Part 6

The next was a day of dullness and misery, a May day of rain. Crossing Broadway, as she hurried to luncheon, she passed Rufus Melton in the crowd. Her lips parted to call, but she checked in time. He hadn’t seen her. She found herself standing loosely in the traffic, her hand to her mouth, until a taxi driver roared at her, and she swung into the stream of people again and reached the curb.

XIV

ISOLATION

PIDGE was leveled with personal shame. Try as she would, she was as lacking in the ability to detach herself from Melton, as from the influence of her father. She had felt the boy’s power over her, and knew innately that she would feel it again; that this sort of thing wasn’t a mere touch and go; that meetings like this, which appear sporadic on the surface, have twined roots beneath. She had been taught from a child that nothing merely happens. The incentive that made her lend him the fifty dollars, which she had held uncashed for nearly a month, did not mean to her now a mere impulsive mistake. It was a symbol of a giving to this boy--of a blind but eager something out of the depths of her heart.

Late in June a letter came to her from Dicky Cobden, who was at Coquihatville on the Equator, where as he said, “the sun’s rays fall as straight as a tile from a roof.”

... Oh, yes, you and Miss Claes knew a lot more than I did that night at Tara Subramini’s. I shot off a lot of words afterwards. Never again. But I’m going to stay with it, Pidge.... I’ve just had ten days here in the jungles, back on one of the tributaries of the Kong. If I stayed long here, I would see it all as these exiled white men do; that God is a rubber man with ivory legs; that the natives are vermin, not only to be walked over, but to be stamped into the ground. They whimper so. It’s too hot here to be whimpered at.... I think so much about you. Of course, this isn’t news to you, but I say it, because it is so different from what I thought it would be. Something snapped when I got to the Kong.... All fat and decoration are sweated off down here. I reach out to you just the same. Only in New York I thought that we were both wrapt in the same sort of film, a tinted filmy sort of glamour that stretched out as we went different ways. That film was stretched too hard. When I reached the River it snapped. I think I’ll never get over feeling this awful isolation of being a separate creature from everybody, worst of all from you....

... Next morning in the office John Higgins called her in to his desk. “Dicky has sent in some stuff. We begin to publish in August.”

He took off his spectacles and wiped them on the flap of his necktie. His eyes looked watery, as if the light had run out in tears.

“I’ve always heard that the Cobdens were honest,” he went on, “three generations of honest men. They’ve built something, Miss Musser. Not a business, that’s well enough, but they’ve built a man. Listen----”

He opened the pages at random and began to read. It was like the stuff in her letter.

“It’s so for pages and pages,” he continued. “Every word standing out, if you get the hang of it. No tint, no art; just words, pain-born, separate like boulders in a field. He has no hopes, yet he writes what he sees.... Something seems to have happened to our Dicky, besides Africa.... He watches the string of natives coming in with their tusks; he watches the crocodiles coming up to the blinding surface water; he watches the big monkeys that live in twos, and the little monkeys that live in troops. I don’t know what the world’ll get out of this, but I know what I get out of it----”

She saw that John Higgins was merely thinking out loud. A few moments later he finished:

“This stuff amounts to the most subtle and incredible rearraignment of imperialistic cruelty, but Dicky doesn’t mean it that way. He keeps repeating with devilish calm that it isn’t so bad as it was. It’s no particular nation, but all whites. He writes from the standpoint of a white man who remembers Cortez in Mexico, Pizarro in Peru, Warren Hastings in India, Cecil Rhodes in Africa and our own dear religious settlers bringing Yankee wits and rum and disease to the red Indians. He turns over the pages of all patriotic histories with a long stick as you would poke the leaves from the face of a corpse you had made yourself. His face tries to turn away; his stomach retches, but he knows each man and each nation must bury his own dead.”

“‘Something seems to have happened to our Dicky, besides Africa,’” Pidge repeated, when she was alone.

Summer days in New York, sleepy stewy days. The low clouds made the nights hot. Pidge was used to the “high sky” of Southern California where every inch of shadow meant coolness, where cool night fell quickly no matter how hot it had been in the sun, where there were no afterglows, nor afterheats, and you wanted a wrap the instant the sun went down. The meaning of summer in New York became a cruel meaning, in the little room off the area. It gave her an astonishing grasp of what people suffered in the tenements.

Two weeks after the copy arrived from Africa, the galleys came up on the Cobden articles, and Pidge asked permission to take a set home to show two friends of Dicky’s in Harrow Street. John Higgins acquiesced. Pidge delivered these to Miss Claes and forgot all about it, until the next night when she returned to the house after dinner, and Miss Claes called her from the door of Cobden’s “parlor.”

“Come in, Pidge, and we’ll shut everything out.”

Nagar was within and the galleys were stretched out under the light. Pidge had never seen Miss Claes and Nagar quite like this. They appeared happy over something they had found in Dicky Cobden’s isolation and melancholy--happy as in the news of a legacy.

“Why, don’t you see?” said Miss Claes strangely. “He’s pondering on Life! He thinks he’s reporting--when really he is giving himself to Life. The world stretches out before his eyes without glamour, stripped. He offers himself to it, but his writing contains a confession with the weariness of the ages on it, that he has nothing to give--that he is a sham like all the rest. There’s not a self-pose in all his pages.”

Nagar had slipped out. Miss Claes came close and added softly:

“Richard is finer than we knew, Pidge. What happened here in this house has prepared him--always the wrecker before the builder.”

“You mean, I’m the wrecker?”

“You couldn’t have done differently.... Too bad he isn’t to see Mohandas Gandhi. Nagar has received word that the Little Man is returning to India. Richard didn’t go to Natal first.”

“He’ll be so sorry,” Pidge said. “It was Nagar’s story that drew him to Africa----”

Their eyes met; no need to amplify.

“Dicky’s so deadly in earnest,” Pidge went on. “He sees what he sees the same at ten in the morning and at ten at night. His coming to Harrow Street didn’t mean a whim. His part that night of our Punjabi dinner didn’t mean a whim. Oh, but I’m so glad he hasn’t started out to save the world!”

“He’s preparing to work better than that.”

“I feel so ungrateful for not missing him more,” Pidge added unsteadily, “for not being more interested in this that pleases you. I can appreciate, but oh, Miss Claes, I don’t belong to your way of seeing things. I’ll always be Dicky Cobden’s hangman, always hurting myself more!”

They were standing close together.

“Nothing matters to me but myself!” Pidge moaned. “I’m hopelessly lost in myself--that’s what’s the matter! What room have I for Africa or the world? There’s more to me in the struggle of John Higgins not to get drunk--in the body hunger and body love of Fanny Gallup--in the lies of Rufus Melton! I can understand this world-service thing--oh, I can see the nations like chessmen on the table!--but I can’t fix Fanny Gallup or John Higgins, I can’t fix Rufus Melton. I can’t fix myself!”

XV

THE COBDEN INTERIOR

PIDGE heard about the assassinations in Bosnia as wearily as of a murder in little Sicily. She heard rumors of war in Europe with ennui--how could there be energy enough left in the human race to make war? She met Nagar in the lower hall at Harrow Street on the evening that war became a fact. He looked like a dead man walking in the twilight. She didn’t see Miss Claes at all that night. The next day in the office war began to show its personal aspects to Pidge Musser of Los Angeles. John Higgins was hours late in returning from lunch. She saw that he wouldn’t be down at all to-morrow. He looked old. He had on a black frock coat, as if dressed for pallbearing, though his face looked as if he were about to be borne himself. The little office was fumy, sweetish.

“Our blessed Savior moves in mysterious ways,” he remarked.

Pidge lingered at the door to get any significance that this might have for her.

“The Lord gives and the Lord takes away,” he added, sitting back straight in his chair.

He removed his spectacles and reached for the flare of his tie to polish them off, but no tie dangled to-day. It was a little black store-made bow, fastened with a clip over the collar button. Pidge still lingered, her hand on the knob.

“Blessed be the name of the Lord,” said John Higgins, “but it’s hell on us.”

She started out, but was called back.

“I need an audience, Miss Musser. I need a female ear. I need ladylike sympathy. It isn’t sweet of you to run off.”

“What’s the matter?”

The editor looked at her, squinted, put on his spectacles and looked again.

“Do you mean to say you don’t know what’s the matter?”

“Everything is the matter,” said Pidge. “But what’s new?”

His hand nearest her lifted and rested upon a pile of page proof on his desk.

“Dicky Cobden hasn’t written a line from the Kong that we can publish. We’ve cabled him to come in, though he’s probably started. You’ll recall that Belgium lies between France and Germany. She’s holding the Germans off from Paris, giving France and England a chance to get set. Belgium’s the world’s public square right now, the one vortexical spot on the face of the earth. Doesn’t it occur to you that even a new angle on her sins in the heart of Africa is about as much in time and place right now, as Paul Revere’s ride?”

... Three weeks later, she heard that Richard Cobden was in town; that John Higgins had seen him the night before. All that day at the office she kept listening for his step and voice, but he didn’t come. His car was in front of the Harrow Street house, however, when she reached there, and a light showed between the doors from his “parlor.” She lost some of the sense of suffocation when she saw that, a curious gladness for a moment. She tapped the door with her finger tip, pulled the curtain aside ever so little and said:

“Hello.”

A quick step in the inner room; then he was before her in the doorway, drawing her in under the light.

“Pidge--Pidge,” he repeated.

The boyish look was gone from him. He might have been taken for ten years older. The thing had happened that takes place abruptly in many Americans, more among business men than artists: Youth had been put away, its trace of divine humor exchanged for adult seriousness.

“Why didn’t you come to the office to-day, Dicky?” she asked.

“I wanted to see you here--like this.”

They were standing under the light.

“Why, you’re different,” she said.

“John Higgins said that. They told me so at home, uptown. I feel different, but it isn’t an improvement. And you, Pidge, you’re taller. And John Higgins says you’re doing so well.”

“I’m thanking you every day for that----”

She kept thinking about the change in him. If this were selflessness, she liked him better before. He had been quite unselfish enough, she thought. She didn’t see the fight in him, because it was so subtly identified with herself. She only knew that he seemed without fight.

“Keep on your things, Pidge. We’ll go out somewhere----”

* * * * *

That was the beginning of strange days and evenings. They played at the old game of _Comrades_. Often they lunched together, occasionally with John Higgins for a third. At such times it seemed that they took _The Public Square_ with them, subscribers, advertisers, contributors, policies. It was that curious time in America when the personal and national meaning of the European war was breaking through with all its paralyzing ramifications; when all who were sensitive at all reflected division and strife in themselves, as a deep leveling sickness.

Pidge was taken to the Cobden home, a new and terrifically complicated modern apartment in East Fiftieth Street, but the furnishings, the household ceremonials, the people themselves, suggested prints of New York interiors in 1870--respectable, established, grim. The gradual speeding up of the world for a half century to the explosive point of 1914 ended with the click of the key in this hall door, and you were in the world of another day, with a spinster aunt, a widowed mother, an unmarried sister, a slowly disintegrating grandfather, and Dicky himself, not in a different guise at all--the same courteous, sincere Dicky, but now to Pidge Musser’s western eyes, utterly, revealingly comprehensible. This was the place that had made him. This was his reason for being.

Here life was life. Here was the family unit, the family a globe, all human society moving outside like the water around a bubble; a closed globe reflecting all else in curious unreality. Here three-score-and-ten was life, and a very long time. Life wasn’t a spiritual experiment, in matter; not an extension in matter of souls that had made innumerable such experiments, but straight work-a-day three-score-and-ten with oblivion at the birth end, and heaven or hell at the other. Here was All Time, in which it behooved man and woman to gather worldly goods and religious goods and love one another and hang together--for the rest was with God. Here senility was dear. The heavy-bodied, dim-minded grandfather was still grandfather, not the vanishing spirit of him. They would weep when the body passed. They would look to his place in the cemetery and say, “Here he lies.”

Pidge Musser wanted to scream, not at the limitations, but at the kindness which was showered upon her. They were ready to perform the great transaction of taking her in, opening their hearts and house to a maiden, who would bring respectable additions to the Cobden line--sharing wealth, well-being, gentleness, the Cobden name which had been kept clean and useable and virile, and the Cobden God, who stood on the other side of death with angelic associates and rewards in His hands.

Pidge continually felt that her next word would ruin everything; yet they unswervingly regarded her as becoming one with themselves; the process of assimilation already begun. They were patient, knowing of old that a new maiden would have incrustations of the world to check off, inequalities to be planed down. They set about not adjusting to her, but as she fancied, assimilating her, as the changeless Chinese assimilate a weaker race, breaking down the foreigner in themselves. She would become theirs to them with the years.

“Oh, Dicky,” Pidge said, when they were in his car again. “I see. I understand. How did you dare to open those doors to me!”

“I spoke of you at home, Pidge. They wouldn’t have understood if I hadn’t brought you soon. They were prepared to open their arms to you. They have their laws----”

“But they are your laws. Dicky--how did you dare? Is it because you don’t know me, don’t see me at all? Do you see something which you want to see, that has nothing to do with me?”

“What is it that troubles you so?”

“Myself--always and forever myself! Oh, don’t you see I have nothing to do with them? Why, you’re comfortable, Dicky--your people are comfortable! _This_ is life to you--this, here and now! It isn’t to me. Life’s an exile to me, a banishment and coldness and pain. In all New York there are not two such opposites. My God is far away. Yours is here--a Person.”

He answered hopelessly: “I can see how it would strike you, but I couldn’t cover up on account of that. I belong to them. I’m of them. Any front I might put on wouldn’t wear. You had to see us, Pidge----”

Another time she might have seen the fine thing back of those words, but she took such finenesses of Richard Cobden for granted, while he rarely could understand that she saw anything but his faults.

“It’s queer,” he said, in the same dull hopeless way. “I stand to you as the most staid and changeless person, but to my family I am dangerous, a fulminant. They love and trust me, but watch me with fierce concern. Already I’ve broken more Cobden convictions in twenty-five years than all my relatives in all their years.”

His face glanced wearily toward her from the lights of the street, as he drove.

“You’ve let me understand too much for one Sunday afternoon,” she said in an awed voice, “and it feels colder and lonelier than ever before. I even see something of the coming years, Dicky. I see that it means Fate, when you say ‘yes’ or ‘no.’ I see that you turn to a girl to stay. I see you don’t cheat. I see that I’m volatile compared; that my honesty is a fierce effort, a deadly self-conscious effort, and yours is an established habit. I’m clumsy at my honesty. I love it terribly, but it is still on the outside of me--something to attain.”

She sank back, laughing. “I wonder if it will stay as deadly clear as this?”

“You are not making it quite clear to me,” he said.

“I must. Oh, I must. Dicky, please open your soul and listen to me--hard, hard! While it’s clear, I must talk. You’ve chosen to be my friend. You’ve chosen not to take the easier course of hating me. I understand all that better now than the night of the Punjabi dinner.”

“I do, too,” said Cobden, and bitterness of the African rivers was in his words.

“Do I have to begin by saying how dear you are--how kind, how utterly good it is to know you; what it means to have faith and trust in one man?”

“Please not, Pidge.”

“But never forget it, Dicky. It’s the pedestal upon which everything’s builded. Always remember that I know you underneath; that I turn to you in trouble--not like a brother or father or lover, but what our word _comrade_ means--what it will sometime mean to many people! That’s you. But, Dicky, because I know you--I can look away! Don’t you see--you’re like something done! Having found you, I can turn to other things.”

“I’ll try to see that, but most people find each other differently, to stay----”

“It’s because they don’t find what I’ve found. I don’t know what I want, only I know there are terrible undone things in me, that other people stir to life. I’m lost in persons. Miss Claes and Nagar lose themselves in nations. You’re getting to be like them, but I see it all in the personal!... Listen, Dicky, if you were to get a woman to take to your house--one ready to go in and be a Cobden and a mother of Cobdens--I could love her! I could hold to you just as close, though secretly. I would expect you to be my _comrade_ just the same--I mean just between us--never on the outside, perhaps. What I mean is, it wouldn’t hurt me--not the thing we have together.”

His car had come to a stand in the stillness of Harrow Street, but still they sat.

“What you mean is--you haven’t any place for me as a lover or a husband.”

“That’s like you, but that’s it.... Dicky, you mean to me something done, something found. I don’t dare to turn to you and rest. The savage undone things in me _won’t_ rest! They demand experiences, life--and no one knows better, that they mean pain ... and oh--under your lamp--it’s horrible to tell it, but you’ll forgive me later, when you see that it had to be told----”

“What are you talking about, Pidge?”

“Under your lamp--in there! He came about a manuscript. He was broke and needed help--all his stories refused. He asked to see me that night. Miss Claes’ basement was occupied. She sent him up. We talked. He wanted something, money, everything. Under your light--he took me to him, his coat open----”

Cobden startled her, as he cleared his throat. The silence between them had been so deep.

“It meant nothing to him! He was used to it. It was only his way to get something--money most, he wanted. It was just as he might take a waitress or hall maid--used to having girls ‘fall for’ him. This is what I mean--though I understand him, a theatrical mind, a liar--life meant something to me that instant, that it never meant before. Something I must do, something calling--pain, but something I haven’t done!”

“You mean--you mean--it isn’t over?”

“Just that, Dicky, and oh, forgive me! I may not see _him_ ever again, but _something in me_ isn’t ‘over.’ I had to tell you--to be honest, to learn to be honest. You’ll be glad some day!”

XVI

DICKY FEELS A SLUMP

IT was nearly a week afterward when Pidge heard sounds, not of meeting only, but of mauling, from over the partitions of Richard Cobden’s office at _The Public Square_. Her desk was now in John Higgins’ room. The racket was “young”--something of the sort you expect in a college fraternity house, rather than in the editorial rooms of a magazine of dignified social protest and short story ideals. John Higgins winced and glared. Now the stranger’s voice was upraised:

“You’re not seedy, Dick--you’re decayed! If Africa treats a man like that, I’m off the Sahara for life.”

Pidge heard this with something of the sense of personal arraignment. The ugly part was that it was true, and it hadn’t been the truth a week before. Dicky had been changed when he arrived, but the change since their ride home from his mother’s apartment in Fiftieth Street was more definitely disturbing. She found John Higgins’ eyes upon her and started guiltily. He leaned forward to whisper:

“It’s a fact. Something’s eating our Dicky. He’s losing his bounce.”

For once, Pidge did not altogether blame herself. There had been no two ways about telling him what had happened under the light. She had been challenged to speak on their first evening together after his return, challenged every hour of the week afterward; and yet it was not until after the words were out, spoken in her particularly ruthless and unequivocal way, that she actually saw the power of their hurt.

In Africa Dicky had stripped himself of hope, in the most complete way he knew. Africa is said to have a way of helping a man in this. Doubtless he had winnowed this hope down to a semi-impersonal concept, that straight, clean devotion would win its reward. But Africa alone was one thing, and New York with Pidge was another. He had been entirely innocent of the possibilities of pain his heart was capable of.

Still they went out together. They tried, furiously tried, but the star toward which they had held their eyes, the star named _Camaraderie_, was for the present out of their sky. She tried to give herself in interest to his particular studies of world politics. His views had nothing to do with intuition or prophecy. Dicky gripped affairs on an academic basis of economics, and the only light he had to work with in relation to the turmoil in Europe was from the same friction that had furnished his sparks in Africa--the pain of his own heart. He told her of the delicate and dangerous adjustments between the nations, as he saw them; the organic play, the push and pull on every national boundary; the draw of Russia upon India, for instance; the grim hold of the British bulldog; the interatomic play of India, Ireland and Egypt; the poison vats of the Balkans, the frowning menaces of the Levant. One night he spoke of Italy’s inner and outer stresses, and of her age-old hatred for Austria.

“And Pidge,” he said quietly, “you won’t mind my saying it, will you? I see it all so clearly when I talk to you. I know you’ll tell me that you don’t know anything about these things. You always tell me that, but you certainly make me know them better.”