The Public Square

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pidge stared at her a second in surprise.

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

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

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

“No, dear.”

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

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

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

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

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

“But I’d like to hear.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cobden looked dazed.

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

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

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

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

He looked at her steadily for an instant.

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

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

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

“You don’t know what you’re saying!”

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