XXIIA LETTER FROM PIDGE

RICHARD COBDEN moved up and down the Near East for a long time, looking for the men they had told him about in school and college—the men who make history, and are said to contain in themselves the greatness of their race. He sailed with sailors, talked with the diploma-ed talkers, rode with soldiers. He found men who would do for their countries what they wouldn’t do for themselves, but the energy of their fidelity to their countries was balanced by their enmity toward other countries. They gave themselves to the heresy of fighting one part of the human family for the alleged enhancement of another. It took Dicky a long time to change the brain tracks made in school and college, that the names of history mightnotbe the names of men who walked with God, whose intellects pained from sheer power. Nor was he spared from the suspicion in all his discoveries, that he was the one who was wrong, that he had become softly insane in the midst of new ideas.

When he essayed the thing Miss Claes spoke of at the Punjabi dinner—he started something which he meant to live up to. The fact that it was harder than hedreamed; an effort, in fact, involving dreary years, hadn’t broken his resolution so far. One of the terms of the Punjabi dinner covenant, for such it had become to him, was not to lose himself in the easy way of hatred, nor to help himself to forgetfulness by casting Pidge Musser’s image out. He knew that the “one” she had spoken of was Rufus Melton. Through months, covering two years, the figure of this young story-writer rose higher and higher in his consciousness, as the person of the Enemy, himself. It was Melton, all unknowing, who vanquished Dicky in his weaknesses, and at best was only kept at bay in his strength. Not to cast her out, not to hate; to know the slow, steady burning of the heart that is focalized upon a woman, and to realize that this woman may be turning to another!

There were really extraordinary days of service in Arabia with young Tom Lawrence, whose fame Dicky Cobden helped to make; desert days of camel back and Turk fighting; desert nights of smoke and tea in such starry stillnesses, that one almost expected the Christ to appear; then, after many weeks, mail at Mecca, and one letter from John Higgins, which was read several times:

... You have done several good things forThe Public Square; but you never did a better thing than wishing Miss Pidge Musser on our editorial rooms. She’s brand new every morning. She’s honest, and a worker. She has brains and a whole lot of psychic viscera, sometimes designated as Soul.... Also she’sa stenographer. Never whispered it until one morning when Maneatin’ Dollie was ill with the flu. My letters were piled up. “Give them to me,” she said. I did that thing, and I’ve been dictating my editorials ever since. It’s like talking to an intelligent audience. When I get opinionated and lose my balance, not seeing the other side of a question, this child sits up and looks disturbed.... I’m sending you separately our Brooklyn Bridge contemporary with a story calledThe Salt Pit. If it isn’t a little man of a story—I don’t know one. Hers.... Of course, you know why she didn’t give it to us. She thought I’d take it on her account and not for the story.... And still we stay out of the War. They’re sending over one big imperialist after another from London, trying to get us in, and all that’s flunkey in Washington, rocks—but so far, we’re only sinning commercially.... Give us more of the inky desert nights, Dicky, and young Lawrence.

Dicky reached Bombay from Aden in the spring of 1917. He was now on his way home, the long way around. He had told no one, but it had grown upon him of late that he could relish a bit of New York after more than two years. He coldly ignored in himself the tendency to thrill at the thought of seeing Pidge Musser again. He had made a bit of a name for himself as a reporter, but was known more as a first-class fact-getter than a feature writer among newspaper men. Facts were sometimes so bleak in his work that one had to possess real understanding and real love for honest materials to find the inherent beauty and order. Hisknowledge of international politics was now granted by all classes of newspaper men, but he was known especially from his articles inThe Public Squareas one who exerted a steady pressure against America entering the war.

To be cool was said to be Cobden’s religion. The stuff that he wrote was cool and the words that he said. “I am a reporter, only,” he occasionally explained. “I write what I see, not my own reactions nor opinions.” He had come far in this doctrine, far enough to be trusted by white men of place in Turkey and the Holy Land, in spite of his curious scorn for war. He was somewhat slower now to get enthused over human actions than he was when he left New York; his boyish humor had become grim. He had seen the worst things men do, and written a few of them. Though he had been through as much hard riding in two years as any empire-building Englishman, he seemed to retain no personal relation to his adventures.

Other men talked about him, however. There was something about the American that made it easy for others to “sketch at him.” Tales of his far chances with Tom Lawrence in El Hejas, for instance, had followed him up into Turkey, but no one knew his tendency to nausea in a pinch.

Dicky had written a lot of big newspaper stories, but they were stories of the day. He had packed the films of tense and frightening and humorous moments away somewhere deep in his brain, to the end of massing them all into one—one day doing the Big Story, thathad to do with finding a Man. That dream had held since the day he first saw Nagar. But in his heart of hearts everything was a side issue—world politics, world wars, newspaper stories, magazine stories, even the Big Story of all—compared to the war in himself over a girl named Pidge. He still had night sweats over the name of Rufus Melton.... A quiet voice, a tired smile, a face darkened and dusty looking from exposure, even after a clean shave—out of this face, usually shadowed by a big cake-basket helmet of cork, shone a pair of steady eyes in a fine mesh of dusty brown wrinkles—Dicky at twenty-eight.

He had scarcely stepped ashore at Bombay when he heard that the States had entered the war. He touched the sleeve of an Englishman who was looking up at the promenade deck of the ship with eyes and mouth wide open.

“Tell me, I hadn’t heard,” Dicky said hoarsely.

“She’s in, but I must say, sir, she took a long time about it.”

“But that cannot be!” Dicky answered.

Now the Englishman stared, this being the peerless rebuke. Moreover, he observed that the American had a sudden withered look, and presumed that he was a mere upstart person. Accordingly, the Englishman refixed his triple focus on the ship’s promenade deck, and Cobden tunneled into the bus for theKing George. There he verified the news. He went to his room a bit whipped, quite a little bit whipped. He wanted to be alone. For two years he had written and felt forAmerica as only an exile can. He had believed in her luck and native horse sense in the midst of the mess other countries were making of their national lives.

Something snapped when he had been alone in his room for a while. It was Dicky’s romantic allegiance to the country of his school histories. For the present he was a man without national gravity, and a sick man since some hot, hard-held part of himself had been ripped out.

He had missed his mail in Aden and left word for it to be forwarded to Bombay on the next steamer. A cablegram from his newspaper connection, rewired from Aden, not only counseled him to make haste to double back to France (to be on the spot to greet the first American military arrivals), but accepted it as settled that there was nothing else for a man of his equipment now to do. The message was actually elate with the “doings” ahead, but Dicky Cobden didn’t see it that way. The fact is, he was sore, personally sore, at what had happened and didn’t care who knew it. The following ship brought his mail, including a letter from Pidge Musser, which he opened with an old and ugly fear, and in this letter the worst that he had ever feared fell upon him:

... Oh, Dicky, there is no other way. I’ve tried to dodge it, but it has to be told now, that I have taken Rufus Melton. Why did I do it? I don’t know, unless it is that I am evil and unfinished and answer to the evil and unfinished in him. He draws me terribly, but atthe same time, I am not deluded. There is never a moment with him that is not unmixed with pain.... I wonder if you can believe that I did not do this thing for happiness; that the happiest moments I have ever known have come from my work with John Higgins and my friendship with you? And can you ever believe that I am no farther from you now, in that mysterious comrade way?... Oh, Life is not like books, Dicky, not at all like what we are taught it is. I have a relation to him. I answer some terrible drawing need—like a child crying for me. But I have a relation to you, too, only different. You mean rest, something done. He means the unfinished. He brings a mirror to me, and says, “Look!” I want to scream, because the mirror brings out all my defects. That’s what his presence means.... This is one true thing, Dicky. The one who can rouse the most hell in your breast is the one to whom you belong for the time. At least, that is true to me.... Have I not been grateful for your stability? And have I not been proud for your moving so quietly up and down the East, keeping your surfaces clean for the world events to be pictured there without twist or falsehood?... A strange door was opened in my being when I was a child. In and out that door, whether I will or not, you often come and go. “He is my friend,” I whisper, “my friend”——and repeat it a thousand times.

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