XIIUNDER THE SAME LAMP
THE manuscript was delivered while Pidge was out to supper. She took it upstairs to Cobden’s “parlor” and read with a nervous interest, and an uncomfortable feeling that Rufus Melton was looking down at her all the time. She didn’t lose herself in the story, but the feeling persisted that she might have done so, another time—especially if the manuscript had come to her in the usual way at the office. Certainly it was different and distinctive, compared to the run of the unsolicited. It was artful, if not art.... She heard Nagar’s quiet steady step as he passed up to his room. She had an impulse to ask him to read, but he wouldn’t say anything. Anyway, he was gone now.
This was a story of the Tunisian sands, written, she decided, by one who hadn’t been there; one who saw the desert as the average American reader would expect, but with additional flatfooted bits of color tramped down with audacity. Moonlight was different in Tunisia, and morals were different—freer than here. There was the glitter of the snake’s eye through the pages, for Pidge Musser. It made her think of a sick man in a gorgeous robe.
She had inferred from Melton’s talk that this story was new; in fact, that it was still hot from his machine. Yet the manuscript didn’t feel new; the front and back pages showed wear. Could she have misunderstood?... It had freedom; not the freedom of ignorance, but the freedom of a drifting ship. Its anchor dragged, its compass was uncentered. It cried out, “My God, I am free!” and it was, as a derelict is free.
At a quarter of ten, she heard the bell in the basement hall; heard Miss Claes directing Melton to the next floor. Pidge would not have had it this way, but people of the house were in the basement. He came up out of the dim stairway, walking wide, his soft cap crumpled in his hand, elbows out. He must have learned her name from Miss Claes.
“You mustn’t think, Miss Musser, that I don’t know how much I am asking—this favor of yours to-night.”
There was a sort of lift and draw to the way he took her hand; at the same time his shoulders and head bent down upon her. This thing that he was playing to-night was college boy—clumsy subtlety of a big boy coming home and greeting his sister—seeing in her, at the moment of greeting, something of the charm other boys might see. He walked around her under the light, laughing, apologizing, making a humorous picture of his own tension atThe Public Squarethat afternoon.
“I went there like an anarchist,” he laughed. “I was prepared to get my answer or blow up the place. I had to laugh afterwards the way I seized upon you.”
“I read the Tunis story,” she said. “Of course, you know it’s really unimportant what I think. I liked it well enough, but wasn’t carried away. I felt the color; in fact, color is the main asset of the story, but it seemed a bit thick——”
He laughed aloud. He was bending to her again, and most benignly, college big brother still in his manner and voice.
“I could tone that down, of course. The trouble is to get a thing like that straight, when you know that part of Africa as I do. I ought to have kept off Tunis, that’s the truth of it.”
“You have really been there?”
“That’s the worst of it, Miss Musser,” he laughed. “I went through hell for that story. Too much feeling to write with, you understand.”
Pidge was awed at her own error. She had been so convinced that the color was faked that she had judged the whole story on that basis.
“I’ve already asked too much of you. I’m sorry,” he added ingenuously. “One can’t force his things through this way. Why, I’d have given the whole six stories toThe Public Squarefor a hundred dollars, and taken the cheapening that comes to an author from a trick like that. That’s how I needed an answer.”
He had glanced up at the light as he spoke, a white, haggard smile, that bloodless look around the mouth. Pity caught and controlled her. She had done him an injustice already.
“You spoke of leaving New York for the west,” she said.
He laughed and shrugged, palms held upward.
“How far? I mean where is your home?”
He pointed to his cap lying on the arm of a chair, as if to say that were his home.
“I’ve got an aunt in Cleveland who wants me,” he added. “A little quiet house away out on one of the cross streets off Euclid, where there’s a room and eats and a place to write. I’ll start to walk, I guess.”
“Where are you staying in New York?”
He was laughing at her. “A little den up in Union Square—just a skylight. It’s a cell, Miss Musser, and even there, I have to stay out until midnight to sneak in without meeting the landlady.... Did you ever sleep in a room that had no window?”
“Mine has a window,” Pidge said.
“Then this isn’t yours?” He pointed to the closed folding doors of the inner room.
“Oh, no. Mine’s up higher, but it has a window. This is just a sitting room we sometimes use—Miss Claes and I—the lodger being away.”
“Oh,” he said queerly; then added with his haggard smile: “So the color was put on too thick—that’s too bad.”
“Does Mr. Higgins know that you have been over there in Tunis?” Pidge asked.
“I figured he would, but maybe he will decide, as you did, that I sat here in New York and stabbed at that setting.”
“I’ll place the story before him to-morrow. I could say to him that you’ve been to the desert——”
“Oh, I wouldn’t. Don’t tell him that. I was hoping, though, that you could tell him you liked it.”
Pidge now looked up into a smile almost childlike in its eager purpose.
“Couldn’t you tell him that? Couldn’t you tell him that—just for what others may find in the story?”
The catch was in her throat again. His hand rested lightly upon her shoulder; his smile was altogether disarming in its wistfulness. She thought he couldn’t mean what he said. She thought of the face in the baby carriage in Santa Monica; of this tortured child of whims and imaginations, in a room with no window, and the pallor around his mouth. She didn’t like any of it, but did not feel exactly separate from it. She thought of a little box upstairs in her own room, of the check her father had sent, which she had so far refused to cash. She was in a blur, her sense of belonging to Melton’s dilemma over all.
“You can’t mean for me to tell Mr. Higgins what I don’t believe,” she said. “I’ll ask him to read the story to-morrow. If he’s against it, I could—I might help you to pay for the room in Union Square, or—enough to get to Cleveland.”
Then the thing happened which she would have apprehended, except for her pity and personal involvement in his trouble. She was drawn in between the open flaps of his coat, and held there against the soft shirt which he wore. And all through her were hiswhispers—soft delighted laughter from lips that pressed into her hair and cheeks, searching for hers.
She had finally pushed him from her, and they stood apart under the lamp. For a moment, they stared. Then it seemed as if he studied her, as one who suddenly revalues, doubles the value of an object. It was the queerest, intensest scrutiny, his head cocked to one side, the light and laughter returning to his eyes and lips.
“I knew I wasn’t safe to come here,” he said. “I knew if you did like the story, I wasn’t safe to hear the verdict. It was the idea of getting enough money to escape from that room, to get back into Cleveland and find myself——”
Still she stared at him.
“I don’t suppose you can ever forgive me, but it broke me wide open, Miss Musser—to find what a ripping sport you are!”
“That’s about enough words,” she said.
He looked down.
“To-morrow,” she went on in a dreary tone, “you may come here—I mean to the basement entrance, at seven in the evening, and I’ll tell you Mr. Higgins’ decision. If it’s against the story, I’ll do as I said about your room rent and the fare to Cleveland.”
His hands went out to her.
“After what I did—you still want to do that?”
“Yes, and now please go.”
Pidge was up in her own room minutes afterward, before she realized that it had happened under that white lamp of Cobden’s “parlor.”