The Public Square

THEY were ensconced in the two upper rooms. Pidge kept up her work at The Public Square, and did not come home for luncheon. She had told John Higgins of her marriage but the subject was not mentioned afterward. The old chief vanished for three days following the news, and when he came back there was a new dignity on his part for Pidge to cope with. She found her position a trifle uncentered. His old stenographer took his letters, and he wrote his editorials on his own machine as aforetime. John Higgins said little, but found flaws in her judgments that had not appeared before. He no longer risked availing himself of her entire equipment; this change being apparently on the basis that he dare not get used to it all over again. He seemed to hold the idea that it was only a question of days at most before a married woman would forget place and town entirely and rush off to pick up pieces of wool and thread for a nest.

Pidge had built so much of herself into her work that there was emphatic pain in the new conditions. She needed the work more than ever now, but The Public Square was falling into sorry days and ways. There was nothing to say but War, and if you didn’t like War, didn’t see the divine uses of War and say so, you had better say nothing. There was no field in the world at this time for a magazine of dignified or any other kind of protest, and in the steady loss of money week after week, the struggle became one of great simplicity—to stay alive.

“Higgins is a rotten old knocker anyway,” said Rufus Melton. “This is a time for Americans to stand together and not criticize the government. He never did pay any real money for his stuff, but was always ready to tell you where you fell down. They’re telling him a word or two now.”

So Pidge didn’t speak much of The Public Square at home.

Rufus vibrated between a depression when his stuff wouldn’t come through and an exaltation when it did. He was quite sincere in his industry, but slept late in the morning. Pidge was up and away four mornings out of five without waking him. Sometimes Rufe decided to eat his “big meal of the day” in the middle of the afternoon, in which case Pidge supped alone. He was slow to get his work started, so that it was often evening before he got “all of himself working at once.” Then he was apt to stay with it for several hours, in which case Pidge could sleep if she got a chance. Occasionally he found that he could dictate a bit of first draft and Pidge undertook at first to help him in this way, but when she perceived that it didn’t occur to him, in the flush of his evening powers, that she had worked all day and must work to-morrow, she decided to stay off his night work.

“I can’t, Rufe,” she said one night on the way to bed. “It’s so fascinating to practice napping in the hushes and rushes of your machine.”

“You won’t take this stuff?”

“No.”

“You won’t?”

“It will interfere with your work session if you lose your temper. Of course, we’ve got the whole upper floor to start something in, but we must think of your story.”

“Whose work counts in this outfit?” he demanded.

“Yours, Rufe, by all means. A fine patriotic short story at any price. But I have a job to look after, and I can’t give them a red-headed somnambulist to-morrow. No, I’m going to sleep, but I do hope you get the American flags waving all right in your story.”

“I’ll get you, Pan—for acting like this.”

“You’ve got me, dear, and don’t forget to have the hero come through with, ‘My country right or wrong.’ No girl can resist that—or editor. Good night.”

Rufe was rarely rough. He didn’t overtire or over-stimulate himself, so that his temper could easily break corral; and at its worst this temper wasn’t a man-eater. Rufe’s nervous system was cushioned in a fine layer of healthy fat, and therefore didn’t flog itself to madness against bare bone and sinew. He was merely involved in himself entirely, which makes any man naïve.

Pidge wasn’t missing any of the petty dramas of her present experience. When she came home the first time to find that he had already had dinner, something flew out of her into space in a frantic search for God. When she realized that he saw nothing but undisturbed equity in the idea of using her for his own work purposes half the night, when she was contracted to The Public Square for the days—another output of herself was loose in the solar system. When she came to understand that the tens he was earning were mysteriously his own, and that her ones were theirs—another day, at least, was spoiled for her in the editorial rooms.

Rufe thought her extremely selfish. So had her father. “Two to one,” she said. “They’ve got it on me. They’ve got it on all of us. This is their world.”... She thought of all this bitterness and bickering taking place in Nagar’s room, which Miss Claes had saved for weeks for a sort of sanctuary of her own. Mostly she was hurt by the deadly parallel of this life, with her life in Los Angeles and vicinity. To cope with this American story-man, she was forced to draw out and readjust and refurbish the old hateful mechanism that had formed within her during the nineteen years with her father. She knew how. The mechanism worked all right, but the sense of the hateful thing resuming activity within her was far harder to bear than the racket of Rufe’s typewriter when she was trying to sleep.

The fact that Rufe Melton was entirely cut off from the play of her real powers; that he thought her ridiculous, and said so, when she gave any notice of holding other than the standard American points of view on politics and religion and social ethics; this was not so serious a breach between them, as it would have been to a woman who had not come into so startling a reaction as Pidge had, against the whole system of knowing and not doing. All the knowledge that really mattered to Pidge was that working doctrine which doesn’t announce or explain, but shows itself in living the life. She was very sad, and continually sad, that she had to work upon Rufe the iron of irony, the stab so subtle that it astonishes before it hurts, and the self-control which disarms.

Sometimes Sundays or in unexpected periods of leisure they had moments of actual delight together. This occasionally happened when food just pleased him, or when an acceptance from a magazine arrived at a price which he considered adequate. (Rufus never neglected the price of his things, as an indication of his getting on.) He uncovered a real levity at such times, and their talk didn’t walk merely, then; it danced.

“We’ll go up to Harlem,” he said one Sunday morning. “I used to live up there in the colored settlement——”

Figuratively speaking, Pidge waved her hand before her own eyes to shut out the critical negatives which always arose when Rufe told of living somewhere. They went and stayed gay. When he turned from her innocently to consult a policeman in Harlem, she checked the first and last, “I told you so.” They found yams that day—yams freshly arrived from Georgia, and coffee said to be parched and dripped according to an ideal of New Orleans first families. These satisfied Rufus, and still they stayed gay. Even his, “I could take you around to a lot of queer dumps in this man’s town,” didn’t upset anything. Altogether that day was memorable.... Once in desperate fatigue, when there were moving dark spots before her eyes in every ray of daylight, Pidge cried to Miss Claes:

“But he is lost to everything, entirely oblivious to everything but himself and his work—his stories, his fame, his winning his way!”

“I know, Pidge, but the world is on top of him yet. He is fighting his way up and out. Romance can’t be entirely satisfying, you know, when it has ambition for a rival. You’ve told me something about the thrall of a book in yourself—how engrossing it is.”

“That all goes out of me when I’m with him,” Pidge said suddenly. “I never thought of it before, but all that old agony to produce another book that I used to feel is gone. I seem to let him carry all that.”

“That helps for the present, doesn’t it?”

“Yes, and it isn’t all sordid—don’t think I mean that, Miss Claes. Sometimes when he’s satisfied with his story, so that he can forget it, we have such good times. He’s such a playboy, such a playmate. Some old terrible longing comes over me when we are close like that, just to be like one of the Mediterranean women, who know nothing but to replenish the earth. But it doesn’t do to dwell on that,” Pidge finished with an impressive quietness of tone. “One thing I learned rather well, before it was too late.”

“What’s that, Pidge?”

“That this isn’t the time or place for us to bring a little baby into the world.”