THE
PUBLIC SQUARE

THE
PUBLIC SQUARE

BY
WILL LEVINGTON COMFORT
AUTHOR OF “ROUTLEDGE RIDES ALONE,” ETC.

D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
NEW YORK :: :: MCMXXIII

COPYRIGHT, 1923, BY
WILL LEVINGTON COMFORT
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

TO
DOROTHY MOSHER

CONTENTS

THE PUBLIC SQUARE

I
54 HARROW STREET

A GIRL of nineteen had just arrived in New York, with one fat bag. She turned into the curving silence of Harrow Street, which is only three minutes’ walk from Washington Square, but some trick to find. Several times she changed her bag from one hand to the other, sometimes putting it down and stepping around it, until she came to a door with a room-to-rent sign. This house was painted fresh green, the only thing that distinguished it from all the other houses of the block, except the number, which was Fifty-four.

“Here goes me!” she said, starting up the stone steps.

She rang. The door before her didn’t open, but the basement door below did. A woman’s voice called, “Yes?” in rising inflection.

The girl trailed her bag down to the walk and around the railing to the lower entrance where a dark-faced woman stood, regarding her with almost concerned attention—dark eyes that saw too much, the girl decided. The face was un-American, but its foreign suggestion was vague. It might even have been East Indian. If her skin was natively white, it had certainly known the darkening of much sunlight. As the girl drew near she sensed a curious freshness from the woman; something hard to name, having to do with the garments as well as the shadowy olive skin.

“I want to rent a room—a small back room. I saw your sign on the door.”

“I have a room, but it hasn’t much air,” the woman said.

“I don’t need much air——”

“Come and we’ll look. It is on the upper floor, but it is not quite back. Leave your bag here in the hall.”

It was eleven in the morning, but the smell of coffee was in the dark basement corridor, and laughing voices were heard behind the shut door to the right. A man’s voice said in a stimulated tone:

“Believe me, and I’ve been around, Miss Claes is the deepest-dyed sport I’ve ever met. You could drag her the length of Harrow Street and she’d come up fresh from the laundry——”

“That reminds me, I’m going to start a laundry,” a woman’s voice announced.

“I’m going to start something myself——” came another voice.

The girl, following through the corridor, heard a little breathless sort of chuckle from the woman ahead of her on the dark stairs. The place smelled like a shut room when it rains—a cigaretty admixture.

They climbed. The next hall was spooky with gaslight; the next was gay with frying sausages. They climbed. The next was the one, and it smelled of paint—the same green paint as on the outside of the house—on one of the doors and doorframes, but the wood was plainly charred under the paint.

“We had a fire, but we put it out with wash water before the engines got here, soapy water.”

The girl had a picture of threshing soap about in pails of water before applying it to the flames.

“This is the one,” the woman said, unlocking the next to last room from the back on the left. “All the rest are filled just now. Most of my lodgers never leave, only as they strike it rich——”

“Do they often strike it rich?”

“Oh, yes, dear. New York is quite the most magic place in America—something for every one who comes, if he only stays on.”

They had crowded into the little room.

“This is fine,” the girl said. “This is what I want. It’s just as I saw it.”

“You get your water in the hall below,” the woman explained. “There is no gas plate, so you will have to bring your coffeepot down to my stove in the basement. The walls are ugly, but I’ll see that the cot is clean for you. If the wall of the next house across the area were only painted white, you would get more light.”

The wall spoken of was less than three feet from the window sill.

“What is the price?” the girl asked, with a cough before and after.

“Twelve dollars a month.”

“I will pay for a month now,” she said, with a small part of a big out-breath.

“When did you come to New York?” the woman asked.

“This morning.”

“First time?”

“Yes. From Los Angeles.”

“And you have had four nights on the train?”

“Six. It was a slow tourist train. I sat up from Chicago——”

“Have you lived in Los Angeles long?”

“Always—in and around.”

“We don’t dare to think of Los Angeles much. To a lot of us here in New York, it’s a kind of heaven. Southern California—the sea and the mountains and the ten months of sunlight and the cool morning fogs and the ripe figs——”

“I’ve wanted New York like that,” the girl said. “I’ve wanted New York so badly that I was afraid on the train that it wouldn’t stay until I got here——”

“That’s the way to come,” the landlady said. “New York would wait for you. Oh, yes, New York waits for your kind. What are you going to do here?”

“Write.”

“Really?”

The woman sat down on the edge of the cot. Her interest did not seem an affectation. Her figure was thin but lithe. One wouldn’t know in these shadows if she were nearer twenty-five or thirty-five. She seemed altogether without haste, smiling easily, but slow to laugh aloud. Her eyes looked startlingly knowing as she lit a cigarette—not natural somehow. At the same time in the matchlight her face had looked tired and weathered. Her way of speaking was like an English person, or one educated in England.

“Do you mean stories?” she asked.

“Yes, a book, a long story—set in eighteenth-century France.”

“But you seem so young.”

“I have written for a long time—always written.”

“How old are you, please?”

“Nineteen—but I have lived in a writing house always.”

“Where is your house? I have been to Los Angeles.”

“Back in a canyon near Santa Monica and my father is there now—in his slippers. He teaches every one how to write——” There was something baleful in the girl’s blue eyes, or perhaps it was exhaustion, as she smiled.

“Does he write stories?”

“No, metaphysics, but he knows everything——”

“What is your name?”

“Musser—Pidge Musser. Not Pidge, really. Pandora is my name, but every one calls me Pidge. My father started it.”

“Is his name Adolph Musser?”

In the dimness, the girl’s face looked like a blur of white; a little stretched, too, it appeared just now.

“Yes, that’s his name,” she said in a hopeless tone. “So you know him, too?”

“I heard him lecture once.”

“I suppose you ‘fell for’ him? They all do.”

The woman’s black eyes twinkled. “The lecture was on cosmic consciousness,” she said. “I remember distinctly that Mr. Musser outlined four paths of approach.”

“Yes, the mystical, the occult, the mathematical, and the artistic. Did he talk in bare feet?”

“Yes, and an Eastern robe.”

“That was a camel driver’s robe,” said the girl. “Oh, I didn’t think I’d hear of him here.”

“You won’t. May I call you Pidge?”

“Yes, what you like. My father names everything.”

“It sounds better than Pandora—at least, to me.... I must go down now. A little breakfast party is waiting there. Take off your things. I’ll come back soon. I am Miss Claes and I want to come back already.”

Pidge Musser sat almost in the center of her room, but not quite. At least, she sat in the center of the stiff little cot. She could touch two of the walls. The third was across the narrow aisle from the cot. The fourth was the windowed one, which looked as if it were about to be bricked up entirely. That was quite a distance.

Her room. She was alone. She looked at the door, arose, brought in the key and turned it from the inside. Alone, and this was New York. She could live a month anyway, and write and write on The Lance of the Rivernais. She could be herself and not be told how to live and love and write and bathe and breathe, and change her polarity and promote her spirit and govern her temper and appetites, by a man who was governed by anything but himself.

New York. She had hardly dared to look at it on the way from the train to Washington Square, where the street car had put her down. She had come to Washington Square because one of the boys who studied with her father had said it was the best place to live in all the big town—the cheapest and friendliest and quietest.... It appeared all true, but Miss Claes wasn’t like a rooming-house landlady; quite different, in fact, and astonishing.

“I could hear her talk about New York, forever,” Pidge said half aloud, and this was a remark of considerable force from one who had known the maiming of many words.

Presently she would go out and look at New York again; walk about a bit, keeping a mental string tied to this green house. Besides she had to rent a typewriter, but there was no rush. It was delicious sitting here alone in the gloom of midday, making the place her own, locked in—a chance at last to take a look at herself and see what she was made of and think of what she was here for.

There was a mirror. It wasn’t cracked, according to tradition, but its surface had frozen over in a high wind. Everything waved, eternally waved. It gave the sense of air in the room, and made one look mended. Pidge hoped she would never shed tears in that mirror. Once she had caught herself weeping, and she looked so abysmal that she was almost frightened out of the habit. With these waves added—— Pidge took off her hat and flipped it over on the cot. Her head didn’t look natural, but that wasn’t all the mirror’s fault. One of the things she had wanted to do for months was to make her hair a shade redder than it was. Of course, she hadn’t dared at home, and she couldn’t manage it on the train, but there had been six hours to wait in Chicago and a small hotel room that frightened her yet. She had emerged from that room a different shade, so Chicago meant henna and rain and a frightful hotel. It would always be so. She had been against landing in New York one color and then changing. She had wanted to start life new in New York and keep it straight, an absolutely new page, a new book.

Her reddened hair waved. It made her face look whiter, and brought out a red tint to her wool dress that had been brown as apple-butter before.

Everything about her was tired. If she took off her new shoes she was afraid she would never get them on again to-day, and she had to think of renting that typewriter. A little later, she sat up straight, because through the wall from the next room back came the buzz of a machine. She listened with a thrill. It stopped and went on—unequal stops and buzzes of rapid typing for several minutes; then a long sustained buzz, until a sheet was changed. No commercial typewriting. That was “creative” stuff, as her father would say—a word she had vowed never to use. At least, some one in there was doing a letter.

All this was before noon on an October day in the good year of 1913, before anything ever happened to anybody.

II
THE COLORED MAN

Once there was an old sculptor who had apprentices. Townsfolk were invited on a certain day to look at the work of the young men. One of the apprentices was greatly worried by the faulty light of the shop in which his exhibit was placed. He complained about it to his master, who is said to have answered in these terms: “Never mind, son, about the light here. It is the light of the public square that tells the story.”

RICHARD COBDEN was twenty-one in 1910, and fresh from his university, when he took his first job as reader in the editorial office of The Public Square, a weekly magazine of opinion and protest and qualified patriotism. This was the publication of old John Higgins, at one time one of the highest-priced editorial writers in New York; but Higgins’ views had become more and more strenuous, instead of mollifying with the years, the end of which is to publish for one’s self or subside. Even in The Public Square he found himself under a pull. He wanted a living out of his magazine, but did not expect to make money. He occasionally drank himself ill for a day or two. One of his aspirations was to publish a distinguished short story in each issue, the shorter the better.

“But there aren’t fifty a year,” he frequently said. “There aren’t ten, but we get two or three of them.”

Richard Cobden came of a well-established New York family of merchants and manufacturers. There was no traceable connection, so far as the family knew, with the English Cobdens, of whom there had been a brave Richard of free trade and free speech. Dicky’s great-grandfather was the Richard Cobden who first made the Cobden trowel, hand-forged in a little shop up Yonkers way, and made it so well that stone masons used to drive from far in back country to his shop. The Cobdens had made and dealt in hardware ever since, but the trowel was the Cobden cachet.

Dicky was now twenty-four. His eyes were strong and so were his enthusiasms. These strengths stood him in good stead against the vast masses of evil typing and the revelations of human frailty contained in a myriad manuscript attempts. There was a mere screen between his desk and the desk of John Higgins. One winter afternoon, Dicky was interrupted by talk between the chief and the office boy:

“That colored guy in the reception room won’t go ’way,” the boy said.

“What guy is that?” Higgins asked.

“The one I told you about two hours ago when you came back from lunch.”

“What does he want?”

“He’s got a story. He says he’ll wait for you.”

“What’s his name?”

“It ain’t a natcherl name. He says the name doesn’t matter—that you don’t know him, anyway.”

“Tell him to leave his manuscript.”

“He won’t. Every little while he pulls up his sock.”

“Let him sit a bit longer. It’s a regular park bench out there, anyway——”

It was the dragging sock that attracted Dicky Cobden—a bit of mindless art on the part of the office boy that somehow aroused the young man by the dreary manuscript pile. Dicky’s world was now full of people who thought they had the story of the age; people who wanted to see the publisher himself; people afraid to trust their manuscripts to the mails; a world of such, coming up through great tribulation, but only here and there a dragging sock. He took a chance now and volunteered to Higgins to clear that bit of seat space in the reception room, if possible.

A dark-faced young man arose to meet him outside. Tired—that was the word that bored into Cobden’s mind with new meaning. There was something potent in the weariness of the black eyes, a deadly sort of patience that rarely goes with brilliance. Dicky was slightly above medium height. The other’s eyes were level with his own. The hanging sock was not in evidence, but Dicky felt that the stranger didn’t dare to move fast, for fear his clothes would break.

“Yet he feels clean,” he thought, “yet he feels clean.” This was important enough to repeat.

“I have a story——”

“Your name?”

“It is Naidu—but not known.”

“Are you from India?”

“Yes.”

“Why not let us have your story to read?”

“It must be read now.”

“This sort of thing isn’t done while one waits, you know.”

“I’m afraid this one will have to be done so.”

“Why, even if it’s promising,” Dicky declared severely, “it would have to be read several times.”

“I’ll wait.”

“But we have hundreds——”

“I know—may I not see the chief editor?”

Mr. Naidu turned slowly back to the bench, as if to resume his seat.

“You win,” Dicky slowly said. “I’ll take the story and read it now, though I’m only a deck hand. If it looks good enough, I’ll try to get Mr. Higgins to look——”

Five minutes after that, Dicky was deep in South Africa. Six thousand words in neat but faded typing, called The Little Man, about a diminutive Hindu person who appeared to have no other business in life but to stand up for the under dog. This person would fight anything, but the British Government was about the size of a foe he liked best—a cheerful story of most shocking suffering, which the Little Man took upon himself for the natives of Natal—no, not the natives, but for the Hindu laborers who had come to Africa to settle. A clear, burning patience through the pages; everything was carried in solution—all one breath, sustained. It wasn’t writing. It was living. It slid on with a soft inevitable rhythm, and it took Dicky along.

More than this, he saw in the story—or in the great stillness which the story brought him—something of the sort of thing he meant to write some day. Nothing exactly like this, of course, but the achievement of this unfettered ease. It made him want to start out at once to find the Little Man. It made him hear from Africa something like a personal call. He let himself dream for a moment. Wouldn’t it be great, his mind-made picture ran, when he had done a real story of his own—wouldn’t it be great to deliver it like this (or perhaps sockless) and make it sell itself? Halfway through, he arose and dumped the sheets he had read before Higgins’ spectacles, saying with slow-measured calm:

“She breathes. She’s a leaping trout!”

“Get out,” said Higgins softly.

“That’s only half,” said Cobden.

“Where’s the rest?”

“I’ve got it in there—not read yet.”

“And you bring this to me?”

“He’s waiting. This story will finish itself. I know it will march straight.”

While he read the second half, Dicky heard Higgins thresh and mutter, and finally call for the rest—old sore-eyed Higgins, who knew a story when he saw one, who had read his eyes out on poor stories looking for the Story of the Age....

Dicky went back to the reception room.

“I’ve read it. Mr. Higgins is reading it now. I think he’ll want it, Mr. Naidu. If you leave your address, we’ll mail you an offer to-morrow——”

“I will take two hundred dollars for the story, but I must have the money to-day.”

Dicky laughed quietly. “I’m afraid the countingroom won’t appreciate that. Countingroom’s not adaptable. It’s intricate, in fact; checks signed and countersigned.... Besides your price is severe for us—unknown name and all that. Oh, it’s not too much, only for us, you know.”

All the time he talked, Dicky knew Mr. Naidu would get his money, and get it to-day. A man with a story like this could get anything. He could write it on wood chips and bring the manuscript in a gunny sack....

“I’ll give him my personal check,” he told Higgins, a moment later. “The office can reimburse me.”

“I always forget you have a piece of change in your own name,” Higgins remarked indulgently. “Don’t ever let it interfere with your work, Dicky.”

“My work to-day is to get that manuscript in our vault. Later,” he added to himself, “my work is to write a story as good as that.”

“He might take less than two hundred——” John Higgins suggested in uncertain tone.

“I can’t bring that up—again,” Dicky said.

“I couldn’t either,” said the editor. “Maybe we are both crazy with the heat—steam heat. But I’ll stand by and see that you get your money. You’ll have to go out with him to get cash on your personal check.”

Dicky and Mr. Naidu were in the street. It was too late for the bank, but the son of the trowel makers found a friend of the family with currency. A rainy dusk in Twenty-third Street near the Avenue, when he took Mr. Naidu’s hand, having turned over the money.

“I have your address, I may hunt you up. You won’t forget The Public Square, when you have another story as good as this?”

“Oh, no,” said the Hindu, “nor you, Mr. Cobden. Good-by.”

Dicky turned to look after him. He reflected that he hadn’t even learned if Mr. Naidu were hungry. He wished he had given him his umbrella. He felt a curious desire to follow; a sense vague, as yet, that his way, the way of his Big Story, lay after the Oriental, and not back toward the office.

III
A FISH OMELET

SNOW had drifted into the outer basement stairway of the green house, and there was a thin frosty bar inside the door of the basement hall. Miss Claes opened the door and looked out through the iron railings to the street. Snow was six inches deep and still falling. She took a deep breath appreciatively, as if she found some faint exquisite scent in the cold air. Presently she began sweeping at the doorway, and continued up the stone steps to the walk. Her arms and throat were bare, and the dark gray dress that she wore was of wool but the fabric very thin. Apparently Miss Claes chose to enjoy the chill of the winter morning. When she returned to her living room, the fire in the grate had been started and a small cup of black coffee was on the table. She sipped thoughtfully and then lit a cigarette, which she half finished, standing by the fireplace.

The kindling had ignited the soft coal, but not without having shot out a spray of cinders over the cement hearth. Miss Claes swept the hearth unhurriedly. A cabinet of dishes across the room from the fireplace was full of color now from the light of the coals—vivid greens and bronzes, pomegranate reds. At length, she opened the door to the kitchen, where an Oriental stood by the big range.

“May I serve your breakfast?” he asked.

“Put it on a tray with something for Pidge. I’ll take it upstairs and perhaps she’ll join me. The child starves.”

“Not in this house——”

“She’s troublesome to do anything for, Nagar. She rebels against accepting any favor. I think she must have been forced to accept many favors from people outside, when she lived with her father. Was there a bit of boiled halibut left from last night?”

“Yes.”

“We’ll make a little omelet with a few flakes of fish in it. I’m sure she isn’t getting any money from her father, but she has kept up her rent in advance. Did she work all night?”

“Her room was quiet after two, until I came down. Then I heard her typewriter as I swept the upper hall.”

“It seems to be a race, Nagar, between the child and her book—which will finish the other? I love her spirit, but she isn’t taking care of herself.... Yes, we’ll put in these asparagus tips.... I think Mr. Musser believes that the world owes him a living, but finds it hard to collect, sometimes, with only metaphysics to offer. And now Pidge has flung herself to the opposite extreme; talks of earning her living in a factory, when her book is done. She’s a living protest against talking and not doing. We must be very good to her, Nagar.”

Miss Claes brought a little creamy porcelain urn, and held it for him to fill with coffee from the larger pot. Nagar held the door open for her into the basement hall. A moment later on the top floor, she tapped at the second last door on the left. Pidge sat at her machine under the gaslight beyond the head of the cot.

“I can’t make their swords play!” she moaned. “All my swords are stiff as shinny sticks. The trouble is, I don’t know men, Miss Claes—not red animal men like they should be in this story. I know pussy men. I know pious men, salvey and wormy men, monks and mummies and monsters, but I don’t know honest-to-God men! Here they are taunting each other as they stab, and their talk sounds—like Shakespeare! Oh, dear, you’ve brought me more coffee and eats!”

“I won’t touch your papers, Pidge, but if you take them off the cot, I’ll put the tray between us. I haven’t had breakfast.”

Pidge turned the roller of her typemill down so that the most recent literary revelation might not appear to a roving eye. Then she crisscrossed different packages of manuscript, placed the mass face down before the waving glass, and moved the oil stove aside so she could pass to her place on the cot.

“You always forget to bring your coffeepot down to the range, Pidge——”

The girl turned back to her typemachine. “He’s a jealous old devil when I leave the room,” she said. “I think the person who rented him before I did addressed envelopes all day—kept cranking him back and forth against time. Now I ride a little ways—then let him stop and browse. We ramble——”

Pidge stopped. Her eyes looked dry and smarting, as if tears were on the verge.

“Oh, Miss Claes,” she went on, “I’m just as crazy as that—I mean my figures of speech! Cranking him back and forth, and in the same breath letting him stop and browse. I wish you wouldn’t bring me this stuff any more. The coffee’s so good that it hurts—and the eggs. I always cry when I’m hurt.”

“But, Pidge, think what a privilege it is for me to climb from the heart of New York to eighteenth-century France, and not leave the house——”

“But you find a twisted cubist sort of France—part Dumas, part Mexican Plaza, Los Angeles, and the rest me!”

“At least, you’re not carried away with the idea that it’s perfect.”

Pidge regarded the other’s face closely. She could see with uncanny clearness in this little dark room where she had struggled night and day for nearly three months; but what she saw now, or was looking for, she hardly knew herself. Her own face was spooky from sleepless strain.

“I’m eating shamelessly,” she said.

A moment later, she pointed to the rear wall, and whispered the question:

“Has Nagar stopped writing? I haven’t raced typewriters with him lately.”

“He hasn’t spoken of changing his work. Did you hear that New York has touched him with her magic?” Miss Claes asked.

“What do you mean?”

“He has sold a story—a short story for two hundred dollars to The Public Square.”

“Nagar—your servant?”

“He isn’t my servant, Pidge. He just lives here and works with me.”

There was a clicking dryness to the girl’s tongue, as she asked:

“And now is he going away? You said they always do when they strike it rich.”

“Oh, no. Nagar wouldn’t leave for a little story success. But nobody quite knows Nagar—nobody.”

Pidge was alone. The Lance of the Rivernais was pricking at her to get back to work, but she resisted for a few minutes, thinking of Miss Claes.

“... She may be crazy, but she’s good to look at,” she muttered. “I believe she can look into me, too.... I wonder what she is?... She may be crazy, but she’s kind! And, oh, I’m so tired,” she yawned a moment later. “I’d like—I’d like to be a leaf in the park under the snow—still snowing, and sleep till spring. Only I’d like some roast turkey first.”

The recent breakfast had an extraordinary flavor, but it was all too dainty for one who had eaten little or nothing since yesterday morning. Her mind trailed off to buns she had seen in bakery windows; and delicatessen stores with opened sausages, big as one’s head and colored like tapestries, and little brown birds and deviled eggs, and sliced filets of fish of amazing tint.

All meats had been anathema in the house of Mr. Adolph Musser. Pidge had lived in no other house in all her years, before coming to New York, but since then, she had shocked her young self through various experiments among the fleshpots of Greenwich. Not so various, for the narrowness of her purse was ever a limp fact, but these few flavory adventures were exciting and memorable. There was a tap of a finger nail upon the panel.

“A letter, Miss Musser,” Nagar said.

She looked at the Hindu with different eyes from ever before. He had sold a story. She wanted to speak of it, wanted to sit before him and listen—this anomaly, whose typewriter she had sometimes heard through the partition, and rarely a low deep hum. She was prejudiced against Hindus, because her father had affected such a knowledge of them, but somehow she had been less lonely in New York because of this one. He was embodied Detachment and Impersonality.... He had turned away.

“Thanks, Nagar,” she called.

The letter was a typewriter bill.

IV
LAMBILL KNOCKS

INSIDE the moonlit castle gardens, across the moat into the pictured halls, up the marble staircase, driving straight and true, Lambill Courtenay, a man of the people—artist, swordsman, lover virgin-hearted, rode—no, ran, for once on his sprightly feet, straight to a sequestered wing of the ancient and noble castle of the Rivernais, and with his ungloved hand touched the knocker of its inner sanctuary.

“Who is there?” came the cry like the thin note of violins.

“I——” swelled the deep orchestral answer of Lambill Courtenay, Frenchiest of the French.

Then the great oaken door from the forests of Savoie opened. Lambill crossed the threshold. The white arms of Madelaine Rivernais opened and the heavens opened also—for the great maze of life had been untangled for these two—and Pidge Musser’s book was done.

Just a book—one of the myriads that you see lying around, like sloughed snake skins on first or secondhand bookshelves—but it had been properly wept on and starved for and toiled over, as only youth in its abandonment can toil for its own ends. It had almost been prayed for, but not quite. Prayer wasn’t easy for Pidge Musser’s defiant soul.

It was two in the morning. The oil stove smelled as if it were dying. Of late the wick had hiked up out of the oil a little earlier each night like a waxing moon, and Pidge had been forced to shake the oil around to keep the flame. Miss Claes and Nagar did so much for her, she was ashamed; and you could get a red apple for the price of a wick.

Pidge coughed. It was the most astonishing and cavernous bark. The silence afterward was painful. She fancied she was keeping him awake—the silent, dark and courteous Nagar, who did prodigies of work every day and was always willing to do more, and who had come into Pidge’s direct limelight since his sale of a story to The Public Square. Pidge hadn’t known a cold for years. It actually amazed her, how unclean it made her feel, and ashamed to have anybody come near.

“I’m going to watch over you very closely, Pidge—you’ll have to let me, now that the book is done,” Miss Claes said in the morning, “because it’s really a shock to stop work after the way you have carried on. The drive—suddenly stopping, you know.”

“I wonder how she knows?” Pidge thought to herself for the thousandth time in regard to the subtle capacities of Miss Claes.

“I’m tough,” she said aloud.

“That is a true saying, Pidge. On that, everything hinges. Am I to hear the story?”

“It would—it must be read aloud. It’s terrible to ask, but will you?”

“I’ve wanted to hear it from the beginning. Now tell me, would you like Nagar to listen, too?”

“Oh, no!”

“Just as you like. Only you’re offering it to the world later——”

“But Nagar knows.”

“That’s what you want, isn’t it?”

“Oh, yes, but——”

“He won’t say a word. Nagar rarely talks, except to answer questions. But, of course, don’t think of it, if you’d rather not.”

“What is Nagar?” Pidge asked suddenly.

“Just a watcher and listener in America, learning to see things impersonally.”

Pidge contemplated the idea for a few seconds; then her eyes hardened. “I’ve heard lots of talk about the impersonal—oh, talk to the skies about the impersonal life in Los Angeles—by people who haven’t yet got a personality!”

Miss Claes bent in low laughter.

“They start in killing out personality before they get a live one,” Pidge added sullenly.

“They do, my dear, but have you heard any words about the impersonal life from Nagar?”

“No. That’s the best thing about him—that he doesn’t explain himself. But I hate mysteries about Hindus—hate people moving about saying, ‘Shh-sh’—finger on their lips, trying to astonish you with something they can’t tell. I’m so tired of all that!”

“Still you asked me about Nagar, though really there is nothing to say, except that he is good to have in the house.”

“I think I’ll let him come and hear the reading, if he’s willing.”

“Good,” said Miss Claes. “We will listen in this room, where the story came to be.”

... Nagar sat in a straight chair, in the aisle between the cot and the wall. Pidge sat by the window before her machine. Miss Claes lay on the cot with her head under the light that Pidge read by, and away they went. There was an hour or more in the early afternoon when both Miss Claes and her helper could escape from below, and two hours, at least, after nine in the evening—this for three days.

Pidge was fagged and ill and frightfully scared. She would begin hoarsely, and for pages in each reading her cold in the head was an obstruction hard to pass; besides, she felt she was boring them horribly and that all the massed effects of her pages dithered away into nothing or worse. But a moment came in each of the six sessions, when the last monster of the mind’s outer darkness was passed. And then, for Pidge, at least, knighthood rose resplendent; days became stately, indeed, and chivalry bloomed again. At such times the dark gleaming hair of Miss Claes—which Pidge could have touched with her hand, became the tresses of Madelaine Rivernais herself, and a little back to the right in the deep shadows, the face of the Easterner there took on the magic and glamour of Lambill’s own. The vineyards of old France stretched beyond from their balcony; the rivers of France flowed below. The lance of the Rivernais was won back heroically and human hearts opened to the drama of love and life.

But on the last night of the reading, after the self-consciousness was passed and all was going well, Pidge, glancing down to Miss Claes’ head under the light, saw gray for the first time, in the depths of her hair. It hadn’t been combed with any purpose of hiding. The outer strands were coal black, the strands beneath had turned. This discovery had the peculiar effect of changing everything around in Pidge’s mind in the moments that followed.

She couldn’t get into the story as before; and in the very last pages of her reading, a face persistently crowded in between her mind’s eye and the rapid flow of the story at its end—a long, humorless complacent face—the high-browed, self-willed and self-thrilled face of her father. It was as if he were reading and not herself; reading with rising expectation, drinking in the silent praise, as if he had done the writing himself and loved it well. So effectually was Pidge mastered by this apparition of her own mind, that the last pages of the manuscript were spoiled entirely. The light had gone out of her and she said hastily, as the final page was turned down:

“I know how kind you are, but please don’t try to tell me anything to-night. Not a word, please!”

There was something in Nagar’s smile as he turned and went out that she knew she would remember again.

“I quite understand,” said Miss Claes, when they were alone. “But say, Pidge, I do want to say this. To-morrow afternoon, Mr. Richard Cobden, an editor of The Public Square, is coming here to see Nagar. He is the one who put through Nagar’s story. We’re to have tea at four. You’ll come down, won’t you?”

“Why, yes, of course.”

“It might be arranged for Mr. Cobden to look at your book. Would you like that?”

“Ye-es.”

“Do you mind if I suggest something?”

“Please,” said Pidge.

“Don’t let Mr. Cobden know, just yet, that you are the one who has written the story. Write a new title-page without the name of the author.”

“All right, but——”

“It’s because you look like such a child, Pidge. No one would be able to see all that’s in your story—if they saw what a child you are!”

“I’ll do as you say. Thank you, but, Miss Claes——”

“Yes?”

“To-night under the light, I saw your hair—underneath!”

“Yes?”

“It made me see everything differently for a minute. You know I hate cults and everything that apes India and talks about saving the world; everybody talking about their souls, but doing the same old secret selfish things—oh, I’ve almost died of talk about all that—but for a minute, to-night under the lamp, it seemed that you knew, but had come down to brass tacks—your feet on the ground—living like the rest of us, but not ‘falling for’ love or money or fame, as we are. Are you really through talking about service—just doing it?”

Miss Claes laughed. “Such a lot of words, Pidge—about some gray hair.”

Pidge was intensely serious. “Are you English?” she began again.

“Yes.”

“I know you’ve been in India. Miss Claes—are you really farther along than I thought? Are you trying for that impersonal thing—trying to belong to everybody—to enter the stream of humanity, as they call it?”

“Of course, I’m trying, Pidge.”

“You and Nagar working together?”

“Yes, but you and I are working together, too.”

Pidge was not to be turned aside by generalities.

“You—down here in lower New York—keeping a rooming house?”

“Why not?”

“Nothing—only it’s so big, so unexpected. I’ve always believed ’way down deep that a real person wouldn’t be long-haired or barefooted or pious, but lost in the crowd something like that—quietly efficient, moving here and there among people unannounced, only a few ever dreaming! Oh, it’s too, too big!”

“Don’t try to believe anything, Pidge.”

“I’ve been spoiled for believing anything, by so much talk!”

“Don’t try to settle things ahead of time,” Miss Claes repeated laughingly. “Let the days—each day tell its story. I’m just living out life as you are.... And now undress and get into bed. I know you’re too tired to sleep, but I’m going to fix you in and open your window and put out your light, and sit with you for a minute, perhaps in the dark. You’re just to rest—a tired little girl—and not even hear me go away.”

V
LUNCHEON AT SHARPE’S

RICHARD COBDEN and John Higgins were lunching at Sharpe’s Chop House. It was one-thirty, and at the height of the day’s business. The tables were packed close.

“You were telling me about that Asiatic landlady down in the Village,” Higgins said, lifting his spectacles to wipe his red-rimmed eyes.

“I wasn’t telling you much,” said Dicky. “She’s too deep for me—looks to thrive on coffee and cigarettes—eyes that have seen too much, a lot of laughter in them, but no hope.... And what would you think of a basement room, with flowers in winter and a fireplace with hickory embers, a Byzantine jar in the corner and a cabinet of porcelain which I haven’t seen the like of on this side?”

“Go on—don’t mind me,” said John Higgins.

“... Little old Harrow Street,” Dicky mused. “Harrow Street curves, you know. There is quite a mass of rooming houses on each side, and number Fifty-four, with a green front, is Miss Claes’ house. And our Mr. Naidu works there with his hands; only they call him Nagar in that house—spelled with an ‘a’ but pronounced ‘nog.’... By the way, he told me twice, yesterday, that it isn’t a fiction story we’ve bought, but a handling of things that actually happened in Africa—Little Man an actual human being named Gandhi or something of the sort.”

“Can’t be done. Fiction and life are different,” said John Higgins.

Dicky resumed: “Some of Miss Claes’ lodgers happened in for the tea party. No one barred apparently. I must have seen most of the houseful: couple of girl-pals; one works in a restaurant to support the other who is to become a prima donna; a couple of decayed vaudeville artists looking for a legacy—a regular houseful, but I don’t believe all of them pay, as they would have to in other houses.”

“Landlady supports those who can’t?”

“That’s the way I see it. The green front in Harrow Street took hold of me. I must have stayed over two hours. Our Mr. Naidu made some coffee to go with that cabinet of porcelain. Also there was a little girl—from Los Angeles, I think they said—red head, brown wool dress and eyes of a blue you see on illumined vellum out of Italy——”

“Some cerulean,” said John Higgins.

“They weren’t large, particularly,” Dicky went on at his literary best, “but that extraordinary blue like the ocean. Ruffled on top, but calm and still in the depth! Never saw such eyes. They come back to me now——”

“They do to me, Dicky.”

“You’re not getting all I mean, John. Uptown here, we think we’re the center of the world, the heart of New York yanking up toward the Park—but down there those old rooming houses are filling up with the boys and girls from all the States west, and the second growths from the families of European immigrants—filling up because they are cheap, with the boys and girls who will do the surgery ten years from now, and the painting and writing and acting——”

“I’ve heard about all that,” said John Higgins. “You’ll do a big story yourself one day.”

“I’m not so sure of it, since yesterday. I couldn’t take their chances. I couldn’t sit down and do a novel and not know how I was going to eat my way through. I couldn’t scrub tenement-house floors for the privilege of writing a book.... Oh, I love books all right. I rise up and yell when a big short story comes in the office, or breaks out anywhere. I think I know a real one, but a man’s got to do a whole lot of appreciating before he gets to doing. I’m not bred somehow as those people are. I’m the first of the Cobdens to break out of trade. They call me a dreamer, my people do—yet compared to those boys and girls in Harrow Street, I’m a basket of fish with only a wiggle at the bottom——”

“Get out,” said John Higgins. “The first thing you know, you’ll be going down there again.”

“I will,” said Dicky. “I’m going down there to live.”

“Eh?”

The younger man nodded seriously. “They’re crazy, perhaps, but I’m convinced from yesterday of one thing: One can’t be sane as I am, and ever find the Big Story, much less write it.”

“Therefore the first thing to do is to go insane.”

“It isn’t like that,” Dicky said gently. “I’ve been brought up to think I know New York, belong and breathe in New York. You see, my family has lived here a hundred years. But yesterday I saw New York for the first time. She isn’t an old Dutch frump, as we thought, John. She’s a damsel! She’s a new moon——”

“Blue eyes?” said John Higgins.

“No, that’s the little girl from Los Angeles. It’s the landlady, of course, who’s the spirit of the place. I figured out afterward that it was because she was there that I liked everybody and had a good time. Wouldn’t be surprised to hear she was a priestess of some sort. I asked if she were Hindu, and she said ‘Yes,’ but she talks as if she were out of an English convent. Of course, most of her lodgers don’t get her. One old actor, out of a job, leaned across the table to me yesterday when Miss Claes left the room. He tapped his forehead, whispering, ‘Lovely, eh, but got the Ophelias.’”

“Is she young?” John Higgins asked presently.

“Moreover,” Dicky added, lost in thought, “I believe Miss Claes knows that they think her cracked and doesn’t mind.... Young? Say, I don’t know, John. You don’t think of her with years, somehow—rather as one who has reached the top of herself and decided to stay there.”

John Higgins leaned back, drained his coffee cup and stared with eyes that smarted at the steaming ceiling. “Is Naidu going to do us another story?”

“We didn’t get to that, but they gave me a novel manuscript to read.”

“His?”

“No, I didn’t get it straight whose it was. Miss Claes handed it over, suggesting I look at it for a serial. Some one in the house had written it or left it there.”

“We’d better be going back to the office. Have you read into the novel?”

“Started, but didn’t get really going. It’s back-age France stuff, and I was a little lost last night on the subject of 54 Harrow Street.”

“You’re a little lost yet, Dicky, I should say—for a Cobden.... So you’re going to lead a double life? Rich young New Yorker, quarters in Fiftieth Street under the eaves of St. Patrick’s, vanishing into life down in Greenwich.”

Dicky’s eyes were keen with memory.

VI
ENTER, FANNY GALLUP

THE Lance of the Rivernais had been in the editorial rooms of The Public Square for almost a month, but there had been no report; not the slightest mention, in fact, though author and editor were frequently together. Richard Cobden had come to 54 Harrow Street to live for the larger part of each week. Pidge had gone to work in a tin-can factory up Lenox way, pasting labels. She was half sick from fatigue from the new work and from keeping the secret about her book. In the days that followed the finishing of the Lance, it was as if her whole body and brain had been a scaffold or matrix for the story, and it had been taken from her, leaving a galvanism useless as an eggshell, a sort of afterbirth that persisted in staying alive.

... There was Fanny Gallup, who sat at her right, elbow to elbow at the pasting bench—Fanny of the intermittent pungencies of scent and the dreary muck of talk about boys and boys and boys. Fanny was a child and woman all in one, about Pidge’s age and size, one whom you could fancy had been a stringy street-kid a year or two ago. But just now, Fanny was in her brief bloom, red in her lips, a lift to her scant breast, the earth driving into her and overflowing with such color and fertility as it could.

For eight hours a day, Pidge dwelt in Fanny’s frequently tropical aura—hateful, yet marveling. The thing that amazed her was that Fanny loved life so, loved the feel of her own hands when she rubbed them together, loved the taste of sweets and the memory of last night’s kisses—loved fearlessly and without reserve, not a pang of dread for what was to come, nor a shudder of regret for what had happened to her mother or sisters or the other girls of Foley Street. Never a thought in Fanny’s head that she was being hoaxed by Nature; that her body was being livened and rounded, her face edged and tinted, for an inexorable purpose; not a suspicion that she was being played for, and must presently produce.

Fanny lived her brief hour to the full, and Pidge Musser suffered and revolted for two. Pidge took the dreary monotone of talk into her soul, as she had taken her father’s, knowing that one day she would be full.

“Oh, you Musser,” Fanny would say. “Why don’t you come over to Foley Street?... You’re dryin’ up, Redhead. What do you do nights? What do you do all the time, thinkin’ and listnin’?... Where’s your fulluh, Redhead? Ain’t got one—wot? Little liar. You’re bad, you are, because you’re so still.... Come on over to Foley Street to-night. I’ll let you have a peep at Albert, m’li’l barber—just one peep, Redhead—not too close. I ain’t sure of him yet, but I’ll let you have one look—aw come on!”

So it was through the hours, pasting apricot labels, lobster, asparagus, pimento, peach, and codfish labels. More and more Fanny’s boys and men folded into one, whose name was Albert.

“I’m gettin’ him goin’—goin’, goin’. Psst! an’ he comes!” Fanny would say. “But I wouldn’t trust him to you, Musser—not longer than a hairpin, dam’ little party, you.”

Miss Claes was observing with some concern the result of her suggestion to Pidge, not to let the young editor know the Lance was hers.

“If it hadn’t been for my tampering, she would have heard about her book before this,” she said to Nagar. “Pidge looked so young, I felt it would prejudice Mr. Cobden against her work. He’s fascinated with Harrow Street, but seems to have no time or thought for a romance of eighteenth-century France! Yet he would have put through her book in a week, if he knew, seeing the story with the same eyes he sees the author.”

“And she doesn’t tell him?”

“No. That’s our Pidge, Nagar. I even suggested that I would speak to him—let the truth slip out. She caught me in her hands, those hard little hands, strong as a peasant’s, ‘Not for worlds, Miss Claes!’ she breathed, and there was a patch of white intensity across her upper lip, ‘Not for worlds!’”

“... Of course, I mean to write,” Pidge had granted to Dicky in the very beginning. “I’ve always meant to write, since the day I learned that print wasn’t done above the clouds somehow, like Moses’ tablets, and had to be written all out first by human beings. But I’m not ready to begin——” and she silently added the word “again” for her own composure.