Chapter LIII: The White Light Again 315 (6)

... I think I’ve seen the Man you wrote of, but I’m more interested
in our own Nagar--altogether different in his native dress. I never
knew how civilized clothes could slow up a man’s looks. If a white
man in New York were as good-looking as Nagar is here, the movie
folk would kidnap him, if necessary, for the screen.... Things look
differently over here. Sitting in this plain house of the one they
call Mahatma-ji, I seem to understand things that would appear absurd
in New York.... Nagar has opened up. He talks freely and laughs. He
is human, and his American years show in fine light. Try to think how
startling all this was to one coming up from Bombay, expecting the
old sphinx of your basement and halls.... I find myself frequently
at the _Ashrama_--a houseful of saints--young men and women devoted
to the Mahatma-ji, like Nagar, and who apparently have taken vows
covering self-sacrifices unlimited. Gandhi is a bit of old brass with
a mustache; terribly battered, only fifty they say, but he shows the
wear of greater years. I seemed to feel that he had been frozen,
that he had been whipped, that he had been burned. Some of his teeth
are gone.... He tells us that you can’t fight back and expect to get
anywhere. He says to answer a hurt with a hurt is to prepare for hurt
again. He says you never can understand your enemy by hating him. He
says that India can only triumph by returning into herself. Imagine
such unearthly affairs from a barrister educated in Middle Temple,
London! And Nagar appears to understand all this.... I haven’t the
organs to believe much. My training hasn’t prepared me easily to
accept miracles--more later, when I cool down. But Nagar is great to
me in himself. I think I find him more interesting, even than Gandhi.
Sometimes he seems to contain Gandhi. But it would smash everything I
have to work with, if I gave either one of them my entire belief. Yet
I dread the thought of going away....

The letter from Nagar was then read slowly twice, and the smile on the face of Miss Claes gradually lost itself in a blur of white, as if twilight had crept into the basement room.

... The American whom we know never speaks directly of the one he
loves; it does not seem to occur to him that we have sympathy that
enfolds his secrets. He asks questions--asks questions. He shakes his
head. His college-trained intellect does not reach up, does not hold
up its cup to receive the synthesis. It moves wearily from one to
another of its separate analyses, with only rarely a connective flash
of intuition. But his heart keeps burning, yearning all the time,
and as he learns, he acts. So he seems very safe.... I have wished so
often that he were going to you, instead of to his work in Europe,
but that, of course, is selfish. He has his work there. We must hold
him between us. He knows already that he will not be able to see and
feel in France, as he does here. It is his ordeal. I have told him
many times; every day, in fact, that what he sees and feels here, he
must remember there, and hold to, until it is made working knowledge
within him.... Our work is merely preparing. The Little Man, as
Richard calls him affectionately from that old story, realizes that
the hour is not yet. We work in the midst of many shades of darkness
and obliquity and inhibition. We are marking time, marking time....
Our American will return to India in time to see the Day break. I
have promised to keep him informed. As Paul Richard says, “We must
prepare in ourselves that magnificent day.”

Miss Claes sat in silence. Then she seemed to become aware that voices above vaguely distracted. She went to the door, and listened. Fanny Gallup was crying, with little care who heard.

XXXII

FRANCE, 1918. THE YANK

DICKY hadn’t had his clothes off for several days. He was in the “Oregon” Forest with Colonel Boulding who was no sort of man to tie to for one who felt that a clean washrag was one of the necessities of life. Dicky hadn’t cared for strenuous field work but it had come to him in France; not the actions of the big fields so much as the extraordinary little back-line dramas that break the laws of perspective by rising more clearly, as days drew on. Four days before, on his way in to Paris, he had met Boulding, who was taking out several fresh battalions to relieve a hard-pressed front at St. Aignan.

“I’ve got an extra horse,” said Boulding, “good old Yorick, steady as a tram-car, and we’ll be back in three days.”

Dicky stood in the twilight, half rain, half snow--one of the interminable waits for order, Boulding back in the ranks somewhere. The firing had died down and Dicky dropped his bridle rein to bang his arms about to get some blood stirring in them. One of the problems of life just now was why wet snow soaked through leather quicker than straight rain water; another was why letters from home always dragged around the wrong fronts before being delivered; another was how long was IT going to last; another was hot coffee.

His mount had turned gently away in the thickening dusk, turned on his toe corks through the slush to follow a wind-blown leaf. Plop--a water-soaked trench-siding gave way, and Yorick disappeared into an unused pit. Dicky stared down into the inky dark. The beast snorted. A flashlamp was procured from one of Boulding’s lieutenants and Dicky found his way down into the trench.

It became clear why Yorick couldn’t rise, even if unhurt. The trench bottom was a six-inch paste of water and clay. Holding the flashlight in front of him, Dicky approached the sprawled beast. Yorick looked like a monster in the process of being born out of the mud. There was something both humorous and hopeless about the gaunt lifted head that came up into the ray. And now Dicky discovered that Yorick’s left foreleg below the knee veered off suddenly to the left, at a decided angle from the way it should lie. Dicky felt alone in a harrowing under world. The leaf that had caused it all, or possibly one like it, protruded from the snaffle ring. Yorick had come up to his leaf all right, and then forgotten what he had gone after.

“Pretty lucky old boy, you are,” Dicky said. “Work done, war over for you, nice warm ditch to lie up in at the last, and I’ve got to take all the responsibility.”

He drew the pistol from his belt and placed it on the little twist of hair halfway between the eyes.

“I ought to take the saddle off first, but I’m not going to. So long, old kid, and best luck.”

The pistol banged in the dugout like a cannon cracker under a flower pot, and the voice of an American sentry above was heard to say:

“Some fool’s blowed his head off, down there. Why in hell can’t a man be patient!”

Dicky climbed up on the level ground, no sicker than before, but a trifle more tired.... He was chafed. Yorick had done some of it in the last four days, but not all. He was chafed in and out and over, chafed from his boots and belt and helmet, but especially from his key ring. This last had ground into him all day. He took it out now, as he waited for coffee. Meanwhile he edged as near as possible (without murdering anybody) to the trench stove Boulding’s cook had got going.

There was the key to his mother’s house in Fiftieth Street--a thick brass stubby affair that belonged to the door of a house where hardware was well understood. This key couldn’t be thrown away. Though it was practically unthinkable--a man might some time get home. It had been done. There was a key to 54 Harrow Street. The woman who ran the place had told him to keep it with him, because it was a symbol of something which he had professed at the time to understand. Then there was a long, old-fashioned inside door key, black and a little bent--the meanest of all to dig into a man’s hip--this to the hall door of certain rooms in the same Harrow Street house. Its duplicate was in the hands of a girl he used to know. She had said she would look in on the apartment while he was gone, but she was married now. No use keeping it any longer.

He took it off the ring, but put it back again.

Certain things were good, but hard to get. Brandy was good. Coffee was good, especially hot. Saddle-horse stew was good. Porkpie, pork and beans, pork sausage and pancakes were reasonable and of good report, but keys on key rings that gored a man while he rode or slept, and stretched back into meanings of the Utterly Absurd that a man couldn’t get straight in Paris, much less in this slaughterhouse of the Western Front--keys on key rings were sheer perversities, especially when a man wasn’t game to toss them into any one of these open sewers....

They were saying at home that his stuff was blurred and unconvincing. Even John Higgins had been singularly silent of late. Chris Heidt, the managing editor of his newspaper connection, had recently written: “We miss that fine patriotic ring that we have come to expect from our correspondent. Your stuff shows subtleties and innuendoes and the dissatisfaction of the boys--the little things back of the lines that make for disorganization, rather than the big doings at the front.”

It was dawning on Dicky that there were two kinds of American patriots, soldier and civilian; and that for keenness and fire-eating zest, the man in the zone of advance was not to be compared to the paper-fed folk at home. In fact, there were only two ways for a writer to please the firesides of America, as the hot flames of Hun-hatred and world-correcting benefactions went up the chimney. One was to stay at home and write the war as you supposed it to be, and the other was to remember how you felt, how the war seemed to you, before you reached France, and write it from that angle.

Blurred, all right, and chafed. One thing he was getting to understand a little, and to have an affection for. That was the American soldier--not officer, so much, but the ruffian in the ranks, _dogus bogus Americanus_--the fellow fused of Irish, Scotch and Jew, of German, English, Russian and French; something of each in the solution, something of all. In the first place, this Yank was the funniest thing ever turned loose on the planet. His officers were occasionally funny in a different way.

Dicky vaguely perceived that an abyss was slowly but surely forming between this Yank and the patriots at home--an abyss only to be bridged by silence. Quite as slowly but surely Dicky’s heart opened to this enlisted man. One has to love something. Once or twice, things he saw this laughing maniac from America do made him very much ashamed of his own mental antics in a certain red room of Bombay.

XXXIII

PARIS, 1918--HADDON AND AMES

SO far as Dicky was concerned, the things of great moment in his experience in France all happened in the fall of 1918. He was in Paris at the end of that shocking summer, and found a letter from Nagar which reiterated that the curtain could not rise on the Drama of India until Great Britain was through fighting in France and the land of the Euphrates.... He was stopping at the _Garonne_. There was a knock at his room door one afternoon and voices outside. It was Haddon and Ames, correspondents out of New York, and they wanted money. Haddon talked first:

“... He’s off his head and in a mess. He mentioned your name. He says he sniffed some gas out in the vineyards somewhere in April, and can’t get over it. Either that, or the family he’s fouled up with is feeding him ground glass.”

“Who’s this you’re talking about?” Cobden asked, though he had heard the name.

“Melton--done some magazine stories,” said Haddon.

“You say he mentioned my name?”

“His French father-in-law picked on me first,” Ames put in. “Just happened. I’m at the _Charente_, where a lot of Americans are putting up. Told me a long story of wrongs to his only child--a female child now married to Author Melton. Mentioned your name----”

“He was gassed?” Dicky repeated.

“He says he was,” said Haddon. “It’s an operation case, all right. Melton will have to be cut out of that French house.”

“I don’t know whether it’s gas in my case or not,” Dicky said, “but the fact is I am not rightly aboard this conversation.”

“The idea is to get aboard with some American currency,” said Ames. “American in trouble--fellows all willing to help a little. Up to somebody to get the fool out. Father picked on me----”

“Let me get this straight,” Dicky heard himself saying, though all he wanted under heaven at this moment was to be alone.

Ames was one of the best Washington correspondents in the American press, a fact-getter extraordinary, who had a semi-inspired way now and then of putting down his stuff. He was fifty, a friend of John Higgins and weathered to a fuzzy gray like a fence board. Just now he bluffed out his embarrassment by speaking of one of Melton’s stories which Dicky was professionally familiar with:

“A short story in one of the weeklies--called _Dr. Filter_--hell of a good story.... It’s nothing to me,” Ames finished. “Only the kid’s an American, and he’s tight up against one of Paris’ prettiest ways.”

Haddon took up the tale:

“The Frenchman’s name is Ducier. Melton’s been living at his house--mixed with the daughter--forced to marry. Now Parent Ducier says the least he can do is to get a living for himself out of it--hard times.”

“Actually married?” Dicky asked.

“Showed me the passport,” said Ames. “I couldn’t get a word alone with Melton. He can’t leave his bed. One of the family always in the room.”

Dicky was straining so hard that he resisted easy comprehension. It was an intense moment. There was more talk.

“Of course, whatever you want from me----” Dicky broke in.

“What you can spare,” Haddon said. “The parents ask twenty thousand francs, but they’ll take half that easy. Just now the boy’s too sick to escape.”

“Count on me for at least half of whatever it costs,” Dicky said.

Haddon’s eyes widened. Ames looked astonished.

“I’ve heard Cobden is rich, Ames,” Haddon explained.

The gray one came closer and examined Dicky’s face. “I heard it, too,” he said. “You really mean this?”

“I would give you the amount now, but I understand that you aren’t sure what it will be. I know Melton. I’m glad to help, of course.”

“I’ve heard you were rich, too,” Ames repeated slowly. “But I didn’t believe it.”

“Why not?”

“You’re too good a newspaper man,” said Ames. “I didn’t think a man could have real money and be as good a newspaper man as you.”

Dicky hardly heard the tribute. The two men were leaving. That was the important thing.... He was alone. An intermittent geyser was at work within him. Every few minutes a surge of hot hope boiled up in his breast. It threatened to deluge him. Out of all the year’s work was netted at this time one bit of working knowledge, as Nagar might have called it, that he must _not_ be deluded by this hope! He tried to cork it up; failing in that he stood as still as he could in the midst of the surges. Gradually, he got the thing in hand, but it was bitter work, this refusing to take the first real breath of life he had known for years.

He found himself in twilight. The day had slipped off, while he struggled alone. His forehead was clammy with the effort going on. To go back into that dreary hopelessness, and not be able to think out the reason why! The force that he had to work with now came from the painful mistake he had made in working for reward before; from the shock of that realization in the red room, that underneath everything, he had counted on his virtue being crowned with Pidge somehow coming across.

Now the fight changed. Persistently in the depths of him grew an awareness that he had not done the full task called of him merely in offering Ames money. This point became so ugly and evident--that he had to laugh. More and more, as moments sped on, it faced him squarely. He had no sentimentalism to tide him over; his emotions stayed ice cold.

“But it’s like a fool Sunday-school story!” he muttered.

Then again the words broke from him: “But living God, suppose she doesn’t want the bundle back! Suppose she’s been trying to lose it, and here I am running after her, saying, ‘You’ve dropped something, Madame----’”

But he couldn’t budge.

Full dark was in the room when he rung Ames at the _Charente_:

“I’ve been thinking over this thing, Mr. Ames, and I’m asking a favor----”

“Yes,” came coldly across the town. Ames believed he was trying to wriggle out of his promise to pay half.

“I’ve come to the conclusion that this thing is up to me--the whole business, and I’ll thank you very much for Mr. Melton’s present address.”

“No. 16, Rue de Belville, Villancourt.” The tones had warmed.

“Thanks. I’ll report to you presently,” Cobden said.

“Sure you don’t want me--or one of us to go along with you?” Ames persisted.

“I’ll see what I can do alone first, if you don’t mind.”

XXXIV

THE HOUSE OF DUCIER

QUEER drama, from eight to twelve that night in the little house of Ducier. Four hours--as long as an uncut opera! The sick man moaned, and interrupted everything, calling to Dicky Cobden:

“For the love of God, don’t go ’way and leave me here! I’m done for, if you leave me alone again.... Oh, Cobden, Cobden----”

The daughter wept. It was her entire part. She had a brown mole upon her ruddy rounded cheek, and very white small teeth in gums of a red that Dicky had never seen before except in dental advertisements. She was made of little curves, and all of them were required in the art of her weeping.

“What’s the matter?” Dicky asked her, during a halt in the proceedings.

“You are taking him away!”

“I don’t seem to be very successful about it.”

“Oh, but you will--you are taking him away!”

Dicky was glad to hear that he was going to get what he came for, but the obstacles still looked serious.

“Isn’t that what you want--to be rid and paid?”

“My father--yes--but me--no, no! He is my lover--oh, such an adored!”

It was new to Cobden’s experience just how obdurate an outraged European can be. M. Ducier reiterated grimly that weeks ago in this house, he had suddenly discovered a condition which destroyed all his past and future. He had forced marriage, but that did not suffice. Dicky turned to the bed at this point.

“How did you happen to stand for marriage, Melton?”

“Nothing to do with it--I was gassed!”

Here the daughter’s cries arose, the hands of the mother were uplifted to heaven, and the face of the father became more grim. It was against Dicky’s training and heredity to stand for being bilked, yet he hesitated to call for help. To start the police at work would mean the American Legation before he was finished, and incredible delay. Momentarily Melton made it harder.

“If you go away and leave me after all they have said,” he moaned, “there won’t be any need for you to come back! I am telling you, Cobden, they keep me here--just as if my legs were tied.”

Rufe spoke in English, which the mother and father did not understand, but of which the daughter had plenty to catch the drift. Dicky did not miss the fact that in the midst of her weeping there were subtle affairs to confide to her father.... It cost him eighteen hundred dollars to get Melton clear that night; but, at least, Melton was thoroughly clear, the marriage certificate and receipt for heartbalm in full, in his pocket. He watched curiously now to see if the tears of Daughter Ducier were dried--but no, though Melton spurned her last proffer of a kiss--at least with her, money was not all.

In the days that followed, Dicky wasn’t able to get any rest from a sense that he had done well. With every ounce of his returning strength Rufe Melton yearned to get out of Paris. He had been abused; he was frightened to depths hitherto unplumbed. He lived in a mortal dread day and night that the Duciers would come for him again.

“I can’t get a passage for you at a moment’s notice,” Dicky would say. “Besides, you’re not fit to travel for a few days yet. I don’t want to send you back to New York looking like a hounded Apache. Let me do this thing right, Melton, while I’m in on it.”

“But don’t go away and leave me here!” Rufe moaned. “Let me go out with you when you go.”

“You needn’t have the slightest fear from the Duciers.”

The hands came up and waved hopelessly.

“You don’t know them! You don’t know her!” Rufe moaned. “I want to get out of here. I want to get on the ship. I don’t want to be left alone.”

And this was what he was getting ready to send back to Pidge! Once, when Dicky was really hard driven, a sudden chill of rage came over him and he proceeded this far with a sentence:

“Why, Melton, I really ought to put you----”

The other words--“to death,” he somehow managed to keep from speech. Dicky suffered especially from the feeling that he was playing the boob. To be sincerely in wrong was his pet aversion--dating from the night of the Punjabi dinner. Besides, he was tortured with the thought that Pidge Musser wouldn’t thank him. Surely, for her sake, his mind repeated, it would have been better even to put old Ames straight, and let one American meet Paris unaided. But Rufe had called for him in his trouble, had mentioned the name of Cobden to the others.

One of the strangest things to Dicky now was that Pidge’s husband could accept all this--somehow as if it were his due. Like a family affair. Rufe seldom spoke of Pidge. Apparently getting back to New York meant her; apparently they weren’t separated. Rufe had the most extraordinary sense of taking her for granted. If he had any money or resources in Paris, he didn’t let the fact be known. It was Dicky who purchased his passage for New York. Again Dicky’s capacity for astonishment was stretched, because Rufe seemed able to comfort himself with the fact that he had it all coming. He had never been sick before. His present infirmity was entirely engrossing. “I was gassed,” covered all discrepancies of word and deed.

Back in his room, after packing Rufe aboard the steamer, Dicky found himself nervous, tired and irritable. A servant came and took out the extra bed Rufe had occupied. The place was stiller than ever, after that--no moaning, no fears, no complaints; but it wasn’t all relief as Dicky had fancied it would be. He missed something--the world was so crazy anyway--something that had taken him out of himself for two weeks; something at least, that had played upon a different set of faculties. Suddenly it dawned upon him, though he couldn’t tell why, that Pidge would be glad after all. If you play orderly and guardian and benefactor to a child--of course you miss the wretch. And Pidge was a woman, and she had said--what had she said, about there not being two ways? Now Dicky felt better. There had not been two ways for him. The chapter was ended at any rate....

Another event of this fall of 1918, so far as Dicky Cobden was concerned, was the Armistice. You can tell how inactive hope had become within him at this time, and within the breasts of tens of thousands of others, when he hadn’t believed that any other than a state of war could exist.

And finally, in December, six weeks after the Armistice, at the time of the greatest rush in history for trans-Atlantic steamers, when Dicky had about concluded that the quickest way home to New York would be around by Asia, a _sepoy_ on leave crossed the city of Paris from the cantonments in Lourdenvoie, and asked to see the American at the _Garonne_.

“You are Richard Cobden?” the young Hindu said, when the room door was closed.

Dicky nodded, a certain gladness in him that he did not understand. At the same time he was intent in a scrutiny of the caller’s face--a youth, but very worn. Something about the eyes made the American think of a camel.

“You have been to Ahmedabad, Mr. Cobden?”

“Yes.”

“Might I ask the name of the river there?”

“The Sabarmati.”

“Are you expecting a message from an American in Ahmedabad?”

“No.”

“From any one there?”

“Yes.” Now Dicky knew that it was the patience in the young Hindu’s eyes that made him think of a camel.

“Is the name Juna?”

“Nagarjuna.”

The soldier bowed. “It is well. I was told to be assured, before giving you the message. It is this: _That the curtain has risen, the play begun, and that a seat is reserved for you._”

“Is there need of haste?”

“_No haste, but no delay!_”

“My plan now is to go to New York----”

“That need not be changed, since it was added for me to say--that it will be well for you to travel westward rather than to the East.”

“To Ahmedabad at once?”

“You will do well to go first to Bombay.”

“Thank you. Is there anything I can do for you?”

“Only say to Nagarjuna--that I, too, hope to come for the end of that play.”

“Your name?”

“He knows his messenger. Here I am not a name, hardly a number----”

“A cigarette--a drink?”

“I will not tarry since it is far to the cantonments.”

The _sepoy_ bowed and departed.

XXXV

FANNY HEARS THE DRUM

PIDGE MUSSER had moved around in an indescribable “deadness” for several days following Rufe’s departure, before it landed on her, theme and all, that she could do a book. Almost four years had elapsed since she wrote the _Lance_. One Sunday morning after the new work was begun, Pidge took out the old story from the drawer under the wavy glass, and glanced over the pages, a puckered smile on her lips. Then she took the manuscript down to the kitchen range, and there was a hot fire for a while.

The new writing was not so simple and flowing. In the first place, there were only Sundays and an hour or two in the evening; but more than that was the fact that she had learned so well what stories long and short are not! She was now in the toil of technic, which is a long passage. First the freedom of ignorance--“A man’s a fool before he learns technic,” John Higgins had said. “He’s a cripple while he’s learning it. When he’s learned it, and forgotten he’s learned it--he begins to be a workman. That’s the freedom of knowledge.”

The old editor didn’t know he had “said it all” for Pidge Musser that day as he looked up from Rufe Melton’s story. She wouldn’t forget. Edit and rewrite--some evenings with nothing but a torturing inhibition to go to bed with. There was no other way. She was tough and broad shouldered. She could toil. She had an instinctive awareness also, that the deadliest danger in the whole scheme of things for her, at least, was to brood inactively. Piled up energy to Pidge meant inevitable disruption.

_The Public Square_ was staying alive under the energy amassed by the family of trowel makers, but John Higgins wasn’t standing the punishment of the days. Pidge saw him falling into the fear of small things. Among other institutions he hated was the U. S. Department of Justice, but this department was hot after him and he was bluffed at last. The climax had come upon the arrest of a famous pacifist, when John Higgins was cornered with the necessity of silence. Since there was no outlet in protest, his venom turned in on himself. His periods of “illness” were frequent, and Pidge had a great deal to do. His old reaction against her marriage was apparently forgotten, though his temper was unreliable. He was using her now as never before. Once in a while, he would look at her long and queerly, and often he said, “I wish Dicky were here.”

* * * * *

In April, 1918, about the same time, a book and a boy were born in 54 Harrow Street. Pidge was present at both deliveries. The enactment of the boy’s coming required a full night; and during the next day, her activities at _The Public Square_ were remote to Pidge, who had shrunk so deeply into herself from nausea and a new kind of fright, that the meaning of outer events was distorted and ungrippable. John Higgins didn’t miss the fact. In the drag of the afternoon, she was called to the telephone--Miss Claes on the wire:

“You’d better come, Pidge!”

An hour later, between five and six in the afternoon, she was in the Harrow Street house, looking down into Fanny’s face which squirmed from side to side. The eyes moved around the room and finally fixed on Pidge.

“That you, Redhead?”

“Yes----”

“You was a hell of a long time comin’.”

“I know----”

“That dirty animal hurt me----” Evidently this referred to the doctor.

“I’m sorry. He didn’t mean to----”

“Know all about it, don’t yer? Know all about everythin’, don’t yer?”

Pidge didn’t answer.

Fanny lay a moment in pallid anger. Then her eyes slowly opened wider, stretched, filled with astonishment, part rapture, part fear.

“Why, Musser,” Fanny said in an awed tone, as one listening to a far sound, “Holy Christ, I’m dying!”

She was the last one in the room to know it--except the baby.

A queer little dud with his black hair that stayed combed. No telling what he knew any of the time. He didn’t open his eyes so that anybody could catch him at it for several days, but the nurse never would have done raving over his black lashes. Finally Pidge heard the news--that the eyes weren’t black after all, as the hair and lashes would indicate, but a dense blue.

“He’s going to be a soldier--such a soldier!” the nurse exclaimed. “I know I’ll die when I have to leave him.”

Pidge’s lips worked without sound, and then a funny little twisted smile stayed there--that made Miss Claes love her as never before.

XXXVI

RUFE HURRIES HOME

RUFE MELTON came home to find life not the same. Matters had evolved while he was away about his country’s business, matters that didn’t please him now. He had rushed to Pidge. As the steamer approached New York, a novel and unforeseen eagerness awoke within to get to her, but she hadn’t put off her Arctics. Besides, off duty from her editorial job, there was an infant in her arms for the most part--a seven-months-old male infant with combed hair, that had looked into his face and begun to yell. Rufe took this as a personal affront. He had supposed it hers at first.

“Sometimes, I forget that it isn’t,” she had said.

Harrow Street furnished the statement and proof, however, that it was Fanny Gallup’s, who was dead.

“But why don’t you adopt the other two?” he asked.

“Miss Claes has found homes for Albert’s children,” Pidge said.

Rufe stood it for two days. “This can’t go on, Pan. I’ve got to get to work--no nerves to work in this racket, since I was gassed----”

“Of course not.”

Under his surface anger, she saw the old look of hurt wonder that harrowed her so.

“Come back--any time, Rufe--come whenever you can. Always a place here, you know.”

XXXVII

JOHN HIGGINS’ CODE

WHEN Dicky Cobden reached New York, he found that Pidge had been called to Los Angeles, because her father was ill. It was an evening in mid-January, 1919, and he went at once to his mother’s house in Fiftieth Street. The strain of waiting for his home-coming had been almost too much there. Grandfather had flickered out; his bed and chairs gaped and would not be comforted. Dicky went into the living arms, however, and found rest and gave it. His mother and aunt and sister livened up like plants, newly-watered. He was queerly astonished to learn that Pidge recently had called upon his people--“just a social call,” his mother said.

Outwardly things looked as hopeless as possible at _The Public Square_. From his latest retirement to his rooms for a change of luck, John Higgins had been taken to the hospital, instead of returning to his desk. It was a gray-faced old man that Dicky found in the early morning of his first full day at home, in a room that smelled of drugs. The face didn’t look at him squarely. The light hurt John Higgins’ eyes and made the features writhe. Dicky wanted to move around to the other side of the bed, so the face would be shaded, but his old friend was gripping him with both hands.

“We have been looking for you a long time, Dicky,” he kept saying.

It wasn’t the unshaven white stubble that changed the face so much as the quiver of the upper lip, when John Higgins spoke.

“What’s the matter, John?”

“Indigestion--all kinds of indigestion. Damn ’em, Dicky, they’ve made me eat my own words----”

“Who?”

“The most pestiferous public nuisance ever organized--Department of Justice.”

Dicky did not need to be warned against the _bête noir_. Its shadow was upon John Higgins’ face.

“I rather liked yesterday’s issue,” he said, “and they tell me that the next two numbers are practically made up.”

“You’ve been to the office then?”

“No. I called up from home at breakfast. That’s how I heard you were here. Just off ship last night----”

“Bert Ames got in three weeks ago. You were a long time coming----”

“My turn didn’t come--everybody dying to get home since the racket stopped.”

“Your paper’s alive, Dicky--that’s the best that can be said.”

“My paper----”

“I’m looking for you to buy the rest. My equity is on the market. _The Public Square_ is alive, but it’s not my fault.”

“Whose?”

“Didn’t they tell you that ‘The Weekly’ was away?”

Dicky looked bewildered. A glint of the old humor had come back to John Higgins’ eyes, as he added:

“The woman thou gavest me.”

“You mean about Pidge Musser being called to Los Angeles?”

“Suddenly discovered she had a father who couldn’t be denied. Ripped out of here on the fifth and left a hole in every department.... They say I’m done with the desk for a time. I knew it without them telling me. I’d have had to wire her to-day or to-morrow to come back, if you hadn’t turned up.”

Dicky’s thoughts now became busy adjusting to the fact that John Higgins wasn’t returning to the desk at once.

“I know when I’m done,” the old man repeated. “It’s taken nearly sixty years, but I know. You’ve heard about the serpent that stings itself to death in captivity?”

“It’s just the chafing of the muzzle, John. You’re not stinging yourself to death----”

“We all have our little code, Dicky, and I haven’t been true to mine. Your paper’s alive, in spite of what I would have done. My code pulled me the other way--against you--but that little thing stood by your interests. You’ve got her to thank, not me.”

“Tell me----”

“They were doing things in this country that I knew about----” the old man shut his eyes, as if in nausea--“but she kept me still. Then they arrested an old friend of mine--man I’ve known for thirty years--man who loves his country _all the time_--as I do not--and they arrested him. One Sunday morning I wrote my little say about it all, and as I wrote, I heard them singing ‘Nearer, My God, to Thee,’ in a church down the block from my rooms. That’s what I called the article. I was sober. I wrote for all days, and every year I had lived went into it--all I was. I was willing to throw you--a little matter of money which you could afford. I was throwing myself, but I was pleased enough with the story to show it to her Monday morning, instead of sending it down to the composing room.”

The narrative halted for several seconds. Dicky moved around the bed to rest the old man’s eyes.

“That little tumult had me bluffed from the beginning. She barred the way to the printer, that’s all. I thought she was done for when she married Melton, but she came back stronger than ever.... Barred the way, Dicky--put her arms across the door. ‘You can’t do it, John Higgins, you can’t send that down. It’s just wanton destruction. It won’t do what you hope. It won’t help your friend, but make life harder for him and for all the C. O.’s. This isn’t your property to waste. My heart’s in it and Dicky’s money’s in it----’ Well, she had her way--and the thing turned in on me--my own words. My organs of assimilation weren’t strong enough to get away with it.”

Dicky gripped John Higgins’ shoulder. The old man added impressively, “Dicky, I’ve sat at the desk for hours and studied how I could ever tell you this one truth! I haven’t written a decent line since that article! My old side-wheeler doesn’t work--that’s the size of it.”

He was pressing his hand to the top of his head, as he went on:

“I’ve studied how I could tell you. It doesn’t seem quite so hard this morning at the show-down--but she’s written all the decent stuff that’s supposed to come from the Desk.... I mean what I said. I’m for sale. I’ve put it to you straight--the worst. But the paper’s alive and the books are for you to look at. Times are getting freer. The next two issues will get out themselves. It’s all I’ve got----”

“But you can take a leave of absence, and keep your income----”

“No. That would be a drain. That’s morals possibly, but not business. I want to sell, Dicky, and what I ask won’t break you. I thought for a while I was done for, and I made out my part to her. That would be simple--but the old hulk still floats--so I have to have some money.”

Now Dicky dwelt reverently upon the old man’s secret. Only one thing could have prevented John Higgins from getting his masterpiece into print; also John Higgins had made out his single possession in the world to Pidge--when he thought he was done for. This thought now electrified Richard Cobden. He wanted events to turn out this way with such one-pointed fury that he forgot for an instant that it entailed the death of his friend. But some time Pidge must have this gift--some way--John Higgins’ life work! Dicky arose. The fact that he could do nothing right now required extraordinary self-control.

“I’ll look the whole property over to-day and tell you to-morrow morning, John. Be sure it will be all right for you. We’re----”

Dicky didn’t know what he had started to say. The old man beckoned him back.

“... Bert Ames can help you for a few days until she comes back. No better Washington man, anywhere, but Bert knows the desk work, too.... Wait. I’ve got to tell you before you go how he dropped in to see me, day or two after he came back from France. I asked him if he’d seen you. He rather allowed he had--and launched into the story of your saving young Melton from the clutches of the French family. Couldn’t stop him in time. He hadn’t the slightest notion that the woman at the desk yonder was Mrs. Melton.”

Dicky was pale.

“It didn’t knock her out. That’s the queer part,” John Higgins added. “... Get Bert Ames. There’s one man who isn’t doing any damage to you as he loafs around New York.”

“I’ll be back to-morrow morning,” Dicky said. “Where’s Melton now--Los Angeles?”

“No, here in New York. I’ve heard he’s stopping at the Vici Club.”

XXXVIII

AN OFFICE OF THE WORLD

DICKY was in the street and it was still only ten in the morning. The first thing he did then was to telegraph Pidge of his arrival; that all was well, and for her not to hurry. He spent the day at _The Public Square_ offices studying the books, reading up in the files. He fancied that he found an aggressive sort of integrity here and there through the systems, that was familiar. The publishing property had weathered the war; it was a building base. Dicky found much that he liked, but fought enthusiasm--fought back a rush of possessive impulses, until he was tired.

At six, when he reached Harrow Street, for the first time, he was not permitted to use the key to the street door that he had carried so long, for Miss Claes met him at the basement entrance. He had heard her voice over the telephone in the morning, but had not remotely anticipated the stir of feeling that the sight of her awakened. No emotionless reporter about Mr. Cobden at this moment. He followed her to the open fire; the door was shut. They stood together in silence, and he had never seen her look so well.

“Why, Miss Claes, you are just the same!” he was saying. “I mean, all day I have been seeing the ravages of the war years in the people at home, in John Higgins, in everybody. But you----”

“Your coming makes me happy.”

Firelight and a fragrant room, and the stillness of Harrow Street. Miss Claes was speaking of Nagar--of Pidge--of Pidge and the child--of Rufus Melton--of Fanny Gallup--of himself--as if they were all one, all blent in destiny.... Pidge had taken the child to Los Angeles.

A ring at the street door! Dicky watched Miss Claes’ face as she left the room, purse in hand. She returned in a moment with a telegram for him.

Welcome home. So glad to hear, so relieved. Needed here a little
longer.
PIDGE.

The door shut again.... Miss Claes had heard of everything--even of his experience with Rufe Melton in Paris, and from Pidge what Ames had told John Higgins.

“I should have put Ames wise about that,” Dicky told her. “It was pretty hard to have Pidge hurt that way.”

“She brought home the news exultingly,” Miss Claes said. “Hurt, of course--her old sorrow for Rufus Melton, but a compensating gladness, too. You would have to be a woman, to feel exactly what it meant to her. Pidge learned that day that you were close enough in sympathy to share her work. That was light to her out of the depths.”

Dicky studied the shadowy face.

“Pidge accepts no revelations from the sacred writings,” Miss Claes added. “Only messages of action count with her. Your action in Paris freshened up her life--that you had been brave enough to help her with her task. And how richly Pidge will pay!”

“It wasn’t hard to do, but hard to know that it was the thing to do.”

“All that matters now is that it is done. One crosses a goal, or one does not. The rest is forgotten.”

He told her of John Higgins and _The Public Square_; of his talk in the morning and the day with the files. She inquired regarding details, mechanical and commercial--her same old rational grasp upon materials. Of course, he did not speak of John Higgins’ secret, nor of his own possible purchase. It was a matter of mercantile tradition in the Cobden house not to discuss an incompleted transaction; but he told her of Pidge’s part at the time of the arrest of the editor’s old friend.

“John Higgins calls her ‘The Weekly,’” he added. “He says it was Pidge who kept the paper going.”

Miss Claes turned to the fire to smile. Dicky didn’t notice. He was lost in the problem of how John Higgins could give half-interest to Pidge, and sell it to himself at the same time.... They were speaking of India.

“Of course, I’ve arranged to go,” he said. “Nagar promises the story of the age----”

“Nagar sent his message here for you, in case you did not receive word from the _sepoy_ in Paris--‘No haste, but no delay.’”

He started. This house of Harrow Street seemed like an office of all the world to him to-night.

* * * * *

“... The hardest part is with my people--for me to go away again,” he was saying, a little later at the door. “Of course, they can’t understand--my mother and aunt and sister. Everything looks all right, except that--leaving them so soon again.”

“Perhaps I can help a little. I’ll go to them often--while you are away.”

“That’s quite too good for me to think of,” he said, and told her of Pidge’s call. “Why, Miss Claes, I haven’t known what it meant to be rested and straightened out like this--since Ahmedabad,” he said at last.

Her hand was raised before him:

“Don’t think about it. Don’t analyze. Just--go to them--and come back when you can. This also is your home always.”

XXXIX

SEVEN FLAWLESS DAYS

DICKY was riding westward through the citrus groves of the last fifty miles into Los Angeles. Eight days in New York; there had been no public announcement of a change in ownership of _The Public Square_, although John Higgins had retired and new energies were actively in operation. The old editor’s faith was gone in himself, but anchored all the tighter to the son of the trowel makers.

The great Range was crossed. All the forenoon the air had been clear and cold, but at noon the Limited had slipped down into San Bernardino, into summer and fruit fragrance. Now it was two in the afternoon and Dicky looked out upon one little town after another, the like of which he had never seen before. Sun-drenched and flowery towns; breathing-spaces between the houses and vine-clad trellises; and everywhere the great orchards, sometimes palm-bordered and often with rose-covered fences of stone.

“Sit tight, sit tight,” he said to himself.

A hundred times he had repeated this to-day. There was loose in him a power of feeling which made the days of his straight unemotional reporting look like a feeble affectation. Coming into the harbor of New York less than two weeks before, he had learned to accept the emptiness of life. But since then, curiously enough, a new order of content had filled him. Was it necessary to be emptied of the old entirely in order to be filled with the new?

Pasadena was behind; the Limited was running down grade into Los Angeles; then momentary halts with Mexican faces turned to the car windows--Chinese faces, a tangle of freights--finally a slow down, and on one side, groups of up-turned faces, expectant, some strained to an intense kind of pain to catch the eyes of their own.... The bags had to be put out. There were people in front of him; he was shut off from windows.

“Sit tight, Dicky----”

A white limp-brimmed straw hat pulled down over her ears like a bonnet! A taller Pidge--no, she was standing on her toes to look over the shoulders of the crowd. Now she saw him; her eyes blinked, her shoulders lifting quickly. He moved slowly, positively not crushing anybody. Her hands were raised--one higher than the other, the fingers apart. They stayed so, until he pressed against them. She was taller. Their faces were so close--both shaded for an instant under the wide brim of her hat. He had been looking into her eyes; then they were too close to look into. It seemed neither had anything to do about it. He hardly dared remember.

Some one near by knew a happiness that shrieked. They walked away from the many voices. Then he realized that he was carrying his two hand bags.

“Where’s the parcel room?” he asked.

“I’ll show you the way. The station is very old and dingy.”

He checked them. They walked to the other end of the yards where the big palms called.

“How’s your father?”

“I think--he’s better. You heard about the baby--Fanny Gallup’s baby?”

“Yes.”

“I brought him west with me. He’s in Santa Monica now, so I’ll have to hurry back. You’ll come?”

“To Santa Monica?”

“Yes.”

“Shall we get a motor car?”

“No. The interurban. I’ll show you.”

“Is there a place to stop down there?”

“Oh, yes, I’ll show you.”

“My steamer trunk can wait here for a day or two. I’d better get my small bags----”

“Yes.”

He unchecked them.... In the city car to the interurban station, she said: “Oh, Dicky, it’s so good.” Then after a pause, she added: “We don’t need to talk about ourselves.”

“I understand.”

“It’s days before your ship?”

“Yes.”

“I can show you around. It’s hard for me not to be troubled about _The Public Square_----”

“Everything’s all right there. I’ll tell you everything when we get on the other car. You’ll like it all.”

“And must you really go to India?”

“I arranged with Nagar, before I left. It’s the story of the age, he says. After that----”

“Yes?”

“After that--New York.”

They were in the Santa Monica car, on the way down to the ocean. She had shown him Hollywood, pointing out some of the moving-picture plants.... If he could only keep calm now--and not rush out to seize the incredible little attractions of the moment! It seemed so important to keep calm right now--as if this were a sort of trial trip. He must be able to move right into this light without flinching--must endure all delight in stillness. It wasn’t like repression--this that was called of him now, but faith. The wonder of it all was her perfect fearlessness with him. Their old word came back to him--_comrade_. He almost spoke it, but stopped in time. He must live it. But why all this holding back--after years of holding back?

“... So he won’t be coming back, I’m afraid,” he was saying of John Higgins. “He understands that his desk is there for him as long as he wants it, but he doesn’t encourage any one to believe he’ll use it again. I told him he could do Washington, and leave Bert Ames on the desk for the present, but he only shook his head.”

“I saw it coming,” said Pidge. “Oh, I’ve seen it for a long time. There was never anything I could do to help him. I never can really help when I want to.”

He felt she was thinking of Melton. She was, but she was thinking of Fanny Gallup, too.

“He has no relatives,” Dicky went on, “but it’s arranged for his income to keep up; anything he wants to do for the magazine----”

He saw her look of sadness.

“John Higgins is so helpless,” she said softly.

“We’ve taken on young Bothwell for the advertising, and given him a little fund to work with,” Dicky reported. “Bothwell isn’t a plunger, steady sort of genius in his game. The idea isn’t to plunge in any department--just to work softly and slowly and steadily, giving everybody his money’s worth. Also, if a story or article just suits, we mustn’t let the price stand in the way any longer.”

She nodded wonderingly.

“Bert Ames has two or three good ideas to work out at the desk before he leaves for Washington.”

“But who after that?”

“_Sit tight, Dicky._”

... He coughed. “It isn’t like the desk in the old sense. We have talked about that. Pidge, I’m wabbling a bit, but the desk is yours.”

They were sitting in the windy front seats. She appeared to be looking into the back of the motor-man’s neck.

“When you get back,” he added.

Her eyes did not move.