XXIIITHE RED ROOM
LINE by line the thing was killing him. He got up and crossed the heavy red carpet to the hall door and turned the key in the lock. He was afraid some one would come in and find him. He had the strange power of partly seeing himself, as the sullen horrors of hatred and revolt boiled up in his breast. Vaguely, but quite well enough, he could watch the man called Richard Cobden in the dim hotel room, the shoulders hunched, the mouth stretched and crooked; unable to sit still, the face wet with poisonous sweat.
The love had gone out of him, and with it, all the light he had. He thought he had known pain and loneliness since leaving New York, but all he had known was humming content compared to now, because there had been a laughing idolatry for all her ways and words, a reliance upon her that he had dared to call absolute. “Understand, understand!” she had cried all through the letter.... Oh yes, he could understand. She wasn’t what he had made her out to be—that was clear enough. He had built upon something which wasn’t there. He had believed her to be—built into himself the conviction—that she was the honestest thing alive, and here she was——
His thought shot back to the night of the Punjabi dinner. That little basement room was devastated before his mind, the table overturned, the face of Miss Claes a mockery, the face of Pidge Musser—that of an American girl found out. Into the center of his consciousness was now flung his old promise not to hate.... He heard his own laughter. He saw his own stretched and twisted mouth from which it came. Like a couple of sly schoolgirls, they looked at him now—Pidge and Miss Claes—slyly pulling together and duping a fat boy....
He saw his room key upon the table. Number Five, it was, the fifth floor. He looked around the dim papered wall—whitish-red like the pulp of raspberries—the deep upholstered chairs, the seats slightly crushed, the full-length mirror, the ash tray, the silver flask on the writing table, his own things here and there orderly enough—all but himself, a sort of maniacal Mr. Hyde. Number Five. He would remember this room where he had fought it out, too, about America entering the war. He poured brandy into a whisky glass. The stuff eased him a little. It made the pain all the more poignant, like a stove getting hotter, but also it seemed to give him the power to move back a little from the stove.... He stood up in the dark and shook himself.
“Oh, you ass!” he muttered. “You awful ass!”
In the light of a match, as he lit a cigarette long afterward, he saw the rest of his mail on the table, one letter from Miss Claes. He couldn’t get head nor tail out ofthat at first. She seemed to be talking about something he had said about finding a Man. Oh, yes. He had written from Mecca, mentioning Tom Lawrence and his search for a Man. He snickered now at himself through the fogs of his own past and present. Then a line seemed to stand up before his eyes. “... If you go to India, go to Ahmedabad. Nagar is there. You are in danger of finding your Man.” Later that night, still in the dark, his back straightened. He laughed and said aloud, failing altogether for the moment to see the absurdity of himself.
“Number Five—queer little old musty room, I wonder who died here?... Good night, Pidge; good night, dear America—grand pair to tie to!”
The next day he cabled to his newspaper connection that he was not returning to France for the opening campaign, at least; and wrote to John Higgins that he didn’t expect to send in much stuff for the present. “I may stay awhile in India—just looking around. She smells like a typhoid ward, and needs orderlies.... I’ll, of course, let you know what comes of myspectating.”
Still he did not start at once for Ahmedabad. He locked himself in Number Five through the days and walked the streets of Bombay at night, walked like a man in a strait-jacket. He wasn’t conscious of this at first, until he began to feel an ache from the tension of his neck and shoulder muscles and tightened elbows. When he forced himself to relax, however, the torture of his thoughts was accentuated. He had been holdinghimself rigidly to help fend off the destroying rush of mental images. He walked himself into one sweat after another for the nights were hot and humid. The point of all his fighting was to keep Pidge Musser out of mind. Of course, he could not succeed. She came in by every door. She came in softly, she came in scornfully, she came in singing, scolding. Mostly she came in saying, “Why, don’t you see, Dicky, I am nearer and clearer than ever?” Then it was as if an isolated bit of shrapnel would explode in his brain.
His whole fabric of world politics was demolished. It looked to him like a tapestry that has been hooked up out of a sewer—all that careful weaving and balanced pigmentation! Before the day of the letter he had prided himself that his building in the past two years was good and strong. Now he faced the pitiful discovery that every block of his building had been placed upon this platform: That even if he couldn’t have her, no one else could. This smelled to him now. Forever after, it smelled to him like the sewage lanes of old Bombay.
Dicky had a good body. After two weeks his physical vitality began to steal back. The love was gone, but out of the debris of Subramini’s Punjabi Fireplace, the face of Miss Claes came up faintly smiling again. Another letter came from her, which he read in dismal irony several times on the day before he took the train for Ahmedabad—the last day in Number Five, with its wall paper of raspberry crush. He couldn’t make sense out of the letter. She seemed to love Pidge, evento respect her. Miss Claes wrote, “It gives me quiet joy to know that Nagar is near you. It will be good for him and good for you. A great dearness for you both goes from this house, as you sit and walk together.” Miss Claes also repeated in her letter that “love never faileth”——
All very pretty and possible, no doubt; it sounded good, but it was no longer his sort of a project. This wasn’t for the product of three generations of hardware merchants and manufacturers. Funny, he thought, how he had ever accepted visionary stuff like this. He would write Miss Claes some time how he had failed, but not now. On the night train, he felt India closing about him really for the first time. Once when the train stopped, he smelled the altogether indescribable earthiness of hills that had been sun baked all day, now letting it be known through the moistness of the night. It was vaguely like home to him; not home in America, but home on earth again, the faintest symptom of his reallegiance to life here, only known to one coming up out of sickness. In the early morning he lay for a while after awakening in a sort of bodily peace. It was as if he had really rested a little, as if he had left behind some utterly miserable part of himself in the red room at Bombay.
“A bit questionable,” he muttered whimsically, with the trace of a smile, “a bit shabby and questionable to leave a bundle, a black bundle like that, in Number Five—for some one else to stumble over.”
He fell asleep again and reawoke with a curioussentence on his lips; something that he had forgotten a long time, something that Miss Claes used to say: “Nobody knows Nagar—nobody.”
“Nobody ever will,” he added, “if he doesn’t talk any more than he used to.”
Again at breakfast the faintest little quiver of organic ease stole into him. The earth was very bright outside and the pot of tea that had been brought tasted actually sane. He had the feeling of being on the way somewhere, of having escaped something, as he watched India slip by from the window of his compartment.... Then Ahmedabad, the station, a Hindu in white garments, almost taking him in his arms—laughing, talking like an American—Nagar talking!