The Public Square

IT was early April, a dark and rainy afternoon. Pidge had been in the tin factory three months. For four weeks the manuscript of the Lance had lain in the bureau drawer of the little upper room in Harrow Street, not being given a second submittal. The secret was still kept. Richard Cobden had not spoken of the story since his report that Sunday afternoon to Miss Claes. There seemed an astonishing cruelty in the fact that he could forget. He had spoken of everything else....

Pidge had just left the factory and was running in her rubbers through the blur of rain toward a downtown subway entrance. A sort of mocking laughter was in her ears, “and this is New York,” the burden of it. In the dim light of the passage down into the tube she saw the gray gleaming patches of wear on the steel steps, slippery now from the rain. There was a shudder and gasp from a girl beside her; a parting of the hurrying ones ahead to avoid clotted pools of blood on two or three steps below.

Farther down in the area, a man lay propped in the arms of a stranger. His face was very white. A few minutes before he had been hurrying down those steel steps that the rain had made slippery—hurrying perhaps in the same confusion of fatigue and hunger that she had known.... A pause had come to him from all that hurry. His white face was more peaceful than any of the bystanders. A hospital ambulance clanged above, as she lingered. Attendants came down with the stretcher. The body of the unconscious man was swept up by one of the swift city brooms. The stream of ticket buyers filed on as before, the downtown express crashed in.

Pidge sat in her cane seat. The main crowd of the city was coming uptown at this hour. At least, she was spared that packing. She breathed the dense tired air, and recalled that on a night or two before she had slipped on the steel stairs, but had not fallen. It was borne upon her that in some way this man had fallen for her, fallen for every one who saw him or the puddles of blood he left. Every one had walked more carefully afterward, reaching for the rails. And he had lost the sense of hurry—that unmitigated madness which drove them all from dawn to dark.

Her old wonder of New York came back, as she thought that she was being flashed fifty miles an hour from the junction at Ninety-sixth Street down to Forty-second Street, under the busiest streets and corners of America. Mere men could manage much. Then the old agony stole in—“the freedom of ignorance.” Surely no one had ever been punished for doing a book as she had been punished: that it was so poor, as to prove a temptation for John Higgins to publish it, because of its chance of falling exactly into the fancy of these—the myriad of shopgirls in the uptown locals and expresses, crashing by in thick ropes of white light. As for the public taste, Dicky Cobden had told her that John Higgins had confessed, speaking wearily and with a smile that had lost its sting of reproach, that for thirty years he had been choosing stories for people to read, and every year he had been forced to lower his estimate as to what the public taste was. Even so, John Higgins had said he was far from the level; that only a trade mind could get stories banal enough. But hers might interest that public.

She was so tired.... For somebody’s shoulder to lean against! Pidge knew what Fanny Gallup felt, what the other factory girls felt, when they pushed out so brazenly toward men—in very clumsiness from hard pressure, spoiling their chances of being treated on the square. Yes, she was really learning what the girls felt, as they hunted their own in the masses of men they passed—how tired, hungry, blurred, unsatisfied their hearts—anything to escape the withering grind of the mills and the counters and the shops. She knew the secret bloom they felt, the terrible brief drive of it—childhood, girlhood and youth, all passing like the uptown trains—a home, a man, a child of their own, the one chance for a breath of life. Of course, they talked of nothing else, in the closets and dressing rooms, in the cars and streets; and read nothing else. Certainly their dreams had to come true in books and plays, even if they didn’t in life. Life would break the dream soon enough. The best life could do didn’t compare with the lowliest dream; for the dream of a girl has glamour, and the life of a woman is stripped. But that was no reason why books and plays should tear off the glamour ahead of time.

It wasn’t that Pidge loved shopgirls and mill girls. She didn’t love herself for sharing their lot. She wasn’t sentimental at all. She recognized bad management somewhere that forced her to this work. She had to have bread, and outer and under clothing. She paid the price, but there was nothing good nor virtuous about it. She didn’t hate Dicky Cobden when he spoke of “shopgirl literature”; she knew how rotten it was, but there was something in her that belonged to it, or she wouldn’t have been in the factory; moreover, that something had helped to write the Lance.

... Somebody’s shoulder. Three months of tin cans was teaching that very well.... And there was a shoulder, straight and steady—a kind of mockery about it, because it was so fine. None of the girls at the big table where she worked would have asked more. It meant books and pictures and all the dining tables of New York; plays and dresses, cleanliness, and all the little coaxing cushions and covers of this arrogant modern hour. It meant all the old solid established joys of place and plenty; all the writing she liked; a leisurely winning of her way through magazines and publishing houses; nothing of Grub Street and the conspiracy against an unknown outsider....

And this life of the factory—hadn’t she earned release? What more could come of the grinding monotony of the days but a more passionate agony to escape, through the under world, or the upper world, through any route at all, even death itself? Was there a further lesson than this?... Somebody’s shoulder. He had the native kindness of clean breeding; also that consideration for others of one who is brought up in a large house. He had an ardent interest in books and life. He was warmly established in the hearts of other men—first and last, a man’s man, which it behooves a woman to inquire into.

There was a tired smile on Pidge’s lips as the car halted at Thirty-second street.... The only blunders he had ever made were in her presence, because he cared so much. He seemed continually in awe and wonder before the thing he fancied she was, as if he had never really looked at a woman before. Of course, another man might act that way, but it was different the way Dicky did it. He had been at school late, and for nearly four years in the office of The Public Square he had bored steadily, craftily toward the center of the life of letters. Work had been his passion up to that day in which he had called to see Nagar, and fell under the spell of Miss Claes and Harrow Street.... There was enough of the artist and dreamer in him to keep life from being tame, yet not enough to make life a maze and a madness. He had health. Money was to him like an old custom, so established as to be forgotten....

Fourteenth Street. Pidge didn’t hear the first call and hopped off with a rush at the second, pulling a growl from the gateman as she sped out.... Dicky was standing at the head of the stairs on the second floor of the Harrow Street house.

“Hello, Pidge,” he said.

“Hello,” she answered, pushing past, but he caught her arm.

“Let me go, please! I haven’t washed yet——”

But he drew her by the hand toward the open door to his front room. The brighter light from there streamed out into the dim hall.

“My hands are sticky from the paste. I’ll come back. I’d rather come back.”

“It’s about that—about your hands, Pidge. I’ve waited as long as I can.”

... Somebody’s shoulder. She wasn’t safe to be trusted right now, yet she couldn’t pull away. If she ever got upstairs—even for a minute in her own little place, before the mirror that waved, she would see it all clearly, but here and now she didn’t want to see clearly. She wanted to give up and rest. She wanted what he wanted—wanted to give him what he wanted, which was the tiredest, most hopeless girl in New York to-night. She was dying of all its strains and failures and rigidities and fightings, and he wanted to take the load.

They were standing under the hanging lamp in his room. The light was white; his face was white. It was leaner than ever before, more of a man in it, more of a boy in it. His will was working furiously to make him speak.

He held her right hand up between them.

“It’s about your hands, Pidge, about the factory. Listen, you make me feel like a tout or a sot—as if you were out killing yourself to support me. I’ve been home two hours and you just coming in.”

“There’s half a million girls in New York—just coming in.”

“I know. We’ll get to them later, but now there’s only one—only one Pidge. I want her home to stay. I want to make a home for her. Why, Pidge, I’ll let you alone, if you just let me do that——”

“I believe you would.”

She was looking up at him hard. She didn’t fully understand, but the boyish cleanliness of him struck her fully that moment. The power of his will which she felt was mainly the fierceness of his decision to speak. It wasn’t the burn of terrible hunger for her. He was young as a playmate: that’s what shook her now. He wanted to fix her place, to let her hands soften again, wanted to let her rest and breathe—not what the other girls laughed about.

“Why, Pidge, I’ve got to take care of you. I’ve got to straighten you out—if it’s only to marry you and go away.”

Something in her heart cracked like a mirror, and a sob broke out of her. It was as if a car that had been running along by itself suddenly left the road and went into a cliff—a warm, kind cliff. Somebody’s shoulder, and she was sobbing:

“I told you I was so tired! I told you I wasn’t safe——”

“Ah, little Pidge——” he was patting her arm and pressing her close.

It had come. This was it. It was rest. The other girls knew. The awful cold ache was broken—warmth of life pouring out of her—heavenly ease in the flood of tears, and something of the dearness of dreams was in his passion, not for her—but to do something for her.

The first whip stroke fell, when Pidge remembered how she looked when she cried. But if she could keep her face covered! She didn’t stir.... Was this the fullness of days? All the consummate essences of ease, he brought—no hunger, no dirt—and really she had fought long and hard.

“... Everything you want, Pidge,” he was whispering. “I’ll take you to my mother. She’s a regular sport, Pidge——”

“She’d have to be,” came from the incorrigible heart in his arms, but not aloud.

The second whip stroke—The Lance of the Rivernais. She had failed, and the failure wasn’t the book, but herself, the thing in his arms. She didn’t stir, but there was coldness of calculation to her thinking now—that he meant ease and rest and expediency, not the ripping, rioting, invincible man force that was to come one day and carry her off her feet.

This was the third whip stroke: that he meant propinquity—the nearest, the easiest way.

She started up and pushed him from her.

“I’m not washed,” she said. “I don’t mean from the mills. I’m not washed, or I couldn’t have—couldn’t have——! I’m just like the rest—dying for a shoulder to cry on. You’re all right, Dicky, so right and fine that I’m ashamed. I’ll always care for you. I’ll always be warm at the thought of you. I’ll always remember how I went to you—how dear you are—but you can’t give me freedom. You can’t give me peace. My soul would rot in ease and peace and plenty. I’ve got to earn my own.”

She looked up into his face and her own took a fright from it.

“I know I’ll suffer hells for hurting you—but I can’t help it. I had to know. If I have to spend a life in misery—I had to know that there isn’t anything you can give that will satisfy——”

His mouth was partly open, his head twisted peculiarly, and lowered, as if his shoulder and neck were deformed. He was shockingly white under the lamp.

“Oh, I’m such a beast and I’m so sorry. I really wanted terribly to stay.... But, Dicky Cobden—it wasn’t for you. It wasn’t for you that I wanted to stay—it was for what you have—more.”