XXITHE DINNER COAT
JOHN HIGGINS came up through the newspapers and magazine editorial rooms in those brave days when a typewriter did not always go with a man’s desk, but a cuspidor nearly always. Even yet, the editor ofThe Public Squaretucked a piece of fine-cut between his cheek and lower jaw after breakfast in the morning, and forgot about it just so long as it was there. The fact that he smoked from time to time caused no inconvenience to the wad of shredded leaf. He complained of indigestion and gave himself wholeheartedly to various forms of diet.
He kept Pidge Musser close at hand during these trying war days. His former stenographer languished. John Higgins found a singular peace in working with Pidge and was innocent enough to discuss it. He was an old integer so far as women were concerned, never getting beyond the rare confession (when a few drinks ripened his mind) that he had had a mother once. He didn’t hate women; nothing like that. He had just merely walked around them as you walk around the shore of an ocean. He wasn’t born with a bathing suit and the idea of taking off his shoes and stockings madehim hoarse with fright. Pidge, however, had crept in through the business door, and John Higgins awoke to find her at his side.
Pidge found him like a somber relative of the elder generation, when she returned from her hectic walk with Melton that afternoon, but for once she could forget John Higgins easily. Twenty times in her mind, at least, Pidge went over the talk and walk with Melton, her face often turned away to the window with a sad but scornful smile. She thought it out with hard sophistication, all that he had said of receiving inspiration from her, but underneath she wanted it to be so; and deep among the secrets of herself, she felt that what he said was possibly truer than he knew.
Had he known that the bank would be closed? She would soon learn about that, for he had promised to bring the check to-night. Even if he didn’t, she could never forget thatcallingto her, back of his actor eyes—calling like a child of her own. New York whirled by below; the manuscripts were piled high in front and side. A Mecca letter came in from Richard Cobden, intimating that he might go to India. Even that did not arouse John Higgins, nor startle Pidge Musser from the painful web she was in.
Melton was at the basement entrance at seven. As Pidge went down to meet him, Fanny Gallup was coming up. They met in the second hall. Fanny stood in the gaslight, her arms open wide, her dress open at the breast, her eyes laughing.
“I saw him, Redhead. He’s a God-awful, that boy.Don’t you bring no little baby to this house! I won’t stand for it.”
Melton wore a black cape coat, a dinner coat beneath. Pidge felt as if she had left all her light in the second hall. She was exasperated with herself for pushing past Fanny and not taking the joke gracefully, exasperated with Melton for togging up to come to Harrow Street, to take her to that old eating house. Couldn’t he resist showing off for just one hour?
Some awe seemed to have fallen upon him, or rather between them. In silence they rounded the almost empty curve of Harrow Street, and presently entered the crowds and lights and crashes of trestled Sixth Avenue. On the corner, as they crossed Eighth Street, Pidge heard a newsboy behind say, “There goes a movie actor.” Pidge deeply knew what that grimed child-face had seen.... It troubled Melton to find the restaurant, and she didn’t help, though she had located it a score of times since that other night. At the table, while they waited, he took a fifty-dollar check from his pocket and handed it over, saying that the real part of the favor he would try to pay bit by bit through the years.
“Because I’ll never get very far from you again,” he added queerly. “Find it very funny, don’t you? Sit there chuckling, don’t you? You can laugh, but it’s true.”
Now Melton began to ask for things which weren’t on the bill-of-fare. He told the waitress how things should be prepared and served—this in a side-street eatinghouse, that specialized in beans and encouraged counter trade. There were hard lines around the mouth of the waitress which Melton commented upon, as she turned her back. Pidge had a warning to hold her temper, and yet she would have died first.
“I’ve never worked in a restaurant,” she said, “but I’ve worked in a factory, and I know what those lines come from. They come from dealing with people like you, people who forget where they are, forget what they come for.”
“How do I forget where I am?” he asked.
“Because you don’t know that this is a place where they serve ‘eats.’ ‘Eats’ are cooked all one way. ‘Eats’ are served fast in business hours, and the waiters sit around and gasp the other times, trying to catch up with themselves. And you don’t know where you are, because you try to show these people and me that you’ve seen how it was done in uptown hotels.”
A trace of sullenness showed in his eyes, and then a warmth of almost incredible delight.
“It’s great! I never was scolded in my life!”
“It wasn’t for supper alone—that wasn’t why I fell into the idea of coming here,” she said. “You forget it entirely. You dare to come in a dress suit—here—here!”
“Listen,” he begged, “don’t run away with that idea. I thought we might go to a theater afterward. I didn’t think so much about where we were going as I did that I was coming to you. I didn’t have anything better than this to put on, and so I came this way.”
A moment before it had seemed the most righteous and perfect thing under heaven to vent a few scathing remarks, but now she felt twisted and diminished. Long and religiously she had tried to keep her rages to herself. Neither spoke while the plates were being served, and then he said:
“I was horribly out of true, in telling these people how to do it, but I wanted it good for you,” he added simply.
She looked at him hard, but the intensity of her trying that instant kept her from reading what was really back of his eyes.
“It’s plenty good enough for me,” she said. “I came here once when I had only twenty cents to live on that day—I remember the stool, that fifth stool, I sat on. I spent my twenty cents all at once,” she added, “and the grub was so good that I could have wept in the arms of the woman on the other side of the counter.”
“Was that when you were working in the factory?” he asked.
“No,” said Pidge, “it was before I got the job. I ate regularly after that.”
“Where was the factory?”
“Oh, way up in the other end of town. I labeled tins, salmon tins, baking powder tins, cocoa tins.”
“To get local color?” he asked.
“To get food. I sat at a big table with a lot of girls, and in the hours and hours, in the monotony of the days, I found out how easy it is to get hard lines aroundthe mouth. I learned to understand just enough to learn that I know nothing, and that’s a lot.”
She was thinking of what a tension she had been in to escape from Fanny Gallup.
“I worked on a ranch in Wyoming,” Melton observed, “cattle ranch.”
“What were you doing on the Tunisian sands?”
“Just ramming around the world. I got in bad with an Arab sheik. It was while running away from him that I got lost in the desert.”
She saw his eyes kindle in the prospect of narration, his faculties forming a fresh tale, which she could not bear to hear that moment. She forestalled his fruitfulness.
They were in the streets.
“No, I don’t want to go uptown,” said Pidge. “I don’t feel like the theater to-night——”
“Wouldn’t you like a ride on the harbor? The ferries are empty this time of night.”
“No, we’ll cross over to Harrow Street.”
“May I come in? There’s so much to say. It’s just—finding you again—Pan.”
“Not to-night. I want to be alone.”
He didn’t answer. She felt a little better after that. She had thought it might be harder to have her way. There seemed always something he could not say behind his words. It wasn’talllies. It became clear for a moment that he would follow after her—so long as she could run ahead; that he would only turn away and forget when she paused to breathe or play.
“I feel strange,” he said in the silence of Harrow Street. “It is strange to-night. It’s like finding the house one has been looking for so long—the house, even the door, but not the key. Pan,” he said suddenly, “give it to me. Give me the key. It’s you—it’s yours——”
His strength was without strain, the strength that is effortless, the strength of laughter. He had taken her to him suddenly, and she dwelt in it, though resisting; something ecstatic, even in holding out.... She heard voices in herself and faces flashed through her mind—Cobden’s, Fanny Gallup’s—but her arms and shoulders and breast knew a terrible sweetness from his strength. It wasn’t hateful. It was like her own boy, not a stranger. His laughing face was nearer. It was coming to hers. In the dark she could see it, eyes and eyelids, curving nostrils and laughing lips. She knew something would die in her when it touched ... that she was dying now of the slowness of its coming. She ceased to struggle, and all that she had known and been arose within her to meet his lips.
She was on the second flight of stairs. She almost prayed that Fanny’s door would not open. She wanted to be in her own little room, the smaller the better to-night—no touch or voice upon her. The key turned in her trembling hand. She was safe, the door locked again. She stood in the dark. Her lips moved audibly:
“Am I—is it because I am my father’s child?”