Chapter LIII: The White Light Again 315 (2)

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

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

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

“She isn’t Hindu. She’s English.”

“I asked her.”

“So did I.”

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

Then they were silent awhile, until Pidge said:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Hard day?” he called.

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

“You haven’t had dinner?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

VII

“THE FREEDOM OF IGNORANCE”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But Dicky meant to finish his report.

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

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

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

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

“Yes, all ready, Pidge.”

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

VIII

SOMEBODY’S SHOULDER

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

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

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

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

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

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

It wasn’t that Pidge loved shopgirls and mill girls. She didn’t love herself for sharing their lot. She wasn’t sentimental at all. She recognized bad management somewhere that forced her to this work. She had to have bread, and outer and under clothing. She paid the price, but there was nothing good nor virtuous about it. She didn’t hate Dicky Cobden when he spoke of “shopgirl literature”; she knew how rotten it was, but there was something in her that belonged to it, or she wouldn’t have been in the factory; moreover, that something had helped to write the _Lance_.

... Somebody’s shoulder. Three months of tin cans was teaching that very well.... And there was a shoulder, straight and steady--a kind of mockery about it, because it was so fine. None of the girls at the big table where she worked would have asked more. It meant books and pictures and all the dining tables of New York; plays and dresses, cleanliness, and all the little coaxing cushions and covers of this arrogant modern hour. It meant all the old solid established joys of place and plenty; all the writing she liked; a leisurely winning of her way through magazines and publishing houses; nothing of Grub Street and the conspiracy against an unknown outsider....

And this life of the factory--hadn’t she earned release? What more could come of the grinding monotony of the days but a more passionate agony to escape, through the under world, or the upper world, through any route at all, even death itself? Was there a further lesson than this?... Somebody’s shoulder. He had the native kindness of clean breeding; also that consideration for others of one who is brought up in a large house. He had an ardent interest in books and life. He was warmly established in the hearts of other men--first and last, a man’s man, which it behooves a woman to inquire into.

There was a tired smile on Pidge’s lips as the car halted at Thirty-second street.... The only blunders he had ever made were in her presence, because he cared so much. He seemed continually in awe and wonder before the thing he fancied she was, as if he had never really looked at a woman before. Of course, another man might act that way, but it was different the way Dicky did it. He had been at school late, and for nearly four years in the office of _The Public Square_ he had bored steadily, craftily toward the center of the life of letters. Work had been his passion up to that day in which he had called to see Nagar, and fell under the spell of Miss Claes and Harrow Street.... There was enough of the artist and dreamer in him to keep life from being tame, yet not enough to make life a maze and a madness. He had health. Money was to him like an old custom, so established as to be forgotten....

Fourteenth Street. Pidge didn’t hear the first call and hopped off with a rush at the second, pulling a growl from the gateman as she sped out.... Dicky was standing at the head of the stairs on the second floor of the Harrow Street house.

“Hello, Pidge,” he said.

“Hello,” she answered, pushing past, but he caught her arm.

“Let me go, please! I haven’t washed yet----”

But he drew her by the hand toward the open door to his front room. The brighter light from there streamed out into the dim hall.

“My hands are sticky from the paste. I’ll come back. I’d rather come back.”

“It’s about that--about your hands, Pidge. I’ve waited as long as I can.”

... Somebody’s shoulder. She wasn’t safe to be trusted right now, yet she couldn’t pull away. If she ever got upstairs--even for a minute in her own little place, before the mirror that waved, she would see it all clearly, but here and now she didn’t want to see clearly. She wanted to give up and rest. She wanted what he wanted--wanted to give him what he wanted, which was the tiredest, most hopeless girl in New York to-night. She was dying of all its strains and failures and rigidities and fightings, and he wanted to take the load.

They were standing under the hanging lamp in his room. The light was white; his face was white. It was leaner than ever before, more of a man in it, more of a boy in it. His will was working furiously to make him speak.

He held her right hand up between them.

“It’s about your hands, Pidge, about the factory. Listen, you make me feel like a tout or a sot--as if you were out killing yourself to support me. I’ve been home two hours and you just coming in.”

“There’s half a million girls in New York--just coming in.”

“I know. We’ll get to them later, but now there’s only one--only one Pidge. I want her home to stay. I want to make a home for her. Why, Pidge, I’ll let you alone, if you just let me do that----”

“I believe you would.”

She was looking up at him hard. She didn’t fully understand, but the boyish cleanliness of him struck her fully that moment. The power of his will which she felt was mainly the fierceness of his decision to speak. It wasn’t the burn of terrible hunger for her. He was young as a playmate: that’s what shook her now. He wanted to fix her place, to let her hands soften again, wanted to let her rest and breathe--not what the other girls laughed about.

“Why, Pidge, I’ve got to take care of you. I’ve got to straighten you out--if it’s only to marry you and go away.”

Something in her heart cracked like a mirror, and a sob broke out of her. It was as if a car that had been running along by itself suddenly left the road and went into a cliff--a warm, kind cliff. Somebody’s shoulder, and she was sobbing:

“I told you I was so tired! I told you I wasn’t safe----”

“Ah, little Pidge----” he was patting her arm and pressing her close.

It had come. This was it. It _was_ rest. The other girls knew. The awful cold ache was broken--warmth of life pouring out of her--heavenly ease in the flood of tears, and something of the dearness of dreams was in his passion, not for her--but to do something for her.

The first whip stroke fell, when Pidge remembered how she looked when she cried. But if she could keep her face covered! She didn’t stir.... Was this the fullness of days? All the consummate essences of ease, he brought--no hunger, no dirt--and really she had fought long and hard.

“... Everything you want, Pidge,” he was whispering. “I’ll take you to my mother. She’s a regular sport, Pidge----”

“She’d have to be,” came from the incorrigible heart in his arms, but not aloud.

The second whip stroke--_The Lance of the Rivernais_. She had failed, and the failure wasn’t the book, but herself, the thing in his arms. She didn’t stir, but there was coldness of calculation to her thinking now--that he meant ease and rest and expediency, not the ripping, rioting, invincible man force that was to come one day and carry her off her feet.

This was the third whip stroke: that he meant propinquity--the nearest, the easiest way.

She started up and pushed him from her.

“I’m not washed,” she said. “I don’t mean from the mills. I’m not washed, or I couldn’t have--couldn’t have----! I’m just like the rest--dying for a shoulder to cry on. You’re all right, Dicky, so right and fine that I’m ashamed. I’ll always care for you. I’ll always be warm at the thought of you. I’ll always remember how I went to you--how dear you are--but you can’t give me freedom. You can’t give me peace. My soul would rot in ease and peace and plenty. I’ve got to earn my own.”

She looked up into his face and her own took a fright from it.

“I know I’ll suffer hells for hurting you--but I can’t help it. I had to know. If I have to spend a life in misery--I had to know that there isn’t anything you can give that will satisfy----”

His mouth was partly open, his head twisted peculiarly, and lowered, as if his shoulder and neck were deformed. He was shockingly white under the lamp.

“Oh, I’m such a beast and I’m so sorry. I really wanted terribly to stay.... But, Dicky Cobden--it wasn’t for you. It wasn’t for you that I wanted to stay--it was for what you have--more.”

IX

“YOU BOTH HAVE KEYS”

DICKY kept his quarters in Harrow Street, but for days at a time did not appear. Pidge Musser at first fancied this was easier. There was a faint cackle of derision from somewhere in her depths, as this idea of it being easier repeated itself in her mind; in fact, there were many conflicting mysteries in Pidge’s deep places. “I laid my head on his shoulder,” she once said to herself, “but thought better of it. Now we are to be strangers.”

At unexpected moments when she was busy at the pasting bench; or nights and mornings, passing in and out of sleep, the faint note of mockery would sound. When she passed Dicky in the halls, or met him at one of Miss Claes’ little tea parties, and he would bow distantly or indulge in formal commonplaces, the mockery would stir itself in Pidge’s profundities, indicating that something somewhere was decidedly idiotic. He looked positively diminished as he kept up his formalities, and she liked and respected him too much to feel pleasant about this. She heard that he was interested in Africa. It was to be observed that he sought Nagar; in fact, several times she heard these two together through the partition.

Finally Pidge heard that Dicky was going to South Africa, possibly to hunt up Nagar’s Little Man, whose name was Gandhi, and who had been Nagar’s friend and teacher both in India and Natal. Also Dicky was to do some letters for _The Public Square_.

On the night before he was to sail for the Mediterranean, he was invited with Pidge by Miss Claes for dinner at Tara Subramini’s Punjabi Fireplace down on Sixth Avenue near Fourth Street. This was also the night Pidge smelled Spring in New York for the first time.

Mid-April; there had been rain. Pidge hadn’t caught the Spring magic coming home from the factory, but now as they walked down Sixth Avenue under the momentary crashes of the Elevated--it stole up out of the pavements as if she were in a meadow--that untellable sweetness which seems the breath of Mother Nature herself, a breath made of all the perfumes of all the flowers, without accentuating one, and a sublimation of all the passions of the human heart as well. Her left hand burrowed under the hanging sleeve of Miss Claes’ wrap. The bare elbow there closed upon it. They both laughed, and Mr. Richard, walking sedately, was altogether out of the question.

Tara Subramini served her Punjabi dinners on great individual plates which were none too hot. She discussed modern dancing with Miss Claes at easy length, when Pidge was served and Richard Cobden was not. The rice cooled, the lamb cooled, even if the peppery curry held its fire. The vast plate had curious little crevices on the side for conserves and glutinous vegetables and various watery leaves. Pidge became prejudiced at once against the Punjab. The great leisure of Asia, which she had heard about from a child and which had tempted her alluringly in the more intense pressures of her own life, lost something of its charm as Tara Subramini conversed with all concerned and the contents of the troughs congealed.

Food is food, but talk is merely talk. Besides, Pidge was hungry. Subramini had things to say, but also an oriental delight in the use of English. Mr. Cobden was unreservedly courteous. Pidge always wondered if he really knew what hunger was. She could get so hungry that her hands trembled, and New York had shown her deeper mysteries of the hunger lesson that she would be slow to forget.

“It must be great to be a gentleman,” she thought.

She positively yearned for Dicky to wake up. If this were poise, this moveless calm of his, this unvarying quiet and courtesy, this inability to be stretched even in laughter--Pidge felt she was ready to drop the hunt; also she was tempted to test out Dicky’s poise to see how much it could really stand.... India bored her, as well as America. Miss Claes could eat and talk at the same time, and drop neither words nor food.... A lone Hindu arose to depart from another table. Subramini helped him with his coat and followed him to the door. Pidge thought once that Subramini was about to spread herself on the doorstep and let him walk over her. Punjab didn’t rise in her regard. Pidge suddenly burst out into a kind of merriment that had nothing to do with anybody present.

“It is because we’re such idiots!” she said brokenly. “Oh, I don’t mean you, Miss Claes. I mean myself and--_Mr._ Cobden. It is the way things are done in the world--so utterly silly. Why should we be strange and embarrassed, avoiding each other for days and weeks--when we should be more than ever friends, and----”

Richard Cobden bent forward attentively. Pidge was turned from him.

“You don’t mean, Pidge, that you fail to see a reason for this strangeness?” Miss Claes asked. “You----”

Pidge stared at her a second in surprise.

“There can’t be any sense to it, can there?” she said slowly.

The other regarded her with a calm that irritated Pidge just now. Everything irritated her, Dicky sitting by, Miss Claes’ familiarity with Subramini, and the look of knowing and not speaking, back of the smile on Miss Claes’ lips. But most of all, peculiarly at this moment, arose in Pidge’s mind the two conflicting stories of nationality.

“Did I hear you wrongly that you said you were English, Miss Claes?” she asked abruptly.

“No, dear.”

“But Dicky said you told him you were Hindu----”

“I did. I am both. I am half-caste, supposed to unite in myself the worst of English and Indian.”

Pidge burned with contrition, less at her questioning than at the bad temper that prompted it. The two women were ready to go, but Dicky wasn’t.

“You seemed to have something to say, Miss Claes, to set us--to set me straight on all this,” he began.

“You see, Richard, one cannot speak without being drawn in. I hesitated on that account.”

“But I’d like to hear.”

Pidge flushed a little as she watched him. Tara Subramini, still afar off, was engaged in words.

“... My house in Harrow Street is just a symbol,” Miss Claes was saying. “To come into one’s house really should mean to come into one’s heart. You both have keys.... What was in my mind to say was that people in your trouble act as strangers for good reasons. If they cannot have each other--they sometimes rush to the other extreme to save themselves the pain of watching another come between.”

Dicky Cobden essayed to light a cigarette. The match broke in his fingers. He did not try again. Miss Claes amplified without apparent feeling:

“Sometimes one who cannot have what he wants--gives way to hatred for a time to ease his wound.... Pidge, what have you to give for the friendship and association of one who wants more?”

“I don’t know that I have anything. I see how selfish I was. It came to me that we, of all people, should be friends, but I didn’t look at the other side.”

“You can be friends, if you are brave enough. You can be, if you dare to come and go and set each other free utterly, but that means long and bitter work.”

The harrowing thing to Pidge was that Miss Claes talked as if Dicky and herself were one in condition and purpose and dilemma, when in reality all the hard part seemed to go to him. She wished Miss Claes would stop, but the words continued with a smooth predestined force:

“The best the world knows, even in books and art, is the kingdom of two; but love doesn’t end in that--at least, not for those who are brave enough and strong enough to sunder their tight little kingdom of each other and let the earth rush in between....”

Tara Subramini’s slippered feet crept in. She stood behind Miss Claes’ shoulders and began to speak of a book of poetic obituaries. The paying of the bill seemed an interminable process.

Cobden looked dazed.

“If Pidge thinks it’s silly to act as strangers--and I can see that it is--I’m for trying the other way,” he repeated, when they reached the street.

The whole talk had been subject to most stubborn and perverse distractions. On Sixth Avenue the racket of traffic had become incessant. Apparently Miss Claes had decided to say no more. Callers waited for her in the basement room at Harrow Street, so Pidge followed Dicky to his “parlor,” which she had not entered since the night of Somebody’s Shoulder.

He seemed possessed to talk of what he had heard, as a youth fascinated by a new course to take. He spoke of a man being big enough to stand by and set a woman free; of a man big enough to wait and watch and be a friend, a comrade. And Pidge, who had brought it all about, listened in a sort of terror which only a woman could understand. This thing which she had aroused in him, this answer of his deep, but still vague powers, to her thoughtless challenge, frightened her now that it had come.

“Don’t, oh, don’t let’s talk any more!” she said at last. “It’s talk, Dicky, just talk. The doing is different, the doing is harder! What do we know of what life will fix for us to do day by day through the years? This thing is so hard that Miss Claes herself hated to let it out. It belongs to you differently than it belongs to me. I haven’t anything to give for your friendship and association. I mean you’ll always want more than I can give.”

He looked at her steadily for an instant.

“I don’t want to be strangers again, Pidge. I want to stand by and wait.”

“You won’t know better than to build pictures while you wait. No one would. You will wait--while you’re away in Africa, making pictures about me, pictures of what I am _not_! I don’t know why I’m chosen to hurt you. If I hadn’t been so utterly lost in myself, I never could have brought this on. I feel that I’ve started a new set of conditions to bring you to another moment--another gash--like in this room the last time we were here. And oh, Dicky Cobden, I don’t want to! To be strangers! To be common and hateful and avoid each other is so much more simple and easy.”

“I’ll stop talking, Pidge,” he said quietly. “It may be easier to be strangers, but it doesn’t look rosy to me. Don’t you worry about it. It is my job and I’ll take a chance.”

“You don’t know what you’re saying!”

“Perhaps not. We won’t talk about that any more.... Now, Pidge, I’m keeping these rooms while I’m away. Wouldn’t you--wouldn’t you for me--look after them--look in on them and keep them alive while I’m gone?... It would make me feel like--great, you know.”

X

APRIL BREATHES AGAIN

THREE nights later, when she reached Harrow Street from the factory, Pidge found two letters. One was from John Higgins of _The Public Square_. This she opened first.

... At the suggestion of Mr. Cobden, just before he left for
South Africa, I am offering you a position here as reader of the
unsolicited manuscripts. Mr. Cobden hints that you know enough about
_The Public Square_ to realize we cannot be lavish in salaries, but
think we can at least pay you what you are getting now, to begin
with--and the work will be different.

“Oh, Dicky Cobden,” she whispered, alone in the upper room.

She sat in the center of her cot as of old, breathing the sweetness of the release from the factory.... Friendliness like this art of Dicky’s was good.... It made her eyes smart now--the new work. It was easier to take it from him--away. It was a soft cloak that she could nestle in, because he wouldn’t see.... Miss Claes knocked. Pidge read in her eyes that she already knew.

“No one can ever tell you anything.”

“I’m so glad you want it, Pidge. I couldn’t tell him for sure that you’d take it.”

“They really need somebody, don’t they?”

“Mr. Cobden said you wouldn’t be in doubt about that after you got there.”

“I’m going to take it,” Pidge said soberly. “I know it means something more than it looks--but I’m going to take it. I’m so sick of myself which fights everything. Also, I’m going down after supper--and sit there--in his ‘parlor.’ I haven’t entered since----”

Miss Claes was called from below. Pidge felt the second letter in her hand. It was from Los Angeles, her father’s writing. A check dropped out on the cot. By powerful effort of will, Pidge left it there, until she had read the note:

... At this time it seems well for me to send you money. Hard as it
has been for me to refrain, I felt before this that it was best for
you to face New York alone, unaided. As there is a New Generation, my
child, there is a New Fatherhood which dares--dares even to allow the
heart’s darling to struggle alone; dares to say “hands off” to all
the untransmuted emotions which rush forth to shield the fledgling
from the world----

Fifty dollars. Pidge sank back and softly batted her pillow with one loose arm. She laughed in a smothery uncertain way that was not of joy.... It was as if she heard his voice in the room--the new parenthood, the new generation, the adjustment of motive to moment!

The sort of thing in this letter always shook and tortured Pidge. It was a part of her. She was bred of it. She had been half as old as now when she first realized it. Then in every thought and act, she had rushed to the other extreme. It was true that her father had taught her the deepest things in books. In his study, she had caught hints of the inner meanings of inaccessible literatures, before she had learned to spell simple words of English. Because his eyes hurt, she had read aloud for hours, day after day, tomes out of Asia which she had no care nor thought to understand, but from which, volatile fairylike impressions came to rest in the depths of her heart. She had loved the few central springs of books in a house of books, until she realized that her father read, but lived them not; that he expounded, exhorted upon the doctrines--but his life was his own twisted rag. That was when Pidge’s heavens cracked--and she had set out to be honest and erect, if only as tall as a gnome.

The thought that came at this moment had come before. It was the passion to be what her father was not that had made her rush forth to be straight in her own head--to refuse to lie to herself--to go to the other extreme of fierceness and bleakness and ill-temper, rather than lie to herself--to be plain and true, if she had to be a man-hater and poison face. Yet Pidge sat up straight with a bitter thought. Like it or not, she saw right now that it was her father who had prepared her to accept and make good, possibly, in this position with _The Public Square_....

“But where did he get the money?” she muttered at last.

She crossed to the open window. April breathed up to her from the stone floor of the area to-night; magic April, breathing up through the trampled earth and the degraded pavements. Suddenly a soft love stole over her. It was love of the April dark.

She heard the sounds of the city over the buildings, over into the stillness of Harrow Street, like the far tread and clatter of a pageant. Mother Nature was actually perceptible in this soft air, and something that Pidge answered to as never before in New York. Her hands stretched out to touch the casings of the window; the old wood gave her an additional warmth. It belonged to this house of Miss Claes, this house of the mystery of kindness. She was free at this moment of the fear of accepting too much, having come up to breathe, at least, out of the ruck of fighting everything and everybody. She had been utterly graceless and narrow in her acceptances, fighting against favors, when she knew all the time that to receive is the other part of giving. A shiver passed over her, nevertheless, as she remembered the subtle mendicancy that she had known in her father’s house, the calm acceptance of gifts and favors from others in the belief that one was evolved enough to give the ineffable in exchange for materials. No wonder she had run from that.

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.