She sank back, laughing. “I wonder if it will stay as deadly clear as this?”
“You are not making it quite clear to me,” he said.
“I must. 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. Always remember that I know you underneath; that I turn to you in trouble—not like a brother or father or lover, but what our word comrade means—what it will sometime mean to many people! That’s you. But, Dicky, because I know you—I can look away! Don’t you see—you’re like something done! Having found you, I can turn to other things.”
“I’ll try to see that, but most people find each other differently, to stay——”
“It’s because they don’t find what I’ve found. I don’t know what I want, only I know there are terrible undone things in me, that other people stir to life. I’m lost in persons. Miss Claes and Nagar lose themselves in nations. You’re getting to be like them, but I see it all in the personal!... Listen, Dicky, if you were to get a woman to take to your house—one ready to go in and be a Cobden and a mother of Cobdens—I could love her! I could hold to you just as close, though secretly. I would expect you to be my comrade just the same—I mean just between us—never on the outside, perhaps. What I mean is, it wouldn’t hurt me—not the thing we have together.”
His car had come to a stand in the stillness of Harrow Street, but still they sat.