Part 5

This of Miss Claes’ was a house with a heart. This was her house. She could breathe in it now, at least, for a little. The numbness and dumbness of the factory had fallen away. The softness stole over her toward Fanny Gallup and the other girls who must still stay at the bench. She would never forget. She had earned an understanding of them, and had been released; _released_ was the word. But something would carry her back to them one day, something born in that slow madness of monotony.

She crossed the room and opened the door into the hall. Supper smells came up to her, the murmur of voices behind the shut doors. The prima donna person was singing, not practicing this time, but singing.... “One comes up through great tribulation to learn to sing,” Miss Claes had once said, “and others share it.”

The warmth stole into her from the halls. Everybody was hungry to-night, the spring hunger, and everybody celebrated, as a festival. April seemed breathing in the halls, too. April was breathing in herself; that was why she was awake to this outer delight. If she could only keep it. It would always be in externals, if she could only keep this springtime alive within. She laughed a little bitterly. Of course, she was elated because the factor had dropped away, because the new position had opened, because the check had come (though she felt something queer about that), because Richard Cobden and Miss Claes were fashioned of unswerving kindnesses, which she suddenly realized as never before.

“It’s money and place, and I’m ‘falling for’ it, venturing to be pleased with myself----” She laughed again. “But, oh, it is so cheerful, so restful to feel New York like this, just for to-night!”

XI

THE BABY CARRIAGE

PIDGE read manuscripts in the office of _The Public Square_. She saw them first. The large part of them were seen by no one else. It was like being a telephone girl in a way, dipping into the secrets of a thousand houses. But it was much more subtle than that; the secrets more soulful and revelatory. She saw the hopelessness of life. She saw love, hopelessly uninviting love--puppy love, and much of the “kidding” clever love that is made in America, and proud of itself for that. But over all, there seemed an anguish on the part of male and female, old and young, _to express_. Before her were secrets of those dying for expression; in her hands, the progeny. She loathed the desire everywhere, because she had the same desire herself.

Every one who wrote and submitted stories and manuscripts had a “front.” In the personal letters, accompanying their stories and articles and poems, they told matters about themselves which their manuscripts did not. They knew this one and that; they had influential friends who had said this and that about their writing. Parlorfuls of friends “had been quite carried away by the inclosed.”... Others hadn’t wanted to write. They had rebelled long; even as Saul, they had kicked against the pricks; but for the good of others, for the message it would carry to the world, they had given in at last and written their story which was inclosed.... “This is a true story,” one personal letter accompanying said.... “This story may be finished differently,” another wrote. “I have thought out a happy ending, if the public is not ready to stand this human one.”... Here was a sales manager who wrote his personal letter with a jovial laugh: “I have just tossed these few experiences into a story which my friends insist belongs to you.... I wouldn’t think of it, but I can’t help seeing what a rotten lot of stuff the magazines publish!”... This one had decided to write stories because she was a widow and had no other means of support, and had heard that writing was “the pleasantest of professions.”... And here was one who had sent in story after story to rejection for six years. “Some time I will win,” came the thin tired cry.

Pidge had fatigued her body in the mill. She tired her heart in the office of _The Public Square_, reaching Harrow Street with something in her breast all sore and shamed. This was the queer strenuous part--the shame of it all. She, too, had fallen into expressing herself, and they had been kind. Miss Claes had been kind and she knew. But Dicky Cobden and John Higgins had been kind, though they hadn’t known the author of the _Lance_. (They would never know.) They had said that the writer had the fine freedom of youth--“the freedom of ignorance.”

Pidge knew even better now what that meant. She saw the freedom of ignorance in the rape of many type machines.... The worst of it was, she herself wasn’t through. She knew the time would come when a new story would form within her, and begin its knocking for life.... And this was New York, the market place; and John Higgins sat near, and always he held his face nearer the manuscripts toward the end of the days, his eyes more tired and dim in the late hours....

“Miss Musser,” he called one afternoon at the end of the first month. “I wish you would go out and see what this Rufus Melton really has to say. We took a story of his some months ago. We had great hopes for him, but now he’s sent in a raft of junk. Kid stuff, this must be, he’s trying to work off. I don’t feel like seeing him right now.”

In the reception room, a young man arose to meet her, as she spoke the name, “Mr. Melton.” It was a face you would expect to see on one of the cars of Hollywood Boulevard, among the movie plants. There was a catch in Pidge’s throat as she said:

“Mr. Higgins asked me to tell you he was occupied, Mr. Melton. His report will go to you in a day or two.”

He was looking down at her, the young man who had written the little twisted fury of a tale called _Dr. Filter_, which Dicky had brought to Harrow Street for her to read. She sensed that he regarded her as an office girl, not as a reader. He couldn’t have been more than twenty-three or four. He knew that her words portended an evil fate for his present offerings. It was not hurt alone in his eyes, but rage, too.

Now Pidge’s mind whirled back to a pair of eyes in a baby carriage at Santa Monica; eyes of a male infant, said to be the handsomest of that locality where the hills and mesas break off abruptly for a sea wall. Large, still, steady blue-black eyes of an actor that had become calm because they were used to seeing faces wilt before them; long, curving coal-black lashes. Pidge hadn’t liked them in the infant; at least, they roused her unpleasantly somehow; and she didn’t like them now. The resemblance was deeper and more essential than that of family, but what held Pidge really was something she recognized, or fancied she did, something that had to do with being broke and threatened with hunger in New York. His clothing was fine, but had been long used. She had a positive divination for poverty.

Now his gaze was lost in her hair, as if he found hope there. Story failures and New York, fear, and its tough core of hunger, these amounted to one thing--but red hair was another. The astonishing part was the constant changing of expressions in his eye. They reflected every mood and whim of him, for one who could read; that is, when he forgot to veil them for purposes of his own. Just now he seemed to be wondering if he had better go any further with this red hair--if he had time to play. He didn’t seem to consider whether Pidge wanted to play or not, only whether the game were worth the while of one whose law was not to let any real chance slip. Pidge had forgotten the hurt of her message from John Higgins. She had a pronounced feeling that she wanted to hurt Melton some way herself....

“So I can’t see Mr. Higgins?”

“He’s been unusually rushed to-day.”

He laughed a little bitterly as if he understood all that. “Are you--are you his secretary?”

“No, an under reader.”

“I see. Have you been through any of my stuff?”

Pidge glanced at him resentfully; she felt he wouldn’t have asked such a question of a man.

“This is a sort of show-down with me,” he went on. “I’m leaving New York. I really hoped to see Mr. Higgins.”

His dilemma seemed real. It pulled her out from herself.

“I’m sorry----”

“Perhaps you--I’d have to know before to-morrow,” he said jerkily. “Perhaps you’d look at another story just finished? If you would read it--there is just a chance you might want to get it to Mr. Higgins before I go.”

“Have you the story with you?”

“No. I was hoping for good word from one of the others first. This new one is my last wallop. Might I bring it to you, anywhere you say, this evening?”

“You may leave it with Miss Claes at 54 Harrow Street.”

“Are you Miss Claes?”

“No, but she will give it to me.”

“Could I call later in the evening also, for your answer? It is only four or five thousand words.”

“You know, my reading is merely--I mean Mr. Higgins would have to decide.”

“But it would help--if the story pleased you--help to pass the night!”

“You may leave it with Miss Claes at the basement entrance and call a little later.”

Pidge found herself walking on tiptoe back to her desk, the catch still in her throat.

XII

UNDER THE SAME LAMP

THE manuscript was delivered while Pidge was out to supper. She took it upstairs to Cobden’s “parlor” and read with a nervous interest, and an uncomfortable feeling that Rufus Melton was looking down at her all the time. She didn’t lose herself in the story, but the feeling persisted that she might have done so, another time--especially if the manuscript had come to her in the usual way at the office. Certainly it was different and distinctive, compared to the run of the unsolicited. It was artful, if not art.... She heard Nagar’s quiet steady step as he passed up to his room. She had an impulse to ask him to read, but he wouldn’t say anything. Anyway, he was gone now.

This was a story of the Tunisian sands, written, she decided, by one who hadn’t been there; one who saw the desert as the average American reader would expect, but with additional flatfooted bits of color tramped down with audacity. Moonlight was different in Tunisia, and morals were different--freer than here. There was the glitter of the snake’s eye through the pages, for Pidge Musser. It made her think of a sick man in a gorgeous robe.

She had inferred from Melton’s talk that this story was new; in fact, that it was still hot from his machine. Yet the manuscript didn’t feel new; the front and back pages showed wear. Could she have misunderstood?... It had freedom; not the freedom of ignorance, but the freedom of a drifting ship. Its anchor dragged, its compass was uncentered. It cried out, “My God, I am free!” and it was, as a derelict is free.

At a quarter of ten, she heard the bell in the basement hall; heard Miss Claes directing Melton to the next floor. Pidge would not have had it this way, but people of the house were in the basement. He came up out of the dim stairway, walking wide, his soft cap crumpled in his hand, elbows out. He must have learned her name from Miss Claes.

“You mustn’t think, Miss Musser, that I don’t know how much I am asking--this favor of yours to-night.”

There was a sort of lift and draw to the way he took her hand; at the same time his shoulders and head bent down upon her. This thing that he was playing to-night was college boy--clumsy subtlety of a big boy coming home and greeting his sister--seeing in her, at the moment of greeting, something of the charm other boys might see. He walked around her under the light, laughing, apologizing, making a humorous picture of his own tension at _The Public Square_ that afternoon.

“I went there like an anarchist,” he laughed. “I was prepared to get my answer or blow up the place. I had to laugh afterwards the way I seized upon you.”

“I read the Tunis story,” she said. “Of course, you know it’s really unimportant what I think. I liked it well enough, but wasn’t carried away. I felt the color; in fact, color is the main asset of the story, but it seemed a bit thick----”

He laughed aloud. He was bending to her again, and most benignly, college big brother still in his manner and voice.

“I could tone that down, of course. The trouble is to get a thing like that straight, when you know that part of Africa as I do. I ought to have kept off Tunis, that’s the truth of it.”

“You have really been there?”

“That’s the worst of it, Miss Musser,” he laughed. “I went through hell for that story. Too much feeling to write with, you understand.”

Pidge was awed at her own error. She had been so convinced that the color was faked that she had judged the whole story on that basis.

“I’ve already asked too much of you. I’m sorry,” he added ingenuously. “One can’t force his things through this way. Why, I’d have given the whole six stories to _The Public Square_ for a hundred dollars, and taken the cheapening that comes to an author from a trick like that. That’s how I needed an answer.”

He had glanced up at the light as he spoke, a white, haggard smile, that bloodless look around the mouth. Pity caught and controlled her. She had done him an injustice already.

“You spoke of leaving New York for the west,” she said.

He laughed and shrugged, palms held upward.

“How far? I mean where is your home?”

He pointed to his cap lying on the arm of a chair, as if to say that were his home.

“I’ve got an aunt in Cleveland who wants me,” he added. “A little quiet house away out on one of the cross streets off Euclid, where there’s a room and eats and a place to write. I’ll start to walk, I guess.”

“Where are you staying in New York?”

He was laughing at her. “A little den up in Union Square--just a skylight. It’s a cell, Miss Musser, and even there, I have to stay out until midnight to sneak in without meeting the landlady.... Did you ever sleep in a room that had no window?”

“Mine has a window,” Pidge said.

“Then this isn’t yours?” He pointed to the closed folding doors of the inner room.

“Oh, no. Mine’s up higher, but it has a window. This is just a sitting room we sometimes use--Miss Claes and I--the lodger being away.”

“Oh,” he said queerly; then added with his haggard smile: “So the color was put on too thick--that’s too bad.”

“Does Mr. Higgins know that you have been over there in Tunis?” Pidge asked.

“I figured he would, but maybe he will decide, as you did, that I sat here in New York and stabbed at that setting.”

“I’ll place the story before him to-morrow. I could say to him that you’ve been to the desert----”

“Oh, I wouldn’t. Don’t tell him that. I was hoping, though, that you could tell him you liked it.”

Pidge now looked up into a smile almost childlike in its eager purpose.

“Couldn’t you tell him that? Couldn’t you tell him that--just for what others may find in the story?”

The catch was in her throat again. His hand rested lightly upon her shoulder; his smile was altogether disarming in its wistfulness. She thought he couldn’t mean what he said. She thought of the face in the baby carriage in Santa Monica; of this tortured child of whims and imaginations, in a room with no window, and the pallor around his mouth. She didn’t like any of it, but did not feel exactly separate from it. She thought of a little box upstairs in her own room, of the check her father had sent, which she had so far refused to cash. She was in a blur, her sense of belonging to Melton’s dilemma over all.

“You can’t mean for me to tell Mr. Higgins what I don’t believe,” she said. “I’ll ask him to read the story to-morrow. If he’s against it, I could--I might help you to pay for the room in Union Square, or--enough to get to Cleveland.”

Then the thing happened which she would have apprehended, except for her pity and personal involvement in his trouble. She was drawn in between the open flaps of his coat, and held there against the soft shirt which he wore. And all through her were his whispers--soft delighted laughter from lips that pressed into her hair and cheeks, searching for hers.

She had finally pushed him from her, and they stood apart under the lamp. For a moment, they stared. Then it seemed as if he studied her, as one who suddenly revalues, doubles the value of an object. It was the queerest, intensest scrutiny, his head cocked to one side, the light and laughter returning to his eyes and lips.

“I knew I wasn’t safe to come here,” he said. “I knew if you did like the story, I wasn’t safe to hear the verdict. It was the idea of getting enough money to escape from that room, to get back into Cleveland and find myself----”

Still she stared at him.

“I don’t suppose you can ever forgive me, but it broke me wide open, Miss Musser--to find what a ripping sport you are!”

“That’s about enough words,” she said.

He looked down.

“To-morrow,” she went on in a dreary tone, “you may come here--I mean to the basement entrance, at seven in the evening, and I’ll tell you Mr. Higgins’ decision. If it’s against the story, I’ll do as I said about your room rent and the fare to Cleveland.”

His hands went out to her.

“After what I did--you still want to do that?”

“Yes, and now please go.”

Pidge was up in her own room minutes afterward, before she realized that it had happened under that white lamp of Cobden’s “parlor.”

XIII

“MOTHER”

“A MAN’S a fool before he learns technic,” John Higgins said, as he leaned back from a manuscript the next afternoon. “He’s a cripple while he’s learning it. When he’s learned it and forgotten he’s learned it--he begins to be a workman. That’s the freedom of knowledge.... As for this Tunis story of young Melton’s--it’s a subtle sort of botch.”

Rufus Melton came to the basement entrance at seven. Even if Miss Claes had not gone out to dinner, Pidge would not have taken him upstairs. He looked older, his back had a curious droop. He glanced at her ruefully, and around the room. Pidge stood beside the table.

“Mr. Higgins didn’t care for your story,” she said. “It has happened unluckily all around.”

His head had bowed before she began to speak. His eyes came up to her now, full of contrition and pain.

“I think the hardest thing I ever did was to come here to-night. Only one thing made it possible. I’d have started west, only New York is a curious old dump.”

“How is that?” she asked warily.

“You have to go north to go west. I mean the only way out is north, for a pedestrian.”

“You haven’t enough for the ferry or tube?”

Their eyes met.

“What I said last night holds good, you know,” she said with effort.

He turned slowly to the door as if in indecision, and Pidge watched. She knew she could make him take the money, but she wanted him to be ready to die first.

“There was nothing in the other stories, either--from Higgins’ point of view?” he asked.

Pidge was white. She felt like an executioner. “The package was mailed back to you to-day.”

For just an instant his head was bowed again, half turned to the door. Then he veered around and his hand came out to hers.

“Good night,” he said.

“Good night. But you--that quiet room in Cleveland----”

He shook his head with a slow, dawning smile.

“It’s great to know you. I’ve heard about such people being here in the Village, but it’s--‘It’s fourteen miles from Schenectady to Troy.’”

“It’s a long way to Albany before that,” she said.

“It’s a long way to One-Hundred-and-Tenth Street, Miss Musser, but it is easier than taking money from a girl.”

She breathed relief. “I came to fight it out here in New York on the same terms you did,” she said. “You can pay me back.”

Now his back was toward her, his face uplifted. She saw his hand grope for the knob of the door, and his shoulders rock weakly. She caught his arm and pulled him back to a chair.

“You see, you really couldn’t get away.”

He had suffered her to lead him to a dining-room chair, and sat very still, his head tilted back, eyes closed. She took the little package of bills from her dress and tucked it into his hand. There were voices in the hall; a vague frown crossed his white temples.

“What is it?” he said queerly.

“You are faint. I’ll go with you to a near place for something to eat. That’s all you need. Come--if you can walk a little way.”

He stood in a sort of confusion, holding the folded bills in his hand as one would hold a card.

“Put that in your pocket,” she said, but he did not seem to comprehend.

They were in the street, her hand steadying him. They found a dim restaurant with a counter and a few tables. He did not speak until the waiter came; then asked for coffee. Pidge had taken the money and thrust it into his coat pocket. Now she was tormented with the fear that he would lose the small roll, not knowing that he had it. She had not brought her own purse. He would be forced to pay; then he would have to see what he had.

He drank the coffee first, then ate sparingly.

“I learned that in the desert,” he said at last.

“Learned what, please?”

“Not to go mad over the taste of food when one has been without.”

The girl who waited on the table looked devotedly into Melton’s profile as she served. Twice as he started to speak, the Sixth Avenue elevated crashed by outside and he seemed to forget what he meant to say. It seemed more true here in the restaurant than it had been in the house in Harrow Street, that he was wonderfully good to look upon. The realization held a small tumult for Pidge. She was altogether different with him than with any one else. They had finished, and still he lingered.

“I’m sorry. I hadn’t intended to come out. I left my bag upstairs. Will you please pay?”

To his illness, a look of embarrassment was now added.

“It’s in your pocket. Right there----”

She pointed to his coat, and he drew out the bills wonderingly.

“Oh, I remember,” he said dully.

While the waitress was away bringing the change, he shoved the rest of the money across the table to Pidge, but she pushed it back, saying quietly:

“I want you to fix up the room rent and get a night train west. We’ll say no more.”

His lips whitened under a curious tightening.

“Let’s get out in the dark,” he said roughly.

They walked back to Eighth Street and over to the Avenue, entering the Square that way. The sooty grass was soft and damp; the faintest trace of fog among the trees.

“You’ve got something on me,” he was saying strangely. “You’re not like a girl, but like a woman and a pal, too. You had something on me last night, or I wouldn’t have fallen for you that way.”

“When you get back to that Cleveland room--perhaps a real story will come of all this.”

“A real story,” he repeated.

His eyes were bright and the pallor of his face intense enough to be visible. She was conscious of his inimitable charm as his head inclined to her and she heard his words in the lowest possible tone:

“Meeting you--that is the real story.”

She pushed away his hand that had lifted to hers.

“You’re all right now. I’m going back. Good night and good luck.”

He made no attempt to detain her.

That night Pidge lay for a long time without sleep. She was forlorn and troubled and restless, but underneath it all there was a queer little throb of happiness, like the recent night of the two letters. It would not be stifled. Every time she could get still enough, she was conscious of it, like the song of a bird that kept on and on, but was only audible in the lulls of almost unbroken traffic. She awoke in the night with the thought of him speeding westward on his train.

The next night when she came home there was another letter from Los Angeles, another check dropped out, and a clipping, which she read first--the wedding announcement of “Adolph Musser, the noted metaphysician, and Mrs. Hastings, wealthy widow of the late Rab Gaunt Hastings, firearms manufacturer of New England, at the Byzantine,” etc.

Pidge didn’t have her guard up. The choke and the shame were too swift for her self-control. For the first time in many days the tears broke, the extra scaldy sort. If she had only been permitted to keep that first check uncashed for a few days longer!...