Part 8

Some awe seemed to have fallen upon him, or rather between them. In silence they rounded the almost empty curve of Harrow Street, and presently entered the crowds and lights and crashes of trestled Sixth Avenue. On the corner, as they crossed Eighth Street, Pidge heard a newsboy behind say, “There goes a movie actor.” Pidge deeply knew what that grimed child-face had seen.... It troubled Melton to find the restaurant, and she didn’t help, though she had located it a score of times since that other night. At the table, while they waited, he took a fifty-dollar check from his pocket and handed it over, saying that the real part of the favor he would try to pay bit by bit through the years.

“Because I’ll never get very far from you again,” he added queerly. “Find it very funny, don’t you? Sit there chuckling, don’t you? You can laugh, but it’s true.”

Now Melton began to ask for things which weren’t on the bill-of-fare. He told the waitress how things should be prepared and served--this in a side-street eating house, that specialized in beans and encouraged counter trade. There were hard lines around the mouth of the waitress which Melton commented upon, as she turned her back. Pidge had a warning to hold her temper, and yet she would have died first.

“I’ve never worked in a restaurant,” she said, “but I’ve worked in a factory, and I know what those lines come from. They come from dealing with people like you, people who forget where they are, forget what they come for.”

“How do I forget where I am?” he asked.

“Because you don’t know that this is a place where they serve ‘eats.’ ‘Eats’ are cooked all one way. ‘Eats’ are served fast in business hours, and the waiters sit around and gasp the other times, trying to catch up with themselves. And you don’t know where you are, because you try to show these people and me that you’ve seen how it was done in uptown hotels.”

A trace of sullenness showed in his eyes, and then a warmth of almost incredible delight.

“It’s great! I never was scolded in my life!”

“It wasn’t for supper alone--that wasn’t why I fell into the idea of coming here,” she said. “You forget it entirely. You dare to come in a dress suit--here--here!”

“Listen,” he begged, “don’t run away with that idea. I thought we might go to a theater afterward. I didn’t think so much about where we were going as I did that I was coming to you. I didn’t have anything better than this to put on, and so I came this way.”

A moment before it had seemed the most righteous and perfect thing under heaven to vent a few scathing remarks, but now she felt twisted and diminished. Long and religiously she had tried to keep her rages to herself. Neither spoke while the plates were being served, and then he said:

“I was horribly out of true, in telling these people how to do it, but I wanted it good for you,” he added simply.

She looked at him hard, but the intensity of her trying that instant kept her from reading what was really back of his eyes.

“It’s plenty good enough for me,” she said. “I came here once when I had only twenty cents to live on that day--I remember the stool, that fifth stool, I sat on. I spent my twenty cents all at once,” she added, “and the grub was so good that I could have wept in the arms of the woman on the other side of the counter.”

“Was that when you were working in the factory?” he asked.

“No,” said Pidge, “it was before I got the job. I ate regularly after that.”

“Where was the factory?”

“Oh, way up in the other end of town. I labeled tins, salmon tins, baking powder tins, cocoa tins.”

“To get local color?” he asked.

“To get food. I sat at a big table with a lot of girls, and in the hours and hours, in the monotony of the days, I found out how easy it is to get hard lines around the mouth. I learned to understand just enough to learn that I know nothing, and that’s a lot.”

She was thinking of what a tension she had been in to escape from Fanny Gallup.

“I worked on a ranch in Wyoming,” Melton observed, “cattle ranch.”

“What were you doing on the Tunisian sands?”

“Just ramming around the world. I got in bad with an Arab sheik. It was while running away from him that I got lost in the desert.”

She saw his eyes kindle in the prospect of narration, his faculties forming a fresh tale, which she could not bear to hear that moment. She forestalled his fruitfulness.

They were in the streets.

“No, I don’t want to go uptown,” said Pidge. “I don’t feel like the theater to-night----”

“Wouldn’t you like a ride on the harbor? The ferries are empty this time of night.”

“No, we’ll cross over to Harrow Street.”

“May I come in? There’s so much to say. It’s just--finding you again--Pan.”

“Not to-night. I want to be alone.”

He didn’t answer. She felt a little better after that. She had thought it might be harder to have her way. There seemed always something he could not say behind his words. It wasn’t _all_ lies. It became clear for a moment that he would follow after her--so long as she could run ahead; that he would only turn away and forget when she paused to breathe or play.

“I feel strange,” he said in the silence of Harrow Street. “It is strange to-night. It’s like finding the house one has been looking for so long--the house, even the door, but not the key. Pan,” he said suddenly, “give it to me. Give me the key. It’s you--it’s yours----”

His strength was without strain, the strength that is effortless, the strength of laughter. He had taken her to him suddenly, and she dwelt in it, though resisting; something ecstatic, even in holding out.... She heard voices in herself and faces flashed through her mind--Cobden’s, Fanny Gallup’s--but her arms and shoulders and breast knew a terrible sweetness from his strength. It wasn’t hateful. It was like her own boy, not a stranger. His laughing face was nearer. It was coming to hers. In the dark she could see it, eyes and eyelids, curving nostrils and laughing lips. She knew something would die in her when it touched ... that she was dying now of the slowness of its coming. She ceased to struggle, and all that she had known and been arose within her to meet his lips.

* * * * *

She was on the second flight of stairs. She almost prayed that Fanny’s door would not open. She wanted to be in her own little room, the smaller the better to-night--no touch or voice upon her. The key turned in her trembling hand. She was safe, the door locked again. She stood in the dark. Her lips moved audibly:

“Am I--is it because I am my father’s child?”

XXII

A LETTER FROM PIDGE

RICHARD COBDEN moved up and down the Near East for a long time, looking for the men they had told him about in school and college--the men who make history, and are said to contain in themselves the greatness of their race. He sailed with sailors, talked with the diploma-ed talkers, rode with soldiers. He found men who would do for their countries what they wouldn’t do for themselves, but the energy of their fidelity to their countries was balanced by their enmity toward other countries. They gave themselves to the heresy of fighting one part of the human family for the alleged enhancement of another. It took Dicky a long time to change the brain tracks made in school and college, that the names of history might _not_ be the names of men who walked with God, whose intellects pained from sheer power. Nor was he spared from the suspicion in all his discoveries, that he was the one who was wrong, that he had become softly insane in the midst of new ideas.

* * * * *

When he essayed the thing Miss Claes spoke of at the Punjabi dinner--he started something which he meant to live up to. The fact that it was harder than he dreamed; an effort, in fact, involving dreary years, hadn’t broken his resolution so far. One of the terms of the Punjabi dinner covenant, for such it had become to him, was not to lose himself in the easy way of hatred, nor to help himself to forgetfulness by casting Pidge Musser’s image out. He knew that the “one” she had spoken of was Rufus Melton. Through months, covering two years, the figure of this young story-writer rose higher and higher in his consciousness, as the person of the Enemy, himself. It was Melton, all unknowing, who vanquished Dicky in his weaknesses, and at best was only kept at bay in his strength. Not to cast her out, not to hate; to know the slow, steady burning of the heart that is focalized upon a woman, and to realize that this woman may be turning to another!

There were really extraordinary days of service in Arabia with young Tom Lawrence, whose fame Dicky Cobden helped to make; desert days of camel back and Turk fighting; desert nights of smoke and tea in such starry stillnesses, that one almost expected the Christ to appear; then, after many weeks, mail at Mecca, and one letter from John Higgins, which was read several times:

... You have done several good things for _The Public Square_; but you never did a better thing than wishing Miss Pidge Musser on our editorial rooms. She’s brand new every morning. She’s honest, and a worker. She has brains and a whole lot of psychic viscera, sometimes designated as Soul.... Also she’s a stenographer. Never whispered it until one morning when Maneatin’ Dollie was ill with the flu. My letters were piled up. “Give them to me,” she said. I did that thing, and I’ve been dictating my editorials ever since. It’s like talking to an intelligent audience. When I get opinionated and lose my balance, not seeing the other side of a question, this child sits up and looks disturbed.... I’m sending you separately our Brooklyn Bridge contemporary with a story called _The Salt Pit_. If it isn’t a little man of a story--I don’t know one. Hers.... Of course, you know why she didn’t give it to us. She thought I’d take it on her account and not for the story.... And still we stay out of the War. They’re sending over one big imperialist after another from London, trying to get us in, and all that’s flunkey in Washington, rocks--but so far, we’re only sinning commercially.... Give us more of the inky desert nights, Dicky, and young Lawrence.

Dicky reached Bombay from Aden in the spring of 1917. He was now on his way home, the long way around. He had told no one, but it had grown upon him of late that he could relish a bit of New York after more than two years. He coldly ignored in himself the tendency to thrill at the thought of seeing Pidge Musser again. He had made a bit of a name for himself as a reporter, but was known more as a first-class fact-getter than a feature writer among newspaper men. Facts were sometimes so bleak in his work that one had to possess real understanding and real love for honest materials to find the inherent beauty and order. His knowledge of international politics was now granted by all classes of newspaper men, but he was known especially from his articles in _The Public Square_ as one who exerted a steady pressure against America entering the war.

To be cool was said to be Cobden’s religion. The stuff that he wrote was cool and the words that he said. “I am a reporter, only,” he occasionally explained. “I write what I see, not my own reactions nor opinions.” He had come far in this doctrine, far enough to be trusted by white men of place in Turkey and the Holy Land, in spite of his curious scorn for war. He was somewhat slower now to get enthused over human actions than he was when he left New York; his boyish humor had become grim. He had seen the worst things men do, and written a few of them. Though he had been through as much hard riding in two years as any empire-building Englishman, he seemed to retain no personal relation to his adventures.

Other men talked about him, however. There was something about the American that made it easy for others to “sketch at him.” Tales of his far chances with Tom Lawrence in El Hejas, for instance, had followed him up into Turkey, but no one knew his tendency to nausea in a pinch.

Dicky had written a lot of big newspaper stories, but they were stories of the day. He had packed the films of tense and frightening and humorous moments away somewhere deep in his brain, to the end of massing them all into one--one day doing the Big Story, that had to do with finding a Man. That dream had held since the day he first saw Nagar. But in his heart of hearts everything was a side issue--world politics, world wars, newspaper stories, magazine stories, even the Big Story of all--compared to the war in himself over a girl named Pidge. He still had night sweats over the name of Rufus Melton.... A quiet voice, a tired smile, a face darkened and dusty looking from exposure, even after a clean shave--out of this face, usually shadowed by a big cake-basket helmet of cork, shone a pair of steady eyes in a fine mesh of dusty brown wrinkles--Dicky at twenty-eight.

He had scarcely stepped ashore at Bombay when he heard that the States had entered the war. He touched the sleeve of an Englishman who was looking up at the promenade deck of the ship with eyes and mouth wide open.

“Tell me, I hadn’t heard,” Dicky said hoarsely.

“She’s in, but I must say, sir, she took a long time about it.”

“But that cannot be!” Dicky answered.

Now the Englishman stared, this being the peerless rebuke. Moreover, he observed that the American had a sudden withered look, and presumed that he was a mere upstart person. Accordingly, the Englishman refixed his triple focus on the ship’s promenade deck, and Cobden tunneled into the bus for the _King George_. There he verified the news. He went to his room a bit whipped, quite a little bit whipped. He wanted to be alone. For two years he had written and felt for America as only an exile can. He had believed in her luck and native horse sense in the midst of the mess other countries were making of their national lives.

Something snapped when he had been alone in his room for a while. It was Dicky’s romantic allegiance to the country of his school histories. For the present he was a man without national gravity, and a sick man since some hot, hard-held part of himself had been ripped out.

He had missed his mail in Aden and left word for it to be forwarded to Bombay on the next steamer. A cablegram from his newspaper connection, rewired from Aden, not only counseled him to make haste to double back to France (to be on the spot to greet the first American military arrivals), but accepted it as settled that there was nothing else for a man of his equipment now to do. The message was actually elate with the “doings” ahead, but Dicky Cobden didn’t see it that way. The fact is, he was sore, personally sore, at what had happened and didn’t care who knew it. The following ship brought his mail, including a letter from Pidge Musser, which he opened with an old and ugly fear, and in this letter the worst that he had ever feared fell upon him:

... Oh, Dicky, there is no other way. I’ve tried to dodge it, but it has to be told now, that I have taken Rufus Melton. Why did I do it? I don’t know, unless it is that I am evil and unfinished and answer to the evil and unfinished in him. He draws me terribly, but at the same time, I am not deluded. There is never a moment with him that is not unmixed with pain.... I wonder if you can believe that I did not do this thing for happiness; that the happiest moments I have ever known have come from my work with John Higgins and my friendship with you? And can you ever believe that I am no farther from you now, in that mysterious comrade way?... Oh, Life is not like books, Dicky, not at all like what we are taught it is. I have a relation to him. I answer some terrible drawing need--like a child crying for me. But I have a relation to you, too, only different. You mean rest, something done. He means the unfinished. He brings a mirror to me, and says, “Look!” I want to scream, because the mirror brings out all my defects. That’s what his presence means.... This is one true thing, Dicky. The one who can rouse the most hell in your breast is the one to whom you belong for the time. At least, that is true to me.... Have I not been grateful for your stability? And have I not been proud for your moving so quietly up and down the East, keeping your surfaces clean for the world events to be pictured there without twist or falsehood?... A strange door was opened in my being when I was a child. In and out that door, whether I will or not, you often come and go. “He is my friend,” I whisper, “my friend”----and repeat it a thousand times.

XXIII

THE RED ROOM

LINE by line the thing was killing him. He got up and crossed the heavy red carpet to the hall door and turned the key in the lock. He was afraid some one would come in and find him. He had the strange power of partly seeing himself, as the sullen horrors of hatred and revolt boiled up in his breast. Vaguely, but quite well enough, he could watch the man called Richard Cobden in the dim hotel room, the shoulders hunched, the mouth stretched and crooked; unable to sit still, the face wet with poisonous sweat.

The love had gone out of him, and with it, all the light he had. He thought he had known pain and loneliness since leaving New York, but all he had known was humming content compared to now, because there had been a laughing idolatry for all her ways and words, a reliance upon her that he had dared to call absolute. “Understand, understand!” she had cried all through the letter.... Oh yes, he could understand. She wasn’t what he had made her out to be--that was clear enough. He had built upon something which wasn’t there. He had believed her to be--built into himself the conviction--that she was the honestest thing alive, and here she was----

His thought shot back to the night of the Punjabi dinner. That little basement room was devastated before his mind, the table overturned, the face of Miss Claes a mockery, the face of Pidge Musser--that of an American girl found out. Into the center of his consciousness was now flung his old promise not to hate.... He heard his own laughter. He saw his own stretched and twisted mouth from which it came. Like a couple of sly schoolgirls, they looked at him now--Pidge and Miss Claes--slyly pulling together and duping a fat boy....

He saw his room key upon the table. Number Five, it was, the fifth floor. He looked around the dim papered wall--whitish-red like the pulp of raspberries--the deep upholstered chairs, the seats slightly crushed, the full-length mirror, the ash tray, the silver flask on the writing table, his own things here and there orderly enough--all but himself, a sort of maniacal Mr. Hyde. Number Five. He would remember this room where he had fought it out, too, about America entering the war. He poured brandy into a whisky glass. The stuff eased him a little. It made the pain all the more poignant, like a stove getting hotter, but also it seemed to give him the power to move back a little from the stove.... He stood up in the dark and shook himself.

“Oh, you ass!” he muttered. “You awful ass!”

In the light of a match, as he lit a cigarette long afterward, he saw the rest of his mail on the table, one letter from Miss Claes. He couldn’t get head nor tail out of that at first. She seemed to be talking about something he had said about finding a Man. Oh, yes. He had written from Mecca, mentioning Tom Lawrence and his search for a Man. He snickered now at himself through the fogs of his own past and present. Then a line seemed to stand up before his eyes. “... If you go to India, go to Ahmedabad. Nagar is there. You are in danger of finding your Man.” Later that night, still in the dark, his back straightened. He laughed and said aloud, failing altogether for the moment to see the absurdity of himself.

“Number Five--queer little old musty room, I wonder who died here?... Good night, Pidge; good night, dear America--grand pair to tie to!”

The next day he cabled to his newspaper connection that he was not returning to France for the opening campaign, at least; and wrote to John Higgins that he didn’t expect to send in much stuff for the present. “I may stay awhile in India--just looking around. She smells like a typhoid ward, and needs orderlies.... I’ll, of course, let you know what comes of my _spectating_.”

Still he did not start at once for Ahmedabad. He locked himself in Number Five through the days and walked the streets of Bombay at night, walked like a man in a strait-jacket. He wasn’t conscious of this at first, until he began to feel an ache from the tension of his neck and shoulder muscles and tightened elbows. When he forced himself to relax, however, the torture of his thoughts was accentuated. He had been holding himself rigidly to help fend off the destroying rush of mental images. He walked himself into one sweat after another for the nights were hot and humid. The point of all his fighting was to keep Pidge Musser out of mind. Of course, he could not succeed. She came in by every door. She came in softly, she came in scornfully, she came in singing, scolding. Mostly she came in saying, “Why, don’t you see, Dicky, I am nearer and clearer than ever?” Then it was as if an isolated bit of shrapnel would explode in his brain.

His whole fabric of world politics was demolished. It looked to him like a tapestry that has been hooked up out of a sewer--all that careful weaving and balanced pigmentation! Before the day of the letter he had prided himself that his building in the past two years was good and strong. Now he faced the pitiful discovery that every block of his building had been placed upon this platform: That even if he couldn’t have her, no one else could. This smelled to him now. Forever after, it smelled to him like the sewage lanes of old Bombay.

Dicky had a good body. After two weeks his physical vitality began to steal back. The love was gone, but out of the debris of Subramini’s Punjabi Fireplace, the face of Miss Claes came up faintly smiling again. Another letter came from her, which he read in dismal irony several times on the day before he took the train for Ahmedabad--the last day in Number Five, with its wall paper of raspberry crush. He couldn’t make sense out of the letter. She seemed to love Pidge, even to respect her. Miss Claes wrote, “It gives me quiet joy to know that Nagar is near you. It will be good for him and good for you. A great dearness for you both goes from this house, as you sit and walk together.” Miss Claes also repeated in her letter that “love never faileth”----

All very pretty and possible, no doubt; it sounded good, but it was no longer his sort of a project. This wasn’t for the product of three generations of hardware merchants and manufacturers. Funny, he thought, how he had ever accepted visionary stuff like this. He would write Miss Claes some time how he had failed, but not now. On the night train, he felt India closing about him really for the first time. Once when the train stopped, he smelled the altogether indescribable earthiness of hills that had been sun baked all day, now letting it be known through the moistness of the night. It was vaguely like home to him; not home in America, but home on earth again, the faintest symptom of his reallegiance to life here, only known to one coming up out of sickness. In the early morning he lay for a while after awakening in a sort of bodily peace. It was as if he had really rested a little, as if he had left behind some utterly miserable part of himself in the red room at Bombay.

“A bit questionable,” he muttered whimsically, with the trace of a smile, “a bit shabby and questionable to leave a bundle, a black bundle like that, in Number Five--for some one else to stumble over.”