The Public Square

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.