XITHE BABY CARRIAGE
PIDGE read manuscripts in the office ofThe Public Square. She saw them first. The large part of them were seen by no one else. It was like being a telephone girl in a way, dipping into the secrets of a thousand houses. But it was much more subtle than that; the secrets more soulful and revelatory. She saw the hopelessness of life. She saw love, hopelessly uninviting love—puppy love, and much of the “kidding” clever love that is made in America, and proud of itself for that. But over all, there seemed an anguish on the part of male and female, old and young,to express. Before her were secrets of those dying for expression; in her hands, the progeny. She loathed the desire everywhere, because she had the same desire herself.
Every one who wrote and submitted stories and manuscripts had a “front.” In the personal letters, accompanying their stories and articles and poems, they told matters about themselves which their manuscripts did not. They knew this one and that; they had influential friends who had said this and that about their writing. Parlorfuls of friends “had been quite carried away by the inclosed.”... Others hadn’t wanted towrite. They had rebelled long; even as Saul, they had kicked against the pricks; but for the good of others, for the message it would carry to the world, they had given in at last and written their story which was inclosed.... “This is a true story,” one personal letter accompanying said.... “This story may be finished differently,” another wrote. “I have thought out a happy ending, if the public is not ready to stand this human one.”... Here was a sales manager who wrote his personal letter with a jovial laugh: “I have just tossed these few experiences into a story which my friends insist belongs to you.... I wouldn’t think of it, but I can’t help seeing what a rotten lot of stuff the magazines publish!”... This one had decided to write stories because she was a widow and had no other means of support, and had heard that writing was “the pleasantest of professions.”... And here was one who had sent in story after story to rejection for six years. “Some time I will win,” came the thin tired cry.
Pidge had fatigued her body in the mill. She tired her heart in the office ofThe Public Square, reaching Harrow Street with something in her breast all sore and shamed. This was the queer strenuous part—the shame of it all. She, too, had fallen into expressing herself, and they had been kind. Miss Claes had been kind and she knew. But Dicky Cobden and John Higgins had been kind, though they hadn’t known the author of theLance. (They would never know.)They had said that the writer had the fine freedom of youth—“the freedom of ignorance.”
Pidge knew even better now what that meant. She saw the freedom of ignorance in the rape of many type machines.... The worst of it was, she herself wasn’t through. She knew the time would come when a new story would form within her, and begin its knocking for life.... And this was New York, the market place; and John Higgins sat near, and always he held his face nearer the manuscripts toward the end of the days, his eyes more tired and dim in the late hours....
“Miss Musser,” he called one afternoon at the end of the first month. “I wish you would go out and see what this Rufus Melton really has to say. We took a story of his some months ago. We had great hopes for him, but now he’s sent in a raft of junk. Kid stuff, this must be, he’s trying to work off. I don’t feel like seeing him right now.”
In the reception room, a young man arose to meet her, as she spoke the name, “Mr. Melton.” It was a face you would expect to see on one of the cars of Hollywood Boulevard, among the movie plants. There was a catch in Pidge’s throat as she said:
“Mr. Higgins asked me to tell you he was occupied, Mr. Melton. His report will go to you in a day or two.”
He was looking down at her, the young man who had written the little twisted fury of a tale calledDr. Filter, which Dicky had brought to Harrow Street for her to read. She sensed that he regarded her as anoffice girl, not as a reader. He couldn’t have been more than twenty-three or four. He knew that her words portended an evil fate for his present offerings. It was not hurt alone in his eyes, but rage, too.
Now Pidge’s mind whirled back to a pair of eyes in a baby carriage at Santa Monica; eyes of a male infant, said to be the handsomest of that locality where the hills and mesas break off abruptly for a sea wall. Large, still, steady blue-black eyes of an actor that had become calm because they were used to seeing faces wilt before them; long, curving coal-black lashes. Pidge hadn’t liked them in the infant; at least, they roused her unpleasantly somehow; and she didn’t like them now. The resemblance was deeper and more essential than that of family, but what held Pidge really was something she recognized, or fancied she did, something that had to do with being broke and threatened with hunger in New York. His clothing was fine, but had been long used. She had a positive divination for poverty.
Now his gaze was lost in her hair, as if he found hope there. Story failures and New York, fear, and its tough core of hunger, these amounted to one thing—but red hair was another. The astonishing part was the constant changing of expressions in his eye. They reflected every mood and whim of him, for one who could read; that is, when he forgot to veil them for purposes of his own. Just now he seemed to be wondering if he had better go any further with this red hair—if he had time to play. He didn’t seem to considerwhether Pidge wanted to play or not, only whether the game were worth the while of one whose law was not to let any real chance slip. Pidge had forgotten the hurt of her message from John Higgins. She had a pronounced feeling that she wanted to hurt Melton some way herself....
“So I can’t see Mr. Higgins?”
“He’s been unusually rushed to-day.”
He laughed a little bitterly as if he understood all that. “Are you—are you his secretary?”
“No, an under reader.”
“I see. Have you been through any of my stuff?”
Pidge glanced at him resentfully; she felt he wouldn’t have asked such a question of a man.
“This is a sort of show-down with me,” he went on. “I’m leaving New York. I really hoped to see Mr. Higgins.”
His dilemma seemed real. It pulled her out from herself.
“I’m sorry——”
“Perhaps you—I’d have to know before to-morrow,” he said jerkily. “Perhaps you’d look at another story just finished? If you would read it—there is just a chance you might want to get it to Mr. Higgins before I go.”
“Have you the story with you?”
“No. I was hoping for good word from one of the others first. This new one is my last wallop. Might I bring it to you, anywhere you say, this evening?”
“You may leave it with Miss Claes at 54 Harrow Street.”
“Are you Miss Claes?”
“No, but she will give it to me.”
“Could I call later in the evening also, for your answer? It is only four or five thousand words.”
“You know, my reading is merely—I mean Mr. Higgins would have to decide.”
“But it would help—if the story pleased you—help to pass the night!”
“You may leave it with Miss Claes at the basement entrance and call a little later.”
Pidge found herself walking on tiptoe back to her desk, the catch still in her throat.