Part 2

“We’ll make a little omelet with a few flakes of fish in it. I’m sure she isn’t getting any money from her father, but she has kept up her rent in advance. Did she work all night?”

“Her room was quiet after two, until I came down. Then I heard her typewriter as I swept the upper hall.”

“It seems to be a race, Nagar, between the child and her book--which will finish the other? I love her spirit, but she isn’t taking care of herself.... Yes, we’ll put in these asparagus tips.... I think Mr. Musser believes that the world owes him a living, but finds it hard to collect, sometimes, with only metaphysics to offer. And now Pidge has flung herself to the opposite extreme; talks of earning her living in a factory, when her book is done. She’s a living protest against talking and not doing. We must be very good to her, Nagar.”

Miss Claes brought a little creamy porcelain urn, and held it for him to fill with coffee from the larger pot. Nagar held the door open for her into the basement hall. A moment later on the top floor, she tapped at the second last door on the left. Pidge sat at her machine under the gaslight beyond the head of the cot.

“I can’t make their swords play!” she moaned. “All my swords are stiff as shinny sticks. The trouble is, I don’t know men, Miss Claes--not red animal men like they should be in this story. I know pussy men. I know pious men, salvey and wormy men, monks and mummies and monsters, but I don’t know honest-to-God _men_! Here they are taunting each other as they stab, and their talk sounds--like Shakespeare! Oh, dear, you’ve brought me more coffee and eats!”

“I won’t touch your papers, Pidge, but if you take them off the cot, I’ll put the tray between us. I haven’t had breakfast.”

Pidge turned the roller of her typemill down so that the most recent literary revelation might not appear to a roving eye. Then she crisscrossed different packages of manuscript, placed the mass face down before the waving glass, and moved the oil stove aside so she could pass to her place on the cot.

“You always forget to bring your coffeepot down to the range, Pidge----”

The girl turned back to her typemachine. “He’s a jealous old devil when I leave the room,” she said. “I think the person who rented him before I did addressed envelopes all day--kept cranking him back and forth against time. Now I ride a little ways--then let him stop and browse. We ramble----”

Pidge stopped. Her eyes looked dry and smarting, as if tears were on the verge.

“Oh, Miss Claes,” she went on, “I’m just as crazy as that--I mean my figures of speech! Cranking him back and forth, and in the same breath letting him stop and browse. I wish you wouldn’t bring me this stuff any more. The coffee’s so good that it hurts--and the eggs. I always cry when I’m hurt.”

“But, Pidge, think what a privilege it is for me to climb from the heart of New York to eighteenth-century France, and not leave the house----”

“But you find a twisted cubist sort of France--part Dumas, part Mexican Plaza, Los Angeles, and the rest _me_!”

“At least, you’re not carried away with the idea that it’s perfect.”

Pidge regarded the other’s face closely. She could see with uncanny clearness in this little dark room where she had struggled night and day for nearly three months; but what she saw now, or was looking for, she hardly knew herself. Her own face was spooky from sleepless strain.

“I’m eating shamelessly,” she said.

A moment later, she pointed to the rear wall, and whispered the question:

“Has Nagar stopped writing? I haven’t raced typewriters with him lately.”

“He hasn’t spoken of changing his work. Did you hear that New York has touched him with her magic?” Miss Claes asked.

“What do you mean?”

“He has sold a story--a short story for two hundred dollars to _The Public Square_.”

“Nagar--your servant?”

“He isn’t my servant, Pidge. He just lives here and works with me.”

There was a clicking dryness to the girl’s tongue, as she asked:

“And now is he going away? You said they always do when they strike it rich.”

“Oh, no. Nagar wouldn’t leave for a little story success. But nobody quite knows Nagar--nobody.”

* * * * *

Pidge was alone. _The Lance of the Rivernais_ was pricking at her to get back to work, but she resisted for a few minutes, thinking of Miss Claes.

“... She may be crazy, but she’s good to look at,” she muttered. “I believe she can look into me, too.... I wonder what she is?... She may be crazy, but she’s kind! And, oh, I’m so tired,” she yawned a moment later. “I’d like--I’d like to be a leaf in the park under the snow--still snowing, and sleep till spring. Only I’d like some roast turkey first.”

The recent breakfast had an extraordinary flavor, but it was all too dainty for one who had eaten little or nothing since yesterday morning. Her mind trailed off to buns she had seen in bakery windows; and delicatessen stores with opened sausages, big as one’s head and colored like tapestries, and little brown birds and deviled eggs, and sliced filets of fish of amazing tint.

All meats had been anathema in the house of Mr. Adolph Musser. Pidge had lived in no other house in all her years, before coming to New York, but since then, she had shocked her young self through various experiments among the fleshpots of Greenwich. Not so various, for the narrowness of her purse was ever a limp fact, but these few flavory adventures were exciting and memorable. There was a tap of a finger nail upon the panel.

“A letter, Miss Musser,” Nagar said.

She looked at the Hindu with different eyes from ever before. He had sold a story. She wanted to speak of it, wanted to sit before him and listen--this anomaly, whose typewriter she had sometimes heard through the partition, and rarely a low deep hum. She was prejudiced against Hindus, because her father had affected such a knowledge of them, but somehow she had been less lonely in New York because of this one. He was embodied Detachment and Impersonality.... He had turned away.

“Thanks, Nagar,” she called.

The letter was a typewriter bill.

IV

LAMBILL KNOCKS

INSIDE the moonlit castle gardens, across the moat into the pictured halls, up the marble staircase, driving straight and true, Lambill Courtenay, a man of the people--artist, swordsman, lover virgin-hearted, rode--no, ran, for once on his sprightly feet, straight to a sequestered wing of the ancient and noble castle of the Rivernais, and with his ungloved hand touched the knocker of its inner sanctuary.

“Who is there?” came the cry like the thin note of violins.

“I----” swelled the deep orchestral answer of Lambill Courtenay, Frenchiest of the French.

Then the great oaken door from the forests of Savoie opened. Lambill crossed the threshold. The white arms of Madelaine Rivernais opened and the heavens opened also--for the great maze of life had been untangled for these two--and Pidge Musser’s book was done.

Just a book--one of the myriads that you see lying around, like sloughed snake skins on first or secondhand bookshelves--but it had been properly wept on and starved for and toiled over, as only youth in its abandonment can toil for its own ends. It had almost been prayed for, but not quite. Prayer wasn’t easy for Pidge Musser’s defiant soul.

It was two in the morning. The oil stove smelled as if it were dying. Of late the wick had hiked up out of the oil a little earlier each night like a waxing moon, and Pidge had been forced to shake the oil around to keep the flame. Miss Claes and Nagar did so much for her, she was ashamed; and you could get a red apple for the price of a wick.

Pidge coughed. It was the most astonishing and cavernous bark. The silence afterward was painful. She fancied she was keeping _him_ awake--the silent, dark and courteous Nagar, who did prodigies of work every day and was always willing to do more, and who had come into Pidge’s direct limelight since his sale of a story to _The Public Square_. Pidge hadn’t known a cold for years. It actually amazed her, how unclean it made her feel, and ashamed to have anybody come near.

“I’m going to watch over you very closely, Pidge--you’ll have to let me, now that the book is done,” Miss Claes said in the morning, “because it’s really a shock to stop work after the way you have carried on. The drive--suddenly stopping, you know.”

“I wonder how she knows?” Pidge thought to herself for the thousandth time in regard to the subtle capacities of Miss Claes.

“I’m tough,” she said aloud.

“That is a true saying, Pidge. On that, everything hinges. Am I to hear the story?”

“It would--it must be read aloud. It’s terrible to ask, but will you?”

“I’ve wanted to hear it from the beginning. Now tell me, would you like Nagar to listen, too?”

“Oh, no!”

“Just as you like. Only you’re offering it to the world later----”

“But Nagar _knows_.”

“That’s what you want, isn’t it?”

“Oh, yes, but----”

“He won’t say a word. Nagar rarely talks, except to answer questions. But, of course, don’t think of it, if you’d rather not.”

“What is Nagar?” Pidge asked suddenly.

“Just a watcher and listener in America, learning to see things impersonally.”

Pidge contemplated the idea for a few seconds; then her eyes hardened. “I’ve heard lots of talk about the impersonal--oh, talk to the skies about the impersonal life in Los Angeles--by people who haven’t yet got a personality!”

Miss Claes bent in low laughter.

“They start in killing out personality before they get a live one,” Pidge added sullenly.

“They do, my dear, but have you heard any words about the impersonal life from Nagar?”

“No. That’s the best thing about him--that he doesn’t explain himself. But I hate mysteries about Hindus--hate people moving about saying, ‘Shh-sh’--finger on their lips, trying to astonish you with something they can’t tell. I’m so tired of all that!”

“Still you asked me about Nagar, though really there is nothing to say, except that he is good to have in the house.”

“I think I’ll let him come and hear the reading, if he’s willing.”

“Good,” said Miss Claes. “We will listen in this room, where the story came to be.”

* * * * *

... Nagar sat in a straight chair, in the aisle between the cot and the wall. Pidge sat by the window before her machine. Miss Claes lay on the cot with her head under the light that Pidge read by, and away they went. There was an hour or more in the early afternoon when both Miss Claes and her helper could escape from below, and two hours, at least, after nine in the evening--this for three days.

Pidge was fagged and ill and frightfully scared. She would begin hoarsely, and for pages in each reading her cold in the head was an obstruction hard to pass; besides, she felt she was boring them horribly and that all the massed effects of her pages dithered away into nothing or worse. But a moment came in each of the six sessions, when the last monster of the mind’s outer darkness was passed. And then, for Pidge, at least, knighthood rose resplendent; days became stately, indeed, and chivalry bloomed again. At such times the dark gleaming hair of Miss Claes--which Pidge could have touched with her hand, became the tresses of Madelaine Rivernais herself, and a little back to the right in the deep shadows, the face of the Easterner there took on the magic and glamour of Lambill’s own. The vineyards of old France stretched beyond from their balcony; the rivers of France flowed below. The lance of the Rivernais was won back heroically and human hearts opened to the drama of love and life.

But on the last night of the reading, after the self-consciousness was passed and all was going well, Pidge, glancing down to Miss Claes’ head under the light, saw gray for the first time, in the depths of her hair. It hadn’t been combed with any purpose of hiding. The outer strands were coal black, the strands beneath had turned. This discovery had the peculiar effect of changing everything around in Pidge’s mind in the moments that followed.

She couldn’t get into the story as before; and in the very last pages of her reading, a face persistently crowded in between her mind’s eye and the rapid flow of the story at its end--a long, humorless complacent face--the high-browed, self-willed and self-thrilled face of her father. It was as if he were reading and not herself; reading with rising expectation, drinking in the silent praise, as if he had done the writing himself and loved it well. So effectually was Pidge mastered by this apparition of her own mind, that the last pages of the manuscript were spoiled entirely. The light had gone out of her and she said hastily, as the final page was turned down:

“I know how kind you are, but please don’t try to tell me anything to-night. Not a word, please!”

There was something in Nagar’s smile as he turned and went out that she knew she would remember again.

“I quite understand,” said Miss Claes, when they were alone. “But say, Pidge, I do want to say this. To-morrow afternoon, Mr. Richard Cobden, an editor of _The Public Square_, is coming here to see Nagar. He is the one who put through Nagar’s story. We’re to have tea at four. You’ll come down, won’t you?”

“Why, yes, of course.”

“It might be arranged for Mr. Cobden to look at your book. Would you like that?”

“Ye-es.”

“Do you mind if I suggest something?”

“Please,” said Pidge.

“Don’t let Mr. Cobden know, just yet, that you are the one who has written the story. Write a new title-page without the name of the author.”

“All right, but----”

“It’s because you look like such a child, Pidge. No one would be able to see all that’s in your story--if they saw what a child you are!”

“I’ll do as you say. Thank you, but, Miss Claes----”

“Yes?”

“To-night under the light, I saw your hair--underneath!”

“Yes?”

“It made me see everything differently for a minute. You know I hate cults and everything that apes India and talks about saving the world; everybody talking about their souls, but doing the same old secret selfish things--oh, I’ve almost died of talk about all that--but for a minute, to-night under the lamp, it seemed that you knew, but had come down to brass tacks--your feet on the ground--living like the rest of us, but not ‘falling for’ love or money or fame, as we are. Are you really through talking about service--just doing it?”

Miss Claes laughed. “Such a lot of words, Pidge--about some gray hair.”

Pidge was intensely serious. “Are you English?” she began again.

“Yes.”

“I know you’ve been in India. Miss Claes--are you really farther along than I thought? Are you trying for that impersonal thing--trying to belong to everybody--to enter the stream of humanity, as they call it?”

“Of course, I’m trying, Pidge.”

“You and Nagar working together?”

“Yes, but you and I are working together, too.”

Pidge was not to be turned aside by generalities.

“You--down here in lower New York--keeping a rooming house?”

“Why not?”

“Nothing--only it’s so big, so unexpected. I’ve always believed ’way down deep that a real person wouldn’t be long-haired or barefooted or pious, but lost in the crowd something like that--quietly efficient, moving here and there among people unannounced, only a few ever dreaming! Oh, it’s too, too big!”

“Don’t try to believe anything, Pidge.”

“I’ve been spoiled for believing anything, by so much talk!”

“Don’t try to settle things ahead of time,” Miss Claes repeated laughingly. “Let the days--each day tell its story. I’m just living out life as you are.... And now undress and get into bed. I know you’re too tired to sleep, but I’m going to fix you in and open your window and put out your light, and sit with you for a minute, perhaps in the dark. You’re just to rest--a tired little girl--and not even hear me go away.”

V

LUNCHEON AT SHARPE’S

RICHARD COBDEN and John Higgins were lunching at Sharpe’s Chop House. It was one-thirty, and at the height of the day’s business. The tables were packed close.

“You were telling me about that Asiatic landlady down in the Village,” Higgins said, lifting his spectacles to wipe his red-rimmed eyes.

“I wasn’t telling you much,” said Dicky. “She’s too deep for me--looks to thrive on coffee and cigarettes--eyes that have seen too much, a lot of laughter in them, but no hope.... And what would you think of a basement room, with flowers in winter and a fireplace with hickory embers, a Byzantine jar in the corner and a cabinet of porcelain which I haven’t seen the like of on this side?”

“Go on--don’t mind me,” said John Higgins.

“... Little old Harrow Street,” Dicky mused. “Harrow Street curves, you know. There is quite a mass of rooming houses on each side, and number Fifty-four, with a green front, is Miss Claes’ house. And our Mr. Naidu works there with his hands; only they call him Nagar in that house--spelled with an ‘a’ but pronounced ‘nog.’... By the way, he told me twice, yesterday, that it isn’t a fiction story we’ve bought, but a handling of things that actually happened in Africa--Little Man an actual human being named Gandhi or something of the sort.”

“Can’t be done. Fiction and life are different,” said John Higgins.

Dicky resumed: “Some of Miss Claes’ lodgers happened in for the tea party. No one barred apparently. I must have seen most of the houseful: couple of girl-pals; one works in a restaurant to support the other who is to become a prima donna; a couple of decayed vaudeville artists looking for a legacy--a regular houseful, but I don’t believe all of them pay, as they would have to in other houses.”

“Landlady supports those who can’t?”

“That’s the way I see it. The green front in Harrow Street took hold of me. I must have stayed over two hours. Our Mr. Naidu made some coffee to go with that cabinet of porcelain. Also there was a little girl--from Los Angeles, I think they said--red head, brown wool dress and eyes of a blue you see on illumined vellum out of Italy----”

“Some cerulean,” said John Higgins.

“They weren’t large, particularly,” Dicky went on at his literary best, “but that extraordinary blue like the ocean. Ruffled on top, but calm and still in the depth! Never saw such eyes. They come back to me now----”

“They do to me, Dicky.”

“You’re not getting all I mean, John. Uptown here, we think we’re the center of the world, the heart of New York yanking up toward the Park--but down there those old rooming houses are filling up with the boys and girls from all the States west, and the second growths from the families of European immigrants--filling up because they are cheap, with the boys and girls who will do the surgery ten years from now, and the painting and writing and acting----”

“I’ve heard about all that,” said John Higgins. “You’ll do a big story yourself one day.”

“I’m not so sure of it, since yesterday. I couldn’t take their chances. I couldn’t sit down and do a novel and not know how I was going to eat my way through. I couldn’t scrub tenement-house floors for the privilege of writing a book.... Oh, I love books all right. I rise up and yell when a big short story comes in the office, or breaks out anywhere. I think I know a real one, but a man’s got to do a whole lot of appreciating before he gets to doing. I’m not bred somehow as those people are. I’m the first of the Cobdens to break out of trade. They call _me_ a dreamer, my people do--yet compared to those boys and girls in Harrow Street, I’m a basket of fish with only a wiggle at the bottom----”

“Get out,” said John Higgins. “The first thing you know, you’ll be going down there again.”

“I will,” said Dicky. “I’m going down there to live.”

“Eh?”

The younger man nodded seriously. “They’re crazy, perhaps, but I’m convinced from yesterday of one thing: One can’t be sane as I am, and ever find the Big Story, much less write it.”

“Therefore the first thing to do is to go insane.”

“It isn’t like that,” Dicky said gently. “I’ve been brought up to think I know New York, belong and breathe in New York. You see, my family has lived here a hundred years. But yesterday I saw New York for the first time. She isn’t an old Dutch frump, as we thought, John. She’s a damsel! She’s a new moon----”

“Blue eyes?” said John Higgins.

“No, that’s the little girl from Los Angeles. It’s the landlady, of course, who’s the spirit of the place. I figured out afterward that it was because she was there that I liked everybody and had a good time. Wouldn’t be surprised to hear she was a priestess of some sort. I asked if she were Hindu, and she said ‘Yes,’ but she talks as if she were out of an English convent. Of course, most of her lodgers don’t get her. One old actor, out of a job, leaned across the table to me yesterday when Miss Claes left the room. He tapped his forehead, whispering, ‘Lovely, eh, but got the Ophelias.’”

“Is she young?” John Higgins asked presently.

“Moreover,” Dicky added, lost in thought, “I believe Miss Claes knows that they think her cracked and doesn’t mind.... Young? Say, I don’t know, John. You don’t think of her with years, somehow--rather as one who has reached the top of herself and decided to stay there.”

John Higgins leaned back, drained his coffee cup and stared with eyes that smarted at the steaming ceiling. “Is Naidu going to do us another story?”

“We didn’t get to that, but they gave me a novel manuscript to read.”

“His?”

“No, I didn’t get it straight whose it was. Miss Claes handed it over, suggesting I look at it for a serial. Some one in the house had written it or left it there.”

“We’d better be going back to the office. Have you read into the novel?”

“Started, but didn’t get really going. It’s back-age France stuff, and I was a little lost last night on the subject of 54 Harrow Street.”

“You’re a little lost yet, Dicky, I should say--for a Cobden.... So you’re going to lead a double life? Rich young New Yorker, quarters in Fiftieth Street under the eaves of St. Patrick’s, vanishing into life down in Greenwich.”

Dicky’s eyes were keen with memory.

VI

ENTER, FANNY GALLUP

_THE Lance of the Rivernais_ had been in the editorial rooms of _The Public Square_ for almost a month, but there had been no report; not the slightest mention, in fact, though author and editor were frequently together. Richard Cobden had come to 54 Harrow Street to live for the larger part of each week. Pidge had gone to work in a tin-can factory up Lenox way, pasting labels. She was half sick from fatigue from the new work and from keeping the secret about her book. In the days that followed the finishing of the _Lance_, it was as if her whole body and brain had been a scaffold or matrix for the story, and it had been taken from her, leaving a galvanism useless as an eggshell, a sort of afterbirth that persisted in staying alive.

... There was Fanny Gallup, who sat at her right, elbow to elbow at the pasting bench--Fanny of the intermittent pungencies of scent and the dreary muck of talk about boys and boys and boys. Fanny was a child and woman all in one, about Pidge’s age and size, one whom you could fancy had been a stringy street-kid a year or two ago. But just now, Fanny was in her brief bloom, red in her lips, a lift to her scant breast, the earth driving into her and overflowing with such color and fertility as it could.

For eight hours a day, Pidge dwelt in Fanny’s frequently tropical aura--hateful, yet marveling. The thing that amazed her was that Fanny loved life so, loved the feel of her own hands when she rubbed them together, loved the taste of sweets and the memory of last night’s kisses--loved fearlessly and without reserve, not a pang of dread for what was to come, nor a shudder of regret for what had happened to her mother or sisters or the other girls of Foley Street. Never a thought in Fanny’s head that she was being hoaxed by Nature; that her body was being livened and rounded, her face edged and tinted, for an inexorable purpose; not a suspicion that she was being played for, and must presently produce.