The Public Square

RUFUS MELTON was having his coffee at Miss Claes’ table. It was noon and July, 1917. The package of mail left at 54 Harrow Street had not forgotten Rufus this morning. Another story had gone through, and he felt that the day was all right. It looked to him like a very good day to play and to shop. Miss Claes came in from the kitchen in a fresh white dress and canvas shoes, nor did she come empty handed. A crystal and silver marmalade jar was in one hand, and a plate of cold ham in the other. These she placed on the cloth before him; and noting that the loaf of rye bread lay uncut upon the board, she went to a drawer for the knife.

Rufus dropped a cube of sugar into his coffee cup and contemplated Miss Claes’ ankle. His mind became industrious. He was thinking how he would describe the ankle if he were using it in a story. He thought of several narrow white things. There was a white greyhound, but you couldn’t say a woman’s ankle was like that. There was a white pleasure yacht on the river, with narrow lines and clipper bow that bore a psychological likeness, but it would take a paragraph to put that over. The boneheads would think of boiler plate. Then there was a birch tree and a polar bear and a snowy church spire ... anyway the ankle was fetching.

“You look great this morning, Miss Claes, and see here——”

He spread out his letter from a most rich and inaccessible editorial room.

“How interesting, Rufus. You are doing so well with your stories.”

“Pidge thinks they’re rotten,” he chuckled.

No comment from Miss Claes.

“She’d have me sit in a cave and growl over a story—bringing one out every three months for editors to muss their hair over and finally turn down. That’s the life——”

Miss Claes had turned to the cabinet of dishes, the double doors of which were open. One might have thought that Rufus was now entirely involved in the subject of Pidge’s idea of stories, but in reality he was studying Miss Claes’ waist and throat and profile. Her particular freshness from boots up this morning fascinated his eye. She took his coffee cup to the kitchen to be refilled, and when she came back close to his chair, Rufus’ arm moved engagingly around her hips, his face turning up with a questioning boyish smile.

“What is it, Rufus?” she asked, making no movement to be free from his arm.

“You’re mighty charming this morning——”

“It’s a charming morning.”

His arm tightened a little, yet she stood perfectly still. Rufus was now in a quandary. This sitting posture had its diminishing aspect: yet to arise and disentangle his feet from under the table, he must loosen his arm or show an uncouth line to the camera, so to speak. Rufus rarely broke his rhythms in these little performances; certainly not when the going was as delicate as this. Miss Claes had become especially desirable, because of an exciting uncertainty about her, and an affectation, at least, of allegiance to Pidge. If he had only had sense enough to turn his chair around, before taking her in. Presently Rufus reached the conclusion that it was better to draw her down to him, than take a chance of getting his arm around her again.

She came—no resistance, no rigidity. His lips found her shadowy cheek, and an indescribable and most disturbing fragrance from her neck and hair. Or was it the extraordinary coolness of everything that disturbed, or the words gently whispered in his ear:

“You’re such a lonely boy. You don’t understand at all what you are really dying for.”

Rufe was disappointed. So hers was the mothering game. Besides his position was uncomfortable, knees under the table, and his coffee was getting cold. So he let her go after all, in order to reach a standing posture, but by the time he was free of the chair and the table, Miss Claes had vanished without haste into the kitchen. Rufus now stood dangling inconveniently between his breakfast and her return.

She came; he went to her. Her dark eyes were utterly calm, no traceable deepening of the color in her face. She halted, but lightly held in the two hands before her was a gold-edged dish, with a little golden globe of butter in the center.

Rufus dropped back in his chair and lifted his coffee cup. What on earth could a man do with a woman holding a butter dish? “It’s hell to be fastidious,” he thought, in regard to his own inhibitions.

Something delectable had gone out of the July day. Miss Claes was no nearer his understanding than before. Pidge would have the laugh on him, because these women could never keep anything to themselves. He didn’t mind anything about Pidge so much as her laugh. Altogether, this little brush at breakfast left him unsatisfied—and this was a play day.

“Thanks,” he said at the door.

She gave him a pink, an old-fashioned white one. “The butter-and-egg-man brought in some from his dooryard garden in Yonkers,” she said.

Rufe started upstairs.

There were voices from one of the rooms on the main floor, but the second was entirely empty and silent until a rear door opened and Fanny Gallup looked out.

“Hello,” she said in a far-reaching whisper.

Fanny’s “hello” was one of the best of her little ways. She said it, as one would cast a silken noose.

Rufe looked back and down. On certain mornings he would have growled an answer and tramped on, but there was something white and calling about the face in the dim shadows this morning, and for a wonder the kids weren’t squalling.

“Oh, come in. Come on in!” was in his ears. Her bare arm was raised and he saw the little muffler of dark in the pit of it. The lacing was gone from the smock, moreover, and there was a pull for the moment to Fanny’s sad little breast. The fact that the smock had once been Pidge’s, Rufe thrust back into his mind for future reference. He halted, looking around and listening again. Then he tiptoed in and the door was shut. Not a great while afterward the door was opened, the crying of children was heard. Fanny was moaning, “Don’t go ’way—oh, don’t go ’way!”

But Rufus breasted past her muttering within himself, “Never again!”

... Pidge and Rufe Melton went over to Bank Street for supper that evening. Rufus wasn’t hungry. He had bought a golf suit that looked very well on him, he said, but evidently now he was troubled how to use it. He hadn’t done any work so far to-day and felt less like it than ever. Pidge thoughtlessly mentioned that an Indian letter had come in to the office from Richard Cobden that day.

“You folks are dippy about this Cobden,” Rufe said. “Every time an article of his comes out in the Passé Square, you gather together to read it as if it had come from the Messiah. What’s he to you, Pan—a little bit tender on your Dicky?”

“A little bit tender,” she said.

Rufus felt abused. He glared at her. This sort of thing had happened before. Rufe had come to look at Pidge as his picket pin. He had a long rope and everything was all right, so long as the pin held. But her manner now would uncenter any man.

“I’d like to get out of Harrow Street,” he growled. “Every time I put my address on the top of a manuscript, I feel it’s a knock rather than a boost. I’ve been tempted to get an agent, for no other reason than to have his address for the magazines to work through. I was talking with Redge Walters who bought this story to-day, and he said, ‘Rufe, you sure fall for the little bobbed heads down in the Village, don’t you? Why don’t you come uptown and live in New York?’”

“I like Harrow Street,” said Pidge.

“You don’t make a secret of it, either,” he went on. “Of course, Miss Claes is kind and all that, but we pay for what we get, and there’s no question in my mind about the pictures in her gallery being hung crooked.”

“If you’ve finished your supper, let’s go,” said Pidge.

“She breathes! The Arctic princess!” Rufe shivered.

Pidge didn’t answer.

“And that second floor needs policing up,” Rufe resumed. “I haven’t taken it to heart so much about living in the Village, but that second floor’s a tenement patch. Every time I go up and down——”

“Fanny’s my fault and Miss Claes accepts it with never a murmur,” Pidge said, wide-eyed. “I’d look well running off uptown and leaving Fanny there. Oh, Rufe, don’t you ever see any fault except on the outside?”

Right then Rufe said something.

“What’s the use of me looking after my own faults when you’ve got them all in hand like Shetland ponies?”

Pidge arose. Black waters were welling up in her breast. It was so true. His faults were with her day and night, and the greatest of them was his entire irresponsibility. Also it touched her in the sorest quick to have him point out that Fanny lowered the values, not only of the second floor, but of the whole Harrow Street house.

Pidge never passed Fanny’s door but she was pressed by something within to enter; yet her whole personal nature rebelled. Often for hours at her work, there was a gloomy semiconscious activity within her that kept urging its notice up to her mind. When she stopped to think, she would realize that she hadn’t gone into Fanny’s room that day, or that she must drop in to-night. It was so now, only more than ever, because Rufe had located her private horror and brought it to speech. On the second floor, returning from supper, she told Rufe to go on up, that she meant to see Fanny for a few minutes.

“What to—come on, Pan, let’s go to a show somewhere!” he said suddenly.

She shook her head.

“There isn’t a clot of work stirring in my brain pan,” he went on.

“I don’t want to go out. I’ve got to see Fanny——”

He caught her sleeve. “It’s too hot to go up. Let’s go somewhere. Let’s get on a bus and go uptown——”

She was too occupied in the thing she hated to do, to notice his concern. He spoke again:

“I’m not going up there alone. You’re colder than a frog to live with anyway——”

“Go out somewhere, Rufe, if you want to. Don’t mind me.”

She didn’t hear his words, but she heard the crying of Fanny’s children. The door opened. Fanny stood there, but looked past her, over Pidge’s shoulder, and queerly enough Pidge thought of the words, “And Jove nods to Jove.” The hall door was then shut.

“Wot you coming in here for—to scold me some more, Redhead?”

“No, Fanny, to see you and the——”

“I know why you come, all right. To find fault—that’s why, and you needn’t kill yourself, because I’m gettin’ along, so-so. Little old Fanny’s holdin’ her own—and that’s more’n you’re doin’.”

Pidge looked into the crib. A core of fetid vapor hung above it, and Fanny’s words seemed to blend with it.

“Think you can hold your job and hold a man, too, don’t you? Oh, yes, Redhead knows how. Redhead’s got it all worked out. Redhead can tell us all how to do it, oh, yes——”

“What’s the matter, Fanny? Are you scolding, so I won’t start? I didn’t come to start something. Just came to see you. Wouldn’t you like to go out for an hour and have me stay with the—with the——”

Pidge always halted this way.

“Worried—eh? Worried about somethin’?” Fanny piped up. “Well, I’m not tellin’ anything—except you ain’t got your little mastiff tied to no corset string——”

“What are you talking about, Fanny?”

“Like to know. Wouldn’t you?”

Pidge felt cold. She cared to know what the other meant. She didn’t say so, however. She knew a better way—an effective way that seemed to come out of depths within her that knew vast pasts and many lands, all strategies of men and maids, all secrets of tent and purdah, lattice and veil.

“Don’t trouble, Fanny. I just came in to see how you were getting on. I’m so sorry, you know——”

“Sorry——” Fanny laughed.

“So sorry, dear—that you’re penned in this way—and Albert missing!”

“Sorry!” Fanny screamed her mirth.

“Don’t you want me to be sorry for you, dear?” Pidge trailed. “Why, I haven’t been nearly so good as I meant to be——”

“Well, you dam’ little itch-face—talking to me about being sorry. Who’n heller-you to tell me about being sorry? Who’n heller-you to talk to me about me gettin’ penned in an’ Albert missin’, when you can’t keep your own man—when you don’t carry your own babies? Who’n heller-you anyway?”

Then Fanny got down to business and spoke of life in the here and now.

“Never mind, dear,” said Pidge. “We can’t attend to everything. I’m going out to get you some ice cream. I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

She was in the street. She brought back a paper pail without haste. Fanny had begun to cry.

“Don’t feel badly,” Pidge said, washing a saucer and spoon.

Fanny cried on. Pidge served her a large dish, and a smaller one for the older child. Then from the paper, she spooned tiny mouthfuls into the face in the crib—spooned until there was sleep from the novel coolness of the sweet. Then Pidge patted Fanny’s shoulder, as she passed out, promising to come back some time to-morrow.

Upstairs she found Rufe, shirt open at the throat, standing by the back window. The light in the room was heavily shaded. He looked to her covertly, half expectantly.

“Want to read something?” he said in a pleasant tone.

“No. I’m going to bed,” said Pidge.