair brushed back. It was as if he had fallen asleep with a tear in his eyes, for a little penciling of salt was on the thin blue-veined skin under the eyelid. His breast was uncovered and that spoiled the picture, spoiled the pathos; for Rufe, though the least athletic of men, was hairy and glad of it.

She hadn’t slept. This, since coming home last night, was a show-down time, as she expressed it. She had met the same several times with her father, when the days became so black and evil that something had to happen. Deep, under words and surface thoughts, lay the affair of Fanny’s room. The dreary consciousness of that never left her, but actual thinking of details was another affair. She couldn’t give way to them, and keep the outer quiet she had determined upon. She had been too honest to hide from herself, even in the beginning, that Rufe habitually took life as it came. She never could forget his first appraisal of herself in the reception room of _The Public Square_.

So this hadn’t come in the nature of shock; rather it was a pitiless uncovering of ugliness that had been vaguely subconscious before. What hurt her most keenly, so that she was close to crying out, as she lay beside him in the night, was the inevitable tramp of Fate, audible through it all--their meeting in Dicky’s room; Dicky’s opening of _The Public Square_ to him in the first place; her own bringing of Fanny Gallup to this house; the weaving back and forth into one, of the different lives--even her father’s.

Rufe wasn’t at home when she returned that night. He hadn’t rung her at the office, but she found word with Miss Claes that he had gone down to Washington. She felt something was going to happen, but through the day she had gathered her strength together to decide that she wouldn’t be the one to bring it about. Underneath all was the old sense of her responsibility.

Pidge was half tempted to seek Miss Claes this night. She even went so far as to learn that her friend was at home. It always happened so, when she needed help: Miss Claes might be out any or at all other times. A light was in the basement room, and no voices, but Pidge crept back upstairs without speaking.... She had failed. She had run away from her father, failing there; failing here. She must see this through alone a little longer.... The next afternoon Rufe called for her at _The Public Square_. His eyes held a glint of triumph.

“I’m going to France,” he said, when they were in the street. “I’ve arranged to do a big feature for Redge Walters and a Sunday newspaper syndicate set.”

“But how about the draft?”

“Went down to Washington to start things going to fix that. Redge gave me letters. Looks as if there won’t be much trouble. You see, the Government needs the writers--public sentiment, you know.”

It wasn’t that Pidge didn’t think of things to say on this point of making public sentiment, but a great gray ennui was over her. She had said enough about his faults.

“You know, I’ve been smothering in Harrow Street--had to get away,” he added.

“Yes, I know, Rufe.” After a time, she said, “I think it’s a good thing.”

“That’s the way to look at it, Pan,” he said in a relieved voice, and 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.”