“You know, my reading is merely—I mean Mr. Higgins would have to decide.”
“But it would help—if the story pleased you—help to pass the night!”
“You may leave it with Miss Claes at the basement entrance and call a little later.”
Pidge found herself walking on tiptoe back to her desk, the catch still in her throat.
XII
UNDER THE SAME LAMP
THE manuscript was delivered while Pidge was out to supper. She took it upstairs to Cobden’s “parlor” and read with a nervous interest, and an uncomfortable feeling that Rufus Melton was looking down at her all the time. She didn’t lose herself in the story, but the feeling persisted that she might have done so, another time—especially if the manuscript had come to her in the usual way at the office. Certainly it was different and distinctive, compared to the run of the unsolicited. It was artful, if not art.... She heard Nagar’s quiet steady step as he passed up to his room. She had an impulse to ask him to read, but he wouldn’t say anything. Anyway, he was gone now.
This was a story of the Tunisian sands, written, she decided, by one who hadn’t been there; one who saw the desert as the average American reader would expect, but with additional flatfooted bits of color tramped down with audacity. Moonlight was different in Tunisia, and morals were different—freer than here. There was the glitter of the snake’s eye through the pages, for Pidge Musser. It made her think of a sick man in a gorgeous robe.
She had inferred from Melton’s talk that this story was new; in fact, that it was still hot from his machine. Yet the manuscript didn’t feel new; the front and back pages showed wear. Could she have misunderstood?... It had freedom; not the freedom of ignorance, but the freedom of a drifting ship. Its anchor dragged, its compass was uncentered. It cried out, “My God, I am free!” and it was, as a derelict is free.
At a quarter of ten, she heard the bell in the basement hall; heard Miss Claes directing Melton to the next floor. Pidge would not have had it this way, but people of the house were in the basement. He came up out of the dim stairway, walking wide, his soft cap crumpled in his hand, elbows out. He must have learned her name from Miss Claes.
“You mustn’t think, Miss Musser, that I don’t know how much I am asking—this favor of yours to-night.”