Chapter LIII: The White Light Again 315 (5)

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.”

Dicky had expected power; he found composure. His idea of power was perhaps in part a hang-over from a boyish ideal of a certain American financial executive. Nothing of that in this room; rather he was conscious of Gandhi’s frailness and smallness. This presence called forth impulses to be tender, to lower one’s voice, to hurry to bring anything wanted. He was shocked a little at the twisted, battered look of the features. The lips looked pulpy in parts and did not rest together evenly. The smile was curiously slow--tentative, like one in whom understanding dawns. Back of the iron-rimmed spectacles and tired eyes, so inured to pain, was the essence of fearlessness. This was the first commanding characteristic to the American.

* * * * *

“... Fear,” Gandhi was saying, “fear of death makes us devoid both of valor and religion. There is no place for fear in the _Satyagrahi’s_ heart.”

“What is a _Satyagrahi_?” Cobden asked.

“One who is devoted and pledged to truth, to _Satyagraha_. I coined the word, to express our purpose in South Africa. _Satyagraha_ is the use of Love-force or Soul-force.”

Curiously, Dicky felt the cleanness of the house, the peace of it, the humming of a _charka_ in the next room, a symbol of that peace. He felt Gandhi’s face growing upon him out of the shadow, a face that had been dried cleanly by many suns, the features fashioned by a life of direct, unpredatory thinking--the face of a man incapable, even in thought, of hitting below the belt. And now, there was to go with the hum of the _charka_, the faint fragrance of dried fruit in the air, or that sweetness one breathes in the altitudes where the sun is shining upon the great conifers.

“The world has talked much of the omnipotence of God,” Mahatma-ji went on. “India, at last, is preparing to put her faith to test. Passive resistance has been called the weapon of the weak; if this is so, the Soul is weaker than the flesh. Passive resistance calls upon its devotees to endure great suffering, even martyrdom and death. Those who believe it is too difficult to carry out do not trust the Soul. They are not moved by true courage.”

There was no pose nor show, no straining for force, rarely an adjective or simile, no shadings of sense--a direct approach, inevitably direct. Dicky felt suddenly hopeless of ever understanding such directness. For the first time in his life, he realized that all his training to live and to write was less than straight. He had been taught half-tones, shadows to accentuate lights. Here was directness.

Gandhi resumed: “It is the sacred principle of love which moves mountains. To us is the responsibility of living out this sacred law; we are not concerned with results.”

“No such thing then as righteous anger?” Dicky asked.

“There is not for us. Anger is the misuse of force. Anger in thought is an enemy to clear thinking, to understanding. To understand is to love. Anger in action tends to become violence, and violence is the negation of spiritual force. In fact, only those who eschew violence can avail themselves of their real powers. Only those who realize that there is something in man which is superior to the brute nature in him, and that the latter always yields to it, can effectively apply this force, which is to violence, and therefore to all tyranny, all injustice, what light is to darkness. For the exercise of the purest Soul-force, prolonged training of the individual Soul is an absolute necessity.”

Just now Dicky was contending with the feeling that he was in the presence of an evangelist or healer. He had difficulty for the moment in recalling that Gandhi was world-trained; a lawyer of London’s careful making; an opponent of governments in South Africa; a man found powerful enough in his own person to be reckoned with by the established laws of men of high place.

“We have many things to ask of England,” Gandhi said, “and she has promised us her attention, as soon as her present difficulties give her freedom of heart and hand to attend our wants here. To press our wants now, or to force our desires upon England in her crisis in Europe, would be taking an unfair advantage. So this is a time for us in India to cleanse and prepare ourselves for future action, sacrifice if necessary----”

At one moment Gandhi’s face was dull and unattractive as a camel driver’s; again it shone with a high clear calm, like the ideal most of us have of a saint or a priest. Now the instant came, as the words stopped, that Dicky seemed to be looking into the Indian face actually for the first time, and Gandhi was looking _into_ him. The American was uncentered for a second or two, as he had once felt in the quick sag of an airplane in a bit of rough going.

It began to become clear to the caller that there were only a few constantly vibrating themes in this man’s talk: the necessity for nonviolence; the control of self, essential before the control of others can be contemplated; the establishment of altruism as a basis for all political activity; the return of India into her own destiny of a handicraft civilization, which involved the making and using of her own goods and the turning of her back upon the “monster of a mechanical civilization”; freedom of speech, devotion to truth, fearlessness, always that.

Dicky now actually contemplated the look of unearthly calm in the eyes of the man before him. Was it fanaticism--this fearlessness which Gandhi put into practice? Was there a soul-calm back of the human nervous system, a central calm that a man could reach and abide in, that made anything negligible that men might do to the body? Was there something really that Miss Claes and Nagar and this man talked about--something that went on and on, that loved one’s enemies, that loved one’s love, no matter what this life effected to keep them apart? Was it worth going after, since every ordinary viewpoint seemed changed in those who had touched it?... Surely India was getting him going--he, Dicky Cobden, of the family of trowel makers! In amazement, he realized that he was responding to some stimulus like the finest wine--that if he didn’t get out of here soon, he would fall to telling his troubles like a man who has had too many drinks.

Gandhi was speaking of his workers and devotees here in Ahmedabad; the manner of their life together:

“So in our _Ashrama_,” he explained, “every child is taught to understand political institutions and to know how his country is vibrating with new emotions, with new aspirations, with new life.... As for men and women living and working together in the _Ashrama_, they must live the celibate life whether married or unmarried. Marriage brings a woman close together with a man, and they become friends in a special sense, never to be parted in this life or in the lives to come; but I do not think that into that place of life, our lusts should necessarily enter.”

Dicky had scrambled to his feet from the floor.

“I won’t take your time any more just now,” he mumbled haltingly.

Mahatma-ji watched him with a look of gentlest understanding.

Dicky backed out. He was in the street alone.... The young men had not restrained him in the slightest. They had seemed to understand that he must be alone. Even Nagar had only walked at his side a moment in the hall, to say that he would come to the _Entresden_ after dinner.... He was alone in the outskirts of the city with the miracle. Somewhere among Gandhi’s sentences about men and women, it had happened--somewhere in there, when he had spoken about--yes, that was it, “about friends in a special sense!...”

A pariah dog yelped, running out of a doorway, almost banging into his knees. He was in a narrow street, and had to step upon a doorsill, while two men passed dragging at a cart. He saw their bare ribs and salt-whitened loin cloths. The sun was still high; the stillness and heat almost fetid in the byways. He passed a native market place by the river, and out of all the moving multicolored crowd, he remembered only one parasol of jade green, though he did not see the face beneath.

His American-trained mind scoffed against the thing that had happened, but his heart held on serenely.... What did this little world-warrior with the battered mouth know about love and living with a woman? What did he know about lusts that he spoke so freely of? Did he ever give three years of his life to the one battle--not to hate the woman he loved most under heaven? Or was that particular battle so far back in his experience that he merely spoke of it as one skirmish in the great campaign of fifty years, called Life?

Alone at dinner at the _Entresden_, Dicky conned every word the Little Man had spoken about the young married people who worked together in the _Ashrama_, of the celibacy they vowed themselves to, of their becoming through marriage “friends in a special sense--for this and all lives.” Yes, Gandhi talked as if it were a foregone conclusion that there were other lives....

He wasn’t tasting his dinner.... He came up from the deeps of reflection to realize a waiter was coming toward him, as if in answer to a signal. He also discovered that he had been sitting over his filled plate with one hand lifted--the thumb and fingers brushing together, as if he were close to _her_, and it was a bit of her dress or a wisp of her hair between his fingers. His mind could scoff all it pleased, for his heart held serenely to the miracle, and this was the miracle: that Pidge Musser, married or not married, was back alive in his heart; and such a melting pity for her plight had come to him as he sat before the Little Man, that he, the hardheaded, had to rise abruptly from the interview and rush away, lest he fall to weeping and explaining all.

XXVIII

THE RACK OF SEX

DICKY and Nagar sat under the _punkahs_ in the room at the _Entresden_--that stillest, hottest night. A fierce stimulus was driving the American. Moment by moment he realized it more clearly--that his love had come back to him, or some strange new fire from it, as he had talked with Mahatma-ji. It compelled him, mind and emotion now, and his questions were insatiable, but he was slow and roundabout in getting to the core of matters that fascinated.

“For instance, what makes him starve himself?” Dicky asked.

“He has no illusions about fasting,” Nagar answered. “Mahatma-ji objects to the distractions of the body. He keeps down this drum of the senses by severity of handling, an old well-tried way of the East. Ask an expert horseman what to do with a spirited saddle horse that has a tendency now and then to take the bit and run away. ‘Cut down his grain, and he will be easier to handle,’ you will be told.”

Dicky was groping feverishly within himself as the other talked. “But what has celibacy to do----” he halted and finished, “with politics and all that?”

“Mahatma-ji has made himself free from the rack of sex and the drum of the senses--enough to realize his great work for others, for India. We who follow him wish to do the same. We understand that we have not the great gift for India, until we are free; that is, only a man who has freed himself from his own desires can help greatly to free others, or his country. We are not free agents so long as we are on the rack of sex. We cannot hate ourselves off that rack; in fact, we must learn to love more, not less, to escape.”

“Tunnel,” Dicky said. “No man educated on the Hudson can get that sort of thing. Have a heart, Nagar.”

“It is my poor telling----”

Dicky smiled and smoked: “I can’t see how he’d have anything left to give the world,” he added--“a man who got on top of himself that way.”

* * * * *

The thing that Dicky had found in the same room with the Little Man wasn’t happiness, but it was better than the deadness he had known; good to feel the tissues of his heart alive again, not a leaden lump.

Again the next day, he went to sit with Mahatma-ji, but nothing happened, though he remained two hours. On one side he had come to doubt the whole business; on the other he had been naïve enough half to believe that all he had to do was to enter the presence of the Indian leader to get this living thing back in his heart, this pain that had the breath of life in it. Two days afterward, however, while he was deeply involved with Gandhi’s explanation of _Satyagraha_, taking notes so that he could put down the other’s words almost exactly, the sense of Pidge Musser’s presence and plight was suddenly with him again, renewed within him, the pity of it almost more than he could endure.

There were hours also when Dicky could believe almost anything at the _Ashrama_, where he was permitted to sit with the native students (Gandhi often halting his speech in Hindi or Guzerati, to talk English for the American’s benefit). And occasionally during long evening talks with Nagar, on the banks of the Sabarmati or under the muffle-winged _punkahs_ in the _Entresden_ room, Dicky’s mind had sudden extensions of range. Still he had a vague foreboding that he would not be able to hold all this hopeful stuff when he was away from India, for slowly and surely he was being pressed to depart.

“America needs your loyalty now,” Nagar said. “We will send for you to come when the curtain rises here. The drama of India is not being played now, but the Play is written. This that you have heard, so far, is only a rehearsal of minor parts.”

In June, a letter came from _The Public Square_, pressing its correspondent to return to France, or at least to some of the points where the American troops were gathering.

... As for magazine conditions, Dicky [John Higgins wrote], they
couldn’t be worse. Our little old _Public Square_ has fallen into
sorry ways.... If you’ve had a German neighbor for thirty years and
learned cautiously to respect the beast, you’re supposed now to
know him no more, in trade or whist or home or club, nor his woman
nor children. Old England’s bloomed out more seductive than ever,
and this country’s infatuated. You couldn’t believe it. We’re more
English than Canada right now. She’s borrowed everything in sight
and is so tickled over herself that she’s beginning to laugh at us
already. It’s a fact, her big business men can’t keep the joke any
longer.... But I only meant to tell you that _The Public Square_
has nothing to say, nothing to do. We tried a critical study of the
architecture of a federal building in Des Moines, and we’re being
looked into for unpatriotic motives. A lot of American business
men, who once gloried in their breadth and toleration, have taken
positions in what they call the Department of Justice, and their
business is to probe into speeches and writings like ours. They are
looking for heresies of citizenship. If we’re not suspended for
making a croak, we’ll likely be forced to suspend for not having the
breath. Otherwise, we’re quite well, and the trade world--you ought
to be able to hear American business boom, even in India--if you’re
not too far inland.

For the first time John Higgins’ views looked diminished to Dicky Cobden’s eyes. This personal treason he laid to India. He made an arrangement, however, to help _The Public Square_ to keep alive.... Gandhi was called to Lucknow, and Dicky saw him into his third-class coach, with a catch in his throat and a sadness of heart. A day or two later he left Nagar at the station where he found him--and the day looked dull and gloomy from the windows of the Bombay _Inter Provincial_, as the American started south alone.

XXIX

RUFUS’ PLAY DAY

RUFUS MELTON was having his coffee at Miss Claes’ table. It was noon and July, 1917. The package of mail left at 54 Harrow Street had not forgotten Rufus this morning. Another story had gone through, and he felt that the day was all right. It looked to him like a very good day to play and to shop. Miss Claes came in from the kitchen in a fresh white dress and canvas shoes, nor did she come empty handed. A crystal and silver marmalade jar was in one hand, and a plate of cold ham in the other. These she placed on the cloth before him; and noting that the loaf of rye bread lay uncut upon the board, she went to a drawer for the knife.

Rufus dropped a cube of sugar into his coffee cup and contemplated Miss Claes’ ankle. His mind became industrious. He was thinking how he would describe the ankle if he were using it in a story. He thought of several narrow white things. There was a white greyhound, but you couldn’t say a woman’s ankle was like that. There was a white pleasure yacht on the river, with narrow lines and clipper bow that bore a psychological likeness, but it would take a paragraph to put that over. The boneheads would think of boiler plate. Then there was a birch tree and a polar bear and a snowy church spire ... anyway the ankle was fetching.

“You look great this morning, Miss Claes, and see here----”

He spread out his letter from a most rich and inaccessible editorial room.

“How interesting, Rufus. You are doing so well with your stories.”

“Pidge thinks they’re rotten,” he chuckled.

No comment from Miss Claes.

“She’d have me sit in a cave and growl over a story--bringing one out every three months for editors to muss their hair over and finally turn down. That’s the life----”

Miss Claes had turned to the cabinet of dishes, the double doors of which were open. One might have thought that Rufus was now entirely involved in the subject of Pidge’s idea of stories, but in reality he was studying Miss Claes’ waist and throat and profile. Her particular freshness from boots up this morning fascinated his eye. She took his coffee cup to the kitchen to be refilled, and when she came back close to his chair, Rufus’ arm moved engagingly around her hips, his face turning up with a questioning boyish smile.

“What is it, Rufus?” she asked, making no movement to be free from his arm.

“You’re mighty charming this morning----”

“It’s a charming morning.”

His arm tightened a little, yet she stood perfectly still. Rufus was now in a quandary. This sitting posture had its diminishing aspect: yet to arise and disentangle his feet from under the table, he must loosen his arm or show an uncouth line to the camera, so to speak. Rufus rarely broke his rhythms in these little performances; certainly not when the going was as delicate as this. Miss Claes had become especially desirable, because of an exciting uncertainty about her, and an affectation, at least, of allegiance to Pidge. If he had only had sense enough to turn his chair around, before taking her in. Presently Rufus reached the conclusion that it was better to draw her down to him, than take a chance of getting his arm around her again.

She came--no resistance, no rigidity. His lips found her shadowy cheek, and an indescribable and most disturbing fragrance from her neck and hair. Or was it the extraordinary coolness of everything that disturbed, or the words gently whispered in his ear:

“You’re such a lonely boy. You don’t understand at all what you are really dying for.”

Rufe was disappointed. So hers was the mothering game. Besides his position was uncomfortable, knees under the table, and his coffee was getting cold. So he let her go after all, in order to reach a standing posture, but by the time he was free of the chair and the table, Miss Claes had vanished without haste into the kitchen. Rufus now stood dangling inconveniently between his breakfast and her return.

She came; he went to her. Her dark eyes were utterly calm, no traceable deepening of the color in her face. She halted, but lightly held in the two hands before her was a gold-edged dish, with a little golden globe of butter in the center.

Rufus dropped back in his chair and lifted his coffee cup. What on earth could a man do with a woman holding a butter dish? “It’s hell to be fastidious,” he thought, in regard to his own inhibitions.

Something delectable had gone out of the July day. Miss Claes was no nearer his understanding than before. Pidge would have the laugh on him, because these women could never keep anything to themselves. He didn’t mind anything about Pidge so much as her laugh. Altogether, this little brush at breakfast left him unsatisfied--and this was a play day.

“Thanks,” he said at the door.

She gave him a pink, an old-fashioned white one. “The butter-and-egg-man brought in some from his dooryard garden in Yonkers,” she said.

Rufe started upstairs.

There were voices from one of the rooms on the main floor, but the second was entirely empty and silent until a rear door opened and Fanny Gallup looked out.

“Hello,” she said in a far-reaching whisper.

Fanny’s “hello” was one of the best of her little ways. She said it, as one would cast a silken noose.

Rufe looked back and down. On certain mornings he would have growled an answer and tramped on, but there was something white and calling about the face in the dim shadows this morning, and for a wonder the kids weren’t squalling.

“Oh, come in. Come on in!” was in his ears. Her bare arm was raised and he saw the little muffler of dark in the pit of it. The lacing was gone from the smock, moreover, and there was a pull for the moment to Fanny’s sad little breast. The fact that the smock had once been Pidge’s, Rufe thrust back into his mind for future reference. He halted, looking around and listening again. Then he tiptoed in and the door was shut. Not a great while afterward the door was opened, the crying of children was heard. Fanny was moaning, “Don’t go ’way--oh, don’t go ’way!”

But Rufus breasted past her muttering within himself, “Never again!”

* * * * *

... Pidge and Rufe Melton went over to Bank Street for supper that evening. Rufus wasn’t hungry. He had bought a golf suit that looked very well on him, he said, but evidently now he was troubled how to use it. He hadn’t done any work so far to-day and felt less like it than ever. Pidge thoughtlessly mentioned that an Indian letter had come in to the office from Richard Cobden that day.

“You folks are dippy about this Cobden,” Rufe said. “Every time an article of his comes out in the _Passé Square_, you gather together to read it as if it had come from the Messiah. What’s he to you, Pan--a little bit tender on your Dicky?”

“A little bit tender,” she said.

Rufus felt abused. He glared at her. This sort of thing had happened before. Rufe had come to look at Pidge as his picket pin. He had a long rope and everything was all right, so long as the pin held. But her manner now would uncenter any man.

“I’d like to get out of Harrow Street,” he growled. “Every time I put my address on the top of a manuscript, I feel it’s a knock rather than a boost. I’ve been tempted to get an agent, for no other reason than to have his address for the magazines to work through. I was talking with Redge Walters who bought this story to-day, and he said, ‘Rufe, you sure fall for the little bobbed heads down in the Village, don’t you? Why don’t you come uptown and live in New York?’”

“I like Harrow Street,” said Pidge.

“You don’t make a secret of it, either,” he went on. “Of course, Miss Claes is kind and all that, but we pay for what we get, and there’s no question in my mind about the pictures in her gallery being hung crooked.”

“If you’ve finished your supper, let’s go,” said Pidge.

“She breathes! The Arctic princess!” Rufe shivered.

Pidge didn’t answer.

“And that second floor needs policing up,” Rufe resumed. “I haven’t taken it to heart so much about living in the Village, but that second floor’s a tenement patch. Every time I go up and down----”

“Fanny’s my fault and Miss Claes accepts it with never a murmur,” Pidge said, wide-eyed. “I’d look well running off uptown and leaving Fanny there. Oh, Rufe, don’t you ever see any fault except on the outside?”

Right then Rufe said something.

“What’s the use of me looking after my own faults when you’ve got them all in hand like Shetland ponies?”

Pidge arose. Black waters were welling up in her breast. It was so true. His faults were with her day and night, and the greatest of them was his entire irresponsibility. Also it touched her in the sorest quick to have him point out that Fanny lowered the values, not only of the second floor, but of the whole Harrow Street house.

Pidge never passed Fanny’s door but she was pressed by something within to enter; yet her whole personal nature rebelled. Often for hours at her work, there was a gloomy semiconscious activity within her that kept urging its notice up to her mind. When she stopped to think, she would realize that she hadn’t gone into Fanny’s room that day, or that she must drop in to-night. It was so now, only more than ever, because Rufe had located her private horror and brought it to speech. On the second floor, returning from supper, she told Rufe to go on up, that she meant to see Fanny for a few minutes.

“What to--come on, Pan, let’s go to a show somewhere!” he said suddenly.

She shook her head.

“There isn’t a clot of work stirring in my brain pan,” he went on.

“I don’t want to go out. I’ve got to see Fanny----”

He caught her sleeve. “It’s too hot to go up. Let’s go somewhere. Let’s get on a bus and go uptown----”

She was too occupied in the thing she hated to do, to notice his concern. He spoke again:

“I’m not going up there alone. You’re colder than a frog to live with anyway----”

“Go out somewhere, Rufe, if you want to. Don’t mind me.”

She didn’t hear his words, but she heard the crying of Fanny’s children. The door opened. Fanny stood there, but looked past her, over Pidge’s shoulder, and queerly enough Pidge thought of the words, “And Jove nods to Jove.” The hall door was then shut.

“Wot you coming in here for--to scold me some more, Redhead?”

“No, Fanny, to see you and the----”

“I know why you come, all right. To find fault--that’s why, and you needn’t kill yourself, because I’m gettin’ along, so-so. Little old Fanny’s holdin’ her own--and that’s more’n you’re doin’.”

Pidge looked into the crib. A core of fetid vapor hung above it, and Fanny’s words seemed to blend with it.

“Think you can hold your job and hold a man, too, don’t you? Oh, yes, Redhead knows how. Redhead’s got it all worked out. Redhead can tell us all how to do it, oh, yes----”

“What’s the matter, Fanny? Are you scolding, so I won’t start? I didn’t come to start something. Just came to see you. Wouldn’t you like to go out for an hour and have me stay with the--with the----”

Pidge always halted this way.

“Worried--eh? Worried about somethin’?” Fanny piped up. “Well, I’m not tellin’ anything--except you ain’t got your little mastiff tied to no corset string----”

“What are you talking about, Fanny?”

“Like to know. Wouldn’t you?”

Pidge felt cold. She cared to know what the other meant. She didn’t say so, however. She knew a better way--an effective way that seemed to come out of depths within her that knew vast pasts and many lands, all strategies of men and maids, all secrets of tent and purdah, lattice and veil.

“Don’t trouble, Fanny. I just came in to see how you were getting on. I’m so sorry, you know----”

“Sorry----” Fanny laughed.

“So sorry, dear--that you’re penned in this way--and Albert missing!”

“Sorry!” Fanny screamed her mirth.

“Don’t you want me to be sorry for you, dear?” Pidge trailed. “Why, I haven’t been nearly so good as I meant to be----”

“Well, you dam’ little itch-face--talking to me about being sorry. Who’n heller-you to tell me about being sorry? Who’n heller-you to talk to me about me gettin’ penned in an’ Albert missin’, when you can’t keep your own man--when you don’t carry your own babies? Who’n heller-you anyway?”

Then Fanny got down to business and spoke of life in the here and now.

“Never mind, dear,” said Pidge. “We can’t attend to everything. I’m going out to get you some ice cream. I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

She was in the street. She brought back a paper pail without haste. Fanny had begun to cry.

“Don’t feel badly,” Pidge said, washing a saucer and spoon.

Fanny cried on. Pidge served her a large dish, and a smaller one for the older child. Then from the paper, she spooned tiny mouthfuls into the face in the crib--spooned until there was sleep from the novel coolness of the sweet. Then Pidge patted Fanny’s shoulder, as she passed out, promising to come back some time to-morrow.

Upstairs she found Rufe, shirt open at the throat, standing by the back window. The light in the room was heavily shaded. He looked to her covertly, half expectantly.

“Want to read something?” he said in a pleasant tone.

“No. I’m going to bed,” said Pidge.

XXX

THE HEAD OF THE HOUSE

EARLY the next morning in the shadowy back room, Pidge moved softly about as she dressed. She saw the new golf suit, and her lips twisted into a smile. Another toy; another bit of acting. That was all of the game he cared for--the clothes that went with it. She thought of the night on the corner when the newsboy had pointed out Rufe as a movie actor. She saw his desk by the window. It looked like a troubled face. Here she was, as usual, furiously busy with his faults--so occupied that he didn’t have to bother at all, sleeping serenely on. But he didn’t understand, never could understand, that her agony was because she saw them as part of herself; that in her own heart she couldn’t free herself from responsibility; knowing deeply the _dis_-ease that comes from that soul-deep question, “Am I my brother’s keeper?”

And there he was lying on his back, innocent as a child. The pain darted into her heart ... the baby carriage at Santa Monica. His complexion was almost as fresh, his black hair brushed back. It was as if he had fallen asleep with a tear in his eyes, for a little penciling of salt was on the thin blue-veined skin under the eyelid. His breast was uncovered and that spoiled the picture, spoiled the pathos; for Rufe, though the least athletic of men, was hairy and glad of it.

She hadn’t slept. This, since coming home last night, was a show-down time, as she expressed it. She had met the same several times with her father, when the days became so black and evil that something had to happen. Deep, under words and surface thoughts, lay the affair of Fanny’s room. The dreary consciousness of that never left her, but actual thinking of details was another affair. She couldn’t give way to them, and keep the outer quiet she had determined upon. She had been too honest to hide from herself, even in the beginning, that Rufe habitually took life as it came. She never could forget his first appraisal of herself in the reception room of _The Public Square_.

So this hadn’t come in the nature of shock; rather it was a pitiless uncovering of ugliness that had been vaguely subconscious before. What hurt her most keenly, so that she was close to crying out, as she lay beside him in the night, was the inevitable tramp of Fate, audible through it all--their meeting in Dicky’s room; Dicky’s opening of _The Public Square_ to him in the first place; her own bringing of Fanny Gallup to this house; the weaving back and forth into one, of the different lives--even her father’s.

Rufe wasn’t at home when she returned that night. He hadn’t rung her at the office, but she found word with Miss Claes that he had gone down to Washington. She felt something was going to happen, but through the day she had gathered her strength together to decide that she wouldn’t be the one to bring it about. Underneath all was the old sense of her responsibility.

Pidge was half tempted to seek Miss Claes this night. She even went so far as to learn that her friend was at home. It always happened so, when she needed help: Miss Claes might be out any or at all other times. A light was in the basement room, and no voices, but Pidge crept back upstairs without speaking.... She had failed. She had run away from her father, failing there; failing here. She must see this through alone a little longer.... The next afternoon Rufe called for her at _The Public Square_. His eyes held a glint of triumph.

“I’m going to France,” he said, when they were in the street. “I’ve arranged to do a big feature for Redge Walters and a Sunday newspaper syndicate set.”

“But how about the draft?”

“Went down to Washington to start things going to fix that. Redge gave me letters. Looks as if there won’t be much trouble. You see, the Government needs the writers--public sentiment, you know.”

It wasn’t that Pidge didn’t think of things to say on this point of making public sentiment, but a great gray ennui was over her. She had said enough about his faults.

“You know, I’ve been smothering in Harrow Street--had to get away,” he added.

“Yes, I know, Rufe.” After a time, she said, “I think it’s a good thing.”

“That’s the way to look at it, Pan,” he said in a relieved voice, and confided: “I need the experience, too, you know, because I’ve never been to Europe----”

It was out before she thought: “But how did you get to the Tunisian sands?”

“I mean I’ve never stayed long enough to look around. Of course, I’ve passed through.”

He grouched for the rest of the evening, but she felt worse about this than he did. She had thought she was through nailing him like that. It had done no good, merely an additional breaking out of her abysmal temper.... On the night before he left, Rufe was at his best--the playboy she loved so much; and, of course, she was pressed harder and harder into the realms of the Arctic Princess, which was by no means her natural habitat. At last, he had her crying, which was something, because it hadn’t happened often.

“Going to miss your Rufie,” he whispered, “sorry he’s going away?”

“Oh, it isn’t that!”

“What is it, Pan?” he demanded in the tone of the head of a household. “Get it off your mind--don’t keep anything from me.”

That started her to laughing. “It’s noth-nothing, Rufe. I’m all right now,” she said brokenly. “I’m only hurt because I haven’t done it better----”

“What?”

“Us.”

“Forget it,” he said. “I never hold a grudge.”

XXXI

TWO LETTERS FROM INDIA

LATER in July, Miss Claes received letters from Dicky Cobden and Nagar. Each, it appeared, had been mainly interested in writing about the other. She read Dicky’s first: