“But he is lost to everything, entirely oblivious to everything but himself and his work—his stories, his fame, his winning his way!”
“I know, Pidge, but the world is on top of him yet. He is fighting his way up and out. Romance can’t be entirely satisfying, you know, when it has ambition for a rival. You’ve told me something about the thrall of a book in yourself—how engrossing it is.”
“That all goes out of me when I’m with him,” Pidge said suddenly. “I never thought of it before, but all that old agony to produce another book that I used to feel is gone. I seem to let him carry all that.”
“That helps for the present, doesn’t it?”
“Yes, and it isn’t all sordid—don’t think I mean that, Miss Claes. Sometimes when he’s satisfied with his story, so that he can forget it, we have such good times. He’s such a playboy, such a playmate. Some old terrible longing comes over me when we are close like that, just to be like one of the Mediterranean women, who know nothing but to replenish the earth. But it doesn’t do to dwell on that,” Pidge finished with an impressive quietness of tone. “One thing I learned rather well, before it was too late.”
“What’s that, Pidge?”
“That this isn’t the time or place for us to bring a little baby into the world.”
XXVI
THE HANGING SOCK
NAGAR was changed. On the day that Richard Cobden reached Ahmedabad, he encountered one of the surprises of his life. It was like meeting a man out in the freedom of the world, whom one had only known before in prison. Two years in the East had sharpened Dicky’s eyes to note something in Nagar’s face that he had been unable to detect before. Dicky called it cleanliness and calm, but this brought up the old difficulty which he never missed in his work of writing—that at best, words only suggest, only intimate.
In America Nagar had looked dark; here he looked fair. There he had moved in and out as one of the colored men; here he was one of the elect. There he had lived in the midst of silences and mysterious inhibitions, diminished by the garments of Western civilization; here he was white-robed in the sunlight, like young Gautama in his father’s garden. Of course, Dicky knew that the change was more substantial than that of garb or place. He could only repeat that Nagar seemed free in his own mind.