XIVISOLATION
PIDGE was leveled with personal shame. Try as she would, she was as lacking in the ability to detach herself from Melton, as from the influence of her father. She had felt the boy’s power over her, and knew innately that she would feel it again; that this sort of thing wasn’t a mere touch and go; that meetings like this, which appear sporadic on the surface, have twined roots beneath. She had been taught from a child that nothing merely happens. The incentive that made her lend him the fifty dollars, which she had held uncashed for nearly a month, did not mean to her now a mere impulsive mistake. It was a symbol of a giving to this boy—of a blind but eager something out of the depths of her heart.
Late in June a letter came to her from Dicky Cobden, who was at Coquihatville on the Equator, where as he said, “the sun’s rays fall as straight as a tile from a roof.”
... Oh, yes, you and Miss Claes knew a lot more than I did that night at Tara Subramini’s. I shot off a lot of words afterwards. Never again. But I’m going to stay with it, Pidge.... I’ve just had tendays here in the jungles, back on one of the tributaries of the Kong. If I stayed long here, I would see it all as these exiled white men do; that God is a rubber man with ivory legs; that the natives are vermin, not only to be walked over, but to be stamped into the ground. They whimper so. It’s too hot here to be whimpered at.... I think so much about you. Of course, this isn’t news to you, but I say it, because it is so different from what I thought it would be. Something snapped when I got to the Kong.... All fat and decoration are sweated off down here. I reach out to you just the same. Only in New York I thought that we were both wrapt in the same sort of film, a tinted filmy sort of glamour that stretched out as we went different ways. That film was stretched too hard. When I reached the River it snapped. I think I’ll never get over feeling this awful isolation of being a separate creature from everybody, worst of all from you....
... Oh, yes, you and Miss Claes knew a lot more than I did that night at Tara Subramini’s. I shot off a lot of words afterwards. Never again. But I’m going to stay with it, Pidge.... I’ve just had tendays here in the jungles, back on one of the tributaries of the Kong. If I stayed long here, I would see it all as these exiled white men do; that God is a rubber man with ivory legs; that the natives are vermin, not only to be walked over, but to be stamped into the ground. They whimper so. It’s too hot here to be whimpered at.... I think so much about you. Of course, this isn’t news to you, but I say it, because it is so different from what I thought it would be. Something snapped when I got to the Kong.... All fat and decoration are sweated off down here. I reach out to you just the same. Only in New York I thought that we were both wrapt in the same sort of film, a tinted filmy sort of glamour that stretched out as we went different ways. That film was stretched too hard. When I reached the River it snapped. I think I’ll never get over feeling this awful isolation of being a separate creature from everybody, worst of all from you....
... Next morning in the office John Higgins called her in to his desk. “Dicky has sent in some stuff. We begin to publish in August.”
He took off his spectacles and wiped them on the flap of his necktie. His eyes looked watery, as if the light had run out in tears.
“I’ve always heard that the Cobdens were honest,” he went on, “three generations of honest men. They’ve built something, Miss Musser. Not a business, that’s well enough, but they’ve built a man. Listen——”
He opened the pages at random and began to read. It was like the stuff in her letter.
“It’s so for pages and pages,” he continued. “Every word standing out, if you get the hang of it. No tint, no art; just words, pain-born, separate like boulders in a field. He has no hopes, yet he writes what he sees.... Something seems to have happened to our Dicky, besides Africa.... He watches the string of natives coming in with their tusks; he watches the crocodiles coming up to the blinding surface water; he watches the big monkeys that live in twos, and the little monkeys that live in troops. I don’t know what the world’ll get out of this, but I know what I get out of it——”
She saw that John Higgins was merely thinking out loud. A few moments later he finished:
“This stuff amounts to the most subtle and incredible rearraignment of imperialistic cruelty, but Dicky doesn’t mean it that way. He keeps repeating with devilish calm that it isn’t so bad as it was. It’s no particular nation, but all whites. He writes from the standpoint of a white man who remembers Cortez in Mexico, Pizarro in Peru, Warren Hastings in India, Cecil Rhodes in Africa and our own dear religious settlers bringing Yankee wits and rum and disease to the red Indians. He turns over the pages of all patriotic histories with a long stick as you would poke the leaves from the face of a corpse you had made yourself. His face tries to turn away; his stomach retches, but he knows each man and each nation must bury his own dead.”
“‘Something seems to have happened to our Dicky, besides Africa,’” Pidge repeated, when she was alone.
Summer days in New York, sleepy stewy days. The low clouds made the nights hot. Pidge was used to the “high sky” of Southern California where every inch of shadow meant coolness, where cool night fell quickly no matter how hot it had been in the sun, where there were no afterglows, nor afterheats, and you wanted a wrap the instant the sun went down. The meaning of summer in New York became a cruel meaning, in the little room off the area. It gave her an astonishing grasp of what people suffered in the tenements.
Two weeks after the copy arrived from Africa, the galleys came up on the Cobden articles, and Pidge asked permission to take a set home to show two friends of Dicky’s in Harrow Street. John Higgins acquiesced. Pidge delivered these to Miss Claes and forgot all about it, until the next night when she returned to the house after dinner, and Miss Claes called her from the door of Cobden’s “parlor.”
“Come in, Pidge, and we’ll shut everything out.”
Nagar was within and the galleys were stretched out under the light. Pidge had never seen Miss Claes and Nagar quite like this. They appeared happy over something they had found in Dicky Cobden’s isolation and melancholy—happy as in the news of a legacy.
“Why, don’t you see?” said Miss Claes strangely. “He’s pondering on Life! He thinks he’s reporting—when really he is giving himself to Life. The world stretches out before his eyes without glamour, stripped. He offers himself to it, but his writing contains a confession with the weariness of the ages on it, that hehas nothing to give—that he is a sham like all the rest. There’s not a self-pose in all his pages.”
Nagar had slipped out. Miss Claes came close and added softly:
“Richard is finer than we knew, Pidge. What happened here in this house has prepared him—always the wrecker before the builder.”
“You mean, I’m the wrecker?”
“You couldn’t have done differently.... Too bad he isn’t to see Mohandas Gandhi. Nagar has received word that the Little Man is returning to India. Richard didn’t go to Natal first.”
“He’ll be so sorry,” Pidge said. “It was Nagar’s story that drew him to Africa——”
Their eyes met; no need to amplify.
“Dicky’s so deadly in earnest,” Pidge went on. “He sees what he sees the same at ten in the morning and at ten at night. His coming to Harrow Street didn’t mean a whim. His part that night of our Punjabi dinner didn’t mean a whim. Oh, but I’m so glad he hasn’t started out to save the world!”
“He’s preparing to work better than that.”
“I feel so ungrateful for not missing him more,” Pidge added unsteadily, “for not being more interested in this that pleases you. I can appreciate, but oh, Miss Claes, I don’t belong to your way of seeing things. I’ll always be Dicky Cobden’s hangman, always hurting myself more!”
They were standing close together.
“Nothing matters to me but myself!” Pidge moaned.“I’m hopelessly lost in myself—that’s what’s the matter! What room have I for Africa or the world? There’s more to me in the struggle of John Higgins not to get drunk—in the body hunger and body love of Fanny Gallup—in the lies of Rufus Melton! I can understand this world-service thing—oh, I can see the nations like chessmen on the table!—but I can’t fix Fanny Gallup or John Higgins, I can’t fix Rufus Melton. I can’t fix myself!”