Part 9

He fell asleep again and reawoke with a curious sentence on his lips; something that he had forgotten a long time, something that Miss Claes used to say: “Nobody knows Nagar--nobody.”

“Nobody ever will,” he added, “if he doesn’t talk any more than he used to.”

Again at breakfast the faintest little quiver of organic ease stole into him. The earth was very bright outside and the pot of tea that had been brought tasted actually sane. He had the feeling of being on the way somewhere, of having escaped something, as he watched India slip by from the window of his compartment.... Then Ahmedabad, the station, a Hindu in white garments, almost taking him in his arms--laughing, talking like an American--Nagar talking!

XXIV

MISS CLAES SPEAKS

ONE Sunday morning about three weeks after the luncheon with John Higgins, during which Rufus Melton came to the Chop House, Pidge found Miss Claes alone in the basement front.

“We’d like to come here to live. Is there any chance?” she asked.

“Yes, it can be managed, I think.”

Pidge regarded her with a kind of cold fixity and added: “We were married night before last. Rufe seems willing enough to come here. I hate to leave this house, but I didn’t think you had the rooms.”

“I’ll make a place for you; a little place, at least. But, Pidge----”

“Yes?”

“Why haven’t you come to me all this time?”

“I know how fond you are of Dicky Cobden. I haven’t hoped any one could understand.”

“Being fond of Richard Cobden doesn’t make me less fond of you.”

“How could I expect you to understand me, when I can’t understand myself?” Pidge demanded. “I am two people, and they are at war.... No use lying about it. I fell for him, knowing him all the time. Not for a minute did I lose track of what he is. But I wanted him. Something in me answered--that’s all.”

“I’ve always loved that honest Pidge,” said Miss Claes.

“Think, if you like, that it’s part of the evil in me that talks this way about him, but I am talking about myself, too.”

“You could never see all this clearly--without ‘falling for’ him, Pidge.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean it would remain a hopeless, unfinished puzzle--if you had run away from Rufus Melton.”

“I couldn’t run away. I wanted him,” Pidge repeated. “But there’s another side. There’s something in him that I seem to have known from the beginning--something like a little child that I left somewhere ages ago. It keeps calling to me from his eyes, and I leave everything to go to it--everything that Dicky means and the world, even writing--I leave all that. And yet when I go, when I go to his arms, I lose the purpose. It’s as if the child that I run to--the irresistible thing that calls to me from his eyes--stops crying and stops needing me! Then I suddenly know that it must need me and not be gratified, ever to be helped. Oh, no one on earth could understand that. It’s insane.”

“But, Pidge, I do understand.”

“How can you?”

“Because I have loved like that, because I have had experience. I loved an English boy in the same way--oh, long ago. I love him still, but I could not stay with him, because he--why, Pidge, it is just the same. He needs to cry for some one, for something, otherwise he remains asleep in life.”

“You’re saying this to help me.”

“What I’ve lived through _should_ help you. It was the hardest thing I’ve ever known--that I couldn’t forget everything and have him, just two alone in the world. But when I went to him, he was satisfied and looked elsewhere. I almost died of revolt.”

Pidge’s eyes were very wide. “And when you didn’t go to him?” she said in slow tones. “What happened then?”

“It was then that he remembered and reminded me that I was half-caste. Also he looked elsewhere, just the same.”

“And you still love him?”

“Deep underneath--that is not changed.”

“But what is Nagar?”

“Nagar means the other world, Pidge--a new heaven and a new earth. He means the not-wanting love, the willing-to-wait love----”

“I’m not like that,” Pidge said with old bitterness. “I want love in a room! I want to shut the world out. I don’t want the love of the world, but love that’s all mine. And I can’t--I can’t have it!”

She was breathing deeply, staring at the fire.

Miss Claes glanced at her wistfully a moment, her lips faintly smiling. The girl’s face had never been so lovely to her. It was like land that has had its rains after long waiting--soft blooms starting, an earthy sweetness rising in the washed sunlight. The beginnings of both laughter and tears were in Pidge’s wide eyes; her red-brown hair, from which the henna was long forgotten, had an easy restful gleam in its coils.

“Why, Pidge,” Miss Claes said at last, “you’re like one who has been born again. It’s wonderful. I had almost forgotten what that love does to a woman, at first--for a little, little time.”

“And you knew that kind of love--with the English boy?”

“Yes.”

“And Nagar knows.”

“Yes.”

Pidge shivered.

“... Rufe brings the fight to me, makes every undone thing rise and live! He brings the most terrible disappointments, the crudest disorder, yet that which would pay for it all, if I were just a simple peasant woman, is denied. Why can’t we shut the door and just live? Why can’t there be a kingdom for two?”

The form was soft and gliding in Miss Claes’ arms. The square-shouldered little figure of the mill and office girl had become almost eloquent with its emotional power. After a moment Pidge straightened, her face staring into Miss Claes’.

“Why don’t you answer?”

“I can only say, Pidge, you are called to learn the next step, the next lesson in what love means. You want the love that has two ends, but the Triangle is ready for you. Oh, many are learning the mystery of the Triangle. It hurts so at first, but it lets the world in--the bigger meanings of life.”

Pidge shivered again. “Is it blasphemy,” she asked, “that I feel just as close to Dicky Cobden--as ever?”

“No more than the finding of bread would spoil your taste for water.”

* * * * *

Pidge said at last:

“Oh, I don’t want to leave this house, Miss Claes. He says he’ll come here, too.”

“I’ve been thinking of putting a bathroom on the third floor. There’s a tiny empty room like yours across the hall. The bath shall be installed there. You know I’ve kept Nagar’s room empty. It is pleasant and larger than yours. I’ll have a door cut through the partition, and with a bath across the hall you will do well enough for a time.”

“You would give us Nagar’s room?”

“Nagar has the key to the whole house,” said Miss Claes.

* * * * *

Moments afterward, Pidge’s strong fingers closed over the hands of the other.

“No one can know how it hurts me--to think of Dicky----”

“He is with Nagar now.”

“Do you think--can it be possible that Nagar will help him--as you help me?”

“Nagar and the Little Man,” said Miss Claes.

XXV

“BE IT EVER SO HUMBLE”

THEY were ensconced in the two upper rooms. Pidge kept up her work at _The Public Square_, and did not come home for luncheon. She had told John Higgins of her marriage but the subject was not mentioned afterward. The old chief vanished for three days following the news, and when he came back there was a new dignity on his part for Pidge to cope with. She found her position a trifle uncentered. His old stenographer took his letters, and he wrote his editorials on his own machine as aforetime. John Higgins said little, but found flaws in her judgments that had not appeared before. He no longer risked availing himself of her entire equipment; this change being apparently on the basis that he dare not get used to it all over again. He seemed to hold the idea that it was only a question of days at most before a married woman would forget place and town entirely and rush off to pick up pieces of wool and thread for a nest.

Pidge had built so much of herself into her work that there was emphatic pain in the new conditions. She needed the work more than ever now, but _The Public Square_ was falling into sorry days and ways. There was nothing to say but War, and if you didn’t like War, didn’t see the divine uses of War and say so, you had better say nothing. There was no field in the world at this time for a magazine of dignified or any other kind of protest, and in the steady loss of money week after week, the struggle became one of great simplicity--to stay alive.

“Higgins is a rotten old knocker anyway,” said Rufus Melton. “This is a time for Americans to stand together and not criticize the government. He never did pay any real money for his stuff, but was always ready to tell you where you fell down. They’re telling him a word or two now.”

So Pidge didn’t speak much of _The Public Square_ at home.

Rufus vibrated between a depression when his stuff wouldn’t come through and an exaltation when it did. He was quite sincere in his industry, but slept late in the morning. Pidge was up and away four mornings out of five without waking him. Sometimes Rufe decided to eat his “big meal of the day” in the middle of the afternoon, in which case Pidge supped alone. He was slow to get his work started, so that it was often evening before he got “all of himself working at once.” Then he was apt to stay with it for several hours, in which case Pidge could sleep if she got a chance. Occasionally he found that he could dictate a bit of first draft and Pidge undertook at first to help him in this way, but when she perceived that it didn’t occur to him, in the flush of his evening powers, that she had worked all day and must work to-morrow, she decided to stay off his night work.

“I can’t, Rufe,” she said one night on the way to bed. “It’s so fascinating to practice napping in the hushes and rushes of your machine.”

“You won’t take this stuff?”

“No.”

“You won’t?”

“It will interfere with your work session if you lose your temper. Of course, we’ve got the whole upper floor to start something in, but we must think of your story.”

“Whose work counts in this outfit?” he demanded.

“Yours, Rufe, by all means. A fine patriotic short story at any price. But I have a job to look after, and I can’t give them a red-headed somnambulist to-morrow. No, I’m going to sleep, but I do hope you get the American flags waving all right in your story.”

“I’ll get you, Pan--for acting like this.”

“You’ve got me, dear, and don’t forget to have the hero come through with, ‘My country right or wrong.’ No girl can resist that--or editor. Good night.”

Rufe was rarely rough. He didn’t overtire or over-stimulate himself, so that his temper could easily break corral; and at its worst this temper wasn’t a man-eater. Rufe’s nervous system was cushioned in a fine layer of healthy fat, and therefore didn’t flog itself to madness against bare bone and sinew. He was merely involved in himself entirely, which makes any man naïve.

Pidge wasn’t missing any of the petty dramas of her present experience. When she came home the first time to find that he had already had dinner, something flew out of her into space in a frantic search for God. When she realized that he saw nothing but undisturbed equity in the idea of using her for his own work purposes half the night, when she was contracted to _The Public Square_ for the days--another output of herself was loose in the solar system. When she came to understand that the tens he was earning were mysteriously his own, and that her ones were theirs--another day, at least, was spoiled for her in the editorial rooms.

Rufe thought her extremely selfish. So had her father. “Two to one,” she said. “They’ve got it on me. They’ve got it on all of us. This is their world.”... She thought of all this bitterness and bickering taking place in Nagar’s room, which Miss Claes had saved for weeks for a sort of sanctuary of her own. Mostly she was hurt by the deadly parallel of this life, with her life in Los Angeles and vicinity. To cope with this American story-man, she was forced to draw out and readjust and refurbish the old hateful mechanism that had formed within her during the nineteen years with her father. She knew how. The mechanism worked all right, but the sense of the hateful thing resuming activity within her was far harder to bear than the racket of Rufe’s typewriter when she was trying to sleep.

The fact that Rufe Melton was entirely cut off from the play of her real powers; that he thought her ridiculous, and said so, when she gave any notice of holding other than the standard American points of view on politics and religion and social ethics; this was not so serious a breach between them, as it would have been to a woman who had not come into so startling a reaction as Pidge had, against the whole system of knowing and not doing. All the knowledge that really mattered to Pidge was that working doctrine which doesn’t announce or explain, but shows itself in living the life. She was very sad, and continually sad, that she had to work upon Rufe the iron of irony, the stab so subtle that it astonishes before it hurts, and the self-control which disarms.

Sometimes Sundays or in unexpected periods of leisure they had moments of actual delight together. This occasionally happened when food just pleased him, or when an acceptance from a magazine arrived at a price which he considered adequate. (Rufus never neglected the price of his things, as an indication of his getting on.) He uncovered a real levity at such times, and their talk didn’t walk merely, then; it danced.

“We’ll go up to Harlem,” he said one Sunday morning. “I used to live up there in the colored settlement----”

Figuratively speaking, Pidge waved her hand before her own eyes to shut out the critical negatives which always arose when Rufe told of living somewhere. They went and stayed gay. When he turned from her innocently to consult a policeman in Harlem, she checked the first and last, “I told you so.” They found yams that day--yams freshly arrived from Georgia, and coffee said to be parched and dripped according to an ideal of New Orleans first families. These satisfied Rufus, and still they stayed gay. Even his, “I could take you around to a lot of queer dumps in this man’s town,” didn’t upset anything. Altogether that day was memorable.... Once in desperate fatigue, when there were moving dark spots before her eyes in every ray of daylight, Pidge cried to Miss Claes:

“But he is lost to everything, entirely oblivious to everything but himself and his work--his stories, his fame, his winning his way!”

“I know, Pidge, but the world is on top of him yet. He is fighting his way up and out. Romance can’t be entirely satisfying, you know, when it has ambition for a rival. You’ve told me something about the thrall of a book in yourself--how engrossing it is.”

“That all goes out of me when I’m with him,” Pidge said suddenly. “I never thought of it before, but all that old agony to produce another book that I used to feel is gone. I seem to let him carry all that.”

“That helps for the present, doesn’t it?”

“Yes, and it isn’t all sordid--don’t think I mean that, Miss Claes. Sometimes when he’s satisfied with his story, so that he can forget it, we have such good times. He’s such a playboy, such a playmate. Some old terrible longing comes over me when we are close like that, just to be like one of the Mediterranean women, who know nothing but to replenish the earth. But it doesn’t do to dwell on that,” Pidge finished with an impressive quietness of tone. “One thing I learned rather well, before it was too late.”

“What’s that, Pidge?”

“That this isn’t the time or place for us to bring a little baby into the world.”

XXVI

THE HANGING SOCK

NAGAR was changed. On the day that Richard Cobden reached Ahmedabad, he encountered one of the surprises of his life. It was like meeting a man out in the freedom of the world, whom one had only known before in prison. Two years in the East had sharpened Dicky’s eyes to note something in Nagar’s face that he had been unable to detect before. Dicky called it cleanliness and calm, but this brought up the old difficulty which he never missed in his work of writing--that at best, words only suggest, only intimate.

In America Nagar had looked dark; here he looked fair. There he had moved in and out as one of the colored men; here he was one of the elect. There he had lived in the midst of silences and mysterious inhibitions, diminished by the garments of Western civilization; here he was white-robed in the sunlight, like young Gautama in his father’s garden. Of course, Dicky knew that the change was more substantial than that of garb or place. He could only repeat that Nagar seemed free in his own mind.

In the first few moments at the station in Ahmedabad, Dicky had himself felt unwashed and unwholesome, as no man ever made him feel before. His hand went up to his chin. Yes, he had shaved that morning, but realizing it did not help much. It wasn’t the grime of travel that hurt him, but the smear of his recent mental and emotional overturning, the ugliness of all those days in the red room at Bombay, and the sense of failure and loss he lived with constantly since the coming of the letter from Pidge.

“... And the Little Man is actually here in Ahmedabad, and not a myth?” Dicky had asked, as they drew out of the crowd at the station.

“Not only that, but you are to go to the _Ashrama_ now, if you will. He is eager to have you come.”

“His house first?” Dicky asked.

“It is also the house in which I live,” said Nagar.

“You mean you wish to put me up in your quarters?”

“If you would not mind our great simplicity.”

“Thanks, I should like that,” said Dicky, “but I think it would be better for me to follow the usual course of a foreigner and find hotel quarters.”

The _Entresden_ was not crowded and Dicky obtained comfortable quarters in a northeast room where the upholstering was covered in clean tan linen, and the _punkahs_ showed signs of life immediately upon their entrance. Nagar prepared to leave as soon as Dicky sat down in the air crossing between two shaded windows.

“I will come for you this afternoon if you wish to go to the _Ashrama_ to-day,” he said. “It is some distance from the center of the city.”

“Sit down, Nagar; don’t hurry off.”

“I thought you would prefer to rest until after _tiffin_.”

“Stay and we’ll have it here. You’ll pour the tea like the old days in Miss Claes’ room.”

Nagar’s face was in the shadows, but there was a soft shining as of polished silver in or around his eyes. At times, shutting his eyes as Nagar spoke, Dicky could almost believe he was back in the basement at Harrow Street. The way Nagar said to him, “my friend,” was almost Miss Claes herself. That was the poignant part of finding the Oriental again; that he brought back Harrow Street--even moments under the white light. The day would have been joyous but for the aching emptiness of heart. Dicky asked tirelessly about Gandhi, especially since it gave him such a chance to study the new Nagar.

“Mahatma-ji has burned away all waste,” Nagar said at length. “He has narrowed himself down, body and mind, to an almost perfect obedience--self-control. He measures action to all his words. The best he knows, step by step, he performs.”

“Where did you hear of him first?”

“Here in India--of his work in South Africa. I went there to know him better--followed the gleam, as you might say. I stayed four years. It was he who encouraged me to go to America to study more of the spirit of the West.”

“What’s Gandhi’s message to these people?”

“He believes that politics cannot be successfully divorced from religion,” Nagar said. “His message always is toward the spiritualizing of India’s political life and her institutions. The spiritual predominance of India, which he idealizes as being the real destiny of India, can only be effected by her rebecoming herself, by the return of the Motherland into herself, by her ceasing to imitate all the ways of western civilization.”

“But if she returns into herself, making her own goods, cutting herself off from all institutions of the present government--England will be done for here.”

Nagar bowed without the trace of a smile.

“I’ve heard that every turn of a spinning-wheel in India takes part of a turn from a power loom in Manchester,” Dicky added.

Nagar further acquiesced.

“And that isn’t politics?... I think I’ll go in for religion, myself.”

* * * * *

“It is very good to have you here,” Nagar said later. “Mahatma-ji will also be glad. He has asked much about you and believes that you may be a means of making many in America understand. It is a saying with us here that ‘to understand is to love.’”

“But I didn’t come here with any set idea, you know.”

“The work you will do for us in America will be the better for that. The more reason and rationale you bring----”

“Evidently it’s easy for one to go off his head where Gandhi is,” Dicky said.

“His effect on some is subtle and strong.”

“I’ll keep a stiff bridle arm. Say, Nagar, have you stopped to think how I happen to be here to-day?”

“Tell me, please.”

“One hanging sock.”

“I do not understand.”

“One hanging sock. It was that which made me go out into the reception room in the first place, that day you brought the story to _The Public Square_. I heard the office boy say to J. H., ‘He keeps pulling up his sock.’ I went out to see. So that’s what made me go to Harrow Street, and meet Miss Claes and the rest and go to Africa, and come here. I believe that’s what started the World War.”

Nagar laughed. “I always had such trouble in the early days with American clothing. I would get one part working and another would give way----”

“But, Nagar, what made it so imperative for you to have the two hundred that day?”

“A ship was leaving within twenty-four hours for the Mediterranean to connect with South African ports. Mahatma-ji was greatly in need of funds to carry on his work.”

“I thought you were ill--possibly starving.”

“I was ill from strain--self-consciousness. It was one of the hardest things I ever had to do--to stand up against America in the office of _The Public Square_.”

“You certainly put it over. But what made you so silent in New York? It’s an actual shock to find you chatty and human, like this.”

“Certain of us in India are trained differently from American ways. You perhaps have read that in the Pythagorean schools, a period of silence was enjoined among the young men. It was so in my training. We seek to silence all opinions, all half-truths, all thinking, in fact, in order to _Know_. We postulate, of course, a center of Spontaneous Knowledge, or Genius, above the mind. To learn obedience to this, one takes a vow of silence----”

“Ah, I remember! Pidge--Miss Musser--I mean Mrs. Melton, told me something of the kind!”

XXVII

THE MAHATMA AND THE MIRACLE

COBDEN heard the voice before he saw the man. Standing in a darkened hall of the bungalow, spoken of as the _Ashrama_, the voice of one speaking English in easy cultured tones reached his ears. When the door opened, he saw several native young men sitting upon the floor and a wasted Hindu figure in the center--a little man in a thin turban more like a skullcap; a homespun loincloth, his bare feet beneath him upon a mat of coarse cloth, a rough pillow at his back. The young men about him had risen, but the central figure merely lifted and extended the hand.

“Mr. Cobden from America,” Gandhi said. “Nagarjuna has made us eager to welcome you.”

Even Nagar withdrew, but one of the boys returned bringing a chair.

“If you don’t mind, I’ll try sitting on the floor, too,” Dicky told the latter. “I’d feel perched with Mr. Gandhi sitting below.”

The Mahatma smiled. “I quite appreciate,” he said. “I hope you will find in India the same kindness that you gave Nagarjuna in New York.”