XXXIXSEVEN FLAWLESS DAYS
DICKY was riding westward through the citrus groves of the last fifty miles into Los Angeles. Eight days in New York; there had been no public announcement of a change in ownership ofThe Public Square, although John Higgins had retired and new energies were actively in operation. The old editor’s faith was gone in himself, but anchored all the tighter to the son of the trowel makers.
The great Range was crossed. All the forenoon the air had been clear and cold, but at noon the Limited had slipped down into San Bernardino, into summer and fruit fragrance. Now it was two in the afternoon and Dicky looked out upon one little town after another, the like of which he had never seen before. Sun-drenched and flowery towns; breathing-spaces between the houses and vine-clad trellises; and everywhere the great orchards, sometimes palm-bordered and often with rose-covered fences of stone.
“Sit tight, sit tight,” he said to himself.
A hundred times he had repeated this to-day. There was loose in him a power of feeling which made the days of his straight unemotional reporting look like a feeble affectation. Coming into the harbor of New York less than two weeks before, he had learned toaccept the emptiness of life. But since then, curiously enough, a new order of content had filled him. Was it necessary to be emptied of the old entirely in order to be filled with the new?
Pasadena was behind; the Limited was running down grade into Los Angeles; then momentary halts with Mexican faces turned to the car windows—Chinese faces, a tangle of freights—finally a slow down, and on one side, groups of up-turned faces, expectant, some strained to an intense kind of pain to catch the eyes of their own.... The bags had to be put out. There were people in front of him; he was shut off from windows.
“Sit tight, Dicky——”
A white limp-brimmed straw hat pulled down over her ears like a bonnet! A taller Pidge—no, she was standing on her toes to look over the shoulders of the crowd. Now she saw him; her eyes blinked, her shoulders lifting quickly. He moved slowly, positively not crushing anybody. Her hands were raised—one higher than the other, the fingers apart. They stayed so, until he pressed against them. She was taller. Their faces were so close—both shaded for an instant under the wide brim of her hat. He had been looking into her eyes; then they were too close to look into. It seemed neither had anything to do about it. He hardly dared remember.
Some one near by knew a happiness that shrieked. They walked away from the many voices. Then he realized that he was carrying his two hand bags.
“Where’s the parcel room?” he asked.
“I’ll show you the way. The station is very old and dingy.”
He checked them. They walked to the other end of the yards where the big palms called.
“How’s your father?”
“I think—he’s better. You heard about the baby—Fanny Gallup’s baby?”
“Yes.”
“I brought him west with me. He’s in Santa Monica now, so I’ll have to hurry back. You’ll come?”
“To Santa Monica?”
“Yes.”
“Shall we get a motor car?”
“No. The interurban. I’ll show you.”
“Is there a place to stop down there?”
“Oh, yes, I’ll show you.”
“My steamer trunk can wait here for a day or two. I’d better get my small bags——”
“Yes.”
He unchecked them.... In the city car to the interurban station, she said: “Oh, Dicky, it’s so good.” Then after a pause, she added: “We don’t need to talk about ourselves.”
“I understand.”
“It’s days before your ship?”
“Yes.”
“I can show you around. It’s hard for me not to be troubled aboutThe Public Square——”
“Everything’s all right there. I’ll tell you everythingwhen we get on the other car. You’ll like it all.”
“And must you really go to India?”
“I arranged with Nagar, before I left. It’s the story of the age, he says. After that——”
“Yes?”
“After that—New York.”
They were in the Santa Monica car, on the way down to the ocean. She had shown him Hollywood, pointing out some of the moving-picture plants.... If he could only keep calm now—and not rush out to seize the incredible little attractions of the moment! It seemed so important to keep calm right now—as if this were a sort of trial trip. He must be able to move right into this light without flinching—must endure all delight in stillness. It wasn’t like repression—this that was called of him now, but faith. The wonder of it all was her perfect fearlessness with him. Their old word came back to him—comrade. He almost spoke it, but stopped in time. He must live it. But why all this holding back—after years of holding back?
“... So he won’t be coming back, I’m afraid,” he was saying of John Higgins. “He understands that his desk is there for him as long as he wants it, but he doesn’t encourage any one to believe he’ll use it again. I told him he could do Washington, and leave Bert Ames on the desk for the present, but he only shook his head.”
“I saw it coming,” said Pidge. “Oh, I’ve seen it for a long time. There was never anything I could do to help him. I never can really help when I want to.”
He felt she was thinking of Melton. She was, but she was thinking of Fanny Gallup, too.
“He has no relatives,” Dicky went on, “but it’s arranged for his income to keep up; anything he wants to do for the magazine——”
He saw her look of sadness.
“John Higgins is so helpless,” she said softly.
“We’ve taken on young Bothwell for the advertising, and given him a little fund to work with,” Dicky reported. “Bothwell isn’t a plunger, steady sort of genius in his game. The idea isn’t to plunge in any department—just to work softly and slowly and steadily, giving everybody his money’s worth. Also, if a story or article just suits, we mustn’t let the price stand in the way any longer.”
She nodded wonderingly.
“Bert Ames has two or three good ideas to work out at the desk before he leaves for Washington.”
“But who after that?”
“Sit tight, Dicky.”
... He coughed. “It isn’t like the desk in the old sense. We have talked about that. Pidge, I’m wabbling a bit, but the desk is yours.”
They were sitting in the windy front seats. She appeared to be looking into the back of the motor-man’s neck.
“When you get back,” he added.
Her eyes did not move.
“This isn’t reward, this is your place; no other can hold down the job. You’ve done it for months. Therewouldn’t have been anyPublic Square, if you hadn’t. I know all about the ‘Nearer, My God, to Thee’ story, and the editorial paragraphs and how you have kept up the reviews, and somehow got stories without money and without price. John Higgins told me everything. It isn’t giving you reward. It is only going on as you were, with some money to work with, and two or three good men to help, and a salary for yourself that will make up in a small way for the pittance you’ve been living on for years.”
“There mustn’t be any desk, Dicky,” she said queerly.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean we’d be the laughing stock of New York, if I perched on a desk, calling myself the Editor.”
She halted, thinking of what Miss Claes had advised about her authorship ofThe Lance of the Rivernais.
“You’ll take it, Pidge?” he said with deadly calm.
“I’ll do what I can until you come back. It must be managed very silently. No announcements. I’ll be there as I was. I’ve been thinking a lot.The Public Square—I know how dear it is to you, Dicky. It is to me, too. It will be wonderful to have some money to work with. I know about Bothwell. He’s the right man for the advertising.”
“I left it open—for you to choose the one to help you when Bert Ames goes over to Washington.”
Her eyes turned to him directly now, searchingly. There seemed to be something intelligible for him in them, but he did not divine the meaning.
“That’ll all work out,” she said presently. “We mustn’t try to plan it all now.”
Her eyes filled with laughter.
“Oh, Dicky,” she said, “if I’d ever get self-conscious about feeling all the responsibilities ofThe Public Squareresting upon my shoulders—I’d muddle the whole business in a day!”
“They have rested on your shoulders, Pidge.”
“Yes, but I didn’t stop to think.... In another minute you’ll be able to see the ocean!”
They were silent. Then she pointed over the motor-man’s shoulder, and he saw a vast stretch of leveled azure, like sky ironed out smooth.
“And—you’re—going—across!” she said suddenly—“still after the Big Story that you’ve always been looking for. And oh, Dicky, I’ll go to see them when you’re gone—your mother and aunt and sister.”
“It did a lot for me to learn that you had called.”
“Dicky,” she said solemnly, “when they told me what you’d done in Paris——”
“Let’s not—Pidge.”
“And when I remembered that Sunday afternoon you took me to your house—and what a beast I was—oh, how that hurt! I’ve been so sorry and so grateful.”
He had seen Pidge with the baby in her arms. He had held the baby himself, in fact, while she got breakfast one morning, and their laughter had disturbedMr. Adolph Musser, who felt that the world was no place for such laughter with his nerves in the condition they were.
“His back feels so funny,” Dicky had reported concerning the infant.
Pidge gave him a look, and went on timing the eggs. Mr. Musser’s egg had to lie three and one-half minutes in water that had ceased to boil.
“And his hair stays combed,” Dicky added.
He had held converse with Mr. Musser, which was an experience. Mrs. Rab Gaunt Hastings had gone her way after a series of such experiences, her fortune undivided. It had been said that the undivided nature of her departure was in a measure responsible for Mr. Musser’s nervous breakdown, though he explained it metaphysically. Since he could not be left in his weak state, it was arranged for him to return with Pidge to New York.
“I have known for many months that the field of my labors was to be amplified,” said Mr. Musser, with one of his sudden hopeful flashes. “My illness is but a cleansing in preparation. Always the wrecker before the builder. My throat, for instance——”
Pidge called at this point from the fig tree back of the bungalow. It was their last day.... For seven days they had walked the sunny silent mesas, traced the interminable canyons, and miles and miles of curving shore of the sea. To-night for him, the Valley train to San Francisco; to-morrow afternoon, the PacificMail steamer.... She had spoken of Rufus Melton for the first time.
“You think he was really married in France?” she asked.
“They frightened him into it,” Dicky said. “It seemed to me as if Rufe looked upon it as a way out—then found that they didn’t mean to let him escape, even then.”
There was no suffocating emotion about this talk. It was only in moments like this that he understood that he had earned something through the years. They had to go back to the bungalow for lunch with the elder and the child, who objected to each other. There was only a little while alone in the afternoon, because he had to be in Los Angeles for his train at six.
“I started things going among the agents in New York, for a serial,” he said at the last, “but you’ll have to decide. We want a corking long story, Pidge—one that has brain and brawn——”
Her face was turned away.
“Just the right one should be lying around somewhere,” he added.
“I’ll look,” she said.
She would have gone into the city with him, but he objected: “You would have to come back alone!”
Their real parting was on the Palisades, and there were few words about it.
“It’s work, now,” he said. “We go opposite ways for the same job—the Story of the Age.”
“And after that—New York,” she answered.
They stood in the superb sunlight at the edge of the escarpment. Hundreds of feet below was the old abandoned bathhouse, and the three white lines of surf pressing into the land, like tireless fingers of a modeler upon the clay. To the left was the portal of the Canyon, to the right the fallow lands with feathery brushes of eucalyptus against the sky.
“We’re all meshed yet, Dicky—meshed in wantings and struggles, all tracked up with recent experiences. We can’t see each other clearly yet——”
He was looking into her face in half profile. Quietly it had dawned upon him that he couldn’t have spared a single one of the hard days of the past five years, not a single one of the black patches, even. They were the dark rooms in which this present striking film had been developed.
“We can’t—what?” he said strangely.
She was speaking, but still he didn’t hear, for that moment in the superb sunlight, he saw Pidge Musser as he had never seen her before.