Summer days in New York, sleepy stewy days. The low clouds made the nights hot. Pidge was used to the “high sky” of Southern California where every inch of shadow meant coolness, where cool night fell quickly no matter how hot it had been in the sun, where there were no afterglows, nor afterheats, and you wanted a wrap the instant the sun went down. The meaning of summer in New York became a cruel meaning, in the little room off the area. It gave her an astonishing grasp of what people suffered in the tenements.
Two weeks after the copy arrived from Africa, the galleys came up on the Cobden articles, and Pidge asked permission to take a set home to show two friends of Dicky’s in Harrow Street. John Higgins acquiesced. Pidge delivered these to Miss Claes and forgot all about it, until the next night when she returned to the house after dinner, and Miss Claes called her from the door of Cobden’s “parlor.”
“Come in, Pidge, and we’ll shut everything out.”
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. He offers himself to it, but his writing contains a confession with the weariness of the ages on it, that he has nothing to give—that he is a sham like all the rest. There’s not a self-pose in all his pages.”
Nagar had slipped out. Miss Claes came close and added softly:
“Richard is finer than we knew, Pidge. What happened here in this house has prepared him—always the wrecker before the builder.”
“You mean, I’m the wrecker?”
“You couldn’t have done differently.... Too bad he isn’t to see Mohandas Gandhi. Nagar has received word that the Little Man is returning to India. Richard didn’t go to Natal first.”
“He’ll be so sorry,” Pidge said. “It was Nagar’s story that drew him to Africa——”