Part 3

Fanny lived her brief hour to the full, and Pidge Musser suffered and revolted for two. Pidge took the dreary monotone of talk into her soul, as she had taken her father’s, knowing that one day she would be full.

“Oh, you Musser,” Fanny would say. “Why don’t you come over to Foley Street?... You’re dryin’ up, Redhead. What do you do nights? What do you do all the time, thinkin’ and listnin’?... Where’s your fulluh, Redhead? Ain’t got one--wot? Little liar. You’re bad, you are, because you’re so still.... Come on over to Foley Street to-night. I’ll let you have a peep at Albert, m’li’l barber--just one peep, Redhead--not too close. I ain’t sure of him yet, but I’ll let you have one look--aw come on!”

So it was through the hours, pasting apricot labels, lobster, asparagus, pimento, peach, and codfish labels. More and more Fanny’s boys and men folded into one, whose name was Albert.

“I’m gettin’ him goin’--goin’, goin’. Psst! an’ he comes!” Fanny would say. “But I wouldn’t trust him to you, Musser--not longer than a hairpin, dam’ little party, you.”

* * * * *

Miss Claes was observing with some concern the result of her suggestion to Pidge, not to let the young editor know the _Lance_ was hers.

“If it hadn’t been for my tampering, she would have heard about her book before this,” she said to Nagar. “Pidge looked so young, I felt it would prejudice Mr. Cobden against her work. He’s fascinated with Harrow Street, but seems to have no time or thought for a romance of eighteenth-century France! Yet he would have put through her book in a week, if he knew, seeing the story with the same eyes he sees the author.”

“And she doesn’t tell him?”

“No. That’s our Pidge, Nagar. I even suggested that I would speak to him--let the truth slip out. She caught me in her hands, those hard little hands, strong as a peasant’s, ‘Not for worlds, Miss Claes!’ she breathed, and there was a patch of white intensity across her upper lip, ‘Not for worlds!’”

“... Of course, I mean to write,” Pidge had granted to Dicky in the very beginning. “I’ve always meant to write, since the day I learned that print wasn’t done above the clouds somehow, like Moses’ tablets, and had to be written all out first by human beings. But I’m not ready to begin----” and she silently added the word “again” for her own composure.

“But they tell me on my floor when you first came, you hammered a typemill day and night. Was it commercial work?” Dicky asked.

“It was _not_,” said Pidge, with such emphasis that she felt her secret endangered again and hastened to add, “That was before I started to work in the factory. Likely they heard Nagar’s machine part of the time.”

“But you seem to know yarns--like one who works with them--tries to do them, I mean,” he remarked.

Her face was flushed. Evasion irritated and diminished her. She coldly explained her father’s professional interest in the short story.

“He isn’t an artist, but he teaches how, you know,” she finished.

Dicky pondered long on how much Pidge meant by this. He had been brought up to revere his parents. Surely, he thought, she must know that one can’t be taught except by life itself to do a real story.

One rainy Sunday forenoon in February, they were sitting together in his “parlor,” the front of his two rooms on the second floor. This room opened through a single door to the main hall, and through folding doors to his sleeping quarters. Dicky had brought some few additional furnishings from his mother’s house in East Fiftieth Street. The place made Pidge feel uncomfortable, but Miss Claes’ basement front was often in use and subject to constant interruption.

“I want to read you something I’ve brought from the office,” Dicky said. “I’m not saying a word--until afterward.”

It was a little story called _Dr. Filter_, by an unknown young man, named Rufus Melton. It had come to _The Public Square_ among the unsolicited manuscripts. Pidge listened with extraordinary restlessness. She seemed to know so much about this story, its processes and the thing it told, that her mind was unpleasantly crowded. It wasn’t a matter of like or dislike. _Dr. Filter_ was here in the world, a live thing. It had to be met and dealt with.

“Not more than once a year, one comes in as live as this,” Dicky said. “Yet it’s like something from a different world from Nagar’s Little Man story.”

“It isn’t whether you like _Dr. Filter_, or not, but you can’t get away from it--like a relative who comes to live in your house,” said Pidge.

“That’s a center shot,” Dicky thoughtfully remarked.

She found herself asking about Rufus Melton. Dicky didn’t know much, but was intensely pleased over her reaction to his latest artistic find.... Pidge never lacked opinions, even verdicts, nor the energy to express them when Dicky was around. They forgot Rufus Melton, and out-generaled time in discussing Miss Claes.

“Every little while as she talks, I feel as if I were going through a tunnel,” he said. “Of course, I admire her, and all that, but sometimes I can’t help asking myself, like the others, if she is really right----”

“The more ignorant one is, the more crazy he thinks Miss Claes,” Pidge observed.

“Another bull’s-eye. Wait till I set up the target again, Pidge. But is it because she’s Hindu--that she’s so different?”

“She isn’t Hindu. She’s English.”

“I asked her.”

“So did I.”

“She’ll have to referee this herself,” Dicky hastily put in.

Then they were silent awhile, until Pidge said:

“Maybe I heard her wrong. I’m sure she’s had a lot of Hindu training. But that’s not what draws me to her. It’s because she’s not taking it out in talk. She knows about plumbing and cooking and streets and common things. Best of all, she pays her bills!”

But Dicky, who had never known other than financial ease and financial integrity, was more interested in the other side of their landlady.

“Can one get books--on her sort of thing?” he asked.

“You’re always getting me into this lately,” Pidge complained. “I don’t like to talk about it. I floated up through zones of Hindu stuff from a child. Better leave it alone, Dicky. Stay in your head--stay down.”

“What do you mean, ‘Stay in your head,’ please?”

“Any one who amounts to anything stays in his head. He’s not complicated by _souls_. All the comfortable, solid world calls you absurd for what you say and the way you look, when this Eastern stuff starts you going. You get so absorbed that you lose all touch with things down here, the things you are really here to do. You stop making money and go around saying the Lord will provide. You don’t really let Him, you let other people support you and call it God’s work. You call yourself the Elect, and yet you can’t do the things that average people do. Mainly, you talk. You stop work to talk. You settle heaven and God and the soul with talk!... Oh, Dicky, that’s why I hate it all so; that’s why I’d rather be a factory girl; that’s why I’m all lame and tired about ‘ideals’ and ‘supermen’ and ‘abstractions’--because I’ve heard so much talk.... It’s the first thing I remember. Lying in the crib--I began to hear my father’s voice.”

“But you’ve got all this stuff, Pidge. That’s what makes you--makes you----”

“It is what makes me nothing! It is what keeps me from being an honest-to-God mill girl. It is what keeps me from everything that means something to other mill girls. It is what keeps me from taking life as I find it. It’s what spoils me from really knowing Miss Claes or Nagar--or what they are about--because so many words have been dinned into my ears before coming to New York.”

The hardest thing on Dicky these days was that Pidge had to work in a factory. This thought was never far from the central arena of his mind. It chafed and irked. There was very little of the philanderer in his breed. Mostly, the Cobdens had chosen their women carefully, after long, cool, studious courtship. Having decided, courted and married, nothing short of death could break in. Doubtless Dicky’s fidelity was as stable as that of his relatives, even though his heart had not turned so cautiously to his light of day. Pidge had risen in his heavens and possessed them like the rising sun. There were not two suns in his system.

He had meant to live lean down in Harrow Street, but his idea of that wasn’t native to the locality. His ramifications for keeping clean were considerable and very disturbing to Pidge Musser, who had been brought up in Southern California to wear a few white garments which she could wash herself. Washing was impossible in her room, and wasn’t at all easy in the hall below where Miss Claes had told her to get her water.

Dicky Cobden was the first _gentleman_ Pidge had ever known. She had met several boys with a streak of genius showing; boys who had come to her father to learn how to write and had taken away something, if not that. Practically all those boys had been “on a shoe string,” and trained to get along without many things that Cobden would have considered actual necessities, including an established routine of order and cleanliness in one’s person and quarters. Pidge had also met many of the “queer” ones of Hollywood and vicinity--men and women who ate this way and that, bathed this way and that, in running waters and still, in sea waters and rain waters, in mud and sunlight, using unctions and ointments, but they were bathing their souls.

Dicky Cobden bathed frequently, carefully, believing beyond cavil that New York and the processes of life grimed him on the outside, that life itself was a constant war against grime, requiring an ever accessible tub, much soap, hot water, changes of clothing, laundry bags, rugs, brushes. Not that Dicky gave any thought to this. It was as if he supposed everybody did the same. Since everybody didn’t and couldn’t; and since everybody didn’t have as much money to spend for bread and meat and tea, as Mr. Cobden did for laundry alone--Pidge was miserably rebellious.

Always as she sat in the presence of Dicky’s altogether thoughtless freshness; sat in her apple-butter colored wool dress which had contained the emotional hurl and thresh of the romantic _Lance_--always Miss Musser had a hard time to forget herself and was frequently on the verge of becoming defiant and bad-tempered for reasons he didn’t dream.

She suffered, because every evening almost, Dicky invited her out to dine, and not once in four times could she pass the frowning negatives of her own soul. He chose to regard her as superbly honest and unaffected. She really needed those dinners, too. All the future novels and heart throbs needed them. Occasionally she met him after dinner for a walk or a picture, and once she had been lured to an uptown theater. Just once--never again in the brown wool dress!

She felt, as she entered the theater lights that night, that she had been betrayed. She felt also like something Mr. Cobden had found in the street, or that she was helping him make good on a first of April bet. Pidge hadn’t been to more than three “talking shows” in all her nineteen years; to her a show house was a place of darkness, except the screen.

Alone in her room afterward that night, she made a great vow: that when the torrent of American dollars turned loose on her (as it was bound to some time) she would buy outright chests full of lingerie, cabinets of hats, shelves of shoes, and a book of orders for frocks to be delivered at future dates. She would keep clean then if a Santa Ana sandstorm settled on New York and lasted a year.

One raw and cold week-night, Pidge was about done up when she reached Harrow Street. She tried to slip softly past his hall door, but Dicky was there.

“Hard day?” he called.

“Yes,” she said, pushing on. “Everybody’s tired and cross the whole length of New York, like a sore spine.”

“You haven’t had dinner?”

“No, but I don’t think I’ll go out----”

“I’ve been waiting, Pidge. There’s a little place near, where I used to come from uptown, thinking it an excursion--just a neighbor of ours now, _The Hob and Hook_, where they make a stew like Dickens tells of in the old English inns--smoking in the pot for twenty-four hours; and there’s tea for tired folks, and no end of scones and honey----”

“Oh, please----” said Pidge. Then she added stubbornly, “No, I’m not going out again to-night.”

“It is a trifle wintry,” Dicky observed. “We’ll have supper here. I’ll go out and get an armful, and Nagar will make us a pot of tea. Oh, I say, Pidge, have a little thought of somebody else.”

She weakened. Alone upstairs a minute afterward, she lit the gas and stood before the mirror that waved.

“If I turned loose just once and ate all I wanted, he’d never speak to me again!”

VII

“THE FREEDOM OF IGNORANCE”

PIDGE was gone from Harrow Street from seven in the morning to seven at night. She had been absolutely blurred with fatigue at the end of the first days, but her hands were hardening, her back adjusting to the monotonous work at the big pasting table. She was actually learning like the other girls the trick of sinking into a sort of coma for an hour or more at a time. Sometimes (as one under the influence of a prying drug, which opens scenes, as from a past life) she would remember the palisades of Santa Monica, the ocean pressing its white fringes up against the gray sand; tirelessly pressing again and again, but never leaving its white lines of foam, unless the water was sick from the big sewer of El Segundo. Rarely a sail on that great sunny bay, but many wings--pelicans, sandpipers, gulls in hundreds, feeding out beyond the surf lines, or gathered in conference on the beaten sand--three strange and ancient bird types, gathered together in one vast audience facing the sea.

This was but one of her pictures. Other times she roamed the canyons, Santa Monica and Topango, and the cheerful and solitary mesas.... “Yes, that same creature--Pan Musser,” she once said, half aloud.... Then she would think of New York and Miss Claes and Richard Cobden; of the book she had actually written, and pretty nearly died for, the book around which there was a conspiracy of silence. In spite of the coma at the pasting table, and the moments of memory drift, the stimulated laughter in the washroom, or in the half hour for lunch as they heated their tea pails over the radiators at noon; in spite of the clatter of tins passing from left to right around the big table, and the tireless goading of Fanny Gallup’s cheerful boy-talk--the brown wool dress contained plentiful hells of the human heart.... And to-morrow would be Thursday, the next day Friday, the next day Saturday, and then sleep, and this was also New York.

The first Sunday afternoon of March was the afternoon of the new frock, a cheap little one-piece dress, bought on Seventh Avenue, neither wool nor brown. It had a tissuey and boxy smell. It was rapturously, adventurously new. Pidge had an omen as she put it on, that this was a sort of hour of all her life, that never another frock would mean quite the same. She was alone with Miss Claes when Dicky Cobden came for her at six, according to a plan made early in the week. They were to cross to Staten Island and find an old Georgian mammy, whom he knew, somewhere back of Stapleton on the wet roads, a mammy who could cook chicken and beaten biscuit.

Dicky seemed only to see her face. A great wonderment came up in Pidge’s heart, not disappointment exactly, but a sort of soul-deep wonder, that Dicky didn’t appear to see the new frock. Could it be possible that a man who managed the details of his own attire with such practiced art had never known what she suffered in the brown wool dress, in all that tragedy of shabbiness and dirt? Had he really not felt ashamed of her that night under the lights in the uptown theater? He turned to her now:

“You won’t mind, Pidge, just a moment or two, if I speak of a little matter to Miss Claes. Oh, I don’t mean for you to leave; in fact, I’d rather not. It is just a report about a long story that should have been made before.”

Then out of the inmost heart of innocence, Pidge was jerked with a crush. Before his next words she realized what she must face; she, sitting aside from them in the new frock.

“... About that book manuscript,” Dicky went on. “I have ordered it sent back to you, Miss Claes--doubtless it will be in the post to-morrow. I have read it, and John Higgins has read it. We’re both agreed on this particular manuscript--that it isn’t for _The Public Square_.”

Pidge stared at him like a child being whipped for the first time. All that was left of the meaning of the book in her own body and mind, and all hope concerning it, had suddenly been put to death. But the rest of her remained alive in a stupor of suffering; her eyes stared. She saw Richard Cobden as never before, saw him as a workman; as they saw him in the office. This was a bit of week-day that he was showing now, sincerely speaking to Miss Claes, having at length done the best he could in regard to the task which she had imposed.

“The thing is _young_, Miss Claes,” he went on. “There is fling and fire to it, but its freedom is the freedom of ignorance. This love and this sort of man-stuff would only do for the great unsophisticated. I’m not saying that some publisher couldn’t take hold of it and make a go. In fact, I’ve seen stuff like it in covers mount up to big sales, but the human male isn’t handled in it, Miss Claes. This is sort of a young girl’s dream of what men are. They drink and fight and love and die and all that, but----”

“There, there, Mr. Cobden. Don’t try so hard,” Miss Claes said laughingly. “I’m sure you’ve given the book its chance.”

But Dicky meant to finish his report.

“That’s just the point,” he said; “its chance with _The Public Square_ is all I’m talking about. This is a shopgirl’s book, and there are myriads of shopgirls. _The Public Square_ would like to have their patronage; yet one pays a price for that. John Higgins--this is the best thing that can be said about one of the best men I’ve known--John Higgins has never yet consented to pay that price.”

Pidge Musser found her head turning from side to side as one who tries to find in which neck muscle a troubling lameness lies. She stopped that. She glanced up at Cobden, who was pressing on his left glove with his bare right hand. Before she turned, she realized that Miss Claes’ eyes were waiting for hers. It wasn’t pity she saw in them, nor friendship, nor loyalty, nor laughter; it was something of each of these, yet something more. Only one word in English even suggests the thing that was pouring upon her through Miss Claes’ eyes--and that word is _compassion_.

Its power could not find her heart with its healing, but it seemed to gather around like a cloak, waiting for entrance. Pidge wanted to be alone with Miss Claes now. The ache was so deep that she felt it would be worth a life if she could go into Miss Claes’ arms and break. That was it, an utter break was the only thing that could ease this pain. Then she became aware of Cobden standing at her side. In a moment he would speak. She did not wait for the moment, but arose.

“Shall we start down toward the ferry?” she asked.

“Yes, all ready, Pidge.”

In the silence that followed, Dicky did not seem to notice anything wrong. At the door Miss Claes’ hand raised and hovered above Pidge’s shoulder, but did not touch. Pidge was grateful for that.

VIII

SOMEBODY’S SHOULDER

IT was early April, a dark and rainy afternoon. Pidge had been in the tin factory three months. For four weeks the manuscript of the _Lance_ had lain in the bureau drawer of the little upper room in Harrow Street, not being given a second submittal. The secret was still kept. Richard Cobden had not spoken of the story since his report that Sunday afternoon to Miss Claes. There seemed an astonishing cruelty in the fact that he could forget. He had spoken of everything else....

Pidge had just left the factory and was running in her rubbers through the blur of rain toward a downtown subway entrance. A sort of mocking laughter was in her ears, “and this is New York,” the burden of it. In the dim light of the passage down into the tube she saw the gray gleaming patches of wear on the steel steps, slippery now from the rain. There was a shudder and gasp from a girl beside her; a parting of the hurrying ones ahead to avoid clotted pools of blood on two or three steps below.

Farther down in the area, a man lay propped in the arms of a stranger. His face was very white. A few minutes before he had been hurrying down those steel steps that the rain had made slippery--hurrying perhaps in the same confusion of fatigue and hunger that she had known.... A pause had come to him from all that hurry. His white face was more peaceful than any of the bystanders. A hospital ambulance clanged above, as she lingered. Attendants came down with the stretcher. The body of the unconscious man was swept up by one of the swift city brooms. The stream of ticket buyers filed on as before, the downtown express crashed in.

Pidge sat in her cane seat. The main crowd of the city was coming uptown at this hour. At least, she was spared that packing. She breathed the dense tired air, and recalled that on a night or two before she had slipped on the steel stairs, but had not fallen. It was borne upon her that in some way this man had fallen for her, fallen for every one who saw him or the puddles of blood he left. Every one had walked more carefully afterward, reaching for the rails. And he had lost the sense of hurry--that unmitigated madness which drove them all from dawn to dark.

Her old wonder of New York came back, as she thought that she was being flashed fifty miles an hour from the junction at Ninety-sixth Street down to Forty-second Street, under the busiest streets and corners of America. Mere men could manage much. Then the old agony stole in--“the freedom of ignorance.” Surely no one had ever been punished for doing a book as she had been punished: that it was so poor, as to prove a temptation for John Higgins to publish it, because of its chance of falling exactly into the fancy of these--the myriad of shopgirls in the uptown locals and expresses, crashing by in thick ropes of white light. As for the public taste, Dicky Cobden had told her that John Higgins had confessed, speaking wearily and with a smile that had lost its sting of reproach, that for thirty years he had been choosing stories for people to read, and every year he had been forced to lower his estimate as to what the public taste was. Even so, John Higgins had said he was far from the level; that only a trade mind could get stories banal enough. But hers might interest that public.

She was so tired.... For somebody’s shoulder to lean against! Pidge knew what Fanny Gallup felt, what the other factory girls felt, when they pushed out so brazenly toward men--in very clumsiness from hard pressure, spoiling their chances of being treated on the square. Yes, she was really learning what the girls felt, as they hunted their own in the masses of men they passed--how tired, hungry, blurred, unsatisfied their hearts--anything to escape the withering grind of the mills and the counters and the shops. She knew the secret bloom they felt, the terrible brief drive of it--childhood, girlhood and youth, all passing like the uptown trains--a home, a man, a child of their own, the one chance for a breath of life. Of course, they talked of nothing else, in the closets and dressing rooms, in the cars and streets; and read nothing else. Certainly their dreams had to come true in books and plays, even if they didn’t in life. Life would break the dream soon enough. The best life could do didn’t compare with the lowliest dream; for the dream of a girl has glamour, and the life of a woman is stripped. But that was no reason why books and plays should tear off the glamour ahead of time.