XVIDICKY FEELS A SLUMP
IT was nearly a week afterward when Pidge heard sounds, not of meeting only, but of mauling, from over the partitions of Richard Cobden’s office atThe Public Square. Her desk was now in John Higgins’ room. The racket was “young”—something of the sort you expect in a college fraternity house, rather than in the editorial rooms of a magazine of dignified social protest and short story ideals. John Higgins winced and glared. Now the stranger’s voice was upraised:
“You’re not seedy, Dick—you’re decayed! If Africa treats a man like that, I’m off the Sahara for life.”
Pidge heard this with something of the sense of personal arraignment. The ugly part was that it was true, and it hadn’t been the truth a week before. Dicky had been changed when he arrived, but the change since their ride home from his mother’s apartment in Fiftieth Street was more definitely disturbing. She found John Higgins’ eyes upon her and started guiltily. He leaned forward to whisper:
“It’s a fact. Something’s eating our Dicky. He’s losing his bounce.”
For once, Pidge did not altogether blame herself.There had been no two ways about telling him what had happened under the light. She had been challenged to speak on their first evening together after his return, challenged every hour of the week afterward; and yet it was not until after the words were out, spoken in her particularly ruthless and unequivocal way, that she actually saw the power of their hurt.
In Africa Dicky had stripped himself of hope, in the most complete way he knew. Africa is said to have a way of helping a man in this. Doubtless he had winnowed this hope down to a semi-impersonal concept, that straight, clean devotion would win its reward. But Africa alone was one thing, and New York with Pidge was another. He had been entirely innocent of the possibilities of pain his heart was capable of.
Still they went out together. They tried, furiously tried, but the star toward which they had held their eyes, the star namedCamaraderie, was for the present out of their sky. She tried to give herself in interest to his particular studies of world politics. His views had nothing to do with intuition or prophecy. Dicky gripped affairs on an academic basis of economics, and the only light he had to work with in relation to the turmoil in Europe was from the same friction that had furnished his sparks in Africa—the pain of his own heart. He told her of the delicate and dangerous adjustments between the nations, as he saw them; the organic play, the push and pull on every national boundary; the draw of Russia upon India, for instance; the grim hold of the British bulldog;the interatomic play of India, Ireland and Egypt; the poison vats of the Balkans, the frowning menaces of the Levant. One night he spoke of Italy’s inner and outer stresses, and of her age-old hatred for Austria.
“And Pidge,” he said quietly, “you won’t mind my saying it, will you? I see it all so clearly when I talk to you. I know you’ll tell me that you don’t know anything about these things. You always tell me that, but you certainly make me know them better.”
And another time when they were going out together in the evening and she had come down from the upper floor with her wrap which he took for a moment:
“I’m sure you won’t mind, Pidge,” he said, “if I tell you that the little things you wear quite take me over. They actually hurt, and I never saw you look quite like to-night.”
This was the quality—more like the words of an older man; a touch of sentimentality upon them, as if he were diminished in her presence, something in him so whipped it did not dare appear on the surface. This was unpleasant to Pidge. The changeless want in his heart suffocated her at times; then her affection changed to revolt. She became irritable and uncentered, her temper hard to govern. She wanted freedom—freedom for something utterly undelineated, but freedom to Life (in Miss Claes’ meaning of that word of words) and she saw him in such times as one who stood in her way.
One night in the little upper room, in her own particular time of self-revelation, as Pidge lay on theborderland between sleep and waking, she saw herself like an ogre, and Dicky Cobden like a terrified child in a great house, and she was driving him from one room to another, from one floor to another, to an inevitable cornering in the farthest wing.
Finally an early October evening, and again his car had halted before 54 Harrow Street. Pidge sat beside him, but Dicky had not opened the door.
“Pidge,” he said suddenly, “I’ve got to the end of my rope. I’m not making good. I’m all blurred on what we’re trying to do. It’s—it’s too much for me here.... I don’t want France or Flanders. I’m going into the Near East forThe Public Squareand a newspaper syndicate.”
“I knew it. I felt it coming, at least,” she said. “And I’ve failed, too, all the time. But, Dicky, back of everything, I know there must be somebody laughing at our seriousness and stupidity. We’ll see the puzzle straight some time. You’ll see.”
They both were sitting straight up.
“Nobody’s—nobody’s shoulder?” he asked with terrible effort.
“No, Dicky. It would only fog us up—all the more.”