OUR SQUARE AND THE PEOPLE IN IT
By Samuel Hopkins Adams
Illustrated by Scott Williams
Boston and New York Houghton Mifflin Company
1917
WALLED in by slums stands Our Square, a valiant green space, far on the flank of the Great City. Ours is an inglorious little world Sociologists have-not yet remarked and classified us. The Washington Square romancers who bold sentimental revel at the foot of Fifth Avenue reck nothing of their sister park, many blocks to the east. But we are patient of our obscurity. Close-knit, keeping our own counsel, jealous of our own concerns, and not without our own pride of place, we live our quiet lives, a community sufficient unto itself. So far as may be for mortals under the sway of death and love and fate, we maintain ourselves with little change amid the kaleidoscopic shiftings of the surrounding metropolis. Few come into Our Square except of necessity. Few go out but under the same stem impulsion. Some of us are held by tradition, some by poverty, some by affection, and some through loyalty to what once was and is no more. Here we live, and here hope to die, “the kind hearts, the true hearts that loved the place of old.” And of all, there is no truer heart or kinder than that of the gentle, shrewd, and neighborly old dominie through whose lips I tell these tales, the real historian of the folk whom I, too, have known and loved in Our Square.
CONTENTS
[ A TALE OF WHITE MAGIC IN OUR SQUARE ]
[ THE MEANEST MAN IN OUR SQUARE ]
[ THE LITTLE RED 'DOCTOR OF OUR SQUARE ]
List of Illustrations
[ Whirled Her out of a Pit Of Darkness ]
[ Her Hands Slipped to his Shoulder ]
[ What Do I Owe Ye But a Curse ]
[ We Have Successfully Terminated the Negotiation ]
[ I Puh-hut It in My Huh-huh-hair ]
[ Jogging Appreciatively Along Behind Schutz's Mouse-hued Mare ]
OUR SQUARE
I
OUR Square lies broad and green and busy, in the forgotten depths of the great city. By day it is bright with the laughter of children and shrill with the bickering of neighbors. By night the voice of the spellbinder is strident on its corners, but from the remoter benches float murmurs where the young couples sit, and sighs where the old folk relax their weariness. New York knows little of Our Square, submerged as we are in a circle of slums. Yet for us, as for more Elysian fields, the crocus springs in the happy grass, the flash and song of the birds stir our trees, and Romance fans us with the wind of its imperishable wing.
The first robin was singing in our one lone lilac when the Bonnie Lassie came out of the Somewhere Else into Our Square and possessed herself of the ground floor of our smallest house, the nestly little dwelling with the quaint old door and the broad, friendly vestibule, next but one to the Greek church. Before she had been there a month she had established eminent domain over all of us. Even MacLachan, the dour tailor on the corner, used to burst into song when she passed. It was he who dubbed her the Bonnie Lassie, and as it was the first decent word he'd spoken of living being within the memory of Our Square, the name stuck. Apart from that, it was eminently appropriate. She was a small girl who might have been perhaps twenty-three or twenty-four if she hadn't (more probably) been twenty, and looked a good deal like a thoughtful kitten when she wasn't twinkling at or with somebody. When she twinkled—and she did it with eyes, voice, heart, and soul all at once—the cart-peddlers stopped business to look and listen. You can't go further than that, not in Our Square at least.
How long Cyrus the Gaunt had been there before she discovered him is a matter of conjecture. He slipped in from the Outer Darkness quite unobtrusively and sat about looking thoughtful and lonely. He was exaggeratedly long and loose and mussed-up and melancholy-looking, and first attracted local attention on a bench which several other people wanted more than he did. So he got up and gave it to them. Later, when the huskiest of them met him and explained, by way of putting him in his proper place, what would have happened to him if he hadn't been so obliging, Cyrus absent-mindedly said, “Oh, yes,” threw the belligerent one into our fountain, held him under water quite as long as was safe, dragged him out, hauled him over to Schwartz's, and bought him a drink. Thereafter Cyrus was still considered an outlander, but nobody actively objected to his sitting around Our Square, looking as melancholy and queer as he chose. Nobody, that is, until the Bonnie Lassie took him in hand.
Nothing could have been more correct than their first meeting, sanctioned as it was by the majesty of the law. Terry the Cop, who presides over the destinies of Our Square, led the Bonnie Lassie to Cyrus's bench and said; “Miss, this is the young feller you asked me about. Make you two acquainted.”
Thereupon the young man got up and said, “How-d'ye-do?” wonderingly, and the young woman nodded and said, “How-d'ye-do?” non-committally, and the young policeman strolled away, serene in the consciousness of a social duty well performed.
The Bonnie Lassie regarded her new acquaintance with soft, studious eyes. There was something discomfortingly dehumanizing in that intent appraisal. He wriggled.
“Yes, I think you'll do,” she ruminated slowly.
“Thanks,” murmured Cyrus, wondering for what.
“Suppose we sit down and talk it over,” said she.
Studying her unobtrusively from his characteristically drooping position, Cyrus wondered what this half-fairy, half-flower, with the decisive manner of a mistress of destiny, was doing in so grubby an environment.
On her part, she reflected that she had seldom encountered so homely a face, and speculated as to whether that was its sole claim to interest. Then he lifted his head; his eyes met hers, and she modified her estimate, substituting for “homely,” first “queer,” then “quaint,” and finally “unusual.” Also there was something impersonally but hauntingly reminiscent about him; something baffling and disconcerting, too. The face wasn't right.
“Do you mind answering some questions?” she asked.
“Depends,” he replied guardedly. “Well, I'll try. Do you live here?”
“Just around the corner.”
“What do you do?”
“Nothing much.”
“How long have you been doing it?”
“Too long.”
“Why don't you stop?”
For the second time Cyrus the Gaunt lifted his long, thin face and looked her in the eye. “Beautiful Incognita,” he drawled with mild impertinence, “did you write the Shorter Catechism or are you merely plagiarizing?”
“Oh!” she said. Surprise and the slightest touch of dismay were in the monosyllable. “I'm afraid I've made a mistake. I thought—the policeman said you were a down-and-outer.”
“I'm the First Honorary Vice-President of the Life Branch of the Organization.”
He slumped back into his former attitude. Again she studied him. “No, I don't understand,” she said slowly.
But the dehumanizing tone had gone from the soft voice. Cyrus began to rescue his personality from her impersonal ignoring of it. He also felt suddenly a livelier interest in life. Then, unexpectedly, she turned his flank.
“You lurk and stare at my house in the dark,” she accused.
“Which house?” he asked, startled.
“You know quite well. You shouldn't stare at strange houses. It embarrasses them.”
“Is that the miniature mansion with the little bronzes of dancing street-children in the windows?”
She nodded.
“Why shouldn't I stare? There's a secret in that house!”
“A secret? What secret?”
“The secret of happiness. Those dancing kiddies have got it. I want it. I want to know what makes'em so happy.”
“I do,” said the girl promptly.
“Yes. I shouldn't be surprised,” he assented, lifting his head to contemplate her with his direct and grave regard. “Do you live there with them?”
“They're mine. I model them. I'm a sculptor.”
“Good Lord! You! But you're a very good one, aren't you?—if you did those.”
“I've been a very bad one. Now I'm trying to be a very good one.”
A gleam of comprehension lit his eye. “Oh, then it's as a subject that you thought I'd do. You wanted to sculp me.”
“Yes, I do. For my collection. You see, I've adopted this Square.”
“And now you're sculping it. I see.” He raised himself to peer across at the windows where the blithe figures danced, tiny mænads of the gutter, Bacchæ of the asphalt. “But I don't see why on earth you want me. Do you think you could make me happy?”
“I shouldn't try.”
“Hopeless job, you think? As a sculptor you ought to be a better judge of character. You ought to pierce through the externals and perceive with your artistic eye that beneath this austere mask I'm as merry a little cricket as ever had his chirp smothered by the slings and arrows of outrageous Fortune.”
It was then that she twinkled at him, and the twinkle grew into a laugh, such golden laughter as brightened life to the limits of its farthest echo. Cyrus had the feeling that the gray April sky had momentarily opened up and sent down a sun-ray to illumine the proceedings.
“How wonderfully you mix them!” she cried. “Shall I sculp you in cap and bells?”
“Why should I let you sculp meat all?” She stopped laughing abruptly and looked up at him with wondering eyes and parted lips, drooping just the tiniest bit at the corners. “Everybody does,” she said.
At once he understood why everybody did that or anything else she wished. “All right,” he yielded. “What am I to sit for?”
“Fifty cents an hour.”
Then the Bonnie Lassie got her second surprise from him. His face changed abruptly. An almost animal eagerness shone in his eyes. “Fif-fif-fif—” he began, then recovered himself. “Pardon my performing like a deranged steam-whistle, but do I understand that you offer to pay me for sitting about doing nothing while you work? Did all those cheerful dancers in the window collect pay at that rate?”
“Some of them did. Others are my friends.”
“Ah, you draw social distinctions, I perceive.”
“I think we needn't fence,” said the girl spiritedly. “When I came to you I thought you were of Our Square. If you will tell me just what variety of masquerader you are, we shall get on faster.”
“Do you think I don't belong quite as much to Our Square as you do?”
“Oh, I! This is my workshop. This is my life. But you—I should have suspected you from the first word you spoke. What are you? Don't tell me that you are here Settlementing or Sociologizing or Improving the Condition of Somebody Else! Because I really do need your face,” she concluded with convincing earnestness. “It's yours at fifty cents an hour.”
“And you're not an Improver?”
“Absolutely not. Do I look as if I'd improved myself?”
“You wouldn't do at all for my present purpose, improved,” she observed. “Please don't forget that. When can you come to me?”
“Any time.”
“Haven't you anything else to do?”
“Nothing but look out for odd jobs. That's why I'm so grateful for regular employment.”
“But this isn't regular employment.” His face fell. “It's most irregular, and there's very little of it.”
“Oh, well, it's fifty cents an hour. And that's more than I've ever earned in my life, Miss Sculptor.”
“I am Miss Willard.”.
“Then, Miss Willard, you're employing Cyrus Murphy. Do you think I'll sculp up like a Murphy?”
“I don't think you'll sculp up like a Murphy at all, and I've too many friends who are Murphys to believe that you are one. In fact, I could do you much better if I knew what you are.”
“That's quite simple. I'm a suicide. I walked right spang over the edge of life and disappeared. Splash! Bubble-bubble! There goes nothing. The only difference between me and a real suicide is that I have to eat. At times it's difficult.”
“Haven't you any trade? Can't you do anything?” With a sweep of her little hand she indicated the bustling activities with which the outer streets whirred. “Isn't there any place for you in all this?”
He contemplated the world's work as exemplified around Our Square. His gaze came to rest upon a steam-roller, ponderously clanking over a railed-off portion of the street. “I suppose I could run that.”
“Could you? That's a man's job at least. Have you ever run one?”
“No, but I know I could. Any kind of machinery just eats out of my hand.”
“Well, that's something. It's better than being a model. Be at my house tomorrow at nine please.”
For an hour thereafter Cyrus the Gaunt sat on the bench musing upon a small, flower-like, almost absurdly efficient young person who had contracted, as he viewed it, to inject light and color into life at fifty cents an hour, and who had plainly intimated that, in her view, he was not a man. It was that precise opinion expressed by another and a very unlike person which was responsible for his being where he was. At that time it had made him furious. Now it made him thoughtful.
Presently he went through his pockets, reckoned his assets, rose up from the bench, and made a trip to MacLachan's “Home of Fashion,” where he left his clothes to be pressed overnight. In the morning he reappeared again, shaved to the closest limit of human endurance, and thus addressed the Scot:—
“Have you got my clothes pressed?”
“Aye,” said the tailor.
“Well, unpress 'em again.”
“Eh?” said the tailor.
“Unpress'em. Sit on'em. Roll'em on the floor. Muss'em up. Put all the wrinkles back, just as they were.”
“Mon, ye shud leave the whiskey be,” advised the tailor.
Thereupon Cyrus caught up his neatly creased suit and proceeded to play football with it, after which he put it on and viewed himself with satisfaction.
“And I almost forgot that she wouldn't have any use for me, improved,” he muttered as he wended his way to the little, old friendly house. “Lord, I might have lost my job!”
Any expectation of social diversion at fifty cents an hour which Cyrus the Gaunt may have cherished was promptly quashed on his arrival. It was a very businesslike little sculptor who took him in hand.
“Sit here, please—the right knee farther forward—let the chin drop a little—” and all that sort of thing.
He might not even watch the soft, strong little hands as they patted and kneaded, nor the vivid face as plastic as the material from which the hands worked their wonders, for when he attempted it:—
“I don't wish you to look at me. I wish you to look at nothing, as you do when you sit on the bench. Make your eyes tired again.”
The difficulty was that his eyes, tired so long with that weariness which lies at the very roots of being, didn't feel tired at all in the little studio. For one thing, there was an absurd, fluffed-up whirlwind of a kitten who performed miracles of obstacle-racing all over the place. Then, in the most unexpected crannies and corners lurked tiny bronzes, instinct with life: a wistful dog submitting an injured paw to a boy hardly as large as himself; “Androcles” this one was labeled. Then there was “Mystery,” a young, ill-clad girl, looking down at a dead butterfly; “Remnants,” a withered and bent old woman, staggering under her load of builders' refuse; “The Knight,” a small boy astride across the body of his drunken father, brandishing a cudgel against a circle of unseen tormentors; and many others, all vivid with that feeling for the human struggle which alone can make metal live.
“Recess!” cried the worker presently. “You're doing quite well!”
Thus encouraged, Cyrus ventured a question:—
“Where are the dancers?”
“They're all in the window.”
“But this in here is quite as big work, isn't it? Why isn't some of it on display?”
“It's for outsiders. It isn't for my people.” She put a world of protectiveness in the two final words.
“I can't see why not.”
“Because the people of Our Square don't need to be told of the tragedy of life. Joy and play and laughter is what they need. So I give it to them.”
A light came into his tired, old-young eyes. “Do you know, I begin to think you're a very wonderful person.”
“Time to work again,” said she. Whereby, being an understanding young man, he perceived that there would be no safe divergence from the strict relations of employer and employed, for the present at least. Half a dozen times he sat for her, sometimes collecting a dollar, sometimes only fifty cents, the money being invariably handed over with a demure and determined air of business procedure, and duly entered in a tiny book, which was a never-failing source of suppressed amusement to him. Then one day the basis abruptly changed, for a reason he did not learn about until long after.
It had to do with a process which I must regretfully term eavesdropping, on the part of the little sculptor. The subjects were two-on-a-bench, in Our Square. One was Cyrus the Gaunt; the other an inconsiderable and hopeless lounger, grim and wan.
Silver passed between them, and something else, less tangible, something which lighted a sudden flame of hope in the hopeless face.
“A real job?” the lurking sculptor overheard him say, hoarsely.
Cyrus nodded. “Nine o'clock to-morrow morning, here,” said he.
Slipping quietly away, the girl almost ran into the grim and wan lounger, no longer so grim and several degrees less wan, as he rounded the opposite curve of the circle and passed out on the street in front of her. The next instant Cyrus shot by her at a long-legged gallop and caught the man by the shoulder.
“Here! Wait! Not nine o'clock,” he cried breathlessly. “I forgot. I've got an engagement, a—very important business engagement.”
The other's jaw dropped. “What the—” he began, when there appeared before them both a trim and twinkling vision of femininity.
“I'm glad I saw you,” said the vision to Cyrus, “because I shan't want you until ten-thirty to-morrow.” Then she passed on, so deep in thought that she hardly responded to the greetings which accosted her on all sides. “I don't understand it at all” she murmured.
Promptly upon the morrow's hour Cyrus appeared at the studio, rumpled and mussed as usual. “How do you do?” the artist greeted him. “Before we go to work I want you to meet Fluff.”
Cyrus glanced at the kitten, who was chasing a phantom mouse up the swaying curtain. “I already know Fluff,” said he.
“Oh, no, you don't,” she corrected gently. “That is, Fluff doesn't know you. She doesn't know that you are alive. Fluff is a person of fine distinctions. Come here, Mischief.” The kitten gave over the chase, after one last lightning swipe, and trotted across the room. “Fluff,” said her mistress, “this is our friend, Cyrus.” The kitten purred and nosed Cyrus's foot.
“Thank you,” said the young man gratefully. “I also am not wholly insensible to fine distinctions. Fluff, do you know how those ancient barbarian parties looked and acted when they were called 'friend of the state of Rome'? Well, regard me.”
His employer twinkled at him with her eyes. “I've sold you,” she remarked.
“At a good price?”
“Yes. You were really very good.”
“It would have been kind to let me see myself before you bartered me away into eternal captivity.”
“Kinder not.”
“You mean I shouldn't have liked your idea of me?”
“Didn't I say that it was good?” she returned with composed pride. “My idea of you wouldn't be good, as modeling. This is the real you, the man underneath.”
“That's worse. You think I oughtn't to like myself as I am.”
She looked up at him with intimate and sympathetic friendliness. “Well, do you?” was all she said.
“Whether I do or not, it's pretty evident what you think of me.”
“It ought to be. I've introduced you to Fluff. One can't be too careful as to whom one introduces to one's young and guileless daughter.”
“Thank you.” For the first time in their acquaintance he smiled. The smile changed his face luminously.
She tossed the tiny iron with which she was working into the far corner of the studio. “That settles it,” she said. “I'm through.”
“For the day?”
“Wrong! All wrong!” she cried vehemently, disregarding his question. “Why did you have to go and smile that way? I haven't done you at all. Do you know what I've been sculping you as?”
“You wouldn't tell me, you know. Nothing very flattering, I judged.”
“As a disenchanted and uncontrolled drifter.”
“And now you think perhaps I'm not?”
“I don't know what you are, but I think I might as well be clicking the shutter of a camera, for all I've done with you. The point is, that I've come to the end of you for the present.”
“You don't want me any more?” he cried, aghast.
“If I did, you wouldn't have time. I've got you a real man's job.”
“What kind of slavery have you sold me into this time?”
“The steam-roller. I've used my influence—you don't know what a pull I've got around here—and I can name my man for the late night-shift. Will you take it?” His face was elate. “Will I take it! Will a duck eat pie?”
“I'm sure I don't know. Will it?”
“It will if it can't get anything else to eat. How long is this job good for?”
“All summer and more. How long are you?”
“Till released.”
“You have made a promise. I'll enter it in my ledger.” Which she did, writing it down in her absurd little booklet with a delicious solemnity of importance.
“But can't I come and sit for you afternoons?” he pleaded.
“How many wages do you want to earn? No; not at present. But Miss Fluff and I are at home to honest working friends on Friday evenings. Come here, Miss Fluff, and tell the new engineer that we'll be glad to have him come and tell us about the job when he's learned it.” But the kitten paid no heed, being at that moment engaged in treacherously and scientifically stalking an imaginary butterfly along the window-sill.
“Before I'm banished,” said Cyrus, “may I ask a question?”
“You might try it.”
“Do you mind telling me your given name? Not for use,” he added, as she looked up at him with her grave, speculative gaze, “but just as a guaranty of good faith. I set great store by other people's names, having been cursed since birth with my own Persian abomination.”
“I don't think Cyrus is bad at all,” she said. “Mine is Carol.”
“Oh,” said he blankly.
“Don't you like it?”
“It's a very nice name, for some people,” he said guardedly.
“You don't like it. Why?”
There was no evading the directness of that demand. “I never knew but one girl named Carol,” he said. “She squinted.”
“What of it? I don't squint. Do I? Do I? DO I?”
With each repetition of her defiance she took one step nearer him, until at the last she was fairly standing on tiptoe under his nose. Cyrus the Gaunt looked down into those radiant eyes that grew wider and deeper and deeper and wider, until his heart, which had been slipping perilously of late, fell into them and was hopelessly lost. “Do I?” she demanded once more.
Cyrus responded with a loud yell. Inappropriate as the outcry was, it saved a situation becoming potentially dangerous, for not far below those luminous eyes was a dimple that flickered at the corner of a challenging mouth; unconsciously challenging, doubtless, yet—And then Fluff, opportunely descrying her imaginary butterfly on the side of Cyrus's trouser-leg, made a flying leap and drove ten keen claws through the fabric into the skin beneath. Her mistress dislodged the too ardent entomologist, and apologized demurely.
“You see,” said she, “you've become an intimate of the household. When you're too busy to come and see us, Fluff and I will peek out and admire you as you go plunging past on your irresistible course.”
“It's going to be a lonely job,” said Cyrus the Gaunt wistfully, “compared to this one.”
“Nonsense!” she retorted briskly as she handed him a dollar bill. “Here's your pay. You'll be too busy to be lonely. Good luck, Mr. Engineer.”
II
Thus Cyrus the Gaunt became a toiler in, and by slow degrees a citizen of, Our Square. We are a doubtful people where strangers are concerned. The ritual of initiation for Cyrus was, at first, chance words and offhand nods, then an occasional bidding to sit in at Schwartz's, and finally consultations and confidences on matters of import, political, social, or private. Thus was Cyrus the Gaunt adopted as one of us. Quite from the outset of his job he became a notable pictorial asset of the place, standing out, lank and black, in the intermittent gleam of his own engine, as he rolled on his appointed course amidst firmamental thunderings. Acting as chauffeur to ten tons of ill-balanced metal, he promptly discovered, is an occupation to which the tyro must pay explicit heed if he would keep within the bounds of his precinct. About the time when he was beginning to feel at ease with his charger, he came to a stop, one misty night, directly opposite the window of a taxicab, and met a pair of eyes which straightway became fixed in a paralysis of amazed doubt.
“No; it isn't. It can't be,” said the owner of the eyes presently.
“Yes, it is,” contradicted Cyrus.
“Well, I'm jiggered!”
“That's all that the pious young Presbyterian boss of a fashionable church has a right to be.”
“What are you doing up there?”
“Piloting a submarine under Governor's Island.”
“So I see.” The taxi-door opened, and some six feet of well-tailored manhood mounted nimbly to Cyrus's side. “What's the fare? And why? Is it a bet?”
Cyrus the Gaunt grinned amiably in the face of the Reverend Morris Cartwright, whose appearance in that quarter did not greatly surprise him. “How did you know? It's leaked out at the club, has it?”
“Not that I know of. I guessed it.”
“Thought nothing short of a bet would account for such a reversal of form, eh? Keep it to yourself, and I'll tell you the rest.”
“You've hired an ear,” observed the young cleric.
“Maybe you heard that I had a nervous breakdown last spring. Kind of a mixture of things.”
“Yes; I know the mixture. Three of gin to one of Italian.”
“You know too much for a minister,” growled the other. “Besides, it was only part that. I just sort of got sick of doing nothing and being nothing, and the sickness struck in, I expect. Well, one morning, after a night of bridge, I came out into the breakfast-room nine hundred plus to the good, and about ready to invest the whole in any kind of painless dope that would save me from being bored with this life any more. There sat Doc Gerritt, pink and smooth like a cherry-stone clam. I stuck out my hand, and it was shaking. I dare say my voice was shaking, too, for Gerry looked up pretty sharp, when I said, 'Doc, can you do anything for me?' 'No,' says he. 'Is it as bad as that?' I asked. 'It's worse,' says he. 'I'm a busy man with no time to waste on sure losses. Flat down, Cyrus, you aren't worth it.' 'This is all I've got of me,' I said. 'I'm worth it to myself.' 'Then do it for yourself,' he snapped. 'You're the only one that can.' 'Will you tell me how?' 'I will,' says he. 'But you won't do it. You aren't man enough.' 'Gerry,' I said, 'you may be a good doctor, but you're a damn liar.' 'Am I?' says he. 'Prove it. Cut the booze and go to work.' 'Work won't do me any good,' I said. 'I've tried it, and it bored me worse than the other thing. When I'm bored, I naturally reach for a drink.' (There's a great truth in that, you know, Carty, if the temperance people would only grab it: boredom and booze —cause and effect.) 'That's a hot line of advice, Doc,' I said. 'Maybe you'll think better of it when you get my bill for fifty,' says he. (I got it, too. I've still got it.) 'I don't mean Wall Street, Cyrus,' says he. 'I mean work. You've never tried work. You've just played at it. I'll bet you a thousand,' he went on (he was playing me up to this all the time, Carty), 'that you'd starve in six months if you tried to make your living where nobody knows you.' Well, Carty, you know how I am with a bet. It comes just as natural to me to say 'You're on,' as 'Here's how,' or 'Have another.' I said it, and here I am. I'll bet Doc Gerritt's laughing yet,” he concluded with a wry face.
“They say he's the best diagnostician going, in his own line.” The young clergyman studied Cyrus out of the corner of his eye. “I wouldn't wonder if it were true. How do you like the prescription so far?”
“Interesting,” said Cyrus the Gaunt. “I've been hungry, and I've been lonely, and I've been scared, and I've even been near-yellow, but I haven't been bored for a minute. You never get bored, Carty, when you have the probabilities of your next meal to speculate on, pro and con. Odd jobs have been my stay mostly, before I landed this. And when there wasn't anything in my own line, I kept up my nerve by catching 'em on the way down and shoving 'em into jobs on Jink Hereford's Canadian preserve.”
“Good man!” approved the Reverend Morris Cartwright. “What'll you have?” he added.
“Frankfurters and a glass of milk, if it's an open order. But you'll have to fetch it to me from Schwartz's. I can't leave this here skittish little pet of mine.”
Then and there some Sunday supplement missed a “throbbing human-interest story” in that no reporter was present to witness one of New York's fashionable young pastors emerging from an obscure saloon bearing food and drink to the grimy driver of an all-night thunder-wagon.
“And now,” said Cyrus the Gaunt, handing down the empty glass, “if it isn't one of your disgraceful secrets, what are you doing in this galley? Heading off some poor unfortunate who wants to go to the devil peacefully, in his own way?”
“No, I leave that to the doctors,” retorted the other mildly.
“Quite so,” chuckled Cyrus. “Throw some water in my face and drag me to my corner, will you?”
“This is an errand of diplomacy,” continued Cartwright. “I'm an envoy. Do you happen to know which house—” His ranging vision fell upon the row of figures joyously dancing in the window. “Never mind,” he said, “I've found it.” He disappeared between the portals of the old-fashioned, hospitable door.
Quite a considerable part of his week's wages would Cyrus the Gaunt have forfeited to interpret the visitor's expression when he came out, a long hour later. He looked at once harassed, regretful, and yet triumphant, as one might look who had achieved the object of a thankless errand.
The Bonnie Lassie came to the door with him and stood gazing out across the flaring lights and quivering shadows of Our Square. It seemed to Cyrus that the flower-face drooped a little.
And indeed the Bonnie Lassie was not feeling very happy. When one's adopted world goes well, the claims that draw one back become irksome ties. The messenger from the world which she had temporarily foregone was far from welcome. But at least she had claimed and won some months of respite and freedom for her work.
So engrossed did she become with that work that she saw little or nothing of Cyrus the Gaunt until Chance brought them together in the climatic fashion so dear to that Protean arbiter of destinies. Returning one evening from a call upon a small invalid friend in a tenement quite remote from Our Square, the Bonnie Lassie essayed a cross-cut which skirted the mouth of a blind alley. From within there sounded a woman's scream of pain and fear.
The Bonnie Lassie hesitated. It was a forbidding alley, and the scream was not inspiriting. It was repeated. Not for nothing is one undisputed empress of Our Square. The Bonnie Lassie had the courage of one who rules. She swooped into that black byway like a swallow entering a cave. Now the screams were muffled, with a grisly, choked sound. They led her flying feet toward a narrow side passage. But before she reached the turn, a towering bulk sped by her, almost filling the thin slit between the walls.
When she came within view, the matter was apparently settled. A swarthy, vividly clad woman cringed against one wall. Against the other Cyrus had pinned a swarthier man. The man, helpless, seemed to be wheedling and promising. With a final shake and a growl—the girl likened it in her mind to that of a great, magnanimous dog—the gaunt one released the Sicilian and stopped to pick up his hat, which had fallen in the struggle. Then the girl's heart leaped and clogged her throat with terror, for, as Cyrus turned, the pretense fell from the face of his opponent and it changed to a mask of murder. His hand darted to his breast and came forth clutching the thin, terrible, homemade stiletto of the rag-picking tribe, a file ground to a rounded needle-point. The girl strove to cry out. It seemed to her only the whisper of a nightmare. But it was enough.
Cyrus spun around and leaped back. His arm went out stiff as a bar. At the end of it was a formidable something which flashed with an ugly glint of metal in the Sicilian's face. Whether or not she heard a report, the terror-stricken onlooker could not have said. But the would-be murderer screamed, tottered, withered. His weapon tinkled upon the coping. Then an arm of inordinate size and strength encircled the Bonnie Lassie, whirled her up out of a pit of blackness, and supported her through a reeling world. At her ear a quietly urgent voice kept insisting that she must walk—walk—walk, and not let herself lapse. A shock jolted her brain. It was the smell of ammonia. The darkness dissipated, became an almost intolerable light, and she found herself seated opposite Cyrus the Gaunt at a polished metal table in an ice cream parlor.
“Don't let go of my hand,” she whispered faintly.
His big, reassuring clasp tightened. “We got away before the crowd came,” he said. “You have wonderful nerve. I thought you were gone.”
“Don't speak of it,” she shuddered. “I can't stand it.”
Not until, after a slow, silent walk, they were seated on a bench in Our Square could she gather her resolution for the dreadful question. “Did you kill him?”
“Good Lord, no!”
Whirled her up out of a pit of blackness, and supported her through a reeling world.
“But—but—you shot him!”
“Yes, with this.” He thrust his hand in his pocket, and again, as she closed her eyes against the sight, she caught faintly the pungent stimulus that had revived her.
“What is it?”
“Ammonia-pop. Model of my own.” Her eyes flew open, the color flooded into her cheeks, but receded again. “He might have killed you!” she exclaimed. “I thought when you turned away and I saw the dagger that— Oh, how could you take such a desperate chance?”
“Just fool-in-the-head, I guess. I supposed he was through. Don't know that breed, you see. But for you, he'd have got me.”
“But for you,” she retorted, “I don't know what might have happened to me. How came you to be down in that slum?”
“Oh,” said he carelessly, “I prowl.”
“As far away as that?” She looked at him, sidelong.
“All around. I know that neighborhood like a book.”
“What's the name of that alley?”
“Alley? Er—what alley?”
“Mr. Cyrus Murphy, how long have you been following me about?”
He turned an unpicturesque, dull red. “Well, that's no place for a girl alone,” he growled.
“You know, one evening I thought I saw you, down near Avenue C, but I couldn't be sure. Was it?”
“It might have been,” he grudged. “Avenue C is a public thoroughfare.”
“And you've been guarding me,” she murmured.
Her eyes brooded on him, and the color was rising in her face to match his. But, while Cyrus blushed like a brick, the Bonnie Lassie blushed like the hue of flying clouds after sunset.
“Why don't you take a policeman?” he blurted out. “If anything should happen to you—It isn't safe,” he concluded lamely.
“Not even when I'm chaperoned with an ammonia popgun?” she smiled. “Why do you carry that?”
“For dogs. Dogs don't always like me. It's my clothes, I suppose.”
“Any dog who wouldn't like and trust you on sight,” she pronounced with intense conviction, “is an imbecile.”
He smiled his acknowledgment. At that her face altered.
“There you go, smiling once more,” she said fretfully. “You do it very seldom, but—”
“I'm always smiling, deep inside me, at you,” he said quietly.
“But when you smile outside, it makes you so different. And I find I've done you all wrong.”
“Are you still sculping me?” he asked in surprise.
“I—I have been, but I stopped.” She paused, trying again to think of him as merely a model, and found, to her discomfiture, that it caused a queer, inexplicable little pang deep inside her heart. Nevertheless, the artist rose overpoweringly within her at his next question.
“Do you want me to sit for you again?”
“Oh, would you? Now?”
He glanced at the church clock. “I've forty-seven minutes,” he said.
Much may be accomplished in forty-seven minutes. In the studio she sprang to her work with a sort of contained fury. And as the eager, intent eyes regarded him with an ever-increasing impersonality, a pain was born in his heart and grew and burned, because to this woman who had clung to him in the abandonment of mortal weakness but an hour before, whose pulses had leaped and fluttered for his peril, he had become only a subject for exploitation, something to further her talent, wax to her deft hand.
Perhaps he had been that since the first. Well, what right had he to expect anything more?
Nothing of this reached the absorbed worker. She was intent upon her model's mouth and chin, whereon she had caught the sense of significant changes. Had she but once come forth from her absorption to see and interpret the man's eyes, she might have known. For only in the eyes does a brave man's suffering show; the rest of his face he may control beyond betrayal. Something happily restrained her from offering payment as usual, when she finally threw the cloth over the unfinished sketch.
“You spoke of dogs not liking your clothes,” she said lightly. “Do you always sleep in them?”
“Oh, no. They sleep on the floor at the foot of my bed and keep watch. May I have them pressed?”
“It would be an interesting change. But why ask my permission?”
“Because you told me once to come as is.'”
“So I did,” she laughed. “But that was before you were an honest workingman. Go and get pressed out.”
“No more use for me as a model?”
“Oh, I don't say that.”
“But I'm to see you sometimes?” he persisted.
“How could it be otherwise, with you doing patrol duty in front of my door?” she twinkled.
With unnecessary emphasis she shut the door upon the retiring form of Cyrus the Gaunt. But his double, already inalienable, returned to the studio with her and formed a severely accusative third party to her dual self-communion. Said the woman within her, woefully: “I mustn't see him again. I mustn't! I mustn't!” Said the sculptor within her, exultingly: “I've got him. I've got what I wanted. It's there and I've fixed it forever.” Which was a mistake of the sculptor's, however nearly right or wrong the woman may have been.
Thenceforward, it appeared to Cyrus the Gaunt, the Bonnie Lassie exhibited an increasing tendency toward invisibility. When he did see her, there were sure to be other people about, and she seemed subdued and distrait. Presently the suspicion dawned upon Cyrus that she was avoiding him. Being a simple, direct person, he laid his theory before her. She denied it with unnecessary heat; but that didn't go far toward rehabilitating the old cheerful and friendly status. Cyrus the Gaunt, despite a wage which assured three excellent meals per day, began to grow gaunter. Our Square commented upon it with concern.
There came a time when, for ten consecutive days, Cyrus the Gaunt never set eyes upon the Bonnie Lassie, nor did his ear so much as catch a single lilt of her laughter. At the end of that period, strolling moodily past his now flavorless job full two hours early, he beheld mounting the steps of the funny little mansion a heavy male figure, clad from head to foot in what had a grisly suggestion of professional black. The sight sent a chill to Cyrus's heart. The chill froze solid when on a nearer approach to the house he heard the sound of voices within, joined in a slow chant. Half-blind and shaking, he made his way to the rail and clung there. Slowly the words took form and meaning, and this was their solemn message:—
The Good Man,
When-he-falleth-in-Love
And-getteth-Snubbed,
Breaketh Forth In-to Tears:
But-the-Ungawdly Careth Notta Damn!
For Woman,
She-is-but-Vanity
Ay, Verily, and False-Curls.
And-the-Wooing Thereof Is Bitterness.
For-he-Wasteth-his-Substance-Upon-Her,
Taking-her-Pic-nics and Balls.
And she Danceth with some
Other Feller.
Oh-hh SLUSH!!!
A window-shade floated sideways, revealing to the peerer's gaze a gnome with blue ears beating out the tempo with the fire-tongs for a quartette, consisting of an aeroplane, a Salvation Army captain, a white rabbit, and an Apache, while a motley crowd circulated around them. In the intensity of his relief, Cyrus the Gaunt took a great resolve: “Invited or not invited, I'm going to that party.”
MacLachan's “Home of Fashion” on the corner was long since dark, but Cyrus's pedal fantasia on the panels brought forth the indignant proprietor.
“What have you got for me to go to a fancy party in, Mac?” demanded his disturber.
“Turnverein or Pansy Social Circle?” inquired the practical tailor.
“Neither. A dead swell party.”
“Go as ye are-rr, ye fule!” said the Scot, and slammed the door.
“Perfectly simple,” said Cyrus the Gaunt. “I'll do it.”
He hastened around to Schwartz's to wash his hands and smut his face artistically.
III
Upon the reiterated testimony of the Oldest Inhabitant, Our Square had never before witnessed such scenes or heard such sounds of revelry by night as the Bonnie Lassie's surprise party, given for her by her friends of the far-away world. None of us was bidden in at first, as the Bonnie Lassie had not the inviting in her hands. But to her—little loyalist that she is!—a celebration without her own neighbors was unthinkable; so she sent her messengers forth and gathered us in from our beds, from Schwartz's, from Lavansky's Pinochle Parlors, from the late shift of the “Socialist Weekly Battlecry,” and even from the Semi-Annual Soirée and Ball of the Sons of Gentlemen of Goerck Street, far out on our boundaries of influence; and though we wore no fancier garb than our best, we made a respectable showing, indeed.
Along with the early comers, and while Cyrus the Gaunt was still putting the final touches to his preparation, there appeared at the hospitable door an unexpected guest, a woman of sixty with a strong, bent figure, and a square face lighted by gleaming eyes with fixed lines about them. The black-hued Undertaker who had constituted himself master of ceremonies met her at the door, and immediately hustled her within.
“While I have not the privilege of this lady's personal acquaintance,” he announced, “I have the honor of presenting, ladies and gentlemen, the eminent and professional chaperon, Mrs. Sparkles.”
The newcomer paused, blinking and irresolute. “But I did not know—” she began, in a faintly foreignized accent From a far corner the Bonnie Lassie spied her, and flew across the floor, flushed, radiant, and confused. “You!” she cried—and there was something in her voice that drew upon the pair curious looks from the other guests. “Oh, Madame! Why didn't you let me know?”
The newcomer set her finger to her lips. “I am incognita. What is it the somber person called me? Mrs. Sparkles? Yes.” The Bonnie Lassie nodded her comprehension. “If I had known that you were making fête this evening—I cannot see your work now.”
“Indeed, you can. I'll shut just us two into the studio. They won't miss me.” She gently pushed the new guest through a side door, which she closed after them. Confronted with the little sculptor's work, the visitor moved about with a swift certainty of judgment, praising this bit with a brief word, shrugging her shoulders over that, indicating by a single touch of the finger the salient defect of another, while her hostess followed her with anxious eyes.
“Not bad,” murmured the critic. “You have learned much. What is under that sheet?”
“Experiments,” answered the girl reluctantly.
The woman swept the covering aside. Beneath were huddled a number of studies, some finished, others in the rough, ungrouped.
“All the same subject, n'est-ce-pas?”
“Yes.”
The visitor examined them carefully. “Very interesting. Any more of this?”
“Some notes in pencil.”
“Let me see them.”
The Bonnie Lassie drew out and submitted a sheaf of papers.
“You have done very badly with this,” was the verdict, after concentrated study. “Or else—you have worked hard and honestly upon it?”
“Harder than on anything I've done.”
“There are signs of that, too. What is it you are aiming at? What is the subject? Inside, I mean?” She tapped her forehead and regarded with her luminous stare the eager girl-face before her.
“Why, I hardly know. At first it was one thing, then it changed. I had thought of doing him as 'The Pioneer.' 'Something lost beyond the ranges,' you know.” The woman nodded. “Then later, I wanted to do 'The Last American,' and I modeled him for that.”
“Good!” The older woman's endorsement was emphatic. “How Lincoln-like the formation of the face is, here.” She touched one of the unfinished bits. “That's the American of it. Or is it? Albrecht Dürer did the same thing in his ideal Knight four centuries ago. You know it? It's like a portrait of Lincoln. Did you consciously mould that line in?”
“Ah!” The girl contemplated her own work with glowing eyes. “That's the haunting resemblance I felt but couldn't catch when I first saw my model.”
“It isn't in most of these.”
“My fault. It must have been there, underneath, all the time.”
“Hm! You consider those pretty faithful studies?”
“As faithful as I could make them. But I haven't been able to catch and fix the face. It's most provoking,” she added fretfully, “but I'm constantly having to remodel.” Before she had finished, the elderly woman's swift hands were busy with the figures, manipulating them here and there, until they were presently set out in a single row with the sketches interspersed. “Read from left to right,” she said curtly. “Is not that the order of time in which the work was done?”
“Pure magic!” breathed the girl. “How could you know?”
“How could I help but know? Child, child! Can't you see you have the biggest subject ready to your hand that any artist could pray for?” The girl looked her question mutely. “The man is making himself. How? God knows—the God that helps all real work. Look! See how the lines of grossness there”—she touched the first figure in her marshaled line —“have planed out here.” The swift finger found a later study. “How could you miss it! The upbuilding of character, resolve, manhood, and with it all something gentler and finer softening it. You have half-done it, but only half, because you have not understood. Why have you not understood?”
“Because I'm not a genius.”
“Who knows? To have half-done it is much. The master-genius, Life, has been carving that face out before your eyes. You need but follow.”
“Tell me what to do.”
“Leave it alone for six months. Come back and take the face as it will be then.”
“Then will be too late,” said the girl in a low voice.
“What!” cried the critic, startled. “Your model isn't dying, is he?”
“Oh, no. I—I had something else in mind.”
“Dismiss it. Have nothing else in mind but to finish this.” She paused. “I have seen all I need to. Let us return to your friends.”
Hardly had the hostess seated her guest in the most comfortable corner of the big divan when there was a stir at the door, and a rangy, big-boned figure, clad in the unmistakable garb of honest labor, appeared, blinking a little at the lights. Instantly the Undertaker, in his rôle of official announcer, dashed forward to greet him. “Gentlemen and ladies,” he proclaimed, “introducing Mr. Casey Jones, late of the Salt Lake Line.”
“Sing it, you Son of Toil!” shouted somebody, and Cyrus the Gaunt promptly obliged, in a clear and robust baritone, leading the chorus which came in jubilantly.
The elderly “Mrs. Sparkles” was not interested in the harmony; but she was interested in the face of her hostess, which had flushed a startled pink. She asked a question under cover of the music.
“That is your model, is it not?”
“Yes.”
“What is he in real life?”
“As you see him.”
“In—deed? What is he doing it for?”
“Two and a half a day, I believe.”
“Quite enough. But why?”
“I never asked him.” And the Bonnie Lassie tripped over to her newest guest, leaving her next-to-newest quite busy with thought.
Owing to the demands upon a hostess,
Cyrus the Gaunt saw very little of her in the brief hour remaining to him. One dance he succeeded in claiming.
“You see,” he remarked, “I came to your party anyway, although uninvited.”
“I didn't give it. It was a surprise,” she explained. “But the job?”
“They've put me on an hour later.”
“You still like it?”
“It limits one socially more than being a model,” he replied solemnly.
“But you are sticking to it?” she persisted.
“Oh, yes, I'm sticking to it, all right.”
“Even if—No matter what happens?”
“What is going to happen?” he asked gravely.
“Nothing,” she said hurriedly. “But it's the job for the job's sake with you now, isn't it?”
“I like the feel of it, if that's what you mean. The feel of being competent to hold it down.”
She nodded with content in her eyes. But he was troubled.
“You had something in mind—” he began, when another partner claimed her, while he was dragged off to assist in an improvised glee-club.
His time was up all too soon, and without chance of a further word from her, other than a formal farewell. In the little rear hallway whither he had made his way through his protesting fellow-revelers, he reached up for his coat, and felt something lightly brush the top of his head. He looked up. It was a sprig of mistletoe. At the same moment two firm hands closed over his eyes, and light, swift lips just grazed his cheek.
Cyrus the Gaunt fell a-trembling. He turned slowly, and found himself confronting a total stranger. The stranger had gray hair and a tired face lighted by crinkly eyes. “Oh!” said Cyrus the Gaunt with an irrepressible bitterness of disappointment.
“Frankness,” observed his salutant, “may or may not be a compliment to the object of it.” Cyrus remained mute. “Who did you hope it was?” Silence seemed still the best policy. “If you are offended”—the eyes twinkled with added keenness—“I will apologize honorably.”
“Let me do it for you,” said Cyrus the Gaunt politely, and kissed the unknown square upon the lips.
She drew back. “Well!” she began; then she laughed. “The entente cordiale having been established, what are you doing here, Cyrus Staten?”
He gasped and gaped. “Do I know you?”
“Having neither memory nor manners, you do not. But I spent weeks at your country place when you were a boy, painting your father. Permit me to introduce myself.” And she gave a name so great that even Cyrus's comprehensive carelessness of art was not ignorant of it.
“Great snakes!” he ejaculated. “I—I'm sorry I kissed you.”
“Oh, I'm human. I rather liked it,” she chuckled, “even though I am old and stately. But how have you contrived to preserve your incognito?”
“Easy enough. This is another world. Look out!” he added as the curtain behind them moved. “Somebody's coming.” The hanging swung aside and the Bonnie Lassie emerged. “Oh!” she said in surprise. “Do you know each other?”
“We were becoming acquainted when you interrupted,” replied the woman. She turned a disconcerting gaze upon her hostess. “Where did you get him?” she demanded, exactly as if Cyrus weren't there. “Oh, please!” cried the girl.
“Don't mind me,” said Cyrus politely, sensible that something was going on which he didn't grasp. “I'm used to it.” He turned to the mighty artist. “You see, in real life I'm a studio model.”
“Are you?” retorted the genius. “I thought you were an engineer. Now I begin to suspect you are a fraud. Well, I have something to say to Miss Prim, here. Run you away and play with your job.”
“So that's your young Lincoln,” she observed, as Cyrus moodily accepted his dismissal, and passed out.
“He doesn't know it.”
“You have missed even more than I thought, in him.”
“I've done my best,” said the girl dispiritedly. “He's too big for little me.”
“Hm! You haven't told me yet where you got him.”
“'The wild wind blew him to my close-barred door,'” quoted the girl.
“A good many wild winds have blown about Cyrus Staten from time to time.”
“Who?”
“Cyrus Staten; don't you know him?”
“No, I picked him up from the bench in Our Square.”
“Which the Statens used to own, by the way. Well, the facilis descensus of an idle waster from the world of white lights and black shadows to a park-bench is nothing new.”
“Does he look like an idle waster?”
“He does not. Therein lies a miracle. What is he doing now?”
“Running the steam-roller, outside.” The face of the girl melted into lovely and irrepressible mirth.
“Ah! That explains much. But not all. What is your part in this?”
“You have seen it.” She nodded backward toward the studio.
“Not that. As a woman? What have you been doing to that boy to make him what he is?”
The girl took her soft lip grievously between her teeth for a moment before answering. “I've been playing my child's tricks with a real man—and now I'm being sorry.”
“And paying for it?”
The Bonnie Lassie's head drooped.
“Is he paying for it, too?”
“No.”
“No? Well, when I played a little surprise on him and kissed him under the mistletoe, I thought that tall and massive youth was going to faint away like a school-miss in my supporting arms, until he saw who it was. What do you suppose his expectations—”
“You had no right to take such an advantage,” flashed the girl, turning crimson.
“So?” The great woman smiled. “But I think my own thoughts. When one pays, or the other pays, that is well. It is the chance of the play. But when both pay—oh, that is wrong, wrong, wrong as wrong can be!”
“I can't help it,” said the girl, very low. “There is a previous debt.” And she turned aside a face so woe-begone that her interrogator forbore further pressure.
“At least,” she said, “the artist must complete the work, at whatever cost to the woman. You will finish that?” She jerked her head toward the studio.
“I—I suppose so. If I can.”
On the way home the genius caught a glimpse of Cyrus the Gaunt upon his triumphal chariot, and halted her auto the better to laugh. As the lumbering, clamoring monster drew opposite, she signaled. Cyrus did something abstruse to the mechanism, which groaned and clanked itself into stillness.
“Young man,” she hailed, “I have a message for you.”
“From whom?” said Cyrus hopefully. “From myself. This is it: Be careful.”
“I am,” said Cyrus with conviction, “the carefulest captain that ever ploughed the stormy pave.”
“Be careful,” she repeated, disregarding his interpretation, “or she'll make a man of you yet. The process is sometimes painful—like most creative processes, Home, Joseph.”
Many of the Bonnie Lassie's outlander guests passed Cyrus the Gaunt that night, but none other identified or noticed him. The latest departures were two heavily swathed youths who paused to light cigarettes in the lee of Cyrus's iron steed.
“Some little farewell party, wasn't it?” the engineer overheard them say. “Why wasn't the happy Bascom there?”
“Not back from Europe yet. I understand Morris Cartwright fixed things up, and the engagement is to be formally announced on his return.”
“It's a shame,” growled the first speaker. “Bascom's all right, but he's old enough to be her father. Wasn't she a dream and a vision to-night!”
“It was one of those legacy engagements, I believe. Dead-father's-wish sort of thing. All right, I suppose, so long as there's no one else. Who was the engineer guy? He seemed to be a reg'lar feller.”
The twain passed on, leaving Cyrus the Gaunt stiff and stricken in his seat. How he got through the next hour he hardly knew. He remembered vaguely a protest from sundry citizens who resented being charged off the cross-walks by a zigzagging juggernaut, a query from Terry the Cop whether he was off his feed, and the startled face of old man Sittser, who paused to pass the time of night on his way home from the late shift on the linotype and was incontinently cursed for his pains. Full consciousness of the practical world was brought back to Cyrus by the purring of a sleek auto close at hand as he curved out at the corner for his straightaway course. He was just gathering momentum when he caught sight of the Bonnie Lassie's face, white and wistful, soft-eyed and miserable, confronting darkness and vacancy from within the luxurious limousine.
Well, nobody can catch a sixty-horsepower motor-car with a ten-ton steamroller.
Cyrus, to do him justice, tried his best. They stopped one dollar and forty cents out of his Saturday's envelope for what he and the roller did to the barriers and lanterns. By the time he had swung into the cross-street, trailing wreckage, the Bonnie Lassie was out of sight and out of his world.
IV
Winter comes, stern and sharp, like an unpaid landlord, to Our Square, with sleet and gale for its agents of eviction. No longer are the benches blithe with the voice of love or play or gossip. The wind has blown them all away. A few tenacious leaves still cling, withered, brown, and clattering, to the trees, “bare, ruin'd choirs where late' the sweet birds sang,” and a few hardy stragglers beat across the unprotected spaces, just to maintain, as it were, the human right of way against the gray rigor of the skies. But, for the most part, we of Our Square, going about our concerns, huddle as close as may be to the lee of walls, for—though we would not for the world have it known—many of us are none too warmly clad. Behind the blank opaqueness of the bordering windows one may surmise much want and penury and cold, which, also, we keep to ourselves. Our Square has its pride. We do not publish our trials.
Perhaps Cyrus the Gaunt knew as much of them as any. For, by imperceptible gradations, he had become the 'confidant, the judge, the arbiter of our difficulties, and the friend of the shyest, the hardest, and the proudest of us alike. His engine-seat was become a throne, from whence he dispensed every good thing but charity. That word and all that follows in its train he hated. Which shows that he had learned Our Square. After hours he would “drop in,” almost secretly, on some friend; and it was a curious coincidence that Cyrus's friends were chosen apparently on the basis of need and distress. He had that rare knack of helping out without involving the aided one in the coils of obligation. There is nothing Our Square wouldn't have done for Cyrus the Gaunt. I believe he could even have been elected alderman.
Winter drove Cyrus from his perch and put a brake on the thunder-wagon before the job was quite finished. There still remained some final repairs which must now wait for the spring, on the side where the Bonnie Lassie's little house stood, bleak and desolate. Not wholly deserted, however, for one brave and happy dancer still stuck to her post in the window, lifting a thrilled face to the sky. Other employment claimed Cyrus the Gaunt until his iron steed should come out of the stable; a day job on a stationary engine around in Pike Street. Our Square remarked with concern that the indoor employment didn't seem to suit Cyrus the Gaunt. He became gaunter and thinner and more melancholy-looking, and more than once he was seen on wild nights, when nobody was supposed to be out late, staring at the now quite unembarrassed house with the quaint little door and the broad vestibule. But though the light and cheer that Our Square had seen grow in Cyrus's face in the early days of his job, were graying over, there increased the new understanding and sympathy and determination, in lines that he had put there himself in the building of his new manhood. Thus, only, in this perplexing world, does a man lift himself by his own boot-straps.
Though Cyrus the Gaunt could boast a thousand friends, he had accepted but one intimate. That was MacLachan the tailor. Every day they lunched on frankfurters and kohlrabi at Schwartz's. Thither Cyrus was wont to have his scanty mail sent from the house where he lodged. One blustery December day the tailor arrived late, to find his friend fingering a pink slip of paper, of suggestive appearance.
“Ye'll have been aimin' a bit ootside!” commented MacLachan.
Cyrus flipped the paper over to him.
“Save us!” cried the awe-stricken Scot. “It's a thousan' dollars. All in the one piece!”
“Two months overdue. He didn't have my address, I suppose.”
“Ha'e ye been drawin' a lottery?”
“No. It's a bet. Also my release. I'd almost forgotten. My time's up.”
“Ye'll not be leavin' us?” said the tailor. Cyrus avoided his eyes. “I'm through, Mac,” he said dully. “It's no use. It's not worth while. Nothing's worth while.” There was a long pause. “Mon,” said MacLachan finally, “ha'e ye tho't what this'll mean to Our Square?”
Cyrus the Gaunt thought. Behind the curtain of his impenetrable face there passed a panorama of recent memories; events which had, for the first time in his career, made him one with the fabric of life. Faces appealed to him; hands were outstretched to him confidently for the friendly help that he could give so well; the voices of the children hailed him as a fellow; the baseball team which did most of its practice at noon on the asphalt claimed a corner of his memory; his ears rang with the everyday greetings of his own people, and another panorama, summoned up by the pink slip, faded away. Cyrus folded the check and put it carefully in the pocket of his overalls.
“Ye'll be stayin' here,” said MacLachan contentedly, having read his expression.
Cyrus nodded. Then the tailor's dour-ness fell from him for the moment. He laid a hand on his friend's shoulder. “Laddie,” he said, “the little bronze dancer is in the window yet.”
Cyrus turned a haggard face to him. “I know,” he said.
“Do ye make nothin' o' that?”
“Nothing. You know why—what she went away for.”
“I ha'e haird.”
“Well, I'm learning to forget.”
“The little bronze dancer is in the window yet,” repeated the obstinate Scot.
How Cyrus won through that long winter is his own affair. Our Square respects other people's troubles. It asked no questions. Finally winter broke and fled before a southeast wind full of fragrance, and the trees began to whisper important tidings to each other; and a pioneer butterfly of the deepest, most luminous purple-black, with buff edges to its wings, arrived and led the whole juvenile populace such a chase as surely never was since the Pied Piper fluted his seductions long ago; and the benches came out of their long retreat, fresh-painted, to stand sturdy and stiff in their old places; and so did Cyrus's thun-der-wagon, whereon he perched nightly once more, and was even more than before the taciturn, humorous, kindly, secret, friendly adviser to all and sundry.
Then, one crisp March evening he became aware of a strong, bent, feminine figure beckoning him from the curbstone. Clanging to a halt, he heard a voice, unforgettable through its tinge of foreign accent, say: —
“How do you do? I have been seeing your face all through my travels.” Cyrus took off his working-cap and shook hands. “So I have come back to look at it. It's thin. Would you like to be painted?”
“I don't think so, thank you. I've been sculped within an inch of my life.”
“So I have understood,” said the Very Great Woman with a smile not devoid of sympathy. “You are not done with it yet. She is coming.”
The face of Cyrus the Gaunt lighted marvelously.. “Coming back to Our Square?” he cried. Then the light faded. “But—”
“But me no buts. She is coming. I did it. I found that she had never finished you. So I told her that if she did not come back and finish, I would take you away from her and finish you myself. And, oh, I am as bad a sculptor as I am a good painter—-almost!” Her laughter rang in the chill air. “So she comes. And I have traveled all the way to this impossible spot to play traitor. The question is: Are you a man? You look it, at last!”
“The question is—Will you answer me one?”
“No! No! No! No! No! Put your questions where they belong. Farewell, my Phaëthon of the Slums.”
The world was mad with the wine of the wind the night the Bonnie Lassie came back to Our Square. All our trees waved their lean arms in welcome and sent down little buds as messengers of joy over her return. Of living welcomers there was none, for the gale had swept all humans before it, except Terry the Cop, and he didn't recognize her, from the distance, in her other-worldly raiment. That must have cost her a pang. Unnoticed she crept into the little, old, quaint, friendly house, and its doors closed behind her like the reassurance of a friendly arm. She set herself in the dark window where the blithe dancer still tripped it, faithful and lonely, and waited for Cyrus the Gaunt. But when she saw his face, the Bonnie Lassie didn't sculp. She cried.
Cyrus mounted to his seat and pulled the lever over. The engine was running badly that night, and the wind almost blew him from his perch. Aside from the improbability that the little sculptor would brave such weather, the charioteer was presently so immersed in his own immediate concerns that he all but forgot the prospective visit. When he had brought his charge to its senses and reduced it to some control, he was interrupted by the plight of a belated push-cart woman, who was dragging anchor and drifting fast to leeward under the furious impulsion of the nor'easter. Cyrus had just dragged her almost from under his ponderous wheels, when a beam flashed in his eyes, and he looked up to see a truck close upon them. His yell split the darkness. The truck-driver, with a mighty wrench, swung his vehicle sharp to the left, and up on the sidewalk.
The uptilted lights shone full into the lower window of the little, old, friendly house. Pressed against that window Cyrus saw the apparition of a tear-softened, desolate visage. Reason, prudence, and propriety deserted their posts in his brain simultaneously. A dozen long-legged leaps carried him as far as the vestibule of the little house. There his knees basely weakened. Perhaps her heart divined his step and sent her forth to meet him; or perhaps it was his old ally, Chance, that brought her into the vestibule as he stood there shaking.
“Oh!” she cried, and shrank back into a corner, with a deprecatory movement, which to him was infinitely pathetic.
“I'm sorry,” said Cyrus. “I saw your face and thought you were in trouble. If—if you wanted me to sit for you again,” he said composedly, “I should be very glad to, until you've finished your sketch.”
“Oh, no. I couldn't ask you. I couldn't think of—after—what—what—” Her voice waned into silence.
“Don't feel that way at all,” he encouraged her with resolved cheerfulness. “I can be a model and nothing more, again, I assure you.”
Her upturned eyes implored him. “Don't be cruel,” she said.
“Cruel?” he repeated wonderingly.
“Not at all. I'll be polite. It isn't too late to offer my best wishes. Though I'm not sure I know the name.”
“What name?”
“Your—your married name.”
“Then you don't know?” she gasped. The brain of Cyrus the Gaunt suddenly went numb. “I know you went away from us to get married.”
“I did,” she quavered. “But I couldn't. I—I—I tried to make myself go through with it. I couldn't. No woman could when—when—” Her voice trembled into silence.
A boisterous back-draft of the tempest thrust its way through the door and puffed out the little vestibule light. With a sense of irreparable loss impending he felt, rather than heard, her moving from him into the blackness of the outer world. Yet his mind seemed clogged and chained as he strove to grasp the meaning of what she had said—or was it what she had left unsaid?
And in a moment she would be gone forever.
Suddenly—miracle of miracles!—he felt those soft, strong hands on his arm, and heard her sobbing appeal: “Oh, Cyrus! Aren't you ever going to smile at me inside again?”
His arms went out. The Bonnie Lassie's hands slipped up to his shoulder. The flower-face pressed, close and cold and sweet, against his.
“Love of my heart!” he cried, “I'll never do anything else all my life long.”
Summer is tyrant in Our Square now. The leaves droop, flaccid and dusty, on the trees, and the sun gives a shrewish welcome to the faithful who still cling to the benches. Gone is Cyrus's chariot of flame and thunder. The work is done. Gone, too, is Cyrus, and with him the Bonnie Lassie, after a wedding duly set forth with much pomp and splendor in the public prints. Among those present was Our Square.
So now the little, quaint, old, friendly house stands vacant, with eager sunbeams darting about it in search of entry. Vacant but not cheerless, for behind the panes, against which the Bonnie Lassie once pressed her sorrowful face, troop the elfin company of her dream-children, the dancing figurines. Cyrus the Gaunt would have it so. He deeded her the house as a wedding-gift, that the happy dancers might remain with us lonely and unforgetting folk. They are the promise that one day Our Bonnie Lassie will come back to Our Square.
THE CHAIR THAT WHISPERED
An Idyl of Our Square
SPRING was in Our Square when I first saw the two of them. They sat on a bench under the early lilacs. It must have been the beginning of it all for them, I think, for there was still a dim terror in her face, and he gestured like one arguing stormily. At the last she smiled and drew a cluster of the lilac bloom down to her cheek. It was not deeper-hued than her eyes, nor fresher than her youth. They rose and passed me, alone on my bench, and I, who am wise in courtships, having watched so many bud and blossom on the public seats of Our Square, saw that this was no wooing, but some other persuasion, though what I could not guess.
So those two drifted out of sight; out of mind, too, for life in our remote, unconsidered, and slum-circled little park is a complex and swiftly changing actuality, and it crowds in with many pressures upon a half-idle old pedagogue like myself. It was the Little Red Doctor who, weeks later, recalled the episode, one blistering evening of the summer's end. He captured me as I emerged from the “penny-circulator” with my thumb in a book.
“What are we ruining our eyes with to-night?” he demanded.
I held up the treasure.
“'Victory,'” he read. “Good! He'll like Conrad.”
Perceiving what was expected, I fulfilled the requirements by asking: “Who will like Conrad?”
“The Gnome.”
I remembered that I had not seen Leon Coventry since the day he passed me with the girl who had youth and spring and terror in her face.
“Am I to loan it to him?”
“You're to read it to him.”
“When?”
“To-night. It's your turn to sit up.”
“Is the Gnome ill?”
“Worse.”
“Mad?”
“Haunted.”
“Since when has your practice branched out into the supernatural, doctor?”
“Oh, as for that, his trouble is physical too.”
“Is it anything that a simple lay mind could grasp?”
The Little Red Doctor grunted. “His legs have turned to lamp-wicking. I don't vouch for the diagnosis. It's his own.”
“Paralysis?” I hazarded.
“Grip,” was the Little Red Doctor's curt rejoinder.
“Don't tell me that grip turns a young Hercules's legs to lamp-wicks?” I objected.
“Grip does if the young Hercules's legs are fools enough to carry him out and around the city with a temperature of one-naught-four-point-two,” retorted the Little Red Doctor with bitter exactitude. “Under such conditions grip turns to pneumonia. And pneumonia is the favorite ally of my old friend, Death.”
“You don't mean that the Gnome is going to die?”
“Not of pneumonia: that fight was fought out some weeks ago. But what pneumonia doesn't do to a young Hercules worry may. Another aid of my old friend, Death, worry is. That's a bothersome Gnome, tossing about in the heat with his sick brain full of plots to get away and no legs to carry'em out. His next try will be his last.”
“Then he got away once?”
“On all fours. As far as the sidewalk. There Cyrus the Gaunt and the Bonnie Lassie found him and brought him back. Cyrus was on duty again last night.”
“I began to see. I'm to be watchdog. It's No. 7, isn't it? At what hour?”
“No. 7. Top floor. Nine o'clock.”
“I'll be there.”
Thanks for neighborly services, which are a taken-for-granted part of our close-pressed life, are not deemed good form in Our Square. The Little Red Doctor nodded and prepared to pass on to the rounds of his unending bout with his old friend and antagonist, Death. I detained him.
“Just a moment. What is the object of the Gnome's excursions? To get work?”
“No. To search.”
“For what?”
The Little Red Doctor moved toward an approaching horse car, almost the last of that perishing genus in New York City. “Heaven knows!” he called back. “And Mac, the tailor, at least suspects. That's as far as I can get.”
He leaped upon the bobtailed vehicle, was immediately held up by a forehanded conductor, and too tardily bethought himself of a forgotten point. “The chair! The chair!” he bellowed. “Look out for the chair!”
“What chair?” I shouted back.
He made as if he would jump off and return. But he had already paid his nickel, so he only waved despairingly. Nickels count in Our Square.
No. 7 opened to me with a musty smell of stale heat. Built in the magnificent days of the neighborhood, by a senator of the United States, it had fallen to the base uses of machine workers on the lower and furnished lodgings on the upper floors. The very walls seemed to sweat as I made my way up to the dim light at the top, where the Gnome's door stood open, hopelessly inviting a draft. Upon my entrance a huge and fumbling creature from the lithographic plant where the Gnome was an assistant rose and made gloomy and bashful adieus.
Leon Coventry reached a great, thin hand across the littered bed to make me welcome. Even in his illness he preserved that suggestion of bowed and gnarled power, strangely alien to his youthfulness, which had given him his nickname in Our Square. Some would have called him ugly of face. But his mouth had the austere sweetness of a saint or a sufferer, and in his eyes glowed a living fire which might tame beasts or subdue hearts.
“How are you feeling to-night?” I asked perfunctorily.
“Wild,” he answered. “When are they going to let me out? When? When?” The little Red Doctor had given me no hint upon this point. So I said non-committally: “Soon, I think,” and moved around the bed to where an easy-chair invited. It was a wicker chair, broad-seated, wide-armed, and welcoming, a chair made conformable and gracious by long usage, a chair for lovers, for high hopes and for dreams, a chair to solace troubles and soothe weariness. Into it I would have dropped gratefully, when the sick man's fingers closed on my wrist like the jaws of an animal, and I was all but jerked from my feet.
“Not there!” he snarled insanely. “Not there!”
“I beg your pardon,” I said, much discomposed.
“I didn't mean to hurt you,” he returned with a return to that habitual gentleness of address which, by its contrast with his formidable physique, gave him the aspect of a kindly and companionable bear. “But if you don't mind sitting here on the bed? Or yonder on the sofa? Or anywhere except—”
“Not in the least,” I assured him. “The fact is, I detest wicker chairs anyway. I had to get rid of mine.”
“Did you? Why?”
“It was no companion for an old, lonely man.”
The Gnome clutched me again. His fingers quivered as they bit into my arm.
“I know! It whispered. Didn't it?”
I nodded.
“So does mine. Strange things. Echoes of what you can't forget.”
“Yes, yes. I know.”
“Do you, now? I wonder. Perhaps you do.” He studied my face with his luminous eyes, and then closed them and fell back, speaking slowly and dreamily. “In the darkness when I can see the chair just enough to know that it's empty as—as an empty heart—I hear it stirring, stirring softly, adjusting itself to—to what is not there. And I hold my breath and pray. But—nothing more.” He opened his eyes that seemed to gaze out across barriers of pain and incomprehension. “Dominie, does yours—did yours keep its secrets?”
That way, obviously, ran the boy's malady toward madness. Regretting that I had chanced upon so unfortunate a topic, I said nothing. But he took my assent for granted.
“So does mine,” he sighed. “It has not been moved nor touched since it was left vacant.”
“Shall I read to you?” I asked, to turn his mind aside.
“No. Talk to me. Tell me what they are doing in the Square.”
So I gave him the news of Tailor Mac-Lachan's latest drunk, and Pushcart Tonio's luck in the lottery, and Grandma Souchet's faux pas at the movies (her first experience) when she rose and yelled for the police to stop the pickpocket in the flagrant act of abstracting the heroine's aged father's watch, thereby disgracing her (grandma's) progeny and making them a derision and a byword even unto the third and fourth generation; and the Morrissey mumps, the whole kit and b'ilin' of juvenile Morrisseys having been sent to school looking like five little red balloons, whereby holiday for the rest of the scholars and great rejoicing, and the unavailing wrath of the authorities upon Mrs. Morrissey's head; and Terry the Cop's extra stripe; and the passing of the skat championship into the unworthy but preposterously lucky hands of the Avenue B Evening Dress Suit Club; and the battle over Orpheus the Piper (which was a jest of the Lords of High Derision, touching the boundaries of uttermost tragedy); and the exotic third stage of the affair, not yet ended, between Mary Moore and the Weeping Scion of Wealth; and the newspaper discovery of a barroom poet at Schmidt's free-lunch counter; and the joke which his fashionable uptown club put up on Cyrus the Gaunt; and politics and social doings, and the whisper of scandal; exactly as it might be in any other little world than Our Square; and, finally, for I was leading up to a delicate and difficult point, my own little smile of fortune, in the form of a small textbook finally accepted and advance royalty duly paid thereon. For the difficult and dangerous point was how to help the Gnome in case he needed it. Offer of charity, even when glossed over with the euphemism of a “loan,” is not accepted in ease of spirit by the people of Our Square. In fact, it isn't accepted at all, as a rule. The likelihood of ability to pay back is too dubious and remote. So it was in my most offhand manner that I inquired:—
“By the way, how are you off for ready cash?”
Leon fluttered his hand among the papers on the bed. They were opened envelopes.
“Look inside them,” he directed.
Within were checks. They were on various mercantile and commercial firms. Mostly the amounts were small; two dollars, two-and-a-half, three, and four, and the largest for ten dollars. Totaled up they amounted to affluence as Our Square understands the term.
“Something new?” I asked.
“Yes. Advertising sketches. They've caught on.”
“I didn't know that you could draw, Leon.”
“Neither did I, beyond scratchy, sketchy blobs, until the Bonnie Lassie told me.
“If the Bonnie Lassie has been giving you lessons, you're in a good school,” I said, for the local sculptress, nymph, and goddess of Our Square had already begun to make us and herself famous with her tiny bronzes.
“Not lessons exactly. But pointers.”
“You're in luck to be making money while you 're laid up.”
“The doc says I oughtn't to work at it. But I had to do something or go crazy. A man can't live by just waiting; can he? So when I can't sleep I sketch. And the checks come in. It's like a miracle. Only—it isn't the miracle that I want. When do you think I'll be strong enough to get out? Can't you tell me? Can't you find out from doc? I'd get better if I only had something to go on!”
Always that was the beginning and end of our talks; talks which often skirted the borders of the secret that was wearing his life down, but never revealed it. When I sought to shift the burden of the query upon the Little Red Doctor, he looked glum and shook his head.
“But go there when you can, dominie. He likes to have you. You rest him. Sometimes he sleeps after you've gone.” Though the Gnome never spoke of it again, I knew why he liked me with him. The bond of sympathy was that in my life, too, had been an empty chair that whispered. So the harsh summer elongated itself like the stretching of a white-hot metal bar, and through the swelter and hush of long nights I watched the rugged Gnome slowly dwindle.
My first weekly watch night in September came with one of the savagest onslaughts of belated heat in the memory of Our Square. For the sake of what little air there was I had drawn the couch out between the two windows. Discouraged by the handicap of a forearm which stuck clammily to his drawing board, the Gnome had turned off his overhead light, and now lay rigid. But I knew that he did not sleep. From some merciful cleft in the brazen sky came a waft of coolness. It fanned me into a doze.
I awoke with a start, to hear the Gnome's voice, in a hard-breathed whisper: “My heart! Oh, my heart!”
“This,” I thought, “is the end.” I tried to rise, but a paralysis of the will held me, though my senses seemed preternaturally acute.
From the bedside I heard the stir of the wicker chair. The withes moved softly upon themselves with delicate, smooth rustlings. The chair, whispering, sagged and yielded as if to the pressure of some light, sweet burden. Then the voice of the Gnome came, out of the darkness, again, and I knew that my fear was without cause, for he was leaning toward the chair and speaking to that which whispered.
“My Heart! Oh, my Heart! Will you never come back? Don't you know that I can't come to find you? I've tried. God of pity, how I've tried! Can't you hear me, can't you feel me calling for you? If I could see you once again! Only once. It isn't so much to ask. And the time is short. Come back to me, my Heart!”
I heard the chair whispering, whispering messages beyond the little reach of human understanding. Then the beggar of ghosts fell back, and the bed creaked and shook. I knew what made it creak and shake. Chairs that whisper have no balm for that misery.
Two of us lay still and wakeful through the rest of that night. In the morning we faced each other pallidly.
“Did you hear me in the night?” asked my host.
“Yes.”
“Then I'm going to tell you the rest, for I think I haven't much longer time to tell anything.”
“Oh, nonsense!” I protested; but it was lip speech only, and he smiled at the pretense.
“Of course, nonsense, if you like. But I'll go, shriven of that secret. The wicker chair is where She used to sit.”
“That much I gathered.”
“How can I describe Her to you? How can I make you understand as you would if you'd seen Her?”
“Perhaps I have.”
“When? Where?”
“Sitting with you on a bench in the Square the week the lilacs bloomed. She looked afraid.”
“She was. A brute of a foreman had insulted her. So she lost her job as a feather finisher—did you see her beautiful hands?—and she could find no other, and there was nobody in the world for her to turn to. Down below her last dollar, and twenty years old, and lovely. There's terror enough in that, isn't there?”
My mind went back to certain black-and-scarlet tragedies which Our Square makes brave pretense of having forgotten; tragedies of its unforgotten daughters. Terror enough, indeed!
“Was she some one you knew?”
No; she was not some one whom the Gnome knew. How to get to know her and help her (for help was his one, all-effacing, loyal purpose from the first moment he looked into her face); there was the heart of the problem. At any moment she might pass on, out of reach of his aid.
Yet to speak to her was too much risk. She sat poised as ready for startled flight as a bird. Into which deadlock of fateful chances intruded Susan Gluck's Orphan, aged six, and with a passion for scientific pursuits. The immediate object of his research was to discover what treasure so strongly interested a honeybee in a lilac bell, and if need be assist in the operation, his honorable purpose also being to help. Unfortunately the Busy One misunderstood and resented, whereupon Susan Gluck's Orphan lifted up his voice and smote the far heavens with his lamentations. To him, running in agonized circles with his finger in his mouth, the girl extended arms and invitation to come and be comforted. The voice, with its clear, soft, mothering appeal, tugged at the Gnome's heart-strings; to Susan Gluck's Orphan it was, however, but the voice of a stranger, and therefore to be feared. There, however, sat Leon the Gnome, unnoted before, but now an appreciated refuge. For to the young of the species in Our Square the Gnome is a delight, because of his athletic habit of using a child—and sometimes two—in evening dumb-bell exercises, for the upkeep of his mighty muscles. To his knees fled the wailful orphan. Gently though clumsily the Gnome extracted the stinger, in astonished contemplation of which the sufferer temporarily forgot his woes; presently, however, as the poison took hold of the nerves, lapsing again into woe.
All this the girl had been watching from the corner of her eye, making, one may guess, a private estimate of the singular-looking youth who had been covertly spying upon her fear and despair. Wise in a lore of which the Gnome was as ignorant as the Orphan, she now offered wet mud. It was applied, and the adoptive pride of the Glucks raced off to vaunt his wounds to his fellows, leaving two people with quick-beating hearts gazing at each other. The Gnome took a quick resolve.
“I have been frightened, too, in my time.”
“He is well over it,” answered the girl, following the now boasting Orphan with her gaze.
“I don't mean that. I have been hungry too.”
Now she understood, and drew back, flushing. But she, too, was one to go straight to a point. Perhaps two more direct spirits than those twain seldom meet. “You mean me?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“I'm not hungry, and I'm not afraid,” she lied.
“Could you believe,” he said slowly, “that I mean as well to you as I did to that child—and the same?”
She did not answer at once, but the defensive look wavered in her eyes.
“Do you ever gamble?” was his next question.
“Gamble?” she repeated in amazement.
“Like matching pennies. I'll match you for the dinners.”
“I—I've only got a dollar,” she said.
“Plenty.”
“It isn't really a dollar,” she murmured. “I've only got—forty-three cents—in the world.”
It was her first confidence, and he thrilled to it. But he accepted it quite as a matter of course.
“Even on that it can be done. Come; where are you any worse off, even if you lose? And, at dinner, we might figure out some way for you to be better off.”
She got out a penny and looked at it a long time and then said: “Do I toss it up?” And of course the Gnome said no; because a tossed penny shows for itself. So they matched, and he looked at his coin (which showed the winning side up) and said:—
“I lose; I didn't match you.”
And then her lost misgiving surged over her and they sat and argued it. That is when I first noticed them. The Gnome won. Of course.
“So I took her to Marot's,” said the young giant, sitting up against his pillows and letting his gaze fare out into the humming heat of the day; “because I knew that, on a pinch, Mme. Marot would look after her. And I had an awful time keeping the bill of fare away from her and making her believe that she was getting only forty-three cents' worth. Courage came back to her with the food. She told me a little of her story; not much, then or afterward. I think she didn't want to claim anything of me, ever, not even sympathy. You see?”
I did see, if only vaguely. Leon the Gnome was building up a character to match the curious beauty of the face I had seen that once.
“That foreman brute wasn't her first experience. She had had to fight before; to leave good employment. To her the world was a jungle full of men who were only a horrible sort of pursuing ape. That came out later when I knew her better. My business there at that first dinner at Marot's was to get her to believe in me. Well,” he sighed, as over the memory of a formidable task accomplished, “I did it!”
He did it! Think of the gulf between those two; full, for her, of shameful memories and bristling fears; a gulf to be crossed with a shrinking heart before she could trust him; and across it he had led her by the mere power of words. Well, no; not words alone. Something shining and clear and trust-compelling back of the words; the nature of the man. Have I said that our Gnome was rather a wonderful person? He was.
“But how did you do it, miracle worker?” I demanded.
“No miracle at all. I don't understand you. I just told her about myself.”
“Quite so. What, for example?”
“Oh, everything,” he said, with a gesture of his big hands, indicating a broad generality. “Just a sort of outline of my life. I wanted her to know me as I was.” I wondered how many youths of my acquaintance in Our Square, or out, could afford to tell “everything” as a method of winning a young girl's confidence. But the Gnome, as I have indicated, was something of a phenomenon.
“So I lent her money and courage to go on with. And that evening, when we had walked and talked I said to her: 'Where will you go to-night?' and she said: 'Tell me.' So I brought her here to live.”
“Here?” I exclaimed.
“What are you thinking?” he growled. “Don't think it. Open that door.”
He pointed to the far corner of the room. I did as directed. “Look on the other side of it. What do you see?”
What I saw on the further side of the door was an oak bar set in iron clamps. Beyond was a tiny room and a tiny white bed and a flower in a pot on the window sill, dead and withered in the heat. Opposite the window an exit led to the hallway.
“There she lived and sang and was happy for fifty-five days. Each day was more glorious than the last for me. She stopped being afraid almost at once. It was just an even week after she came that she tapped on the door, when I had settled down to read my evening away.
“'May I come in?' she asked.
“'Yes,' I said.
“'For quite a time she made no move. Then: 'Are you sure?' she said.
“I understood. That was her way—to make you understand more than she said.” The sick man leaned out from his pillow toward the little door. “I can see her now, as she came into the room. She was all in fresh white, with a touch of some color at her waist. I had bought that dress for her. Do you know the delight of buying the realities of life for the woman you love? Oh, yes! I loved her then. I had loved her from the first sight, when I spoke to her on the bench because she seemed so desolate and scared.
“She came straight to me, and I stood up and put down my book. She looked me in the eyes, hard. Then she held out her hand. 'Shake hands,' she said. I shook. 'I'll keep the bargain,' I said. 'I know you will,' said she. She sat down in the wicker chair. No one has sat in it since; not even the Bonnie Lassie when she came. Yes; she sat down in the chair as if she were adopting it for her own. And we talked.”
“What did you talk about?” I asked. A foolish question, for what do youth and youth always talk about, when they encounter? But his reply surprised me.
“Money, mostly, that first evening. We went over accounts. She was keeping strict record of every cent I spent on her, to pay back when she got a job. Room rent, too. Oh, it was all very businesslike throughout. Afterward we talked about life and books and things. I lent her my books. I read a good deal, you know; all of us in the printing trades are great readers,” he added with a touch of guild pride. “She was better educated than I, though. Where did she get it? I never found out. Of course I didn't ask any questions. That was part of the bargain, as I understood it. She asked me a million. She turned me inside out and sometimes she laughed at me. But her laughter never hurt. It wasn't that kind.”
“Mightn't she have thought that your not asking questions of your own showed a lack of interest in her?” I suggested.
“How could she? I hadn't the right to ask questions. I hadn't the right to do anything but watch over her and guard her and keep to my bargain. Every evening she knocked and came in and sat in the wicker chair, and we talked. It was the sweetest thing in life to me, that absolute confidence. But the greater her confidence grew the more I was bound not to let her see what I felt for her. Isn't it so? You see, I know nothing about women.”
Having my grave doubts upon the point, I offered no advice.
“She got a job. I don't know where. Next week she began to pay me up.”
“Did you make any protests?” I asked, sounding him.
“Protests? Certainly not. I couldn't, could I? It was a question of her self-respect.”
“Of course. I beg your pardon for asking.”
“There was one night—we had been to a concert, Dutch treat, of course—and she came into my room to sit and talk it over for a few minutes. Passing me on her way back to her own room, she stopped behind my chair, and I felt something just brush my temple; and then the door shut behind her and the bar fell, and I heard her voice: 'Good-night, Gala-had.' For the next three days I never set eyes on her.”
“Did that tell you nothing?”
“What should it tell me?” retorted that pathetic young idiot. “It was just part of her mystery, of the mystery of woman, I suppose. The next Saturday night that drunken sot, MacLachan, came and ruined everything.”
“Soft words, Leon,” I protested, for the dour-faced, harsh-spoken, sore-hearted tailor of Our Square has his own reasons for drink and forgetfulness, and, drunk or sober, he is my friend.
“I wish he had broken his neck on the stairs,” said the Gnome savagely. “He sat over there, bleating to me some gibberish about Scotch philosophy, when Vera came into her room, and knocked as she always did. It was he that called 'Come in.' She came and stopped, looking at him with surprise. 'Oh,' she said, 'I didn't know.' 'No more did I,' said MacLachan, standing up with solemn, drunken politeness. 'I was not aweer there was a Mrs. Leon Coventry here.' She turned color, but looked him in the eye. 'There isn't,' said she. 'Then take shame to yerself,' he said. 'Ye should make at least the pretex'.'
“If she hadn't jumped between us, I would have pitched him out of the window. But she checked me long enough for him to get away and run down the stairs. It was the first time I had felt her arms and it turned me sick with longing. She backed away from me and said: 'I'm sorry, Leon. I didn't know there was any one here.' 'Wait,' I said. 'We've got to be married now.' If you could have seen her face, you'd have thought I'd struck her.” He stopped and swept the beads of sweat from his temples.
“Is that all you said?” I asked.
He stared at me. “That's almost what she asked me?” he replied. “She said: 'Is that all you have to say to me, Leon?' I didn't get her meaning. I was intent on the one thing—the bargain: that I mustn't make love to her; that I mustn't catch her in my arms and hold her against my heart that was bursting with love of her. The fever was on me, then, too, and I suppose that kept me to the one idea that was burning in my brain.
“'We can go to the Greek church, on the other side of the square,' I said. 'When can you be ready?'
“She walked back into her room, and I never saw her again.”
“God forgive you for a fool!” I said.
“Why didn't you tell her what every woman wants to hear, that you loved her?”
“Why, she must have known it; she must have realized it a thousand times, by a thousand signs. Yet she left me—that way.”
“You've had nothing from her since?”
“Yes. A money order for the balance of what she owed me.” An involuntary, jealous clutch at his pillow told me that the money order had not been and would not be cashed.
“No word with it?”
“Just gratitude.” The Gnome's sensitive lips quivered. “What do I want with gratitude? I want her! I want to find her. Suppose she were in trouble again. She's so young and helpless!”
“MacLachan never meant—”
“I went out to kill MacLachan next day. I was having pretty good luck at it too, when Terry the Cop came in. They brought me back here and called the doctor, and MacLachan cried out of one eye, for the other was closed.”
I recalled the tailor's black eye. Further I recalled that when some other-world business had taken me to Fifth Avenue I had there encountered Mac (of all persons) in (of all places) a millinery store. The fragments of his conversation which I caught related to ostriches. To my inquiry he replied that he was pursuing a will-o'-the-wisp, and that it was a lawful occupation. The suspicion now lodged in my mind that Mac had been searching for a lost trail. Of this I said nothing to Leon.
“Sometimes at night,” the sick man went on, “when I am not longing to smash up all the world because I can't get out and find her, she comes and sits in the wicker chair, and I hear the pressure of her dear body against the withes, and I feel her breath in the silence, but she never speaks. Is she dead, do you think?”
I most emphatically declined to entertain any such hypothesis. As for the Gnome, it seemed that he soon might be. The Little Red Doctor's visits grew more frequent, and his brow more corrugated, and his eyes more perplexed. Once he went so far as to observe in my hearing that nature could go just about so far without sleep and then it cracked.
“Through that crack,” he remarked, “enters sometimes my old friend, Death, sometimes madness. Let's pray that it won't be madness in the Gnome's case.”
Indications seemed to point in that direction, however. Leon's association with the spirit of the chair became closer and more constant. Night after night I heard him murmuring in the darkness, and the soft creak and rustle and whisper of the chair in reply, until the hairs of my neck quivered.
There came a night when the heat broke under a pressure of wild wind and rain from the northwest that swept Our Square like an aerial charge. It whirled me, breathless, into No. 7, and pursued me up the stairs, puffing out the light at the top. The Gnome was working. Beside him on a stand rustled a little pile of checks, weighted down.
“I'm going to leave a legacy,” he said gayly. “Will you be my executor? You'll have to find Her, you know.”
“Ask me ten years from now, if I'm alive,” I answered. “What's to-night? Reading?”
“Sleep, for you. You look done up. Take the couch and a blanket.”
I took them and, with them, what I had originally planned to be a brief nap, for there was medicine to be given now. When I woke up the room was dark. It seemed to me that a cold draft had passed over and roused me. Above the rush and whistle of the wind I could hear the chair whispering.
“My Heart! Oh, my Heart! Have you come back?” pleaded the Gnome's voice in the silence.
Then all the blood in my body made one great leap and stopped. The chair had sobbed.
“It has seemed so often that I could stretch out my hand and touch you,” went on the piteous, quiet voice from the bed. “But you were never there. And my soul is tired with waiting and longing.”
The chair rustled again with the sound of release from weight. There was a broken cry of love and fear and gladness that was of this and not the other world, and I knew without seeing that it was a woman of flesh and blood who lay on the Gnome's breast, covering his face with her kisses.
“Darling fool! Darling fool! Why didn't you tell me?” she sobbed. “Why didn't you tell me that you loved me?”
“I thought that I did,” said the Gnome, and I started at the changed voice, for it had suddenly taken on life and vigor. “I thought I told you in every word and look that you were all my world.” There was a pause, then: “Who did tell you?”
“Mr. MacLachan. He found me at last. He took me by the arm and said: 'Lassie, the love o' you is the life o' him. An' it's going if you don't come back an' save him!' Is it true, dearest one?” she cried passionately. “Tell me I'm not too late.”
Then I judged it best to tiptoe quite circumspectly out of the room. On the landing below I met the Little Red Doctor.
“Who went up the stairs just now?” he cried.
“Love,” said I. “Did you fear it was Death?”
MACLACHAN OF OUR SQUARE
MACLACHAN, the tailor, is as Scotch as his name and as dour as the Scotch. Our Square goes to his Home of Fashion to have its clothes made, repaired, and, on rare and special occasions, pressed, as a matter of local loyalty, which does not in the least imply that it either likes or approves MacLachan. It is, in fact, rather difficult to like him. He has a gray-granite face with a mouth like a snapped spring, toppling brows, and a nose wrinkled into the expression of one suspicious of all mankind and convinced that his worst suspicions are well founded. He has also the Scotch habit of the oracle, and deals largely in second-hand aphorisms.
Once he had a daughter, a wild-rose girl, who lived over the Home of Fashion with him, and kept him and the place in speckless order. But she is gone, three years since, and in her place MacLachan has only a bitter memory and a devouring shame. What they quarreled about Our Square never knew. The hard-bitten tailor was easy to quarrel with at any time. No information was offered by him, and public opinion in the neighborhood does not favor vain and curious inquiries into another man's family troubles. The night that Meg left, with her gray eyes blazing like two clear flames and her little chin so fiercely set that the dimple disappeared from it totally, MacLachan went out blackly glowering, and came back drunk and singing “The Cork Leg.”
What affinity may exist, even in a Scotchman's mind, between that naive and chatty ballad and strong liquor is beyond my imagination. But our dour, sour tailor then and there chose it and has since retained it for the slogan of his spirituous outbreaks, and sings it only when he is, in his own phrase, “a bit drink-taken.” The Bonnie Lassie has one of her queer theories that he used to sing Meg to sleep with it when she was a baby. “And that's why, you see,” says she. I don't see at all; it seems to me a psychologically unsound theory. Still, some of the unsoundest theories I have ever heard from the Bonnie Lassie's lips have been inexplicably borne out by the facts afterward. When I marvel at this she laughs and says that an old pedagogue who has spent his life with books mustn't expect to understand people.
As for the wild-rose Meg, she passed wholly out of the little, close-knit, secluded world of Our Square. Even those few of us who knew MacLachan and counted ourselves his friends feared to mention her name, not so much because of his known temper as of the haunting pain that grew in his eyes. With the temerity of youth, Henry Groll, one of Meg's many local adorers, and the best second tenor in the Amalgamated Glee Clubs, did put it to the tailor, having come to the Home of Fashion on a matter of international complications, viz., to ascertain whether red Hungarian wine would come out of a French piqué waistcoat.
“By the way, what d'you hear from Meg?” inquired the young man.
“What!”.The tailor's heavy shears went off at such a bias across the cloth he was cutting that Lawyer Stedman's coat, when completed, never could be coaxed to set exactly right under the left arm.
“I—I only ast ye,” said the visitor, somewhat disconcerted. “What's Meg doin' now?”
Three inches lower—the Little Red Doctor assured Henry a few moments after his ill-advised query, binding up the spot where the flung scissors had struck—and he would never again have sung second tenor nor anything else calling for the employment of intact vocal cords. Henry sent a messenger after the waistcoat. That night MacLachan reeled home bellowing “The Cork Leg” in a voice that brought Terry the Cop bounding across Our Square like a dissuasive antelope.
My one first-hand experience with the ballad of MacLachan's lapse from sobriety was brought about long after through the Bonnie Lassie's procuring. She thrust a sunny head from her studio window and beckoned me from the sidewalk with her modeling tool.
“Dominie, have you seen MacLachan, the tailor, to-day?” she called when she secured my attention.
“No. Is he looking for me?”
“You should be looking for him.”
I examined my clothing for possible rents or stains. My sober black was respectable if shiny. The Bonnie Lassie made a gesture of annoyance with the modeling tool which nearly cost her latest creation its head.
“Do you know what day this is?”
“Tuesday, the sev—”
“Don't be a calendar, please! What day is it in MacLachan's life?”
I groped. “Is it his birthday?” (Not that we are much given to celebrating birthdays in Our Square.)
“Oh, you men! You men! I've just telephoned the Little Red Doctor and he didn't know either. It's the second anniversary of the day MacLachan's Meg left him. Do you remember what happened last year, dominie?”
Did I remember! When Lawyer Sted-man had lured me to perjure my immortal soul before a magistrate, who let Mac off only upon the strength of a character sketch (by me) that would have overpraised any one of the Twelve Apostles! I did remember.
“Very well, then. You and the doctor are to take him away this evening. Far away and bring him back sober.”
We did our best. And we almost succeeded. For it was close on midnight and Mac was sleepily homebound between us before what he had drunk—against a rising current of our protests—awoke the devil of music in his brain. We were cutting across Second Avenue when he began:
“I'll tell you a story without any sham.
In Holland there lived Mynheer van Flam,
Who every morning said: 'I am
The richest merchant in Rotterdam,
Ri-tu, di-nu, di-nu—da—na—day!
Ri-tu, di-nu, di-nay!”
From the shadow of a tree there moved one of those brazen and piteous she-ghosts that haunt the locality. She addressed the three of us with hopeful impartiality. MacLachan shook himself free of our arms and walked close to her, staring strangely into her face.
“I've got a daughter in your line of trade,” he said.
He spoke quietly, but the she-ghost read his eyes. She shrank back trembling, stammered something, and hurried away.
Not until we entered Our Square, after ten minutes of strained silence, did MacLachan look up from the pavement.
“Was there a lassie I spoke to?” he asked vaguely. “What did I say to her?” The Little Red Doctor told him circumstantially. “Personally, I think you're a liar,” he added.
“Do ye?” wistfully answered the tailor, slumping upon a bench. “I take it kind of ye that ye do. But I'm no liar. Once and for all I'll tell ye both. Then ye'll know, and we'll bury it. When my Meg left me I began to die—inside. The last thing in me to die was my pride. When that was dead too—or I thought it so—I set out to seek her. I found her. It was just off Sixth Avenue. In the broad o' the afternoon it was, and there she stood bedizened like yon poor hussy that spoke to us. Raddled with paint too; raddled to the eyes. But the eyes had not changed. They looked at me straight and brave and hard. I had meant well by her, however I might find her. God knows I did! But at the sight of her so, my gorge rose. 'What are ye,' says I, 'that ye should come into the light of day wearing shame on yer face?' Her look never wavered—you mind how fearless she always was, dominie—though she must have seen I was near to killing her with my naked hands. 'I'm as you see me. Take me or leave me,' she says. So I left her to go her ways, and I went mine.” There was a long silence. Then the Little Red Doctor deliberately measured off a short inch on MacLachan's forefinger.
“You're not that much of a man, Mac,” said he, and flipped the hand from him. “Do you take him home, dominie; I haven't the stomach for any more of him to-night.”
With any other than the Little Red Doctor it would have been a lasting quarrel. But the official physician and healer of bodies (and souls at times) to Our Square is too full of other and more important things to find room for resentment. So when, a fortnight later, MacLachan sallied forth to the tune of “The Cork Leg,” and came back raving with pneumonia, it was, of course, the Red One who pulled him through it. And in that period of delirium and truth the wise little physician saw deep into the true MacLachan and realized that a spirit as wistful and craving as a child's was beating itself to death against the bars of the dour Scotch tradition of silence and repression.
“He'll kill himself with the drink,” said the Little Red Doctor to me after the tailor was restored to the Home of Fashion. “Though I'll stop him if I can. That's my business. Even so, maybe I'll be wrong. For the man's heart is breaking slowly. I've a notion that my old friend, Death, Our Square might do better with the case than I can.”
At shorter and ever shortening intervals thereafter the booming baritone rendition of “The Cork Leg” apprised Our Square that the tailor was “on it again.” One late August day, as the doctor was passing the Home of Fashion, he heard from behind the closed door the sound of MacLachan's mirthless revelry. He stepped in and found the Scot, cross-legged and with a bottle at his elbow, rocking in time to his own melody while he stylishly braided mine host Schmidt's pants (“trousers” is an effete term not favored by Arbiter MacLachan) for the morrow's picnic and outing of the Pinochle Club:—
“One day when he'd stuffed him as full as an egg
A poor relation came to beg,
But he kicked him out without broaching a keg,
And in kicking him out he broke his own leg.
Ri-tu, di-nu, di—”
“Shut up, Mac! Stop it.”
“I've stopped. You've rooned my music. The noblest song, bar Bobbie Burns—What's yer wish, little mannie?”
“I've some work for you.”
“I've no time—”
“It's important. I must surely have it to-morrow.”
“'Must is a master word, but will not is no man's slave,'” pronounced MacLachan, the oracle.
“Listen, Mac,” pleaded the other. “I've a consultation to-morrow, and I must have my other coat fixed up for it.”
“What's wrong wi' the garrment?”
“It's—it's ripped: torn across the skirt,” floundered the Little Red Doctor, who is a weak, unreliable prevaricator at best.
The dour tailor leaned forward and shook his goose at the visitor. “Peril yer salvation with no more black lies about yer black coat,” said he firmly. “It's' the drink ye're strivin' to wean me from. But I'm proof against yer strategy, ye pill-an'-pellet Macchiavelli! Ye've no more rip nor tear in yer black coat than I've a ring in my nose.”
“Well, I'd have made one, then,” returned the shameless doctor.
“Ye'd have wasted time and money. Go yer own gait an' fight yer old friend, Death. But leave me with my friend, the Drink.”
“Listen to me, Mac. As sure as you keep it up, just so sure the dissecting-room will get your kidneys and the devil will get your soul.”
Carefully setting aside the bottle, MacLachan leaned forward to fasten a claw on the Little Red Doctor's shoulder.
“Do you listen now, and I'll tell ye a secret. While I'm still sober I'll tell it ye, so you'll believe it and fash me no more about the drink. Ye say the devil will get my soul. Ye're a backward prophet, mannie. He's got it. Yes, he's got it, an' another of the same blood to boot. An' all he ever gave me in trade is this,” he cried, pointing to the bottle. “So go an' save them as wants it, or stay an' listen:—
“'Mr. Doctor, says he, 'now you've done your work.
By your sharp knife I lose one fork,
But on two crutches I never will stalk,
For I'll have a beautiful leg of cork.'”
“Mac.”
“Don't delay my work. I've to finish these pants before John Nelson comes to fetch me.”
“Who's John Nelson?”
“Friend of my seafarin' days. Now Captain Nelson, if ye please, in the coastwise trade, new back from the deep seas and the roaring trades with a tropical thirst. 'T is he sent me yon messenger,” and he indicated the bottle of rum. “Be easy. I'll not come back to Our Square till I'm sober.”
“If you do, I'll swear you into Bellevue with my own right hand,” declared the Little Red Doctor disgustedly. He slammed the door as he went out.
The next person to open that door was Captain John Nelson. There was a brief ceremonial in which the captain's messenger played an important rôle, the newcomer joined his voice, for old friendship's sake, in the refrain of MacLachan's favorite ballad, and shortly thereafter the twain were seen arm in arm making a straight course across the open for unknown lands. All that we of Our Square had to judge MacLachan's sea comrade by was a stumping gait, a plump figure, a brown and good-humored face, and a most appalling interpretation of the second part in simple harmony.
We were to see him once again, briefly; to hear from his lips the events of that astonishing evening. Of the Odyssey of the sailor and the tailor there is little to be said. Crisscross and back, along Broadway, from Fourteenth Street upward, it ran, coming to a stop shortly before theater-closing time at a small restaurant which, I am told, has a free-and-easy rather than an unsavory repute. There they sat down to a bit of supper, having had, as the captain pathetically stated later, not a bite to eat since dinner at eight o'clock. I still possess the worthy mariner's “chart of the operations,” as he terms it, sketched in order that we landlubbers of Our Square might comprehend fully how it all developed. From this masterpiece of cartography I learn that the two friends occupied a side table some halfway down the room, Captain Nelson facing the rear. At the next table back, and therefore directly in his view, sat a couple, the lady spreading so much canvas that she covered all of ninety degrees, whereby the mariner means, I take it, that his neighbor's hat shut off his view of the prospect beyond. Food and drinks being ordered, MacLachan had just leaned back to a discussion of the relative merits of Burns and Garlyle when the orchestra struck into a tune not unlike “The Cork Leg.” To the scandal and distress of the captain, MacLachan straightway lifted up his voice:—
“A tinker in Rotterdam, 't would seem,
Had made cork legs his study and theme,
Each joint was as strong as an iron beam
And the springs were a compound of clockwork and steam.
Ri-tu——
The diplomatic dissuasions of the head waiter, added to the pained and profane protests of his companion, induced the singer to stop at that point. But the lady-under-full-sail arose with a proud, disgusted expression and stalked out, drawing her escort in her wake and uttering loud and refined reflections upon the vulgar environment. Thus was left to Captain Nelson, resuming his seat, a clear view to the far-rear table. This table, he was aesthetically pleased to note, was occupied by a distinctively pretty girl. The girl, as he was humanly affected in perceiving, was exhibiting what, all silly mock modesty apart, he could interpret only as a marked interest in his own romantic and attractive personality.
“What for are you swelling up like a bullpout, John?” inquired his companion, who, having his back turned, had seen nothing of the byplay.
The sailor waved a jaunty hand. “Nothing; nothing at all. It often happens to me. Just a pretty lass in the offing flying signals.”
Without turning, MacLachan made some references of a libelous character concerning a Babylonian lady whose antiquity is the only excuse for her even being mentioned by respectable lips.
“Babylon, Long Island?” queried the captain. “I've got an aunt lives there. You think this young lady comes from those parts?”
“How do I know?” growled the tailor, and explained in biting terms that his citation was symbolic, not geographic.
“Hum!” said the seafarer. “She's a little high-colored, I admit, but that don't make her what you say. Anyway, I'll just run down and speak a word of politeness to her. By the time you've finished that drink and the next I'll be back.”
The incognita received Captain Nelson with a direct and unsmiling handshake.
“You know me,” she instructed him under her breath as a waiter came up. “We're old acquaintances.” Then in full voice: “I hardly recognized you at first. How long is it since I've seen you?” Necessity for immediate invention was obviated by the opportune arrival of the waiter. Glancing at the tall, icy glass in front of his new acquaintance, the bold mariner said: “I'll take the same,” and was considerably disconcerted when the waiter passed along the word: “One lemonade.”
“Now,” said the girl sharply as soon as the waiter had left, “who is your friend that sings?”
“His name's MacLachan. He's all right, only—”
“Bring him here.”
“But first can't I—”
“Bring him here,” repeated the girl inexorably. “I like his voice.”
Sadly the shattered seafarer retraced his course. MacLachan listened, demurred, growled, acquiesced. As the pair walked along, the tailor reeling a bit, the girl was busy searching for something under the table. She did not lift her face until the men were beside her. Then she rose and looked up at MacLachan.
“Dad,” she said.
MacLachan went stark, staring sober in one pulse-beat. But all he said was “Oh!” That is all, I am told, that men say when they are shot through the heart. Nelson slid a chair behind his friend's trembling knees. He sat down. Bending forward, he glared into the garishly splotched face of his daughter and put his hand to his throat, struggling for speech. A door behind closed, and a cheerful, boyish voice said:—
“Hello, little girl. Been waiting long?”
The wild-rose face dimpled and blossomed into sweetness under the layers of paint. “Hello, Jim-boy. Get yourself a chair.”
“Introduce me to your friends,” said the newcomer.
“That one used to be my old dad,” said the girl slowly.
The young man whistled as he drew in his chair. “Quite a family party,” he remarked.
“Who is this?” demanded MacLachan.
“My husband.”
“Your—your husb—” MacLachan took a deep gulp from the lemonade glass which the resourceful captain thoughtfully thrust into his hand. “Why, he—he's a mere laddie. Can he support ye?”
“He's making seventy-five a week every week in the year,” said the girl quietly. “And I'm good for about that average.”
“You? In what trade?” demanded the father slowly and fearfully.
“The movies. Both of us. He's a set designer. I'm an ingénue. Why else would I be all gommered up like this” (she touched her cheeks), “not having time to wash off my make-up?”
“How long have ye been in the business?” faltered MacLachan.
“Since I left. It was hard at first.”
“When I saw ye in the street that day—”
She nodded. “Yes; I was just out of rehearsal.”
Then the devil's pride of the Scot, recalling with fierce self-pity his long heartbreak and loneliness, rose in a flame of resentment and seared the flowering love in his heart.
“Ye gave me no word,” he snarled, rising. “Ye knew I was killing myself for lo—, for shame of ye, and ye let be. What do I owe ye but a curse!”
“That's enough,” said the boy husband; but his voice had become that of a man.
“Dad!” cried the girl.
MacLachan, the dour, turned away. Nelson set a hand on his arm, but he struck it down.
“Oh, Jim-boy!” whispered the girl to her husband. “I can't let him go again.”
He was a youth of resource, that husband; I'm not prepared to say that he didn't have even a touch of genius. “Granddad!” he said.
“Eh?” MacLachan stopped, as if stricken in his tracks.
“What do you think of her?” Jim-boy had produced, quick as conjuring, a little leather-mounted photograph which he held up before MacLachan's eyes. “Did Meg look like her when she was a baby?”
“The varra spit an' image,” cried MacLachan, reverting to his broadest Scotch. Then, with a cry that shook him: “My bairnie!”
Meg went to his arms in a leap.
“And you may believe it or not—I would not, on the oath of a chaplain if I had not seen it with my own eyes,” ran Captain Nelson's subsequent narrative to Our Square, “but I saw the tears on those twin gray rocks that serve MacLachan for cheeks. So I drifted down to leeward and gathered my coat and gave three waiters a quarter each for not staring and came away to tell you. And you'll forgive me for waking the two of you up, and it gone eight bells—I mean midnight—but that was Mac's last word as I left, that I was to tell you. He said you'd be glad.”
Glad we were, and all Our Square joined in the gladness, for it was a changed and softened MacLachan that came back to us, sober and strangely, gently awkward, the next day after a night spent with “my family.”
“Ye'll not see me drink-taken again,” he promised the Little Red Doctor.
That good word went swiftly. Consequently it was the greater shock when, on the very next Thursday afternoon, several of us who had run into the Bonnie Lassie's studio for tea and the weekly inspection of ourselves as mirrored in her work, heard in the familiar rumbling baritone from the open park space:—
“Horror and fright were in his face,
The neighbors thought he was running a race,
He clung to a lamp-post to stay his pace,
But the leg broke away and kept up the chase,
Ri-tu, di-nu, di-nu—di—na—day!
Ri-tu, di-nu, di-nay!”
“My God!” cried the Little Red Doctor in consternation. “Mac's off again.”
He jumped up, but the Bonnie Lassie was quicker. “Let me get him,” she said, and ran from the room.
Almost at once she was back, her face quivering. “Come and look!” she bade us.
We crowded the front windows. On a bench in Our Square slouched a thin, hard, angular figure, terminating in a thin, hard, angular face, at the moment wide open and pouring forth unabashed melody for the apparent benefit of a much befrilled vehicle, which was being propelled back and forth by a thin, long leg. MacLachan was entertaining his granddaughter.
THE GREAT 'PEACEMAKER
A Story of Neutrality in Our Square ONE of the notable sporting events of Our Square is the nightly chess duel at Thomsen's Elite Restaurant. Many a beer, not a few dinners, and once even a bottle of real champagne won and lost, have marked the enthusiasm and partisanship of the backers. Personally I prefer David's cavalry dash as exemplified in long-range handling of doubled rooks, but there are plenty who swear and bet by the sapper-and-miner doggedness of Jonathan's pawn manipulations. The contestants have been known as David and Jonathan to Our Square for ten years, except for the late, melancholy months following the combat which broke off all relations and left the corner table at Thomsen's Square vacant. Since then the light-minded—such as Cyrus the Gaunt—have called them David and Goliath.
David is a little, old, hot-hearted Frenchman whose real name is Henri Dumain. Hermann Groll, alias Jonathan, alias (alas!) Goliath, is a ponderous and gentle old German. Their first meeting was at Thomsen's, back early in the century, when there were only ten tables in the place and the front window shyly invited the public through the medium of a guinea-chicken, a fish in season, and two chops with their paper-frilled shanks engaged like buttoned foils. In those days Henri, a newcomer, sat back against the side wall and unobtrusively watched a guerrilla campaign between Hermann and a nondescript casual patron with weak eyes and a deprecating manner, of whom none of us knew anything except that he came from somewhere on Avenue B and had an irritating trick of answering queen's gambit by pawn to king's rook 4. But one evening two thick-booted strangers interrupted the game and took away the eccentric pawn-pusher. He had, it appeared, flavored his aged aunt's soup with arsenic. Life has its thrills in Our Square!
Hermann was disconsolate. “A pity,” he murmured. “I should have checkmated in four moves.”
“Your pardon, but I think not,” said a courteous but positive voice.
Hermann looked up and saw Henri. “You think not?” he said mildly. “Maybe so. We will try. Sit down.”
They played it out. Owing to an unforeseen brilliant diversion on the part of the newcomer's knight, the struggle was prolonged for twenty moves before victory went to the Teuton. He rose.
“The sacrifice of the rook's pawn,” he observed, “was able. Very able. Tomorrow evening?”
“With pleasure,” answered his adversary. Thereafter they played nightly, with almost equal fortunes, and as they played their association ripened into friendship, and their friendship, through sympathies subtle and strange in two characters so apparently unlike, into the love that passeth the love of woman. They became David and Jonathan indeed, and one of the pleasantest sights that helped me to peaceful dreams was the frequent glimpse I got of the big German and the little Frenchman walking home after the battle arm in arm across Our Square.
Each had been a lone spirit, craving companionship. And nearest to the lonely heart of each was the struggle and achievement of an only son in the other half of the world; one carving out a business career in Algiers, the other introducing American ideas in horticulture to the staid garden scientists of Würtemberg. Presently they took to reading their boys' letters in common; and they would chuckle, or look serious, or debate, or prophesy with a single and equal interest whether it were a matter of Hermann, Jr., or of young Robert in Africa. Comradeship can go no deeper. The flash of a foreign postage stamp across the marble-topped table was the signal for Elsa, the polyglot cashier of the Elite, to set down one more drink than usual, for it invariably meant a prolonged and confidential confab after the game was over. Tradition held their chosen table always in reserve. And tradition has all the force and more than the respect of law in Our Square.
Judge, then, of our amazement at the unprecedented behavior of Inky Mike on a certain evening a little before the regular hour for the chess-players to appear. The world without was big with the presage of tremendous events just then, but this was forgotten for the moment in the shock of Mike's performance. He sauntered down the length of the aisle, an expression of self-confidence upon his smeary countenance, and coolly dropped into Jonathan's chair, nodding to Elsa, the pretty polyglot. Now Inky Mike plumes himself upon a “connection with the press” (through the rollers, it is understood in Our Square, though he is loftily vague about it) and the passion of his life is to pick news “off the wires” and announce it in advance of print, in some startling manner. This might be one of his coups. Elsa regarded him with puzzled suspicion. Then she descended upon him, polite but with firm purpose of eviction.
“Bitte,” she said, with the queenly gesture of one accustomed to command.
Mike lifted one eyebrow, and that with an effort. Otherwise he stirred not.
“S'il vous plait!” said the little cashier determinedly.
“Mine's a beer,” returned the smeary one.
“If you please!” she stamped her foot in the universal and unmistakable language.
“Oh, I got you the foist time,” drawled Mike. “You should worry. They won't be here.”
“No—o—o—oah?” queried Elsa in a soaring whoop of amazement.
“Not this evenin', nor any other evenin'! You can plant a 'To Let' sign on their table. They won't care.”
“Warum? Pourquoi pas? W'y not?”
The repository of terrible secrets delivered himself of his theme in complacent triumph. “War's just declared between France and Germany. That's w'y not.”
Thus the tremendous news came to Thomsen's. On the heels of it came the Teutonic Jonathan. Inky Mike rose astounded and hastily moved, for he is sufficiently one of us to respect the Square's traditions.
“Excuse me,” he apologized. “Is Mister—is your side pardner coming?”
The answer to the question was given in the person of the Gallic David. Inky Mike gaped at them.
“Will they mix it, d'ye think?” he inquired in an awed and hopeful tone of Cyrus the Gaunt, who was eating ice cream at an adjoining table with the Bonnie Lassie. Those were the days when the Bonnie Lassie was sculping Cyrus the Gaunt and Cyrus was acting as chauffeur to ten tons of steam roller on a bet, and each was discovering the other to be the most wonderful person in the world—in which they weren't so far wrong as a cynical mind might suppose.
Cyrus did not think; at least not for the inkful one's benefit. He acted. It was done unobtrusively, his shifting to the table next the chess rivals. They did not notice it. They did not notice anything but each other. David was breathing hard, as he took his seat, and a queer light flickered in his eyes.
“You take black to-night,” said Jonathan slowly.
His friend pushed the chessboard aside. “You have heard?” he said, and pulling a newspaper from his pocket slapped it on the table.
Now the doubly damned devil of mischance influenced him to reach into the wrong pocket, so he drew forth not the “Extry—Extry” which he had just bought of Cripple Chris on the corner, but an earlier copy of the “Courrier des Etats-Unis.” Jonathan stiffened in his chair.
“I do not read that language,” he said deliberately.
“You have then perhaps lost your mind since yesterday,” said the fiery little Frenchman.
“I have the mind I have always had. It is a German mind,” was the grim response.
“Then it is the mind of a savage!” cried the other.
The big man got to his feet. The little one was up as quickly. Cyrus the Gaunt laid a hand, every finger of which had the grip of a lobster's claw, on the shoulder of each.
“Sit down,” he said quietly. “Let's arbitrate.”
“But,” began the Frenchman, “I—he—”
“There's a lady waiting to speak to you,” interrupted Cyrus.
The Bonnie Lassie stood, smiling but anxious-eyed, behind his shoulder. David sprang to get her a chair. Then they invited me into consultation, and we sat in solemn conclave while Inky Mike hovered, with diminishing hopes, on the outskirts. At the close there was ratified what I believe to have been the first agreement of total neutrality in the present world conflict. By its provisions every topic having to do with the war or any of the parties to it was rigorously tabooed. Both the German and the French language, even for purposes of exclamation and emphasis, were to be eschewed. Literature, art, and music were, however, to remain open topics, irrespective of nationality. And chess, that studious mimicry of what is most terrible in the world, was to proceed as usual. That evening David and Jonathan walked homeward across Our Square arm in arm.
By what unremitting exercise of self-control and loyalty those two kept the pact through the tinder-and-powder events of succeeding months only they themselves know. It was pitiful and at the same time beautiful to see the subterfuges whereby they preserved their affection from the blight of the all-devouring war, even in its remote associations. There came a day when mails arrived by a Holland steamer. That evening David waited expectant. But his friend gave out no news. The natural impatience of the Frenchman broke bounds.
“And the young Hermann?” he demanded. “How goes it with our special assistant to Mother Nature?”
“It goes—it goes well,” answered Jonathan.
“He persuades the others to his ideas, always?”
“Hermann is no longer in the gardens. He—he has left.”
“Left!” cried David. “Given up—” He stopped short, looking into the face of his friend, a face whose eyes shifted uneasily away from his. Then comprehension came to him, and he did a fine and beautiful thing.
“To the brave,” said he, lifting his glass, “who face death for the country that they love.”
Was there, perhaps, a small savor of salt to the beer which Jonathan set down after his draught? If so, he need not have been ashamed. It seemed to me, when I saw them going home that night, that their arms were hooked a little closer than common.
Not long after it was David's turn to get a letter. He sat fingering it when Jonathan entered.
“From our young Robert?” asked the German.
David nodded.
“Am I to see it?”
“He says—he says some things about—about the war,” faltered the Frenchman. “Youth is perhaps harsh. And he is a high spirit—my boy.”
Something in the tone told the German. “He has enlisted?”
The other father nodded.
“I am glad,” said the German simply. “And may God bring him safely through!”
How that could have happened which did thereafter come to pass between two souls so fine, so brave, so forbearing, is one of the mysteries of the madness of the human heart. It was on the evening when Elsa, the polyglot, had just completed her chef-d'ouvre of embroidery which still hangs upon the wall. It is a legend subscribed in a double scroll, which is held in the beak of a dove of peace about half the size of the scroll, the whole being tastefully surrounded by a frieze of olive branches done in blue, Elsa's green yarn having given out prematurely. The legend reads:—
BE NEUTRAL
SPEAK ENGLISH
THINK AMERICAN
Out of compliment she had hung it over the chess-players' table. The game developed a swift and interesting attack, that evening, down an open center, David having castled on the queen's side, and brought both rooks into early action. All was going well for him, when a band outside halted and began to play “Die Wacht am Rhein.” That they played it atrociously out of tune is unimportant to the issue. Rendered by a celestial choir that particular song would probably have inspired David with frenzy. The first symptom was that he moved his queen upon a. diagonal with his king, open to an opposing bishop. Just what the course of events subsequently was I cannot say, as my table was in the far end. But I heard Elsa's lamentable voice, startled quite out of the practice of the language neutrality which she preached, and this is what I heard: —“Oh, Messieurs! Oh! Meine Herren!! Gents!!!”
Crash! The chessboard was swept to the floor, and the contestants rolled after it, tight clinched. They tipped over two neighboring tables, and a plate of salad, a soft-shell crab, and a fried chicken, violating their neutrality, descended to take a conspicuous part in the fight. Over and over rolled the combatants, now one on top, now the other, clawing, kicking, pummeling, and filling the air with bilingual fury. It was all very comic, for the onlookers who didn't understand, and the “Tribune” reporter made a good story of it next day. But he did not know—how could he?—the underlying tragedy; the tragedy of hate, where love had been and loneliness in the place of comradeship. With ordinary luck it might have been kept out of the newspapers and the police court, but, unfortunately, Terry the Cop, a wise young Daniel of Our Square, was followed in by a strange policeman. “And so,” Terry explained to me, regretfully,
“I had to make the pinch. Wouldn't it make you sick?” he added. “Two good old guys like them! War sure is hell!” Of the subsequent proceedings, Inky Mike brought us a fuller report than the newspapers. The Little Red Doctor, being appealed to to procure bail, had done so, and had further taken two stitches in, the big man's head and set a disjointed thumb for the little man. In the police court, thanks to Terry, who “put him wise,” the judge had bidden the two belligerents shake hands and go free. They shook hands, at arm's length, and went free, separately.
“No more David an' Jonathan stuff,” gloated Inky Mike. “David and Goliath is more in their line. This finishes their game.”
“Ah, Smart Aleck!” said Elsa resentfully. “You know nothing. 'S macht nichts aus! Ça ne signifie rien! Fudge is what I try to say. They come back this evening, good as new.”
Come back they did not, however. In vain did Elsa keep her eyes on the clock and her hopes high. When nine o'clock struck and the table beneath her desk was still vacant she burst into tears, gave a Magyar from Second Avenue eight dollars and sixty cents change out of a five-dollar bill (the Magyar hasn't been seen since), and rushed forth from the place with her apron over her head, finding refuge on a bench of Our Square, where she sat openly wailing until Terry the Cop led her home.
“Will they never come back to their little table, do you think?” miserably inquired. Polyglot Elsa of the Little Red Doctor several evenings later, gazing with blurred eyes down upon the stolidly opposing armies of chessmen in their brave array.
The Little Red Doctor shook a dubious head. “That's a bad mess,” he said.
“But they have nothing else but themselves!” cried the girl. “So sad it is. Perhaps,” she added with timid hopefulness, “you could make a peace again between them.”
“I've tried. The only peacemaker strong enough to bring them together, I'm afraid, is my old friend Death.”
Jonathan almost wholly disappeared from Our Square after the rupture. Not so David. He was much in evidence. Usually he whistled as he walked with a lightsome and swaggering step to show that he hadn't a care in the world. But when you got near him you saw the hollows under his eyes. Pride carried him even into Thomsen's, and almost to the vacant table in the corner. Not quite. For thereon stood the little wood soldiers, sturdy and stanch, and above them leaned Elsa, smiling welcome to him—and hope. David, the irreconcilable, stopped short, dropped into the nearest chair, turned his back upon that haunted corner, and ordered his favorite refreshment in a voice so cheerful that it almost chirped. Halfway through his carafon, having caught Elsa's gaze, melancholy, accusing, and imploring, he swore, choked over his vin ordinaire, and retreated in bad order to the shelter of the outer darkness without paying his check.
How long he wandered about Our Square I cannot say. He was there when I crossed to Thomsen's at nine o'clock. He was there when I peered out at ten. He was still there when I returned home at eleven-fifteen.
So was Jonathan. The reason why we of the Square had not seen him of late was that he had chosen for his promenade an hour when he would be unlikely to encounter any of us. This time he met David. They passed each other within a foot. Jonathan was profoundly absorbed in the condition of a tree trunk which he had passed without interest some thousands of times. David studied the constellation Orion with a concentrated attention quite creditable in one so new to a passion for astronomy. I sat down on a bench and gave vent to my feelings. Said Terry the Cop to me, approaching solicitously:—
“Are ye laughing, dominie, or choking to death?”
“I am laughing, Terry,” I said.
“And why are ye laughing, dominie?”
“I am laughing, Terry,” I informed him, “because it is better to laugh than to do a certain other thing.” And I declined, with proper dignity, his well-meant but ill-informed offer to escort me home.
There came a black day for our fiery old French David when the Dutch liner arrived bearing assorted mails. That afternoon he paced, stony-eyed and silent, a square swept vacant by savage rain blasts, with a half-ounce of letter over his heart and a thousand tons of grief pressing down above it. Presently another bedraggled wayfarer entered the Square, wandered aimlessly, and sprawled his ponderous bulk upon the corner bench, where the umbrella tree affords a partial shelter. The Teuton Jonathan was also braving the storm.
Back and forth, back and forth, through the fierce, gray slant of the rain, marched the Frenchman, drawing at each turn a little nearer to the corner bench. The German did not move nor look up. He seemed lost in reverie. A square of white cardboard lay on his knee. His eyes stared out over it, brooding. At length the marcher in the rain came to the rightabout directly in front of the bench and stopped, rubbing his forehead like a man struggling out of a dream. David had recognized Jonathan.
He took an impetuous step forward. A gust of wind plucked the square of cardboard from the unheeding German's knee. It fell, displaying to the newcomer the double eagle of imperial Germany. David's face, which had softened, became a mask of fury. Another step forward and he saw something else above the insigne, a bar of black. He stooped and picked up the card. Jonathan neither saw nor moved.
Beneath the symbol on the card stood a line of German script. David lifted his eyes from it and looked about him. In the doorway of the Elite Restaurant, just across the asphalt, he saw Polyglot Elsa.
“Behüte!” cried Elsa when she saw his face. “Sainte Vierge! What has happened?”
“Mademoiselle, translate for me,” cried the little old Frenchman: “'Auf dem Felde der Ehre gefallen'.”
“'Dead on the field of honor.' What—” But he was already halfway back, fighting his way through the gusts. With grave misgivings Elsa saw him advance upon his former friend and bitter foe. She wished Terry would come. Terry was a mighty discourager of trouble and violence.
David advanced to the sheltered bench without speaking. Quietly he seated himself beside Jonathan. Jonathan might have been dead for all that he heeded. His mind was in another world. David touched him on the shoulder.
“Hein?” said the big German vaguely. “'S ist du?” using involuntarily the tender pronoun of affection. Comprehension and remembrance came back to him instantly, and he shrank away with an inarticulate snarl of hatred.
David drew from his pocket the letter that had crushed the heart beneath it. He spread it on his knee.
“I have seen, Hermann,” he said brokenly. “Look you.”
Hermann looked. He looked from the gallant tricolor to the words below, and one phrase stood forth and went to his heart. “Mort dans la gloire pour la patrie: Robert Humain.”
Jonathan's fingers crept to David's knee and clung there. David's hand went to Jonathan's shoulder. The two old heads sagged lower and lower and closer and closer.
And Terry the Cop, who had crossed the street in five leaps with the liveliest anticipation of trouble in the first degree, took one look, turned hastily away, and huskily commanded a storm-beaten sparrow in the path to move on.
ORPHEUS
Who Made Music in Our Square
A PLAYWRIGHT named Euripides was the means of bringing us together. He sat hunched upon a bench in Our Square—not Euripides, of course, but this strange disciple of his—over a little book. When the church clock struck twelve he arose and unfolded himself to preposterous lengths. He stepped casually over a four-foot wire, strode across forbidden grass plots, and leaned pensively against the northern boundary fence. Although it was a six-foot fence, he jutted considerably above it. I glanced from him back to the bench he had just quitted. There lay his book. I picked it up. It was “The Bacchae.” In the original, if you please!
Now, to find a gigantic and unexplained stranger in the metropolitan hurry and stress of Our Square perusing the classic version of the very 'Greekest and most mystic of dramas, by the spluttering ray of Jove's own lightning pent up and set to work in a two-by-one frosted globe at so many cents per kilowatt, is a startling experience for a quiet, old semi-retired pedagogue like myself. I pocketed the volume (which was in a semiuncial text like running tendrils) and sat down to consider its owner. Another of the Thunderer's bottled bolts diffused its light where he now stood, and set forth his face. It was young and comely and gallant, with a wrapt, intent melancholy; the face of a seeker, baffled but still defiant of despair. It seemed to be turned toward a star that I could not see.
I sat and waited for Terry the Cop to arrive on his stated rounds. If that shrewd young guardian of the local peace did not already know about the classical stranger, he could be depended upon to find out. When his heavy tread paused before my bench I indicated the trespassing giant. “Terry,” said I, “what is that?”
“That,” replied Terry promptly, “is a Nut.”
“Where does it come from?”
“Search me, dominie. It just kinda drops in.”
“Often?”
“Every night.”
“Why haven't I seen it before?”
“You hit the hay too early. This bird is an owl, and it don't begin to hoot till late.”
“Hoot?” I repeated. Terry's symbolism sometimes tends to the obscure.
“Stick around a few minutes,” advised the wise young policeman, “and you'll hear something.”
“Is he an amateur astronomer?” I asked. “Or what is it he is staring at?”
Terry pointed. “Look between those two roofs. See a little light, way up there?” I did. “That's it. That's the window.”
“Ah,” said I. “Romeo, I suppose.”
“Long-distance to the balcony,” returned Terry the Cop, who does not lack literary background. “That's the upper wing of the Samaritan Hospital, two blocks away. Sh-h-h! He's going to begin.” The stranger had taken from his coat a short, slender object which he fitted together with precision. Now he threw up his head and set it to his lips. Faint and pure as the song of a bird, heard across the hushed reaches of a forest, the music came to us. It was a wild, soaring melody unknown to me, but as I listened I thought of all the songs with which reed and pipe have ever answered to the breath of man; Pan's minstrels, and the glorified penny whistle of Svengali and the horns of elfland faintly blowing, and the witchery of the Pied Piper of Hamelin; and it seemed to me that all these and more blended in the rise and fall of those magic measures.
Silence fell. A wakened sleeper in a tree twittered a sleepy request for more. The player had lowered his instrument and was leaning against the rail, gazing. At that distance there could have been no answer from the far hospital window; the tones of his pipe were so soft as hardly to be audible where we stood. Yet he presently nodded and threw up his hand, and his face was transfigured with a wistful passion as he lifted the slender pipe to his lips again. This time, indeed, I knew what he played. It was that music which, above all other, embodies the soul and spirit of immortal youth; youth that hopes and fears and despairs and hopes again; youth that hungers and loves and suffers; youth that ever, through all turmoil and grief and wreckage, is imperishably young and immortally lovely, the music of “Bohême.” Again the strains sank and died in the darkness.
“That's all,” Terry the Cop informed me. “It's their signal. And he always ends on that.”
“Signal? At that distance? Do you mean to tell me she—whoever she is —can hear?”
“Whether she hears or not, she seems to get somethin' over to this Romeo guy.”
“No, Terry,” I said. “Not Romeo. An older singer and a greater.” And, with my hand on the little volume in my pocket, I gave my policeman friend the benefit of Gilbert Murray's matchless translation:—
“In the elm woods and the oaken,
There where Orpheus harped of old,
And the trees awoke and knew him,
And the wild things gathered to him,
As he sang amid the broken
Glens his music manifold.”
“Some rag!” said Terry the Cop admiringly.
“That, Terry,” said I, indicating the stranger, who was once more lost in watchfulness, “is Orpheus.”
This was too much of a strain on Terry's classic lore. “You're in wrong there, dominie. He don't belong to any Orpheus nor Arion nor Liedertafel. He's a Greek and his name is Philip, two pops, and an oulos.”
“All very well; Terry,” said I, trying him out. “But does that give him the right to play a musical instrument in a public place at an unlawful hour?”
“Come off, dominie,” said Terry the Cop uneasily. “He ain't doing any harm.”
“Disturbing the peace,” I pursued severely, “and tramping down the park grass against the statute thereunto made and provided. What do you let him do it for, Terry?”
“Aw, I kinda like the guy,” admitted Terry shamefacedly. “He's a nut. But he's a good nut. I'm sorry for him. He's up against it with that girl. She ain't ever coming out of the hospital, I guess. Besides, he did me a good turn once.”
The good turn, it appeared, had consisted in the prompt and effective wielding of a cane, unceremoniously borrowed from a passer-by when a contingent of the Shadow Gang from Second Avenue had undertaken, in pure wantonness of spirit, to “jump” Terry. Subsequently, Orpheus had initiated Terry into some technical and abstruse mysteries of stick work, whereby, he explained, the Orthian shepherds defended themselves against robbers and wolves alike.
“I told him to keep a stick with him,” said Terry. “He'll need it, for that bunch will get to him some time. They don't forget.”
No weapon was in the Greek's hand, however, as he turned away toward the nearest exit. Halfway there he paused, felt in his pocket, and hurried over to his bench with a look of dismay. I met him, holding out the precious book. He took it with a sigh of relief, thanking me with precise but curiously accented courtesy.
“It is a beautiful text,” I observed. “You can read it?” he said with kindling eyes. “You read the Greek?”
“Sure,” put in Terry the Cop. “The dominie knows all the languages from Chinese to Williamsburg. Domine, make you acquainted with Mr. Phil.”
Thus I met Orpheus. We sat on a bench until the stroke of three brought me to my senses, while he declaimed selected passages in a voice as of rolling waters. That was the first of many nights of Dionysian revelry on the slopes of Mount Olympus, with “The Bacchae” for guidebook and the strange piper for leader. Never would he pipe for me, however. If I wished to hear the soft marvel of his music I must wait until midnight and stand apart in the shadow to listen while he played to the far-away beam of light in the hospital wing. Though our acquaintance ripened swiftly into a species of intimacy, he made no reference to the devotion in which his life centered. He had the gift of an impenetrable reserve.
Concerning himself, he was only less reticent. From casual references, however, I gathered that he was the son of a merchant of Lamia, educated in England, and sent to this country on an errand of commerce, and that he would long since have returned but for the light in that window.
It is not good for man to live on hope alone. So I sought to involve my Greek in the close-woven interests of Our Square. I took him to dine at the Elite Restaurant, and introduced him to Polyglot Elsa, the cashier (who put a fearful strain on his courtesy with her barbarous modern Greek), and impressed him into the amateur police to escort MacLachan the Tailor home, drunk and singing “The Cork Leg,” and even got him to pipe gay tunes of an early evening for our little asphalt-dancers to practice by; but always back of his gentle courtesy and tolerant kindness there was an aloofness of the spirit, as if he had but stepped out, a godlike spectator, from the limbo of some remote world hidden behind the tendrils and leafage of that wonderful semiuncial text. Then one night, when he had sent his heart and hope and longing out upon the wings of music through the night, I asked him to help me soothe the wakefulness of Leon Coventry. Together we climbed the stifling stairs of the old mansion to the top floor where Leon the Gnome lay eating his heart out and staring from an empty chair that whispered to the door of an empty room, its oaken bar fallen, its little white bed smooth, its one flower withered and dead on the window sill. Little was said between the swarthy Gnome on the bed and the splendid young god sitting beside him, but there passed between them some subtle understanding of the spirit. Orpheus made his music for the sick man; almost such music as he had sent winging through the outer darkness. At the end he took the Gnome's gnarled hand in his own.
“She will come back,” he said. “Believe always that she will come back. It is only by faith that we hold the dreams that are truer than reality.”
Outside Orpheus turned to me. “You believe that, do you not?” he asked.
I muttered something.
“I must believe it,” he said vehemently. “I must—or there is nothing left.” Then, simply, as if he were relating some impersonal anecdote, he told me his story, one of those swift, inevitable, pregnant romances of two outlanders in this great wilderness which we call New York.
“I met her in a language class. We were both taking Spanish. It was to help her in the corporation office where she worked. We lunched at the same place. We used to talk, to help out over lessons. She was French. Her name was Toinette.”
He handed me his watch, open. The print was dim and vague, but in the very poise of the head was the incarnation of mirth and youth. “She is very lovely,” I said. I should have said it in any case. In this case it happened to be true.
“She is little and quick and brown and laughing. We Greeks love laughter. She laughed at me because she said I had solemn eyes like an owl. Then I kissed her and she did not laugh, but clung to me, and I felt her tears. That evening we heard 'La Bohême.' hand in hand, and I played it to her afterward. I have played it to her ever since. When I would speak to her of marriage she would set her fingers to my lips and the joy would die out of her face. Once she said I must go back and forget her. Then it was my turn to laugh. We do not love and forget, we Greeks.
“She had a brother serving in the Argonne. He died dragging a wounded comrade to safety. She was very proud of it. But the heart that had been working so poorly almost stopped working at all when they brought her the news. She sent for me to tell me that she must go to the hospital. That was why she would not let me speak of marriage. Her heart had always been weak, and she feared she might be an invalid and a burden on me. As if that mattered! 'So I could not let you speak,' she said, 'because I loved you so, and I might have been weaker than my heart.' They took her to the Samaritan. That is her room, just beyond where you see the speck of light. Every night I stand where I can see it and make my music for her. So it was arranged between us.”
“But,” I began, and bit my tongue into silence.
“True,” he said equably. “At such a distance she cannot hear. It does not matter. She knows I make my music for her. That is all that matters.”
“How long since you have seen her?”
“April the 24th.”
“And this is August! Four months! Good Heavens, man, how is that?”
“'Anangke, Fate.” he murmured. “It could not be otherwise.”
“Surely it could,” I protested. “Won't they let you see her?”
He shook his head.
“But that's barbarous! Think what she must be suffering.”
“Oh, no. She understands. It is I who suffer.”
“Needlessly,” I cried. “It can be arranged. You must see her. Four months! Will you let me arrange it?”
“It is useless.”
I believe I took him by the shoulder and shook him. “Don't be a fool,” I bade him savagely. “I tell you, you shall see her. At once. To-morrow.”
He turned upon me eyes like those of an animal that pleads dumbly against torture. “It cannot be,” he said.
“Why?”
“She is dead,” he whispered.
“Dead?” I loosed my grasp on him. “But you play—How can she—When did you—” All my thought and speech were jumbled within me. “Dead?” I finally contrived to get out. “When did she die?”
“On the last day of April. When they told me of it the little children were dancing in the park. She was like a little lovely child herself. They told me she was dead, but it is only at times that I am weak enough to believe them.”
I gazed at him, utterly bewildered. He returned my look with a gaze of infinite despair.
“To-morrow,” he said bravely, “I shall again know that she is alive and loving me.”
Later I learned how the blow had fallen; a grim and brutal experience for so gentle a spirit as his.
Three weeks after his Toinette was admitted to the Samaritan a forlorn-hope operation was determined upon. Happily, Orpheus knew nothing about it until it was all over, with unexpected promise of success and even complete cure. Once a week they let him see her. On the other six days he might call at the office for such information as a stolid and blank official chose to dole out. But no official could interpose his stolidity between Orpheus, piping at dead of night, and his Eurydice lying happily awake in the far upper wing of the hospital, knowing that he made his music for her and perhaps hearing it—who knows?—with the finer ear of the spirit. Vary his choice as he might, he told me, she always knew what he had played and could tell when they next saw each other. So all went well with those two young, brave hearts, and the meager reports grew increasingly hopeful, until one bright spring morning Orpheus paid his unfailing daily visit for information. A brusque young brute of an interne was at the desk, the regular official having stepped out.
“Twenty-one?” he repeated in reply to Orpheus's gentle-voiced question. “That's the heart case. Died yesterday afternoon.”
“But last night I played to her,” protested Orpheus in a piteous, stricken whisper, “and she heard and answered. It cannot be.”
“Nutty!” said the interne to the information official who returned at this point. “Takes'em that way sometimes. Better get him out before he busts loose.”
They got him out without trouble. He wandered into Our Square and watched the children dancing-in the May. They seemed to him like unreal creatures moving in a world of unrealities. More and more unreal grew everything about him until late that night he faced the grim reality of a barred door which kept him from his beloved dead, and that door he attacked with such fury and power that it took two policemen, in addition to the hospital corps, to subdue him. As he was a foreigner and vague and sorrow-stricken, the magistrate naturally gave him two months. He came out dazed but steadied. The one hold he had upon happiness was the delusion to which he so pathetically clung, the pretense, passionately cherished, that she was still alive. Poor Orpheus! He had indeed gone down into Hades for his Eurydice and stayed there. If he could find solace in his limbo of minor madness, perhaps that was best for him.
So thought the Little Red Doctor, wise in human suffering, to whom alone I told the story of Orpheus. Said the Little Red Doctor first: “There are times when I blame my old friend Death for doing a job by halves”; and second: “Cure him? Who wants to cure peace with pain! Let him play his music”; and third: “God help that interne if I ever meet up with him!”
If Death resented his friendly opponent's strictures, he never showed it, but kept on doing business as usual in Our Square. And Orpheus continued to make, among the broken glens of our brick-and-stucco sky line, his music manifold to ears that heard not. As for the interne, the Little Red Doctor did, in the fullness of time, meet up with him, and improved the occasion to lay down certain ethics and principles of conduct as pertaining to the profession of healing. Whereupon the interne, who should have known better, being not more than half again as big as the Little Red Doctor, treated the lesson in a light and flippant vein, and asserted that when he wished to learn his business he wouldn't apply to a half-boiled shrimp.
Thus it happened that he who had come forth from the hospital an interne intact and unafraid returned thereto a battered and terrified patient with a broken nose and two displaced ribs urgently requiring attention. The practice of medicine in Our Square, as exemplified by so thoroughgoing an exponent as the Little Red Doctor, is not wholly a lily-fingered science.
Minora cano! And why should I sing of such lesser matters as the correction of the interne, when there awaits my historical pen a conflict worthy of Euripides's own strophes! Cyrus the Gaunt and the Bonnie Lassie had been serving the midnight rarebit to three of their uptown friends who had dropped down through the slums to the friendly little old house with the dancing figurines in the window, and Cyrus had undertaken to pilot his friends to the corner, lest their evening raiment be locally misinterpreted and resented. Coming, later than my wont, from the Elite Restaurant, I crossed Our Square a few rods in advance of them. Orpheus stood in his corner, piping to his lost young love. From without there approached him swiftly a dark group, close gathered. It was the Shadow Gang, from Second Avenue, bent upon reprisals. There were eight or nine of them, under the leadership of “Mixer” Boyle, a local middle-weight of ill repute. They closed in upon the Greek, and as I ran, shouting for Terry the Cop, I saw him go down under the pack. More than music was in that soul, however. If he was Orpheus, he had something, too, in him of Thersites and Achilles and Agamemnon. Like a bear struggling from beneath an onset of dogs, he up-heaved his big shoulders. From behind me came an answering shout, not Terry the Cop, indeed, but the next best thing, Cyrus the Gaunt, followed closely by the Rev. Morris Cartwright, Gerrit Bascom, and two other visions of white shirt fronts protruding and black coat tails streaming in the wind. They passed me as if I were a milestone, and the battle was joined.
Cyrus the Gaunt is a mighty man of his hands. But the hands are those of an amateur. Mixer Boyle's are those of a professional. They crossed, and Cyrus went down under a left swing. Before the Mixer could turn he was toppled with the blessing (full arm to the ear) of the Rev. Morris Cartwright. Two others fell upon the Rev. Morris and the Rev. Morris fell upon the Mixer, and then they all rose and went at it again.
I am old who once was young, but never do I look upon the stricken field without remembering that in my prime I was a man of deeds and juggled deftly with seventy-five-pound dumb-bells. Talents of this sort are never wholly wasted. Upon attaining the outskirts of the mêlée I selected the largest hostile bulk in reach, seized it around the hips, and lifted it clear. It struggled and developed a solid fist which, in contact with my jaw, utterly destroyed my equilibrium. I fell, but contrived so to twist myself that the hostile bulk fell beneath me. It lay quiet. But when I strove to rise, a paralysis across my shoulders strongly advised against it. So I sat upon my captive's chest and dizzily watched the combat.
Now do I fully understand why war correspondents are not permitted at the front. It destroys their special usefulness. The fighting spirit and historical accuracy are totally incompatible. Nobody could have had a better view of the stirring events which succeeded than I. The forces and topography of the combat were clear in my mind: nearly two to one in favor of the enemy, but with our party fighting on home soil and in momentary hope of reenforcements. Yet all that I can recall is the sound of thumps and stifled curses and a confused mess of strained faces, violently working arms, and broad white shirt fronts now splotched with a harsher color. Then it seemed to me that I saw a little circle cleared about the mighty Greek, and a heavy cane which he brandished by the middle in both hands gave me the clue. The odds were balancing better, though still with the invaders. As if the Fates themselves were concerned to assure a more even field, there sounded a far, furious whoop, and the Little Red Doctor descended joyously upon the riot. At this critical juncture my captive came to and bit me in the leg. I lost all interest, temporarily, in the art and practice of war correspondence.
Having secured a hold (not prescribed by the formal rules of wrestling, I am informed) with my knee upon my opponent's neck, I turned to view the battle again. The defenders were against the fence now; but alas! the Rev. Morris Cartwright was on his hands and knees, and one of the other uptown knights was reeling. The gangsters pressed in hard, striving to edge around the Greek and get him in the rear. Cyrus, with his heavy fists, guarded one side of him; the Little Red Doctor was fighting like a fury on the other. I prayed (kneeling upon my captive's neck) for Heaven's success to the just, and Terry the Cop.
A shrill shout marked the next swift development.
“Look out! He's got a knife!”
A bright gleam of steel slanted toward Cyrus's shoulder. But the deft Greek had seen it. He chopped with his stick. The knife whirled free and descended. Like a football team plunging for a loose ball, the contestants dived for it. For a moment they groveled, struggling. Then out of the mass rose a shriek of the uttermost agony. It seemed to me that the group was stricken into sudden silence and immobility. Slowly it disintegrated, drawing apart in two sections. A half-doubled figure ran, staggering and dodging, into the shadows. A policeman's whistle shrilled. The gangsters turned and ran. Mine ran too. He tried, I regret to say, to give me a parting kick as I let him up. On the ground lay the knife. There was just a little trickle of red on it.
Cyrus picked it up and looked around. Every man of our party was battered, but none was stabbed.
“Must have got his own man in the mix-up,” quoth the Little Red Doctor. “Come to my place and get fixed up.” After much minor repairing with plaster and patch we separated upon our respective ways, disheveled, disreputable, but exultant. Orpheus, with his face one mass of cuts and bruises, went back, if you will believe it, to play the final “Bohême” to the little beam of light in the window.
“I hope,” he whispered to me, “that she could not hear the noise. It would frighten her.”
In consideration of my strained back the Little Red Doctor escorted me home. As we set foot to the steps we heard a soft groan from the black areaway. From between two barrels the physician dragged a cowering wretch. His hands were pressed to his abdomen. There was a pool of blood where he had crouched.
“The Samaritan Hospital for you,” said the Little Red Doctor.
“Not me!” snarled the youth. “Guess again.”
“Got any last message?” asked the doctor coolly.
The young fellow's eyelids fluttered. “Am I croaked?” he said.
“Unless you're on the table within the hour.”
The gangster summoned his bravado. “Let'er go as she lies. No Samaritan for mine. I was there oncet. They don't allow you no cigs. 'No smoking.' I'll croak foist.”
The Little Red Doctor scratched his head in perplexity. I looked at the wounded man. His face was sullen and brave, but his hands were quivering.
“Take him up to my room, doctor,” I said.
That is how I came by my first lodger. His name was Pinney the Rat.
After the Little Red Doctor had saved his body, many and various visitors climbed my stair for the purpose of saving the Rat's soul. The Rev. Morris Cartwright came all the way downtown (with an ear tastefully framed in surgeon's plaster) to convert him to decency. Cyrus the Gaunt strove manfully to convert him to the gospel of work with offers of regenerating labor in Canadian wildernesses. MacLachan the Tailor undertook to curse him into sobriety. Our French David and our German Jonathan dropped in separately to forecast to him respectively the Entente and the Alliance arguments of the Great War and to hint at enlistment when he should be recovered. Herman Groll undertook to convert him to music. All of this he accepted with noncommittal and rather contemptuous tolerance. It served to pass the time of his halting recovery. As a patient he was docile; as a guest he was not inconsiderate, though I could hardly say that he was grateful. To Orpheus alone of his visitors he exhibited a distinctive attitude. When the Greek dropped in upon us Pin-ney's face became a mask of cold watchfulness. He would freeze up into silence, following the big, gentle visitor's every movement with his unwinking eyes. The Little Red Doctor noted this with uneasiness.
“That's not a rat,” he warned me. “It's a rattlesnake. And I don't like the way it looks at our Greek friend.”
“What can he have against Orpheus?”
“Probably thinks it was he that knifed him.”
“It wasn't. I can swear to that much.”
“Save your breath. You'll never argue the resolve to get even out of the mind of a gangster.”
“What shall I do? Tell Orpheus to keep away?”
“No. But see that our patient doesn't get his hands on any sort of weapon.” Strangely enough, the wounded man seemed to exercise a strange fascination upon the Greek. Day after day he would come and sit, talking or reading, while the gangster lay silent, maturing murder in his soul. What a pair they made; the secretive, time-abiding, venomous Rat and the gentle madman!
In time the Rat's patience was rewarded. He got his weapon. He got it from the Bonnie Lassie. She had taken to dropping in upon us to see my lodger. She, at least, did not try to convert him. At first she just sat and twinkled at him, and the man does not live who can resist the Bonnie Lassie when she twinkles. On her second visit she brought him cigarettes in profusion and announced that she was going to sculp him in miniature, and proceeded forthwith to do it. Before the job was done they were sworn comrades. She would sit by his couch with her modeling tools and clay and work while he boasted in a hoarse, thin pipe of the evil things he had done. He was openly flattered that she should make him the chief figure of a group to be called “Ambush.” One day while she was absorbed in a difficult line he quietly annexed her compasses. A pair of compasses is two excellent stilettos. Pinney the Rat secreted his booty in the bed. That evening I found him cautiously practicing, first with his right, then with his left hand, what I supposed to be that method pugilistically termed an uppercut. Had I been more expert, I might have noted that his thumb was turned sidewise and upward.
Concern and ignorance were choicely blended in the Rat's manner when, next day, the Bonnie Lassie came in to inquire for her lost tool, bringing as usual some “smokes.”
“Do you like this kind better?” she asked.
“They're all right,” said the Rat. “But, say, lady, not wishin' to ast too much—”
“Go on,” she encouraged him as he—
“Woddya know,” pursued the patient hesitantly, “about a big, fat cig with funny letters like this on?”
“Those look like Greek letters,” said the Bonnie Lassie, studying the marks which he had scrawled. “I'll see if I can get some for you.”
Search for that brand proved unavailing, however. It seemed to be a special importation.
“Where did you ever smoke them?” she asked the Rat.
“Over to th' S'maritan.”
“Do they serve cigarettes in the hospital?”
“They do—I don't think! It was a little lady there give'em to me on the quiet. She seen what them big stiffs o' doctors never seen, that I was goin' batty for a smoke. She sneaked'em in to me. She was one real baby! Some guy outside useter send'em in to her to give me.”
“Was she a nurse?”
“No; a case. Pretty near all in when she came. After she got well nobody wanted her to leave; and she didn't want to, I guess. So they made a job for her. I useter tell her she was hired out for sunshine. I ain't seen her since.” He sighed.
“Would you like to see her?”
Pinney the Rat's eyes became human. “Oh, Gee!” he murmured.
“I'll bring her,” said the Bonnie Lassie. “Whom shall I ask for?”
“Jus' leave word for Miss Tony that Pin—that No. 7, Men's Surgical—is hurted again, but O. K., and could she come and see him, maybe, some day.” She came at once, Pinney the Rat's Miss Tony. She was little and quick and brown and lovely, but not laughing. There was a depth of woe and loss in her big eyes. Let that be my excuse that I did not at once identify her as Eurydice—that and the fact that, as far as I knew, Eurydice was dead and buried these four months and lived only in Orpheus's resolutely self-deluded mind.
For Pinney's sake, his visitor summoned up the phantom of past gayety. She shook, first her finger and then her little fist at him, upbraiding him in quaintly accented English, while he lay and visibly worshiped.
“You haf sayed that you will go straight. An' now voilà you, wit' your pro-mess broke an' a stick in your estomac.”
“Yessum,” said Pinney the Rat.
“That learn you something? That learn you to be'ayve?”
“Yessum,” assented that murderous gangster like an abashed schoolboy.
“You give me your han' now that you be a good boy an' go no more wit' les Apaches an' get you a job?”
The Rat's face hardened. He squirmed away from those clear eyes. “I got one little account to square up,” he muttered. “After that if I make my getaway, I'll join the Salvationists if you tell me to. An' say, Miss Tony, you know them cigs you useta gimme? Them with the dinky letters on?”
The girl's trembling hand went to her throat. She looked at him strangely.
“If I could get a handful o' them,” he continued shyly, “they—I—it'd kinda remind me when—when you ain't here. How's me unknown friend on the outside that useta send'em in?”
Miss Tony leaned her head against the wall and burst into a passion of tears. I led her out, still sobbing, while the ex-Men's Surgical No. 7 sat up in his bed and cursed himself with wild, blasphemous, wondering oaths.
Whatever surmise our young gangster may have entertained he kept to himself. And, on the following morning, sterner matters claimed his attention, for, while I was out, Orpheus, the Greek, dropped in, and Pinney, once more the Rat, saw the hour of his revenge upon his supposed assailant at hand. For the Greek, forgetful of caution, had seated himself well within arm's length of the patient's couch. Beneath the sheet the Rat clutched the needle-pointed compasses and waited. Should he risk the jump and the stroke? No! He might miss. And he knew, from the memory of the Battle of Our Square, the Greek's swiftness of eye and hand. He must get him nearer. It was a time for strategy.
“Hey, sport. Got a smoke on you?”
Orpheus drew a box from his pocket, extracted a fattish cylinder, and leaned forward to the other—not quite far enough. “Gimme a light, will ye?” piped the Rat hoarsely, taking the cigarette in his left hand.
His right was working, wriggling slowly, slowly out from beneath the sheet. Orpheus struck a match and leaned toward the bed. His heart was almost over the lurking point. Slowly advancing the tip for the flame, Pinney the Rat—now the Rattlesnake with death in his stroke—raised his arm to blind his victim's vision against the blow. The movement brought the flimsy-papered cylinder directly before his own eyes. Familiar characters leaped out at him from the paper.
“Gawd!” croaked Pinney the Rat.
Though it had the sound of an oath, it was perhaps as near a prayer as the gangster had ever uttered. His frame, tense as a spring, slumped back among the covers. Orpheus dropped the match. “What is it?” he cried with quick concern. “You suffer?”
“Where didje get that cig?”
“The cigarette? From Greece. I always smoke this kind.”
“Have ye—didje ever send 'em to a little lady in the S'maritan Hospital fer a—a guy she was good to?”
“Yes.” The Greek's eyes widened. He began to shake through all his frame. “My God! You knew her?”