VIENTER, FANNY GALLUP
THE Lance of the Rivernaishad been in the editorial rooms ofThe Public Squarefor almost a month, but there had been no report; not the slightest mention, in fact, though author and editor were frequently together. Richard Cobden had come to 54 Harrow Street to live for the larger part of each week. Pidge had gone to work in a tin-can factory up Lenox way, pasting labels. She was half sick from fatigue from the new work and from keeping the secret about her book. In the days that followed the finishing of theLance, it was as if her whole body and brain had been a scaffold or matrix for the story, and it had been taken from her, leaving a galvanism useless as an eggshell, a sort of afterbirth that persisted in staying alive.
... There was Fanny Gallup, who sat at her right, elbow to elbow at the pasting bench—Fanny of the intermittent pungencies of scent and the dreary muck of talk about boys and boys and boys. Fanny was a child and woman all in one, about Pidge’s age and size, one whom you could fancy had been a stringy street-kid a year or two ago. But just now, Fannywas in her brief bloom, red in her lips, a lift to her scant breast, the earth driving into her and overflowing with such color and fertility as it could.
For eight hours a day, Pidge dwelt in Fanny’s frequently tropical aura—hateful, yet marveling. The thing that amazed her was that Fanny loved life so, loved the feel of her own hands when she rubbed them together, loved the taste of sweets and the memory of last night’s kisses—loved fearlessly and without reserve, not a pang of dread for what was to come, nor a shudder of regret for what had happened to her mother or sisters or the other girls of Foley Street. Never a thought in Fanny’s head that she was being hoaxed by Nature; that her body was being livened and rounded, her face edged and tinted, for an inexorable purpose; not a suspicion that she was being played for, and must presently produce.
Fanny lived her brief hour to the full, and Pidge Musser suffered and revolted for two. Pidge took the dreary monotone of talk into her soul, as she had taken her father’s, knowing that one day she would be full.
“Oh, you Musser,” Fanny would say. “Why don’t you come over to Foley Street?... You’re dryin’ up, Redhead. What do you do nights? What do you do all the time, thinkin’ and listnin’?... Where’s your fulluh, Redhead? Ain’t got one—wot? Little liar. You’re bad, you are, because you’re so still.... Come on over to Foley Street to-night. I’ll let you have a peep at Albert, m’li’l barber—just one peep,Redhead—not too close. I ain’t sure of him yet, but I’ll let you have one look—aw come on!”
So it was through the hours, pasting apricot labels, lobster, asparagus, pimento, peach, and codfish labels. More and more Fanny’s boys and men folded into one, whose name was Albert.
“I’m gettin’ him goin’—goin’, goin’. Psst! an’ he comes!” Fanny would say. “But I wouldn’t trust him to you, Musser—not longer than a hairpin, dam’ little party, you.”
Miss Claes was observing with some concern the result of her suggestion to Pidge, not to let the young editor know theLancewas hers.
“If it hadn’t been for my tampering, she would have heard about her book before this,” she said to Nagar. “Pidge looked so young, I felt it would prejudice Mr. Cobden against her work. He’s fascinated with Harrow Street, but seems to have no time or thought for a romance of eighteenth-century France! Yet he would have put through her book in a week, if he knew, seeing the story with the same eyes he sees the author.”
“And she doesn’t tell him?”
“No. That’s our Pidge, Nagar. I even suggested that I would speak to him—let the truth slip out. She caught me in her hands, those hard little hands, strong as a peasant’s, ‘Not for worlds, Miss Claes!’ she breathed, and there was a patch of white intensity across her upper lip, ‘Not for worlds!’”
“... Of course, I mean to write,” Pidge had granted to Dicky in the very beginning. “I’ve always meant to write, since the day I learned that print wasn’t done above the clouds somehow, like Moses’ tablets, and had to be written all out first by human beings. But I’m not ready to begin——” and she silently added the word “again” for her own composure.
“But they tell me on my floor when you first came, you hammered a typemill day and night. Was it commercial work?” Dicky asked.
“It wasnot,” said Pidge, with such emphasis that she felt her secret endangered again and hastened to add, “That was before I started to work in the factory. Likely they heard Nagar’s machine part of the time.”
“But you seem to know yarns—like one who works with them—tries to do them, I mean,” he remarked.
Her face was flushed. Evasion irritated and diminished her. She coldly explained her father’s professional interest in the short story.
“He isn’t an artist, but he teaches how, you know,” she finished.
Dicky pondered long on how much Pidge meant by this. He had been brought up to revere his parents. Surely, he thought, she must know that one can’t be taught except by life itself to do a real story.
One rainy Sunday forenoon in February, they were sitting together in his “parlor,” the front of his two rooms on the second floor. This room opened through a single door to the main hall, and through foldingdoors to his sleeping quarters. Dicky had brought some few additional furnishings from his mother’s house in East Fiftieth Street. The place made Pidge feel uncomfortable, but Miss Claes’ basement front was often in use and subject to constant interruption.
“I want to read you something I’ve brought from the office,” Dicky said. “I’m not saying a word—until afterward.”
It was a little story calledDr. Filter, by an unknown young man, named Rufus Melton. It had come toThe Public Squareamong the unsolicited manuscripts. Pidge listened with extraordinary restlessness. She seemed to know so much about this story, its processes and the thing it told, that her mind was unpleasantly crowded. It wasn’t a matter of like or dislike.Dr. Filterwas here in the world, a live thing. It had to be met and dealt with.
“Not more than once a year, one comes in as live as this,” Dicky said. “Yet it’s like something from a different world from Nagar’s Little Man story.”
“It isn’t whether you likeDr. Filter, or not, but you can’t get away from it—like a relative who comes to live in your house,” said Pidge.
“That’s a center shot,” Dicky thoughtfully remarked.
She found herself asking about Rufus Melton. Dicky didn’t know much, but was intensely pleased over her reaction to his latest artistic find.... Pidge never lacked opinions, even verdicts, nor the energy to express them when Dicky was around. They forgotRufus Melton, and out-generaled time in discussing Miss Claes.
“Every little while as she talks, I feel as if I were going through a tunnel,” he said. “Of course, I admire her, and all that, but sometimes I can’t help asking myself, like the others, if she is really right——”
“The more ignorant one is, the more crazy he thinks Miss Claes,” Pidge observed.
“Another bull’s-eye. Wait till I set up the target again, Pidge. But is it because she’s Hindu—that she’s so different?”
“She isn’t Hindu. She’s English.”
“I asked her.”
“So did I.”
“She’ll have to referee this herself,” Dicky hastily put in.
Then they were silent awhile, until Pidge said:
“Maybe I heard her wrong. I’m sure she’s had a lot of Hindu training. But that’s not what draws me to her. It’s because she’s not taking it out in talk. She knows about plumbing and cooking and streets and common things. Best of all, she pays her bills!”
But Dicky, who had never known other than financial ease and financial integrity, was more interested in the other side of their landlady.
“Can one get books—on her sort of thing?” he asked.
“You’re always getting me into this lately,” Pidge complained. “I don’t like to talk about it. I floated up through zones of Hindu stuff from a child. Betterleave it alone, Dicky. Stay in your head—stay down.”
“What do you mean, ‘Stay in your head,’ please?”
“Any one who amounts to anything stays in his head. He’s not complicated bysouls. All the comfortable, solid world calls you absurd for what you say and the way you look, when this Eastern stuff starts you going. You get so absorbed that you lose all touch with things down here, the things you are really here to do. You stop making money and go around saying the Lord will provide. You don’t really let Him, you let other people support you and call it God’s work. You call yourself the Elect, and yet you can’t do the things that average people do. Mainly, you talk. You stop work to talk. You settle heaven and God and the soul with talk!... Oh, Dicky, that’s why I hate it all so; that’s why I’d rather be a factory girl; that’s why I’m all lame and tired about ‘ideals’ and ‘supermen’ and ‘abstractions’—because I’ve heard so much talk.... It’s the first thing I remember. Lying in the crib—I began to hear my father’s voice.”
“But you’ve got all this stuff, Pidge. That’s what makes you—makes you——”
“It is what makes me nothing! It is what keeps me from being an honest-to-God mill girl. It is what keeps me from everything that means something to other mill girls. It is what keeps me from taking life as I find it. It’s what spoils me from really knowing Miss Claes or Nagar—or what they are about—because so many words have been dinned into my ears before coming to New York.”
The hardest thing on Dicky these days was that Pidge had to work in a factory. This thought was never far from the central arena of his mind. It chafed and irked. There was very little of the philanderer in his breed. Mostly, the Cobdens had chosen their women carefully, after long, cool, studious courtship. Having decided, courted and married, nothing short of death could break in. Doubtless Dicky’s fidelity was as stable as that of his relatives, even though his heart had not turned so cautiously to his light of day. Pidge had risen in his heavens and possessed them like the rising sun. There were not two suns in his system.
He had meant to live lean down in Harrow Street, but his idea of that wasn’t native to the locality. His ramifications for keeping clean were considerable and very disturbing to Pidge Musser, who had been brought up in Southern California to wear a few white garments which she could wash herself. Washing was impossible in her room, and wasn’t at all easy in the hall below where Miss Claes had told her to get her water.
Dicky Cobden was the firstgentlemanPidge had ever known. She had met several boys with a streak of genius showing; boys who had come to her father to learn how to write and had taken away something, if not that. Practically all those boys had been “on a shoe string,” and trained to get along without many things that Cobden would have considered actual necessities, including an established routine of order and cleanliness in one’s person and quarters. Pidge had also metmany of the “queer” ones of Hollywood and vicinity—men and women who ate this way and that, bathed this way and that, in running waters and still, in sea waters and rain waters, in mud and sunlight, using unctions and ointments, but they were bathing their souls.
Dicky Cobden bathed frequently, carefully, believing beyond cavil that New York and the processes of life grimed him on the outside, that life itself was a constant war against grime, requiring an ever accessible tub, much soap, hot water, changes of clothing, laundry bags, rugs, brushes. Not that Dicky gave any thought to this. It was as if he supposed everybody did the same. Since everybody didn’t and couldn’t; and since everybody didn’t have as much money to spend for bread and meat and tea, as Mr. Cobden did for laundry alone—Pidge was miserably rebellious.
Always as she sat in the presence of Dicky’s altogether thoughtless freshness; sat in her apple-butter colored wool dress which had contained the emotional hurl and thresh of the romanticLance—always Miss Musser had a hard time to forget herself and was frequently on the verge of becoming defiant and bad-tempered for reasons he didn’t dream.
She suffered, because every evening almost, Dicky invited her out to dine, and not once in four times could she pass the frowning negatives of her own soul. He chose to regard her as superbly honest and unaffected. She really needed those dinners, too. All the future novels and heart throbs needed them.Occasionally she met him after dinner for a walk or a picture, and once she had been lured to an uptown theater. Just once—never again in the brown wool dress!
She felt, as she entered the theater lights that night, that she had been betrayed. She felt also like something Mr. Cobden had found in the street, or that she was helping him make good on a first of April bet. Pidge hadn’t been to more than three “talking shows” in all her nineteen years; to her a show house was a place of darkness, except the screen.
Alone in her room afterward that night, she made a great vow: that when the torrent of American dollars turned loose on her (as it was bound to some time) she would buy outright chests full of lingerie, cabinets of hats, shelves of shoes, and a book of orders for frocks to be delivered at future dates. She would keep clean then if a Santa Ana sandstorm settled on New York and lasted a year.
One raw and cold week-night, Pidge was about done up when she reached Harrow Street. She tried to slip softly past his hall door, but Dicky was there.
“Hard day?” he called.
“Yes,” she said, pushing on. “Everybody’s tired and cross the whole length of New York, like a sore spine.”
“You haven’t had dinner?”
“No, but I don’t think I’ll go out——”
“I’ve been waiting, Pidge. There’s a little place near, where I used to come from uptown, thinking itan excursion—just a neighbor of ours now,The Hob and Hook, where they make a stew like Dickens tells of in the old English inns—smoking in the pot for twenty-four hours; and there’s tea for tired folks, and no end of scones and honey——”
“Oh, please——” said Pidge. Then she added stubbornly, “No, I’m not going out again to-night.”
“It is a trifle wintry,” Dicky observed. “We’ll have supper here. I’ll go out and get an armful, and Nagar will make us a pot of tea. Oh, I say, Pidge, have a little thought of somebody else.”
She weakened. Alone upstairs a minute afterward, she lit the gas and stood before the mirror that waved.
“If I turned loose just once and ate all I wanted, he’d never speak to me again!”