XXIVMISS CLAES SPEAKS
ONE Sunday morning about three weeks after the luncheon with John Higgins, during which Rufus Melton came to the Chop House, Pidge found Miss Claes alone in the basement front.
“We’d like to come here to live. Is there any chance?” she asked.
“Yes, it can be managed, I think.”
Pidge regarded her with a kind of cold fixity and added: “We were married night before last. Rufe seems willing enough to come here. I hate to leave this house, but I didn’t think you had the rooms.”
“I’ll make a place for you; a little place, at least. But, Pidge——”
“Yes?”
“Why haven’t you come to me all this time?”
“I know how fond you are of Dicky Cobden. I haven’t hoped any one could understand.”
“Being fond of Richard Cobden doesn’t make me less fond of you.”
“How could I expect you to understand me, when I can’t understand myself?” Pidge demanded. “I am two people, and they are at war.... No use lying about it. I fell for him, knowing him all the time. Notfor a minute did I lose track of what he is. But I wanted him. Something in me answered—that’s all.”
“I’ve always loved that honest Pidge,” said Miss Claes.
“Think, if you like, that it’s part of the evil in me that talks this way about him, but I am talking about myself, too.”
“You could never see all this clearly—without ‘falling for’ him, Pidge.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean it would remain a hopeless, unfinished puzzle—if you had run away from Rufus Melton.”
“I couldn’t run away. I wanted him,” Pidge repeated. “But there’s another side. There’s something in him that I seem to have known from the beginning—something like a little child that I left somewhere ages ago. It keeps calling to me from his eyes, and I leave everything to go to it—everything that Dicky means and the world, even writing—I leave all that. And yet when I go, when I go to his arms, I lose the purpose. It’s as if the child that I run to—the irresistible thing that calls to me from his eyes—stops crying and stops needing me! Then I suddenly know that it must need me and not be gratified, ever to be helped. Oh, no one on earth could understand that. It’s insane.”
“But, Pidge, I do understand.”
“How can you?”
“Because I have loved like that, because I have had experience. I loved an English boy in the same way—oh, long ago. I love him still, but I could not stay withhim, because he—why, Pidge, it is just the same. He needs to cry for some one, for something, otherwise he remains asleep in life.”
“You’re saying this to help me.”
“What I’ve lived throughshouldhelp you. It was the hardest thing I’ve ever known—that I couldn’t forget everything and have him, just two alone in the world. But when I went to him, he was satisfied and looked elsewhere. I almost died of revolt.”
Pidge’s eyes were very wide. “And when you didn’t go to him?” she said in slow tones. “What happened then?”
“It was then that he remembered and reminded me that I was half-caste. Also he looked elsewhere, just the same.”
“And you still love him?”
“Deep underneath—that is not changed.”
“But what is Nagar?”
“Nagar means the other world, Pidge—a new heaven and a new earth. He means the not-wanting love, the willing-to-wait love——”
“I’m not like that,” Pidge said with old bitterness. “I want love in a room! I want to shut the world out. I don’t want the love of the world, but love that’s all mine. And I can’t—I can’t have it!”
She was breathing deeply, staring at the fire.
Miss Claes glanced at her wistfully a moment, her lips faintly smiling. The girl’s face had never been so lovely to her. It was like land that has had its rains after long waiting—soft blooms starting, an earthysweetness rising in the washed sunlight. The beginnings of both laughter and tears were in Pidge’s wide eyes; her red-brown hair, from which the henna was long forgotten, had an easy restful gleam in its coils.
“Why, Pidge,” Miss Claes said at last, “you’re like one who has been born again. It’s wonderful. I had almost forgotten what that love does to a woman, at first—for a little, little time.”
“And you knew that kind of love—with the English boy?”
“Yes.”
“And Nagar knows.”
“Yes.”
Pidge shivered.
“... Rufe brings the fight to me, makes every undone thing rise and live! He brings the most terrible disappointments, the crudest disorder, yet that which would pay for it all, if I were just a simple peasant woman, is denied. Why can’t we shut the door and just live? Why can’t there be a kingdom for two?”
The form was soft and gliding in Miss Claes’ arms. The square-shouldered little figure of the mill and office girl had become almost eloquent with its emotional power. After a moment Pidge straightened, her face staring into Miss Claes’.
“Why don’t you answer?”
“I can only say, Pidge, you are called to learn the next step, the next lesson in what love means. You want the love that has two ends, but the Triangle is ready for you. Oh, many are learning the mysteryof the Triangle. It hurts so at first, but it lets the world in—the bigger meanings of life.”
Pidge shivered again. “Is it blasphemy,” she asked, “that I feel just as close to Dicky Cobden—as ever?”
“No more than the finding of bread would spoil your taste for water.”
Pidge said at last:
“Oh, I don’t want to leave this house, Miss Claes. He says he’ll come here, too.”
“I’ve been thinking of putting a bathroom on the third floor. There’s a tiny empty room like yours across the hall. The bath shall be installed there. You know I’ve kept Nagar’s room empty. It is pleasant and larger than yours. I’ll have a door cut through the partition, and with a bath across the hall you will do well enough for a time.”
“You would give us Nagar’s room?”
“Nagar has the key to the whole house,” said Miss Claes.
Moments afterward, Pidge’s strong fingers closed over the hands of the other.
“No one can know how it hurts me—to think of Dicky——”
“He is with Nagar now.”
“Do you think—can it be possible that Nagar will help him—as you help me?”
“Nagar and the Little Man,” said Miss Claes.