“Yours, Rufe, by all means. A fine patriotic short story at any price. But I have a job to look after, and I can’t give them a red-headed somnambulist to-morrow. No, I’m going to sleep, but I do hope you get the American flags waving all right in your story.”
“I’ll get you, Pan—for acting like this.”
“You’ve got me, dear, and don’t forget to have the hero come through with, ‘My country right or wrong.’ No girl can resist that—or editor. Good night.”
Rufe was rarely rough. He didn’t overtire or over-stimulate himself, so that his temper could easily break corral; and at its worst this temper wasn’t a man-eater. Rufe’s nervous system was cushioned in a fine layer of healthy fat, and therefore didn’t flog itself to madness against bare bone and sinew. He was merely involved in himself entirely, which makes any man naïve.
Pidge wasn’t missing any of the petty dramas of her present experience. When she came home the first time to find that he had already had dinner, something flew out of her into space in a frantic search for God. When she realized that he saw nothing but undisturbed equity in the idea of using her for his own work purposes half the night, when she was contracted to The Public Square for the days—another output of herself was loose in the solar system. When she came to understand that the tens he was earning were mysteriously his own, and that her ones were theirs—another day, at least, was spoiled for her in the editorial rooms.
Rufe thought her extremely selfish. So had her father. “Two to one,” she said. “They’ve got it on me. They’ve got it on all of us. This is their world.”... She thought of all this bitterness and bickering taking place in Nagar’s room, which Miss Claes had saved for weeks for a sort of sanctuary of her own. Mostly she was hurt by the deadly parallel of this life, with her life in Los Angeles and vicinity. To cope with this American story-man, she was forced to draw out and readjust and refurbish the old hateful mechanism that had formed within her during the nineteen years with her father. She knew how. The mechanism worked all right, but the sense of the hateful thing resuming activity within her was far harder to bear than the racket of Rufe’s typewriter when she was trying to sleep.
The fact that Rufe Melton was entirely cut off from the play of her real powers; that he thought her ridiculous, and said so, when she gave any notice of holding other than the standard American points of view on politics and religion and social ethics; this was not so serious a breach between them, as it would have been to a woman who had not come into so startling a reaction as Pidge had, against the whole system of knowing and not doing. All the knowledge that really mattered to Pidge was that working doctrine which doesn’t announce or explain, but shows itself in living the life. She was very sad, and continually sad, that she had to work upon Rufe the iron of irony, the stab so subtle that it astonishes before it hurts, and the self-control which disarms.
Sometimes Sundays or in unexpected periods of leisure they had moments of actual delight together. This occasionally happened when food just pleased him, or when an acceptance from a magazine arrived at a price which he considered adequate. (Rufus never neglected the price of his things, as an indication of his getting on.) He uncovered a real levity at such times, and their talk didn’t walk merely, then; it danced.
“We’ll go up to Harlem,” he said one Sunday morning. “I used to live up there in the colored settlement——”
Figuratively speaking, Pidge waved her hand before her own eyes to shut out the critical negatives which always arose when Rufe told of living somewhere. They went and stayed gay. When he turned from her innocently to consult a policeman in Harlem, she checked the first and last, “I told you so.” They found yams that day—yams freshly arrived from Georgia, and coffee said to be parched and dripped according to an ideal of New Orleans first families. These satisfied Rufus, and still they stayed gay. Even his, “I could take you around to a lot of queer dumps in this man’s town,” didn’t upset anything. Altogether that day was memorable.... Once in desperate fatigue, when there were moving dark spots before her eyes in every ray of daylight, Pidge cried to Miss Claes: