XVTHE COBDEN INTERIOR
PIDGE heard about the assassinations in Bosnia as wearily as of a murder in little Sicily. She heard rumors of war in Europe with ennui—how could there be energy enough left in the human race to make war? She met Nagar in the lower hall at Harrow Street on the evening that war became a fact. He looked like a dead man walking in the twilight. She didn’t see Miss Claes at all that night. The next day in the office war began to show its personal aspects to Pidge Musser of Los Angeles. John Higgins was hours late in returning from lunch. She saw that he wouldn’t be down at all to-morrow. He looked old. He had on a black frock coat, as if dressed for pallbearing, though his face looked as if he were about to be borne himself. The little office was fumy, sweetish.
“Our blessed Savior moves in mysterious ways,” he remarked.
Pidge lingered at the door to get any significance that this might have for her.
“The Lord gives and the Lord takes away,” he added, sitting back straight in his chair.
He removed his spectacles and reached for the flareof his tie to polish them off, but no tie dangled to-day. It was a little black store-made bow, fastened with a clip over the collar button. Pidge still lingered, her hand on the knob.
“Blessed be the name of the Lord,” said John Higgins, “but it’s hell on us.”
She started out, but was called back.
“I need an audience, Miss Musser. I need a female ear. I need ladylike sympathy. It isn’t sweet of you to run off.”
“What’s the matter?”
The editor looked at her, squinted, put on his spectacles and looked again.
“Do you mean to say you don’t know what’s the matter?”
“Everything is the matter,” said Pidge. “But what’s new?”
His hand nearest her lifted and rested upon a pile of page proof on his desk.
“Dicky Cobden hasn’t written a line from the Kong that we can publish. We’ve cabled him to come in, though he’s probably started. You’ll recall that Belgium lies between France and Germany. She’s holding the Germans off from Paris, giving France and England a chance to get set. Belgium’s the world’s public square right now, the one vortexical spot on the face of the earth. Doesn’t it occur to you that even a new angle on her sins in the heart of Africa is about as much in time and place right now, as Paul Revere’s ride?”
... Three weeks later, she heard that Richard Cobden was in town; that John Higgins had seen him the night before. All that day at the office she kept listening for his step and voice, but he didn’t come. His car was in front of the Harrow Street house, however, when she reached there, and a light showed between the doors from his “parlor.” She lost some of the sense of suffocation when she saw that, a curious gladness for a moment. She tapped the door with her finger tip, pulled the curtain aside ever so little and said:
“Hello.”
A quick step in the inner room; then he was before her in the doorway, drawing her in under the light.
“Pidge—Pidge,” he repeated.
The boyish look was gone from him. He might have been taken for ten years older. The thing had happened that takes place abruptly in many Americans, more among business men than artists: Youth had been put away, its trace of divine humor exchanged for adult seriousness.
“Why didn’t you come to the office to-day, Dicky?” she asked.
“I wanted to see you here—like this.”
They were standing under the light.
“Why, you’re different,” she said.
“John Higgins said that. They told me so at home, uptown. I feel different, but it isn’t an improvement. And you, Pidge, you’re taller. And John Higgins says you’re doing so well.”
“I’m thanking you every day for that——”
She kept thinking about the change in him. If this were selflessness, she liked him better before. He had been quite unselfish enough, she thought. She didn’t see the fight in him, because it was so subtly identified with herself. She only knew that he seemed without fight.
“Keep on your things, Pidge. We’ll go out somewhere——”
That was the beginning of strange days and evenings. They played at the old game ofComrades. Often they lunched together, occasionally with John Higgins for a third. At such times it seemed that they tookThe Public Squarewith them, subscribers, advertisers, contributors, policies. It was that curious time in America when the personal and national meaning of the European war was breaking through with all its paralyzing ramifications; when all who were sensitive at all reflected division and strife in themselves, as a deep leveling sickness.
Pidge was taken to the Cobden home, a new and terrifically complicated modern apartment in East Fiftieth Street, but the furnishings, the household ceremonials, the people themselves, suggested prints of New York interiors in 1870—respectable, established, grim. The gradual speeding up of the world for a half century to the explosive point of 1914 ended with the click of the key in this hall door, and you were in the world of another day, with a spinster aunt, a widowed mother, an unmarried sister, a slowly disintegratinggrandfather, and Dicky himself, not in a different guise at all—the same courteous, sincere Dicky, but now to Pidge Musser’s western eyes, utterly, revealingly comprehensible. This was the place that had made him. This was his reason for being.
Here life was life. Here was the family unit, the family a globe, all human society moving outside like the water around a bubble; a closed globe reflecting all else in curious unreality. Here three-score-and-ten was life, and a very long time. Life wasn’t a spiritual experiment, in matter; not an extension in matter of souls that had made innumerable such experiments, but straight work-a-day three-score-and-ten with oblivion at the birth end, and heaven or hell at the other. Here was All Time, in which it behooved man and woman to gather worldly goods and religious goods and love one another and hang together—for the rest was with God. Here senility was dear. The heavy-bodied, dim-minded grandfather was still grandfather, not the vanishing spirit of him. They would weep when the body passed. They would look to his place in the cemetery and say, “Here he lies.”
Pidge Musser wanted to scream, not at the limitations, but at the kindness which was showered upon her. They were ready to perform the great transaction of taking her in, opening their hearts and house to a maiden, who would bring respectable additions to the Cobden line—sharing wealth, well-being, gentleness, the Cobden name which had been kept clean and useable and virile, and the Cobden God, who stood on the otherside of death with angelic associates and rewards in His hands.
Pidge continually felt that her next word would ruin everything; yet they unswervingly regarded her as becoming one with themselves; the process of assimilation already begun. They were patient, knowing of old that a new maiden would have incrustations of the world to check off, inequalities to be planed down. They set about not adjusting to her, but as she fancied, assimilating her, as the changeless Chinese assimilate a weaker race, breaking down the foreigner in themselves. She would become theirs to them with the years.
“Oh, Dicky,” Pidge said, when they were in his car again. “I see. I understand. How did you dare to open those doors to me!”
“I spoke of you at home, Pidge. They wouldn’t have understood if I hadn’t brought you soon. They were prepared to open their arms to you. They have their laws——”
“But they are your laws. Dicky—how did you dare? Is it because you don’t know me, don’t see me at all? Do you see something which you want to see, that has nothing to do with me?”
“What is it that troubles you so?”
“Myself—always and forever myself! Oh, don’t you see I have nothing to do with them? Why, you’re comfortable, Dicky—your people are comfortable!Thisis life to you—this, here and now! It isn’t to me. Life’s an exile to me, a banishment and coldnessand pain. In all New York there are not two such opposites. My God is far away. Yours is here—a Person.”
He answered hopelessly: “I can see how it would strike you, but I couldn’t cover up on account of that. I belong to them. I’m of them. Any front I might put on wouldn’t wear. You had to see us, Pidge——”
Another time she might have seen the fine thing back of those words, but she took such finenesses of Richard Cobden for granted, while he rarely could understand that she saw anything but his faults.
“It’s queer,” he said, in the same dull hopeless way. “I stand to you as the most staid and changeless person, but to my family I am dangerous, a fulminant. They love and trust me, but watch me with fierce concern. Already I’ve broken more Cobden convictions in twenty-five years than all my relatives in all their years.”
His face glanced wearily toward her from the lights of the street, as he drove.
“You’ve let me understand too much for one Sunday afternoon,” she said in an awed voice, “and it feels colder and lonelier than ever before. I even see something of the coming years, Dicky. I see that it means Fate, when you say ‘yes’ or ‘no.’ I see that you turn to a girl to stay. I see you don’t cheat. I see that I’m volatile compared; that my honesty is a fierce effort, a deadly self-conscious effort, and yours is an established habit. I’m clumsy at my honesty. I love itterribly, but it is still on the outside of me—something to attain.”
She sank back, laughing. “I wonder if it will stay as deadly clear as this?”
“You are not making it quite clear to me,” he said.
“I must. Oh, I must. Dicky, please open your soul and listen to me—hard, hard! While it’s clear, I must talk. You’ve chosen to be my friend. You’ve chosen not to take the easier course of hating me. I understand all that better now than the night of the Punjabi dinner.”
“I do, too,” said Cobden, and bitterness of the African rivers was in his words.
“Do I have to begin by saying how dear you are—how kind, how utterly good it is to know you; what it means to have faith and trust in one man?”
“Please not, Pidge.”
“But never forget it, Dicky. It’s the pedestal upon which everything’s builded. Always remember that I know you underneath; that I turn to you in trouble—not like a brother or father or lover, but what our wordcomrademeans—what it will sometime mean to many people! That’s you. But, Dicky, because I know you—I can look away! Don’t you see—you’re like something done! Having found you, I can turn to other things.”
“I’ll try to see that, but most people find each other differently, to stay——”
“It’s because they don’t find what I’ve found. I don’t know what I want, only I know there are terribleundone things in me, that other people stir to life. I’m lost in persons. Miss Claes and Nagar lose themselves in nations. You’re getting to be like them, but I see it all in the personal!... Listen, Dicky, if you were to get a woman to take to your house—one ready to go in and be a Cobden and a mother of Cobdens—I could love her! I could hold to you just as close, though secretly. I would expect you to be mycomradejust the same—I mean just between us—never on the outside, perhaps. What I mean is, it wouldn’t hurt me—not the thing we have together.”
His car had come to a stand in the stillness of Harrow Street, but still they sat.
“What you mean is—you haven’t any place for me as a lover or a husband.”
“That’s like you, but that’s it.... Dicky, you mean to me something done, something found. I don’t dare to turn to you and rest. The savage undone things in mewon’trest! They demand experiences, life—and no one knows better, that they mean pain ... and oh—under your lamp—it’s horrible to tell it, but you’ll forgive me later, when you see that it had to be told——”
“What are you talking about, Pidge?”
“Under your lamp—in there! He came about a manuscript. He was broke and needed help—all his stories refused. He asked to see me that night. Miss Claes’ basement was occupied. She sent him up. We talked. He wanted something, money, everything.Under your light—he took me to him, his coat open——”
Cobden startled her, as he cleared his throat. The silence between them had been so deep.
“It meant nothing to him! He was used to it. It was only his way to get something—money most, he wanted. It was just as he might take a waitress or hall maid—used to having girls ‘fall for’ him. This is what I mean—though I understand him, a theatrical mind, a liar—life meant something to me that instant, that it never meant before. Something I must do, something calling—pain, but something I haven’t done!”
“You mean—you mean—it isn’t over?”
“Just that, Dicky, and oh, forgive me! I may not seehimever again, butsomething in meisn’t ‘over.’ I had to tell you—to be honest, to learn to be honest. You’ll be glad some day!”