The Public Square

by Will Levington Comfort

Her old wonder of New York came back, as she thought that she was being flashed fifty miles an hour from the junction at Ninety-sixth Street down to Forty-second Street, under the busiest streets and corners of America. Mere men could manage much. Then the old agony stole in—“the freedom of ignorance.” Surely no one had ever been punished for doing a book as she had been punished: that it was so poor, as to prove a temptation for John Higgins to publish it, because of its chance of falling exactly into the fancy of these—the myriad of shopgirls in the uptown locals and expresses, crashing by in thick ropes of white light. As for the public taste, Dicky Cobden had told her that John Higgins had confessed, speaking wearily and with a smile that had lost its sting of reproach, that for thirty years he had been choosing stories for people to read, and every year he had been forced to lower his estimate as to what the public taste was. Even so, John Higgins had said he was far from the level; that only a trade mind could get stories banal enough. But hers might interest that public.

She was so tired.... For somebody’s shoulder to lean against! Pidge knew what Fanny Gallup felt, what the other factory girls felt, when they pushed out so brazenly toward men—in very clumsiness from hard pressure, spoiling their chances of being treated on the square. Yes, she was really learning what the girls felt, as they hunted their own in the masses of men they passed—how tired, hungry, blurred, unsatisfied their hearts—anything to escape the withering grind of the mills and the counters and the shops. She knew the secret bloom they felt, the terrible brief drive of it—childhood, girlhood and youth, all passing like the uptown trains—a home, a man, a child of their own, the one chance for a breath of life. Of course, they talked of nothing else, in the closets and dressing rooms, in the cars and streets; and read nothing else. Certainly their dreams had to come true in books and plays, even if they didn’t in life. Life would break the dream soon enough. The best life could do didn’t compare with the lowliest dream; for the dream of a girl has glamour, and the life of a woman is stripped. But that was no reason why books and plays should tear off the glamour ahead of time.

It wasn’t that Pidge loved shopgirls and mill girls. She didn’t love herself for sharing their lot. She wasn’t sentimental at all. She recognized bad management somewhere that forced her to this work. She had to have bread, and outer and under clothing. She paid the price, but there was nothing good nor virtuous about it. She didn’t hate Dicky Cobden when he spoke of “shopgirl literature”; she knew how rotten it was, but there was something in her that belonged to it, or she wouldn’t have been in the factory; moreover, that something had helped to write the Lance.

... Somebody’s shoulder. Three months of tin cans was teaching that very well.... And there was a shoulder, straight and steady—a kind of mockery about it, because it was so fine. None of the girls at the big table where she worked would have asked more. It meant books and pictures and all the dining tables of New York; plays and dresses, cleanliness, and all the little coaxing cushions and covers of this arrogant modern hour. It meant all the old solid established joys of place and plenty; all the writing she liked; a leisurely winning of her way through magazines and publishing houses; nothing of Grub Street and the conspiracy against an unknown outsider....

And this life of the factory—hadn’t she earned release? What more could come of the grinding monotony of the days but a more passionate agony to escape, through the under world, or the upper world, through any route at all, even death itself? Was there a further lesson than this?... Somebody’s shoulder. 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. Of course, another man might act that way, but it was different the way Dicky did it. He had been at school late, and for nearly four years in the office of The Public Square he had bored steadily, craftily toward the center of the life of letters. Work had been his passion up to that day in which he had called to see Nagar, and fell under the spell of Miss Claes and Harrow Street.... There was enough of the artist and dreamer in him to keep life from being tame, yet not enough to make life a maze and a madness. He had health. Money was to him like an old custom, so established as to be forgotten....

Fourteenth Street. Pidge didn’t hear the first call and hopped off with a rush at the second, pulling a growl from the gateman as she sped out.... Dicky was standing at the head of the stairs on the second floor of the Harrow Street house.

“Hello, Pidge,” he said.

“Hello,” she answered, pushing past, but he caught her arm.

“Let me go, please! I haven’t washed yet——”