IVLAMBILL KNOCKS
INSIDE the moonlit castle gardens, across the moat into the pictured halls, up the marble staircase, driving straight and true, Lambill Courtenay, a man of the people—artist, swordsman, lover virgin-hearted, rode—no, ran, for once on his sprightly feet, straight to a sequestered wing of the ancient and noble castle of the Rivernais, and with his ungloved hand touched the knocker of its inner sanctuary.
“Who is there?” came the cry like the thin note of violins.
“I——” swelled the deep orchestral answer of Lambill Courtenay, Frenchiest of the French.
Then the great oaken door from the forests of Savoie opened. Lambill crossed the threshold. The white arms of Madelaine Rivernais opened and the heavens opened also—for the great maze of life had been untangled for these two—and Pidge Musser’s book was done.
Just a book—one of the myriads that you see lying around, like sloughed snake skins on first or secondhand bookshelves—but it had been properly wept on and starved for and toiled over, as only youth in its abandonment can toil for its own ends. It had almost beenprayed for, but not quite. Prayer wasn’t easy for Pidge Musser’s defiant soul.
It was two in the morning. The oil stove smelled as if it were dying. Of late the wick had hiked up out of the oil a little earlier each night like a waxing moon, and Pidge had been forced to shake the oil around to keep the flame. Miss Claes and Nagar did so much for her, she was ashamed; and you could get a red apple for the price of a wick.
Pidge coughed. It was the most astonishing and cavernous bark. The silence afterward was painful. She fancied she was keepinghimawake—the silent, dark and courteous Nagar, who did prodigies of work every day and was always willing to do more, and who had come into Pidge’s direct limelight since his sale of a story toThe Public Square. Pidge hadn’t known a cold for years. It actually amazed her, how unclean it made her feel, and ashamed to have anybody come near.
“I’m going to watch over you very closely, Pidge—you’ll have to let me, now that the book is done,” Miss Claes said in the morning, “because it’s really a shock to stop work after the way you have carried on. The drive—suddenly stopping, you know.”
“I wonder how she knows?” Pidge thought to herself for the thousandth time in regard to the subtle capacities of Miss Claes.
“I’m tough,” she said aloud.
“That is a true saying, Pidge. On that, everything hinges. Am I to hear the story?”
“It would—it must be read aloud. It’s terrible to ask, but will you?”
“I’ve wanted to hear it from the beginning. Now tell me, would you like Nagar to listen, too?”
“Oh, no!”
“Just as you like. Only you’re offering it to the world later——”
“But Nagarknows.”
“That’s what you want, isn’t it?”
“Oh, yes, but——”
“He won’t say a word. Nagar rarely talks, except to answer questions. But, of course, don’t think of it, if you’d rather not.”
“What is Nagar?” Pidge asked suddenly.
“Just a watcher and listener in America, learning to see things impersonally.”
Pidge contemplated the idea for a few seconds; then her eyes hardened. “I’ve heard lots of talk about the impersonal—oh, talk to the skies about the impersonal life in Los Angeles—by people who haven’t yet got a personality!”
Miss Claes bent in low laughter.
“They start in killing out personality before they get a live one,” Pidge added sullenly.
“They do, my dear, but have you heard any words about the impersonal life from Nagar?”
“No. That’s the best thing about him—that he doesn’t explain himself. But I hate mysteries about Hindus—hate people moving about saying, ‘Shh-sh’—finger on their lips, trying to astonish you withsomething they can’t tell. I’m so tired of all that!”
“Still you asked me about Nagar, though really there is nothing to say, except that he is good to have in the house.”
“I think I’ll let him come and hear the reading, if he’s willing.”
“Good,” said Miss Claes. “We will listen in this room, where the story came to be.”
... Nagar sat in a straight chair, in the aisle between the cot and the wall. Pidge sat by the window before her machine. Miss Claes lay on the cot with her head under the light that Pidge read by, and away they went. There was an hour or more in the early afternoon when both Miss Claes and her helper could escape from below, and two hours, at least, after nine in the evening—this for three days.
Pidge was fagged and ill and frightfully scared. She would begin hoarsely, and for pages in each reading her cold in the head was an obstruction hard to pass; besides, she felt she was boring them horribly and that all the massed effects of her pages dithered away into nothing or worse. But a moment came in each of the six sessions, when the last monster of the mind’s outer darkness was passed. And then, for Pidge, at least, knighthood rose resplendent; days became stately, indeed, and chivalry bloomed again. At such times the dark gleaming hair of Miss Claes—which Pidge could have touched with her hand, became the tresses of Madelaine Rivernais herself, and a littleback to the right in the deep shadows, the face of the Easterner there took on the magic and glamour of Lambill’s own. The vineyards of old France stretched beyond from their balcony; the rivers of France flowed below. The lance of the Rivernais was won back heroically and human hearts opened to the drama of love and life.
But on the last night of the reading, after the self-consciousness was passed and all was going well, Pidge, glancing down to Miss Claes’ head under the light, saw gray for the first time, in the depths of her hair. It hadn’t been combed with any purpose of hiding. The outer strands were coal black, the strands beneath had turned. This discovery had the peculiar effect of changing everything around in Pidge’s mind in the moments that followed.
She couldn’t get into the story as before; and in the very last pages of her reading, a face persistently crowded in between her mind’s eye and the rapid flow of the story at its end—a long, humorless complacent face—the high-browed, self-willed and self-thrilled face of her father. It was as if he were reading and not herself; reading with rising expectation, drinking in the silent praise, as if he had done the writing himself and loved it well. So effectually was Pidge mastered by this apparition of her own mind, that the last pages of the manuscript were spoiled entirely. The light had gone out of her and she said hastily, as the final page was turned down:
“I know how kind you are, but please don’t try to tell me anything to-night. Not a word, please!”
There was something in Nagar’s smile as he turned and went out that she knew she would remember again.
“I quite understand,” said Miss Claes, when they were alone. “But say, Pidge, I do want to say this. To-morrow afternoon, Mr. Richard Cobden, an editor ofThe Public Square, is coming here to see Nagar. He is the one who put through Nagar’s story. We’re to have tea at four. You’ll come down, won’t you?”
“Why, yes, of course.”
“It might be arranged for Mr. Cobden to look at your book. Would you like that?”
“Ye-es.”
“Do you mind if I suggest something?”
“Please,” said Pidge.
“Don’t let Mr. Cobden know, just yet, that you are the one who has written the story. Write a new title-page without the name of the author.”
“All right, but——”
“It’s because you look like such a child, Pidge. No one would be able to see all that’s in your story—if they saw what a child you are!”
“I’ll do as you say. Thank you, but, Miss Claes——”
“Yes?”
“To-night under the light, I saw your hair—underneath!”
“Yes?”
“It made me see everything differently for a minute. You know I hate cults and everything that apes Indiaand talks about saving the world; everybody talking about their souls, but doing the same old secret selfish things—oh, I’ve almost died of talk about all that—but for a minute, to-night under the lamp, it seemed that you knew, but had come down to brass tacks—your feet on the ground—living like the rest of us, but not ‘falling for’ love or money or fame, as we are. Are you really through talking about service—just doing it?”
Miss Claes laughed. “Such a lot of words, Pidge—about some gray hair.”
Pidge was intensely serious. “Are you English?” she began again.
“Yes.”
“I know you’ve been in India. Miss Claes—are you really farther along than I thought? Are you trying for that impersonal thing—trying to belong to everybody—to enter the stream of humanity, as they call it?”
“Of course, I’m trying, Pidge.”
“You and Nagar working together?”
“Yes, but you and I are working together, too.”
Pidge was not to be turned aside by generalities.
“You—down here in lower New York—keeping a rooming house?”
“Why not?”
“Nothing—only it’s so big, so unexpected. I’ve always believed ’way down deep that a real person wouldn’t be long-haired or barefooted or pious, but lost in the crowd something like that—quietly efficient,moving here and there among people unannounced, only a few ever dreaming! Oh, it’s too, too big!”
“Don’t try to believe anything, Pidge.”
“I’ve been spoiled for believing anything, by so much talk!”
“Don’t try to settle things ahead of time,” Miss Claes repeated laughingly. “Let the days—each day tell its story. I’m just living out life as you are.... And now undress and get into bed. I know you’re too tired to sleep, but I’m going to fix you in and open your window and put out your light, and sit with you for a minute, perhaps in the dark. You’re just to rest—a tired little girl—and not even hear me go away.”