Will Levington Comfort

“ Oh, I must. Dicky, please open your soul and listen to me—hard, hard! While it’s clear, I must talk. You’ve chosen to be my friend. You’ve chosen not to take the easier course of hating me. I understand all that better now than the night of the Punjabi dinner.”
“I do, too,” said Cobden, and bitterness of the African rivers was in his words.
“Do I have to begin by saying how dear you are—how kind, how utterly good it is to know you; what it means to have faith and trust in one man?”
“Please not, Pidge.”
“But never forget it, Dicky. It’s the pedestal upon which everything’s builded. ”

“ Pidge hadn’t caught the Spring magic coming home from the factory, but now as they walked down Sixth Avenue under the momentary crashes of the Elevated—it stole up out of the pavements as if she were in a meadow—that untellable sweetness which seems the breath of Mother Nature herself, a breath made of all the perfumes of all the flowers, without accentuating one, and a sublimation of all the passions of the human heart as well. Her left hand burrowed under the hanging sleeve of Miss Claes’ wrap. ”

“ Of all keepers of the peace, Gandhi was apparently master; but in the fearlessness of the eyes that gazed on him now, Dicky fancied for a moment, at least, that he saw what British Government did not. The Little Man suddenly appeared to him as the living embodiment of the Enemy to all existing Governments, utterly terrible in stillness and poise. At the same time, Dicky didn’t lose for a moment his feeling of pity for the wasted figure before him, that tenderness which he could not even have explained to an American. ”

“ He had the native kindness of clean breeding; also that consideration for others of one who is brought up in a large house. He had an ardent interest in books and life. He was warmly established in the hearts of other men—first and last, a man’s man, which it behooves a woman to inquire into.
There was a tired smile on Pidge’s lips as the car halted at Thirty-second street.... The only blunders he had ever made were in her presence, because he cared so much. He seemed continually in awe and wonder before the thing he fancied she was, as if he had never really looked at a woman before. ”

“ 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 is called a bigot, a fanatic, a living Blue Law, and it is all true, Pidge. He is drawn in black and white. He has no half-tones, no twilights, no afterglows. He is devoid of atmosphere as the moon. His lines of light and shadow are never blent or diffused. He is vivid noon where his light strikes, densest night where light ends.... It is not that he loathes the West, but that he knows the East. He has become a specialist, as Nagar says repeatedly. He has withdrawn his attention from the world to India, Herself. ”

“ Pidge stopped. Her eyes looked dry and smarting, as if tears were on the verge.
“Oh, Miss Claes,” she went on, “I’m just as crazy as that—I mean my figures of speech! Cranking him back and forth, and in the same breath letting him stop and browse. I wish you wouldn’t bring me this stuff any more. The coffee’s so good that it hurts—and the eggs. I always cry when I’m hurt.” ”

“ Nagar was within and the galleys were stretched out under the light. Pidge had never seen Miss Claes and Nagar quite like this. They appeared happy over something they had found in Dicky Cobden’s isolation and melancholy—happy as in the news of a legacy.
“Why, don’t you see?” said Miss Claes strangely. “He’s pondering on Life! He thinks he’s reporting—when really he is giving himself to Life. The world stretches out before his eyes without glamour, stripped. ”

“ In the first few moments at the station in Ahmedabad, Dicky had himself felt unwashed and unwholesome, [162] as no man ever made him feel before. His hand went up to his chin. Yes, he had shaved that morning, but realizing it did not help much. It wasn’t the grime of travel that hurt him, but the smear of his recent mental and emotional overturning, the ugliness of all those days in the red room at Bombay, and the sense of failure and loss he lived with constantly since the coming of the letter from Pidge.
“... And the Little Man is actually here in Ahmedabad, and not a myth?” ”

“ And Pidge, who had brought it all about, listened in a sort of terror which only a woman could understand. This thing which she had aroused in him, this answer of his deep, but still vague powers, to her thoughtless challenge, frightened her now that it had come.
“Don’t, oh, don’t let’s talk any more!” she said at last. “It’s talk, Dicky, just talk. The doing is different, the doing is harder! What do we know of what life will fix for us to do day by day through the years? This thing is so hard that Miss Claes herself hated to let it out. ”

“ 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?” ”

“ Miss Claes laughed. “That is only the way you see it. Fanny isn’t heavy on us here. Not at all. It’s the dear, possessive Pidge that is hurt. Do you suppose I am torn by what goes on in the rooms and halls? Not torn beyond repair from day to day, at least. Fanny’s only a little more simple than most, a little less secretive.”
“She’s unmoral,” Pidge declared solemnly. “The awful thing is, she doesn’t learn. Life passes through her like a sieve, leaves its muck on her, and she doesn’t learn.”
Philosophy seldom helped Pidge; she had heard too much of it, and money was invariably a serious affair. ”

“ The way Nagar said to him, “my friend,” was almost Miss Claes herself. That was the poignant part of finding the Oriental again; that he brought back Harrow Street—even moments under the white light. The day would have been joyous but for the aching emptiness of heart. Dicky asked tirelessly about Gandhi, especially since it gave him such a chance to study the new Nagar.
“Mahatma-ji has burned away all waste,” Nagar said at length. “He has narrowed himself down, body and mind, to an almost perfect obedience—self-control. He measures action to all his words. ”

“ In the last three days with him, I have come to understand you as never before—and America and the American soldier. I have found out, Pidge, what you mean by stating and living the fact, that it isn’t how much one knows that counts, but how much one does. Gandhi is a doer. I used to hear in church something about the Spirit being made flesh, and now I’ve got an inkling of what that means. Gandhi’s genius doesn’t dream. It does. The sun shines on all India, but Gandhi has become a lens. ”

“ It was that curious time in America when the personal and national meaning of the European war was breaking through with all its paralyzing ramifications; when all who were sensitive at all reflected division and strife in themselves, as a deep leveling sickness.
Pidge was taken to the Cobden home, a new and terrifically complicated modern apartment in East Fiftieth Street, but the furnishings, the household ceremonials, the people themselves, suggested prints of New York interiors in 1870—respectable, established, grim. ”

“ A man didn’t need a field glass to cover the maidan. One could see the faces; one could see the fallen; one could see the writhing cords of human bodies. Oh, no, one didn’t need a field glass. One could see the thousands on the maidan now—as one up-turned face, the face of a child betrayed, but unable to believe. Fyatt merely chose this way to cover his own face. His back looked stiff and blocky as he swung slowly around behind the glasses. His shoulders and neck didn’t move. He turned from the hips, Dicky perceived, as he touched the General’s sleeve. ”

“ Life wasn’t a spiritual experiment, in matter; not an extension in matter of souls that had made innumerable such experiments, but straight work-a-day three-score-and-ten with oblivion at the birth end, and heaven or hell at the other. Here was All Time, in which it behooved man and woman to gather worldly goods and religious goods and love one another and hang together—for the rest was with God. ”

“ A great square of colored cloths in the sunlight—from twelve to fifteen thousand human beings listening [274] to a man who cried out against violence, who cried out that Sarkar couldn’t hurt his children—suddenly being ground in the great crush of Fear, being sprayed with rifle fire—blanks, of course—but to a result almost as deadly, for the people were destroying each other. They didn’t mean to, but they were trampling each other to death. Thus his mind viewed and reviewed—all this in a matter of seconds.
Now Mr. Cobden saw something he didn’t understand. ”

“ 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. ”

“ For the first time in his life, he realized that all his training to live and to write was less than straight. He had been taught half-tones, shadows to accentuate lights. Here was directness.
Gandhi resumed: “It is the sacred principle of love which moves mountains. To us is the responsibility of living out this sacred law; we are not concerned with results.”
“No such thing then as righteous anger?” Dicky asked.
“There is not for us. Anger is the misuse of force. Anger in thought is an enemy to clear thinking, to understanding. To understand is to love. ”

“ I think I find him more interesting, even than Gandhi. Sometimes he seems to contain Gandhi. But it would smash everything I have to work with, if I gave either one of them my entire belief. Yet I dread the thought of going away....
The letter from Nagar was then read slowly twice, and the smile on the face of Miss Claes gradually lost itself in a blur of white, as if twilight had crept into the basement room.
... The American whom we know never speaks directly of the one he loves; it does not seem to occur to him that we have sympathy that enfolds his secrets. ”

“ Martial Law had done its part and gone to supper. The people flocking into the maidan with moanings and horror-stricken cries now were those looking for their own. From the farthest parts of Amritsar they were drawn, from many houses to which one or more did not report for the evening meal. Living men and women—hurrying, bending—hands reaching down, hands pressed to faces—the quick and the dead. ”

“ And now, there was to go with the hum of the charka, the [169] faint fragrance of dried fruit in the air, or that sweetness one breathes in the altitudes where the sun is shining upon the great conifers.
“The world has talked much of the omnipotence of God,” Mahatma-ji went on. “India, at last, is preparing to put her faith to test. Passive resistance has been called the weapon of the weak; if this is so, the Soul is weaker than the flesh. Passive resistance calls upon its devotees to endure great suffering, even martyrdom and death. ”

“ On one side he had come to doubt the whole business; on the other he had been naïve enough half to believe that all he had to do was to enter the presence of the Indian leader to get this living thing back in his heart, this pain that had the breath of life in it. Two days [177] afterward, however, while he was deeply involved with Gandhi’s explanation of Satyagraha, taking notes so that he could put down the other’s words almost exactly, the sense of Pidge Musser’s presence and plight was suddenly with him again, renewed within him, the pity of it almost more than he could endure. ”

“ This thing, you understand, has attracted me merely as a concept, not with the dreamer’s fire at all. Short work Gandhi made of the mating of the East and West. The damsel, New India, is not ready for marriage. She is not clean. She has not found herself, therefore has not herself to give. (These are not his words, but the idea.) She must become free, before she has anything to bestow. She is just a perfumed body, which the West has already desecrated and begun to despise—merely an offering now, not a wife. ”

“ You know I hate cults and everything that apes India [29] and talks about saving the world; everybody talking about their souls, but doing the same old secret selfish things—oh, I’ve almost died of talk about all that—but for a minute, to-night under the lamp, it seemed that you knew, but had come down to brass tacks—your feet on the ground—living like the rest of us, but not ‘falling for’ love or money or fame, as we are. Are you really through talking about service—just doing it?”
Miss Claes laughed. “Such a lot of words, Pidge—about some gray hair.” ”

“ So this hadn’t come in the nature of shock; rather it was a pitiless uncovering of ugliness that had been vaguely subconscious before. What hurt her most keenly, so that she was close to crying out, as she lay beside him in the night, was the inevitable tramp of Fate, audible through it all—their meeting in Dicky’s room; Dicky’s opening of The Public Square to him in the first place; her own bringing of Fanny Gallup to this house; the weaving back and forth into one, of the different lives—even her father’s. ”

“ You stop making money and go around saying the Lord will provide. You don’t really let Him, you let other people support you and call it God’s work. You call yourself the Elect, and yet you can’t do the things that average people do. Mainly, you talk. You stop work to talk. You settle heaven and God and the soul with talk!... Oh, Dicky, that’s why I hate it all so; that’s why I’d rather be a factory girl; that’s why I’m all lame and tired about ‘ideals’ and ‘supermen’ and ‘abstractions’—because I’ve heard so much talk.... ”

“ Even his, “I could take you around to a lot of queer dumps in this man’s town,” didn’t upset anything. Altogether that day was memorable.... Once in desperate fatigue, when there were moving dark spots before her eyes in every ray of daylight, Pidge cried to Miss Claes:
“But he is lost to everything, entirely oblivious to everything but himself and his work—his stories, his fame, his winning his way!”
“I know, Pidge, but the world is on top of him yet. He is fighting his way up and out. Romance can’t be entirely satisfying, you know, when it has ambition for a rival. ”