THE PUBLIC SQUARE

BY WILL LEVINGTON COMFORT AUTHOR OF “ROUTLEDGE RIDES ALONE,” ETC.

D. APPLETON AND COMPANY NEW YORK :: :: MCMXXIII

COPYRIGHT, 1923, BY WILL LEVINGTON COMFORT PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

TO DOROTHY MOSHER

I 54 HARROW STREET

A GIRL of nineteen had just arrived in New York, with one fat bag. She turned into the curving silence of Harrow Street, which is only three minutes’ walk from Washington Square, but some trick to find. Several times she changed her bag from one hand to the other, sometimes putting it down and stepping around it, until she came to a door with a room-to-rent sign. This house was painted fresh green, the only thing that distinguished it from all the other houses of the block, except the number, which was Fifty-four.

“Here goes me!” she said, starting up the stone steps.

She rang. The door before her didn’t open, but the basement door below did. A woman’s voice called, “Yes?” in rising inflection.

The girl trailed her bag down to the walk and around the railing to the lower entrance where a dark-faced woman stood, regarding her with almost concerned[2] attention—dark eyes that saw too much, the girl decided. The face was un-American, but its foreign suggestion was vague. It might even have been East Indian. If her skin was natively white, it had certainly known the darkening of much sunlight. As the girl drew near she sensed a curious freshness from the woman; something hard to name, having to do with the garments as well as the shadowy olive skin.

“I want to rent a room—a small back room. I saw your sign on the door.”

“I have a room, but it hasn’t much air,” the woman said.

“I don’t need much air——”

“Come and we’ll look. It is on the upper floor, but it is not quite back. Leave your bag here in the hall.”

It was eleven in the morning, but the smell of coffee was in the dark basement corridor, and laughing voices were heard behind the shut door to the right. A man’s voice said in a stimulated tone:

“Believe me, and I’ve been around, Miss Claes is the deepest-dyed sport I’ve ever met. You could drag her the length of Harrow Street and she’d come up fresh from the laundry——”

“That reminds me, I’m going to start a laundry,” a woman’s voice announced.

“I’m going to start something myself——” came another voice.

The girl, following through the corridor, heard a little breathless sort of chuckle from the woman ahead[3] of her on the dark stairs. The place smelled like a shut room when it rains—a cigaretty admixture.

They climbed. The next hall was spooky with gaslight; the next was gay with frying sausages. They climbed. The next was the one, and it smelled of paint—the same green paint as on the outside of the house—on one of the doors and doorframes, but the wood was plainly charred under the paint.

“We had a fire, but we put it out with wash water before the engines got here, soapy water.”

The girl had a picture of threshing soap about in pails of water before applying it to the flames.

“This is the one,” the woman said, unlocking the next to last room from the back on the left. “All the rest are filled just now. Most of my lodgers never leave, only as they strike it rich——”

“Do they often strike it rich?”

“Oh, yes, dear. New York is quite the most magic place in America—something for every one who comes, if he only stays on.”

They had crowded into the little room.

“This is fine,” the girl said. “This is what I want. It’s just as I saw it.”

“You get your water in the hall below,” the woman explained. “There is no gas plate, so you will have to bring your coffeepot down to my stove in the basement. The walls are ugly, but I’ll see that the cot is clean for you. If the wall of the next house across the area were only painted white, you would get more light.”

[4]The wall spoken of was less than three feet from the window sill.

“What is the price?” the girl asked, with a cough before and after.

“Twelve dollars a month.”

“I will pay for a month now,” she said, with a small part of a big out-breath.

“When did you come to New York?” the woman asked.

“This morning.”

“First time?”

“Yes. From Los Angeles.”

“And you have had four nights on the train?”

“Six. It was a slow tourist train. I sat up from Chicago——”

“Have you lived in Los Angeles long?”

“Always—in and around.”

“We don’t dare to think of Los Angeles much. To a lot of us here in New York, it’s a kind of heaven. Southern California—the sea and the mountains and the ten months of sunlight and the cool morning fogs and the ripe figs——”

“I’ve wanted New York like that,” the girl said. “I’ve wanted New York so badly that I was afraid on the train that it wouldn’t stay until I got here——”

“That’s the way to come,” the landlady said. “New York would wait for you. Oh, yes, New York waits for your kind. What are you going to do here?”

“Write.”

“Really?”

[5]The woman sat down on the edge of the cot. Her interest did not seem an affectation. Her figure was thin but lithe. One wouldn’t know in these shadows if she were nearer twenty-five or thirty-five. She seemed altogether without haste, smiling easily, but slow to laugh aloud. Her eyes looked startlingly knowing as she lit a cigarette—not natural somehow. At the same time in the matchlight her face had looked tired and weathered. Her way of speaking was like an English person, or one educated in England.

“Do you mean stories?” she asked.

“Yes, a book, a long story—set in eighteenth-century France.”

“But you seem so young.”

“I have written for a long time—always written.”

“How old are you, please?”

“Nineteen—but I have lived in a writing house always.”

“Where is your house? I have been to Los Angeles.”

“Back in a canyon near Santa Monica and my father is there now—in his slippers. He teaches every one how to write——” There was something baleful in the girl’s blue eyes, or perhaps it was exhaustion, as she smiled.

“Does he write stories?”

“No, metaphysics, but he knows everything——”

“What is your name?”

“Musser—Pidge Musser. Not Pidge, really. Pandora[6] is my name, but every one calls me Pidge. My father started it.”

“Is his name Adolph Musser?”

In the dimness, the girl’s face looked like a blur of white; a little stretched, too, it appeared just now.

“Yes, that’s his name,” she said in a hopeless tone. “So you know him, too?”

“I heard him lecture once.”

“I suppose you ‘fell for’ him? They all do.”

The woman’s black eyes twinkled. “The lecture was on cosmic consciousness,” she said. “I remember distinctly that Mr. Musser outlined four paths of approach.”

“Yes, the mystical, the occult, the mathematical, and the artistic. Did he talk in bare feet?”

“Yes, and an Eastern robe.”

“That was a camel driver’s robe,” said the girl. “Oh, I didn’t think I’d hear of him here.”

“You won’t. May I call you Pidge?”

“Yes, what you like. My father names everything.”

“It sounds better than Pandora—at least, to me.... I must go down now. A little breakfast party is waiting there. Take off your things. I’ll come back soon. I am Miss Claes and I want to come back already.”

Pidge Musser sat almost in the center of her room, but not quite. At least, she sat in the center of the stiff little cot. She could touch two of the walls. The third was across the narrow aisle from the cot. The fourth was the windowed one, which looked as if it[7] were about to be bricked up entirely. That was quite a distance.

Her room. She was alone. She looked at the door, arose, brought in the key and turned it from the inside. Alone, and this was New York. She could live a month anyway, and write and write on The Lance of the Rivernais. She could be herself and not be told how to live and love and write and bathe and breathe, and change her polarity and promote her spirit and govern her temper and appetites, by a man who was governed by anything but himself.

New York. She had hardly dared to look at it on the way from the train to Washington Square, where the street car had put her down. She had come to Washington Square because one of the boys who studied with her father had said it was the best place to live in all the big town—the cheapest and friendliest and quietest.... It appeared all true, but Miss Claes wasn’t like a rooming-house landlady; quite different, in fact, and astonishing.

“I could hear her talk about New York, forever,” Pidge said half aloud, and this was a remark of considerable force from one who had known the maiming of many words.

Presently she would go out and look at New York again; walk about a bit, keeping a mental string tied to this green house. Besides she had to rent a typewriter, but there was no rush. It was delicious sitting here alone in the gloom of midday, making the place her own, locked in—a chance at last to take a look at[8] herself and see what she was made of and think of what she was here for.

There was a mirror. It wasn’t cracked, according to tradition, but its surface had frozen over in a high wind. Everything waved, eternally waved. It gave the sense of air in the room, and made one look mended. Pidge hoped she would never shed tears in that mirror. Once she had caught herself weeping, and she looked so abysmal that she was almost frightened out of the habit. With these waves added—— Pidge took off her hat and flipped it over on the cot. Her head didn’t look natural, but that wasn’t all the mirror’s fault. One of the things she had wanted to do for months was to make her hair a shade redder than it was. Of course, she hadn’t dared at home, and she couldn’t manage it on the train, but there had been six hours to wait in Chicago and a small hotel room that frightened her yet. She had emerged from that room a different shade, so Chicago meant henna and rain and a frightful hotel. It would always be so. She had been against landing in New York one color and then changing. She had wanted to start life new in New York and keep it

straight, an absolutely new page, a new book.

Her reddened hair waved. It made her face look whiter, and brought out a red tint to her wool dress that had been brown as apple-butter before.

Everything about her was tired. If she took off her new shoes she was afraid she would never get them on again to-day, and she had to think of renting that typewriter. A little later, she sat up straight, because[9] through the wall from the next room back came the buzz of a machine. She listened with a thrill. It stopped and went on—unequal stops and buzzes of rapid typing for several minutes; then a long sustained buzz, until a sheet was changed. No commercial typewriting. That was “creative” stuff, as her father would say—a word she had vowed never to use. At least, some one in there was doing a letter.

All this was before noon on an October day in the good year of 1913, before anything ever happened to anybody.

II THE COLORED MAN

Once there was an old sculptor who had apprentices. Townsfolk were invited on a certain day to look at the work of the young men. One of the apprentices was greatly worried by the faulty light of the shop in which his exhibit was placed. He complained about it to his master, who is said to have answered in these terms: “Never mind, son, about the light here. It is the light of the public square that tells the story.”

RICHARD COBDEN was twenty-one in 1910, and fresh from his university, when he took his first job as reader in the editorial office of The Public Square, a weekly magazine of opinion and protest and qualified patriotism. This was the publication of old John Higgins, at one time one of the highest-priced editorial writers in New York; but Higgins’ views had become more and more strenuous, instead of mollifying with the years, the end of which is to publish for one’s self or subside. Even in The Public Square he found himself under a pull. He wanted a living out of his magazine, but did not expect to make money. He occasionally drank himself ill for a day or two. One of his aspirations was to publish a distinguished short story in each issue, the shorter the better.

“But there aren’t fifty a year,” he frequently said.[11] “There aren’t ten, but we get two or three of them.”

Richard Cobden came of a well-established New York family of merchants and manufacturers. There was no traceable connection, so far as the family knew, with the English Cobdens, of whom there had been a brave Richard of free trade and free speech. Dicky’s great-grandfather was the Richard Cobden who first made the Cobden trowel, hand-forged in a little shop up Yonkers way, and made it so well that stone masons used to drive from far in back country to his shop. The Cobdens had made and dealt in hardware ever since, but the trowel was the Cobden cachet.

Dicky was now twenty-four. His eyes were strong and so were his enthusiasms. These strengths stood him in good stead against the vast masses of evil typing and the revelations of human frailty contained in a myriad manuscript attempts. There was a mere screen between his desk and the desk of John Higgins. One winter afternoon, Dicky was interrupted by talk between the chief and the office boy:

“That colored guy in the reception room won’t go ’way,” the boy said.

“What guy is that?” Higgins asked.

“The one I told you about two hours ago when you came back from lunch.”

“What does he want?”

“He’s got a story. He says he’ll wait for you.”

“What’s his name?”

“It ain’t a natcherl name. He says the name doesn’t matter—that you don’t know him, anyway.”

[12]“Tell him to leave his manuscript.”

“He won’t. Every little while he pulls up his sock.”

“Let him sit a bit longer. It’s a regular park bench out there, anyway——”

It was the dragging sock that attracted Dicky Cobden—a bit of mindless art on the part of the office boy that somehow aroused the young man by the dreary manuscript pile. Dicky’s world was now full of people who thought they had the story of the age; people who wanted to see the publisher himself; people afraid to trust their manuscripts to the mails; a world of such, coming up through great tribulation, but only here and there a dragging sock. He took a chance now and volunteered to Higgins to clear that bit of seat space in the reception room, if possible.

A dark-faced young man arose to meet him outside. Tired—that was the word that bored into Cobden’s mind with new meaning. There was something potent in the weariness of the black eyes, a deadly sort of patience that rarely goes with brilliance. Dicky was slightly above medium height. The other’s eyes were level with his own. The hanging sock was not in evidence, but Dicky felt that the stranger didn’t dare to move fast, for fear his clothes would break.

“Yet he feels clean,” he thought, “yet he feels clean.” This was important enough to repeat.

“I have a story——”

“Your name?”

“It is Naidu—but not known.”

“Are you from India?”

[13]“Yes.”

“Why not let us have your story to read?”

“It must be read now.”

“This sort of thing isn’t done while one waits, you know.”

“I’m afraid this one will have to be done so.”

“Why, even if it’s promising,” Dicky declared severely, “it would have to be read several times.”

“I’ll wait.”

“But we have hundreds——”

“I know—may I not see the chief editor?”

Mr. Naidu turned slowly back to the bench, as if to resume his seat.

“You win,” Dicky slowly said. “I’ll take the story and read it now, though I’m only a deck hand. If it looks good enough, I’ll try to get Mr. Higgins to look——”

Five minutes after that, Dicky was deep in South Africa. Six thousand words in neat but faded typing, called The Little Man, about a diminutive Hindu person who appeared to have no other business in life but to stand up for the under dog. This person would fight anything, but the British Government was about the size of a foe he liked best—a cheerful story of most shocking suffering, which the Little Man took upon himself for the natives of Natal—no, not the natives, but for the Hindu laborers who had come to Africa to settle. A clear, burning patience through the pages; everything was carried in solution—all one breath, sustained. It[14] wasn’t writing. It was living. It slid on with a soft inevitable rhythm, and it took Dicky along.

More than this, he saw in the story—or in the great stillness which the story brought him—something of the sort of thing he meant to write some day. Nothing exactly like this, of course, but the achievement of this unfettered ease. It made him want to start out at once to find the Little Man. It made him hear from Africa something like a personal call. He let himself dream for a moment. Wouldn’t it be great, his mind-made picture ran, when he had done a real story of his own—wouldn’t it be great to deliver it like this (or perhaps sockless) and make it sell itself? Halfway through, he arose and dumped the sheets he had read before Higgins’ spectacles, saying with slow-measured calm:

“She breathes. She’s a leaping trout!”

“Get out,” said Higgins softly.

“That’s only half,” said Cobden.

“Where’s the rest?”

“I’ve got it in there—not read yet.”

“And you bring this to me?”

“He’s waiting. This story will finish itself. I know it will march straight.”

While he read the second half, Dicky heard Higgins thresh and mutter, and finally call for the rest—old sore-eyed Higgins, who knew a story when he saw one, who had read his eyes out on poor stories looking for the Story of the Age....

Dicky went back to the reception room.

“I’ve read it. Mr. Higgins is reading it now. I[15] think he’ll want it, Mr. Naidu. If you leave your address, we’ll mail you an offer to-morrow——”

“I will take two hundred dollars for the story, but I must have the money to-day.”

Dicky laughed quietly. “I’m afraid the countingroom won’t appreciate that. Countingroom’s not adaptable. It’s intricate, in fact; checks signed and countersigned.... Besides your price is severe for us—unknown name and all that. Oh, it’s not too much, only for us, you know.”

All the time he talked, Dicky knew Mr. Naidu would get his money, and get it to-day. A man with a story like this could get anything. He could write it on wood chips and bring the manuscript in a gunny sack....

“I’ll give him my personal check,” he told Higgins, a moment later. “The office can reimburse me.”

“I always forget you have a piece of change in your own name,” Higgins remarked indulgently. “Don’t ever let it interfere with your work, Dicky.”

“My work to-day is to get that manuscript in our vault. Later,” he added to himself, “my work is to write a story as good as that.”

“He might take less than two hundred——” John Higgins suggested in uncertain tone.

“I can’t bring that up—again,” Dicky said.

“I couldn’t either,” said the editor. “Maybe we are both crazy with the heat—steam heat. But I’ll stand by and see that you get your money. You’ll[16] have to go out with him to get cash on your personal check.”

Dicky and Mr. Naidu were in the street. It was too late for the bank, but the son of the trowel makers found a friend of the family with currency. A rainy dusk in Twenty-third Street near the Avenue, when he took Mr. Naidu’s hand, having turned over the money.

“I have your address, I may hunt you up. You won’t forget The Public Square, when you have another story as good as this?”

“Oh, no,” said the Hindu, “nor you, Mr. Cobden. Good-by.”