“She’s in, but I must say, sir, she took a long time about it.”

“But that cannot be!” Dicky answered.

Now the Englishman stared, this being the peerless rebuke. Moreover, he observed that the American had a sudden withered look, and presumed that he was a mere upstart person. Accordingly, the Englishman refixed his triple focus on the ship’s promenade deck, and Cobden tunneled into the bus for the King George. There he verified the news. He went to his room a bit whipped, quite a little bit whipped. He wanted to be alone. For two years he had written and felt for America as only an exile can. He had believed in her luck and native horse sense in the midst of the mess other countries were making of their national lives.

Something snapped when he had been alone in his room for a while. It was Dicky’s romantic allegiance to the country of his school histories. For the present he was a man without national gravity, and a sick man since some hot, hard-held part of himself had been ripped out.

He had missed his mail in Aden and left word for it to be forwarded to Bombay on the next steamer. A cablegram from his newspaper connection, rewired from Aden, not only counseled him to make haste to double back to France (to be on the spot to greet the first American military arrivals), but accepted it as settled that there was nothing else for a man of his equipment now to do. The message was actually elate with the “doings” ahead, but Dicky Cobden didn’t see it that way. The fact is, he was sore, personally sore, at what had happened and didn’t care who knew it. The following ship brought his mail, including a letter from Pidge Musser, which he opened with an old and ugly fear, and in this letter the worst that he had ever feared fell upon him:

... Oh, Dicky, there is no other way. I’ve tried to dodge it, but it has to be told now, that I have taken Rufus Melton. Why did I do it? I don’t know, unless it is that I am evil and unfinished and answer to the evil and unfinished in him. He draws me terribly, but at the same time, I am not deluded. There is never a moment with him that is not unmixed with pain.... I wonder if you can believe that I did not do this thing for happiness; that the happiest moments I have ever known have come from my work with John Higgins and my friendship with you? And can you ever believe that I am no farther from you now, in that mysterious comrade way?... Oh, Life is not like books, Dicky, not at all like what we are taught it is. I have a relation to him. I answer some terrible drawing need—like a child crying for me. But I have a relation to you, too, only different. You mean rest, something done. He means the unfinished. He brings a mirror to me, and says, “Look!” I want to scream, because the mirror brings out all my defects. That’s what his presence means.... This is one true thing, Dicky. The one who can rouse the most hell in your breast is the one to whom you belong for the time. At least, that is true to me.... Have I not been grateful for your stability? And have I not been proud for your moving so quietly up and down the East, keeping your surfaces clean for the world events to be pictured there without twist or falsehood?... A strange door was opened in my being when I was a child. In and out that door, whether I will or not, you often come and go. “He is my friend,” I whisper, “my friend”——and repeat it a thousand times.

XXIII
THE RED ROOM

LINE by line the thing was killing him. He got up and crossed the heavy red carpet to the hall door and turned the key in the lock. He was afraid some one would come in and find him. He had the strange power of partly seeing himself, as the sullen horrors of hatred and revolt boiled up in his breast. Vaguely, but quite well enough, he could watch the man called Richard Cobden in the dim hotel room, the shoulders hunched, the mouth stretched and crooked; unable to sit still, the face wet with poisonous sweat.

The love had gone out of him, and with it, all the light he had. He thought he had known pain and loneliness since leaving New York, but all he had known was humming content compared to now, because there had been a laughing idolatry for all her ways and words, a reliance upon her that he had dared to call absolute. “Understand, understand!” she had cried all through the letter.... Oh yes, he could understand. She wasn’t what he had made her out to be—that was clear enough. He had built upon something which wasn’t there. He had believed her to be—built into himself the conviction—that she was the honestest thing alive, and here she was——

His thought shot back to the night of the Punjabi dinner. That little basement room was devastated before his mind, the table overturned, the face of Miss Claes a mockery, the face of Pidge Musser—that of an American girl found out. Into the center of his consciousness was now flung his old promise not to hate.... He heard his own laughter. He saw his own stretched and twisted mouth from which it came. Like a couple of sly schoolgirls, they looked at him now—Pidge and Miss Claes—slyly pulling together and duping a fat boy....