“Captain!” said Mayme with a searing scorn in her voice. “Quartermaster’s Department! Safety first! When half the little fifteen-per tape-snippers in the Emporium are breakin’ their fourteen-inch necks volunteerin’ early and often to get where the fightin’ is.”
David Berthelin stood on his feet, and his pretty face wore an ugly expression.
“Let me out of here,” he growled.
“David!” said his mother. “Where are you going?”
“To enlist.”
“Davey!” It was a shriek. “You shan’t.”
“I will.”
“I won’t let you.”
“You can go to—”
“Buddy!” Mayme’s voice, magically softened, broke in. “Cut out the rough stuff. You better go home and think it over. Bein’ a private is no pink-silk picnic.”
“I’d rather see a son of mine dead than a common soldier!” cried Mrs. Berthelin.
The Bonnie Lassie, very white, rose. “You must leave this house,” she said. “At once. Think yourself fortunate that I cannot bring myself to betray a guest. Otherwise I should report you to the authorities.”
Young David addressed Mayme in the words and tone of a misunderstood and aggrieved pet. “You think I’m no good. I’ll show you, Mayme. Wait till I come back—if I ever do come back—and you’ll be sorry.”
“Hero stuff,” commented the Little Red Doctor. “It’ll all have oozed out of his fingertips this time to-morrow.”
“Will you show me a place to enlist?” challenged the boy. “And,” he added with a malicious grin, “will you enlist with me?”
“Sure!” said the Little Red Doctor. “I’ll show you. But they won’t take me.” He bestowed a bitter glance on his twisted foot. “Come along.”
They went off together, while Mrs. Berthelin scandalized Our Square by an exhibition of hysterics involving language not at all in accord with the rich respectability of her apparel and her limousine.
We waited at the Bonnie Lassie’s for the Little Red Doctor’s return. He came back alone. I thought that I detected a pathetic little gleam of disappointment in Mayme’s deep eyes.
“He’s done it,” said the Little Red Doctor. And I was sorry for him, so much was there of tragic envy in his face.
“Did you give him your blessing?” I asked.
“I did. He shook hands like a man. There’s maybe something in that boy, if it weren’t for the old hell-cat of a mother. However, she won’t have much chance. He’s off to-morrow.”
“Will he write?” said Mayme in a curious, strained voice.
“He will. He’ll report to me from time to time.”
“Didn’t he—wasn’t there any message?”
“Just good-bye and good luck,” answered the Little Red Doctor, censoring ruthlessly.
The Bonnie Lassie went over and put her arms around Mayme McCartney.
“My dear,” she said softly. “It wouldn’t do. It really wouldn’t. He isn’t worth it. You’re going to forget him.”
“All right.” Suddenly Mayme looked like a very helpless and sorrowful little girl. “Only, it—it isn’t goin’ to be as easy as you think. He was so pretty,” said Mayme McCartney wistfully.
Summer was smiting Our Square with white-hot bolts of sun-fire, from which one could scarcely find refuge beneath the scraggly shelter of parched shrubbery, when one morning the Bonnie Lassie approached my bench with a fell and purposeful smile.
“Dominie, you’re a dear old thing,” she began in her most insinuating tones.
“I won’t do it,” I said determinedly, foreboding something serious.
The Bonnie Lassie raised her eyebrows at me, affecting aggrieved innocence. “Won’t do what?” she inquired.
“Whatever it is that you’re trying to wheedle me into.”
The eyebrows resumed their normal arch, and a dimple flickered in the corner of the soft lips. By this I knew that the case was hopeless. “Oh, but you’ve already done it,” she said.
“Help! Tell me the worst and get it over with.”
“It must be lovely to be rich,” said the Bonnie Lassie meditatively. “And so generous!”
“How much is it? What do you want it for? I haven’t got that much,” I hastily remarked.
“And to keep it an absolute secret from everybody. Even from Mayme herself.”
“Go on. Don’t mind me,” I murmured.
“The Little Red Doctor has found the place. It’s in New Mexico. And in the fall she’s going on to the Coast. He’s almost willing to guarantee that a year of it will make her as strong as ever. And the hundred dollars a month you allow her besides her traveling expenses will be plenty. Youarea good old thing, Dominie!”
“What you mean is that I’m an old good-thing. How shall I look,” I demanded bitterly, “when Mayme comes to thank me?”
“No foolisher than you do now, trying to raise unreasonable objections to our perfectly good plans,” retorted the Bonnie Lassie. “Besides, she won’t. She knows that your way is to do good by stealth and blush to find it fame, and she’s under pledge to pretend to know nothing about it.”
“Where did the Little Red Doctor raise it?” I queried.
“There are times, Dominie, when your mind has real penetrative power. Think it over.”
“The Weeping Scion of Wealth and Position!” I cried. “Did our medical friend blackmail him?”
“Not necessarily. He only dropped a hint that Mayme’s chance here was rather poorer than a soldier’s going to war, unless something could be done and the Weeping Scion fairly begged to be allowed to do it. ‘Do you think she’d take it from you?’ said the Little Red Doctor, ‘after what your mother called her?’ ‘Don’t let her know,’ says our ornamental young weeper. ‘Tell her somebody else is doing it. Tell her it’s from that white-whiskered old—from the elderly and handsome gentleman with the benevolent expres—‘”
“Yes: I know,” I broke in. “Very good. I’m the goat. Lying, hypocrisy, false pretense, fake charity; it’s all one to a sin-seared old reprobate like me. After it’s over I’ll go around the corner and steal what pennies I can find in Blind Simon’s cup, just to make me feel comparatively respectable and decent again.”
It was no easier than I expected it to be, especially when little Mayme, having come to say good-bye, put her lips close to my ear and tried to whisper something, and cried and kissed me instead.
Our Square was a dimmer and duller place after she left. But her letters helped. They were so exactly like herself! Even at the first, when things seemed to be going ill with her, they were all courage, and quaint humor and determination to get well and come back to Our Square, which was the dearest and best place in the world with the dearest and best people in it. Homesickness! Poor little, lonely Mayme. She was reading—she wrote the Bonnie Lassie—all the books that the Dominie had listed for her, and she was being tutored by a school-teacher with blue goggles and a weak heart who lived at the same resort. “Why grow up a Boob,” wrote the philosophic Mayme, “when the lil old world is full of wise guys just aking to spill their wiseness?”
Contemporaneously the Weeping Scion of Wealth was writing back his views on life and the emptiness thereof, in better orthography, but with distinctly less of spirit.
“It appears,” reported the Little Red Doctor, “that every man in his own company has licked our young friend and now the other companies of the regiment are beginning to show interest, and he doesn’t like it. I believe he’d desert if it weren’t that he’s afraid of what Mayme would think.”
“Still on his mind, is she?” I asked.
The Little Red Doctor produced a letter with a camp postmark from the South and read a passage:
“You were right when you guessed that I never wanted anything very much before, without having it handed to me. Perhaps you are right about its being good for me. But it comes hard. The promise goes, of course. I’m going to show you and her that I’m not yellow. [So that was still rankling; salutary, if bitter dose!] But if this war ever finishes, all bets are off and I’m coming back to find her. And don’t you forget your part of the bargain, to write and let me know how she is getting on.” The Little Red Doctor was able to send progressively encouraging news. When the cold weather came, Mayme moved westward to Southern California, and found herself on the edge of one of the strange, tumultuous, semi-insane moving-picture colonies of that region. Thence issued, presently, stirring tidings.
“What do you think?” wrote our exile. “They’ve got my funny little monkey mug in the movies. Five per and steady work. The director likes me and says he will give me a real chance one of these days. But, as the Dominie would say, this is a hell of a place. [Graceless imp!] I would not say it myself, because I am a perfect lady. You have to be, out here. That reminds me: I have cut out the Mayme. Every fresh little frizzle in the colony with a false front and a pneumatic figure calls herself Mayme or Daisye or Tootsye. Not for me! I am keeping up my lessons and trying to make my head good for something besides carrying a switch. Tell the Little Red Doctor that it is so long since I coughed I have forgotten how. And I love you all so hard that ithurts.
“Your loving
“P.S. I am going to be Marie Courtenay when I get my name up in the pictures. Put that in the Directory and see how it looks.
“P.S.2. How is my soldier boy getting along? Poor kid! I expect he is finding it a lot different from Broadway with money in your pocket.”
About this time the Weeping Scion was finding things very different, indeed, from Broadway, having been shifted to a specially wet and muddy section of France; and was taking them as he found them. That is to say, he had learned the prime lesson of war.
“And he’s been made corporal,” announced the Little Red Doctor with satisfaction.
“That sounds encouraging,” remarked the Bonnie Lassie. “How did it happen?”
“He went over on one of the ‘flu ships,’ and when the epidemic began to mow ’em down there was a kind of panic. From what I can make out, the Scion kept his head and his nerve, and made good. A corporal’s stripes aren’t much, but they’re something.”
Better was to come. There was high triumph in the Little Red Doctor’s expression when he came to my bench with the glad tidings of young David’s promotion to a sergeantcy.
“While it’s very gratifying,” I remarked, “it doesn’t seem to me an epoch-making event.”
“Doesn’t it!” retorted my friend. “That’s because of your abysmal military ignorance, Dominie. Let me tell you how it is in our army. A fellow can get himself made a captain by pull, or a major by luck, or a colonel by desk-work, or a general by having a fine martial figure, but to get yourself made a sergeant, by Gosh, you’ve got to show thestuff. You’ve got to be aman. You’ve got to have—”
“Are you going to tell her?” interrupted the Bonnie Lassie who had been sent for to share the news.
The Little Red Doctor fell suddenly grave. “She’s another matter,” he said. “I don’t think I shall.”
Matters were going forward with Mayme—beg her pardon, Mary McCartney, too.
“Better and more of it,” she wrote the Bonnie Lassie. “They rang me in on one of their local Red Cross shows to do a monologue. Was I a hit? Say, I got more flowers than a hearse! You’ve got to remember, though, that they deliver flowers by the car-load out here. And the local stock company has made me an offer. Ingenue parts. There is not the money that I might get in the pictures, but the chance is better. So Marie Courtenay moves on to the legit.—I mean the spoken drama. Look out for me on Broadway later!”
In the correspondence from Sergeant Berthelin there came a long hiatus followed by a curt bit of official information: “Seriously wounded.” The Little Red Doctor brought the news to me, with a queer expression on his face.
“It doesn’t look good, Dominie,” he said. “You know, my old friend, Death, is a shrewd picker. He’s got an eye for men.” He mused, rubbing his tousled, brickish locks with a nervous hand. “I was getting to kind of like that young pup,” he muttered moodily.
The saying that no news is good news was surely concocted by some one who never chafed through day after lengthening day for that which does not come. But in the end it did come, in the form of a scrawl from the Weeping Scion himself. He was mending, but very slowly, and they said it would be a long time—months, perhaps—before he could get back to the front. Meantime, they were still picking odds and ends, chiefly metallic, out of various parts of his system.
“I’m one of the guys you read about that came over here to collect souvenirs,” he commented. “Well, I’ve got all I need of ’em. They can have the rest. All I want now is to get back and present a few to Fritzie before the show is over.”
Thereafter the Little Red Doctor exhibited, but read to us only in small parts, quite bulky communications from overseas. Some of them, it became known, he was forwarding to our little Mary, out in the Far West. With her answer came the solution.
“Some of the ‘Grass and Asphalt’ sketches are wonders; some not so good. I am going to try out ‘Doggy’ if I can find a poodle with enough intelligence to support me. But you need not have been so mysterious, Doc, about your ‘young amateur writer who seems to have some talent.’ Did you think I would not know it was David? Why, bless your dear, silly heart, I told him some of those stories myself. But how does he get a chance to write them? Is he back on this side? Or is he invalided? Or what? Tell me. I want to know about him. You do not have to worry about my—well, my infatuation for him, any more. He was a pretty boy, though, wasn’t he? But I have seen too many of that kind in the picture game. I’m spoiled for them. How I would love to smear some of their pretty, smirky faces! They give me a queer feeling in my breakfast. Excuse me: I forgot I was a lady. But don’t say ‘pretty’ to me any more. I’m through. At that, you were all wrong about Buddy. He was a lot decenter than you thought: only he was brought up wrong. Give him my love as one pal to another. I hope he don’t come back a He-ro. I’m offen he-roes, too. Excuse again!”
Wars and exiles alike come to an end in time. And in time our two wanderers returned, but Mary first, David having been sent into Germany with the Army of Occupation. Modest announcements in the theatrical columns informed an indifferent theater-going world that Miss Marie Courtenay, an actress new to Broadway, was to play the ingenue part in the latest comedy by a highly popular dramatist. Immediately upon the production, the theater-going world ceased to be indifferent to the new actress; in fact, it went into one of its occasional furores about her. Not that she was in any way a great genius, but she had a certain indefinable and winningly individual quality. The critics discussed it gravely and at length, differing argumentatively as to its nature and constitution. I could have given them a hint. My predictions regarding the ancestral potencies of the monkey-face were being abundantly justified.
No announcements, even of the most modest description, heralded the arrival of Sergeant Major (if you please!) David Berthelin upon his native shores. He came at once to Our Square and tackled the Little Red Doctor.
“Where is she?” he asked.
The Little Red Doctor assumed an air of incredulous surprise. “Have you still gotthatbee in your bonnet?” said he.
“Where is she?” repeated the Weeping Scion.
Maneuvering for time and counsel, the Little Red Doctor took him to see the Bonnie Lassie and they sent for me. We beheld a new and reconstituted David. He was no longer pretty. The soft brown eyes were less soft and more alert, and there were little wrinkles at their corners. He had broadened a foot or so. That pinky-delicate complexion by which he had, in earlier and easier days, set obvious store, was brownish and looked hardened. The Cupid’s-bow of his mouth had straightened out. High on one cheekbone was a not unsightly scar. His manner was unassertive, but eminently self-respecting, and me, whom aforetime he had stigmatized as a “white-whiskered old goat,” he now addressed as “Sir.”
“Perhapsyou’lltell me where she is, sir,” said he patiently.
“Leave it to me,” said the Bonnie Lassie, who has an unquenchable thirst for the dramatic in real life. “And keep next Sunday night open.”
She arranged with Mary McCartney to give a reading on that evening, at her studio, of David’s “Doggy” from the “Grass and Asphalt” sketches which he had written in hospital. It was a quaint, pathetic little conceit, the bewildered philosophy of a waif of the streets, as expressed to his waif of a dog. For the supporting part we borrowed Willy Woolly from the House of Silvery Voices, and admirably he played it, barking accurately and with true histrionic fervor in the right places (besides promptly falling in love with the star at the first and only rehearsal). After the try-out, Mary came over to my bench with a check for a rather dazzling sum in her hand, and said that now was the time to settle accounts, but she never could repay—and so forth and so on; all put so sweetly and genuinely that I heartily wished I might accept the thanks if not the check. Instead of which I blurted out the truth.
“Oh,Dominie!” said the girl, with such reproach that my heart sank within me. “Do you think that was fair? Don’t you know that I never could have taken the money?”
“Precisely. And we had to find a way to make you take it. We couldn’t have you dying on the premises,” I argued with a feeble attempt at jocularity.
“But fromhim!” she said. “After what had happened—And his mother. How could you let me do it!”
“I thought you would have gotten over that feeling by this time,” I ventured.
“Oh, there’s none of the old feeling left,” she answered, so simply that I knew she believed her own statement. “But to have lived on his money—Where is he?” she asked abruptly.
I told her that also and about Sunday night; the whole thing. The Bonnie Lassie would have slain me. But I couldn’t help it. I was feeling rather abject.
Sunday night came, and with it Miss Marie Courtenay, escorted by an “ace” covered with decorations, whose name is a household word and who was only too obviously her adoring slave. Already there had been hints of their engagement. Had I been that ace, I should have felt no small discomposure at the sight of the girl’s face when she first saw the changed and matured Weeping Scion of three years before. After the first flash of recognition she had developed on that expressive face of hers a look of wonder and almost pathetic questioning, and, I thought, who knew and loved the child, already something deeper and sweeter. Young David, after greeting the star of the evening, took a modest rear seat as befitted his rank. But when the Bonnie Lassie announced “Doggy,” it was his face that was the study.
Of that performance I shall say nothing. It is now famous and familiar to thousands of theater-goers. But if ever mortal man spent twenty minutes in fairyland, it was David, while Mary was playing the work of his fancy. At the close, he disappeared. I suppose he did not dare trust himself to join in the congratulations with which she was overwhelmed. I found him, as I rather expected, on the bench where he had sat when Mayme McCartney first found him. And when the crowd had departed from the studio, I told the girl. Without even stopping to put on her hat she went out to him.
He was sitting with his elbows on his knees and his fists supporting his cheekbones. But this time he was not weeping. He was thinking. Just as of old she put a hand on his humped shoulder. Startled, he looked up, and jumped to his feet. She was holding something out to him.
“What’s that?” he said.
“A check. For what I owe you.”
“Who told you? The Little Red Doctor promised—”
“He’s kept his promise. The Dominie told me.”
“Oh! I suppose,” he said slowly, “I’ve got to take this. You wouldn’t—no, of course you wouldn’t,” he sighed.
“I’ve tried to keep strict account,” she said.
David adopted a matter-of-fact tone. “I can’t deny that it’ll come in handy, just now,” he remarked. “At the present price of clothing, and with my personal exchequer in its depleted state—”
“Why,” she broke in, “has anything happened? Your mother—?”
“Cut off,” said David briefly.
“She’s cut you off? On my account? Oh—”
“No. I’ve cut her off. Temporarily. She doesn’t want me to work. I’m working. On a newspaper.”
“That’s good,” said the girl warmly. “Let’s sit down.”
They sat down. Each, however, found it curiously hard to begin again. Mary was aching to thank him, but had a dreadful fear that if she tried to, she would cry. She didn’t want to cry. She had a feeling that crying would be a highly unstrategic procedure leading to possible alarming developments. Why didn’t David say something? Finally he did make a beginning.
“Mayme.”
“No: not ‘Mayme’ any more.”
He flushed to his temples. “I beg your pardon, Miss Courtenay.”
“Nonsense!” she said softly. “Mary. I’ve discarded the ‘Mayme’ long ago.”
“Mary,” he repeated in a tone of musing content.
“Buddy.”
He caught his breath. “A few thousand of the best guys in the world,” he said, “call a fellow that. And every time they said it, it made my heart ache with longing to hear it in your voice.”
“You’re a queer Buddy,” returned the girl, not quite steadily. “Did you bring me home a German helmet for a souvenir?”
He shook his head. “I didn’t bring home much of anything, except some experience and the discovery of the fact that when I had to stand on my own feet, I wasn’t much.”
“You got your stripes, didn’t you?” suggested the girl.
“That’s all I did get,” he returned jealously. “I didn’t get any medal, or palms or decorations or crosses of war: I didn’t get anything except an occasional calling down and a few scratches. If I’d had the luck to get into aviation or some of the fancy branches—” David checked himself. “There I go,” he said in self-disgust. “Beefing again.”
It was quite in the old, spoiled-child tone; an echo of indestructible personality, the Weeping Scion of other days; and it went straight to Mary’s swelling, bewildered, groping heart. She began to laugh and a sob tangled itself in the laughter, and she choked and said:
“Buddy.”
He turned toward her.
“Don’t be dumb, Buddy,” she said, in the words of their unforgotten first talk. “You’ve—you’ve got me—if you still want me.”
She put out a tremulous hand to him, and it slipped over his shoulder and around his neck, and she was drawn close into his arms.
“The Little Red Doctor,” remarked David after an interlude, in the shaken tone of one who has had undeserved miracles thrust upon him, “said that to want something more than anything in the world and not get it was good for my soul, besides serving me right.”
“The Little Red Doctor,” retorted Mary McCartney, with the reckless ingratitude of a woman in love, “is a dear little red idiot. What does he know aboutUs!”
Immediately upon hearing of my fell design MacLachan, the tailor, paid a visit of protest to my bench.
“Is it true fact that I hear, Dominie?”
“What do you hear, MacLachan?”
“That ye’re to make one of yer silly histories about Barbran?”
“Perfectly true,” said I, passing over the uncomplimentary adjective.
“‘Tis a feckless waste of time.”
“Very likely.”
“‘Twill encourage the pair, when a man of yer age and influence in Our Square should be dissuadin’ them.”
“Perhaps they need a friendly word.”
MacLachan frowned. “Ye’re determined?”
“Oh, quite!”
“Then I’ll give ye a title for yer romance.”
“That’s very kind of you. Give it.”
“The Story of Two Young Fools. By an Old One,” said MacLachan witheringly, and turned to depart.
“Mac!”
“What?”
“Wait a moment.”
I held him with my glittering eye. Also, in case that should be inadequate, with the crook of my cane firmly fixed upon his ankle.
“I’ll waste na time from the tailorin’,” began the Scot disdainfully, but paused as I pointed a loaded finger at his head. “Well?” he said, showing a guilty inclination to flinch.
“Mac, wasIan original accomplice in this affair?”
“Will ye purtend to deny—”
“DidIscheme and plot with Cyrus the Gaunt and young Stacey?”
MacLachan mumbled something about undue influence.
“DidIget arrested?”
MacLachan grunted.
“In a cellar?”
MacLachan snorted.
“With my nose painted green?”
MacLachan groaned. “There was others,” he pleaded.
“A man of your age and influence in Our Square,” I interrupted sternly, “should have been dissuading them.”
“Arr ye designin’ to put all that in yer sil—in yer interestin’ account?”
“Every detail.”
MacLachan dislodged my crook from his leg, gave me such a look as mid-Victorian painters strove for in pictures of the Dying Stag, and retired to his Home of Fashion.
That men of the sobriety and standing of Cyrus the Gaunt, MacLachan, Leon Coventry, the Little Red Doctor, and Boggs (I do not count young Phil Stacey, for he was insane at the time, and has been so, with modifications and glorifications, ever since) should paint their noses green and frequent dubious cellars, calls for explanation. The explanation is Barbran.
Barbran came to us from the immeasurable distances; to wit, Washington Square.
Let me confess at once that we are a bit supercilious in our attitude toward the sister Square far to our West, across the Alps of Broadway. Our Square was an established center of the social respectabilities when the foot of Fifth Avenue was still frequented by the occasional cow whose wanderings are responsible for the street-plan of Greenwich Village. Our Square remains true to the ancient and simple traditions, whereas Washington Square has grown long hair, smeared its fingers with paint and its lips with free verse, and gone into debt for its inconsiderable laundry bills. Washington Square we suspect of playing at life; Our Square has a sufficiently hard time living it. We have little in common.
Nevertheless, it must be admitted that there are veritable humans, not wholly submerged in the crowd of self-conscious mummers who crowd the Occidental park-space, and it was at the house of one of these, a woman architect with a golden dream of rebuilding Greenwich Village, street by street, into something simple and beautiful and, in the larger sense urban, that the Bonnie Lassie, whose artistic deviations often take her far afield, met Barbran.
They went for coffee to a queer little burrow decorated with improving sentiments from the immortal Lewis Carroll which, Barbran told the Bonnie Lassie, was making its blue-smocked, bobbed-haired, attractive and shrewd little proprietress quite rich. Barbran hinted that she was thinking of improving on the Mole’s Hole idea if she could find a suitable location, not so much for the money, of course—her tone implied a lordly indifference to such considerations—as for the fun of the thing.
The Bonnie Lassie was amused but not impressed. What did impress her about Barbran was a certain gay yet restful charm; the sort of difficult thing that our indomitable sculptress loves to catch and fix in her wonderful little bronzes. She set about catching Barbran.
Now the way of a snake with a bird is as nothing for fascination compared to the way of the Bonnie Lassie with the doomed person whom she has marked down as a subject. Barbran hesitated, capitulated, came to the Bonnie Lassie’s house, moused about Our Square in a rapt manner and stayed. She rented a room from the Angel of Death (“Boggs Kills Bugs” is the remainder of his sign, which is considered to lend tone and local interest to his whole side of the Square), just over Madame Tallafferr’s apartments, and, in the course of time, stopped at my bench and looked at me contemplatively. She was a small person with shy, soft eyes.
“The Bonnie Lassie sent you,” said I.
She nodded.
“You’ve come here to live—Heaven only knows why—but we’re glad to see you. And you want to know about the people; so the Bonnie Lassie said, Ask the Dominie; he landed here from the ark.’ Didn’t she?”
Barbran sat down and smiled at me.
“Having sought information,” I pursued, “on my own account, I learn that you are the only daughter of a Western millionaire ranch-owner. How does it feel to revel in millions?”
“Romantic,” said she.
“Of course you have designs upon us.”
“Yes.”
“Humanitarian, artistic, or sociological?”
“Oh, nothing long and clever like that.”
“You grow more interesting. Having designs upon us, you doubtless wish my advice.”
“No,” she answered softly: “I’ve done it already.”
“Rash and precipitate adventuress! What have you done already?”
“Started my designs. I’ve rented the basement of Number 26.”
“Are you a rag-picker in disguise?”
“I’m going to start a coffee cellar. I was thinking of calling it ‘The Coffee Pot.’ What do you think?”
“So you do wish my advice. I will give it to you. Do you see that plumber’s shop next to the corner saloon?” I pointed to the Avenue whose ceaseless stream of humanity flows past Our Square without ever sweeping us into its current. “That was once a tea-shop. It was started by a dear little, prim little old maiden lady. The saloon was run by Tough Bill Manigan. The little old lady had a dainty sign painted and hung it up outside her place, ‘The Teacup.’ Tough Bill took a board and painted a sign and hung it up outsidehisplace; ‘The Hiccup.’ The dear little, prim little old maiden lady took down her sign and went away. Yet there are those who say that competition is the life of trade.”
“Is there a moral to your story, Mr. Dominie?”
“Take it or leave it,” said I amiably.
“I will not call my cellar ‘The Coffee Pot’ lest a worse thing befall it.”
“You are a sensible young woman, Miss Barbara Ann Waterbury.”
“It is true that my parents named me that,” said she, “but my friends call me ‘Barbran’ because I always used to call myself that when I was little, and I want to be called Barbran here.”
“That’s very friendly of you,” I observed.
She gave me a swift, suspicious look. “You think I’m a fool,” she observed calmly. “But I’m not. I’m going to become a local institution. A local institution can’t be called Barbara Ann Waterbury, unless it’s a crêche or a drinking-fountain or something like that, can it?”
“It cannot, Barbran.”
“Thank you, Mr. Dominie,” said Barbran gratefully. She then proceeded to sketch out for me her plans for making her Coffee Cellar and herself a Local Institution, which should lure hopeful seekers for Bohemia from the far parts of Harlem and Jersey City, and even such outer realms of darkness as New Haven and Cohoes.
“That’s what I intend to do,” said Barbran, “as soon as I get my Great Idea worked out.”
What the Great Idea was, I was to learn later and from other lips. In fact, from the lips of young Phil Stacey, who appeared, rather elaborately loitering out from behind the fountain, shortly after my new friend had departed, a peculiar look upon his extremely plain and friendly face. Young Mr. Stacey is notable, if for no other reason than that he represents a flat artistic failure on the part of the Bonnie Lassie, who has tried him in bronze, in plaster, and in clay with equal lack of success. There is something untransferable in the boy’s face; perhaps its outshining character. I know that I never yet have said to any woman who knew him, no matter what her age, condition, or sentimental predilections, “Isn’t he a homely cub!” that she didn’t reply indignantly: “He’ssweet!” Now when women—wonderful women like the Bonnie Lassie and stupid women like Mrs. Rosser, the twins’ aunt, and fastidious women like Madame Tallafferr—unite in terming a smiling human freckle “sweet,” there is nothing more to be said. Adonis may as well take a back seat and the Apollo Belvedere seek the helpful resources of a beauty parlor. Said young Phil carelessly:
“Dominie, who’s the newcomer?”
“That,” said I, “is Barbran.”
“Barbran,” he repeated with a rising inflection. “It sounds like a breakfast food.”
“As she pronounces it, it sounds like a strain of music,” said I.
“What’s the rest of her name?”
“I am not officially authorized to communicate that.”
“Are you officially authorized to present your friends to her?”
“On what do you base your claim to acquaintanceship, my boy?” I asked austerely.
“Oh, claim! Well, you see, a couple of days ago, she was on the cross-town car; and I—well, I just happened to notice her, you know. That’s all.”
“Yet I am informed on good and sufficient authority that her appearance is not such as to commend her, visually, if I may so express myself, to the discriminating eye.”
“Who’s the fool—” began Mr. Stacey hotly.
“Tut-tut, my young friend,” said I. “Certain ladies whom we both esteem can and will prove, to the satisfaction of the fair-minded, that none of the young person’s features is exactly what it should be or precisely where it ought to be. Nevertheless, the net result is surprising and even gratifying.”
“She’s a peach!” asseverated my companion.
“Substantially what I was remarking. As for your other hint, you need no introduction to Barbran. Nobody does.”
“What?” Phil Stacey’s plain face became ugly; a hostile light glittered in his eyes. “What do you mean by that?” he growled.
“Simply that she’s about to become a local institution. She’s plotting against the peace and security of Our Square, to the extent of starting a coffee-house at Number 26.”
“No!” cried Phil joyously. “Good news!”
“As a fad. She’s a budding millionairess from the West.”
“No!” growled Phil, his face falling.
“Bad news; eh? It occurred to me that she might want some decorations, and that you might be the one to do them.” In his leisure hours, my young friend, who is an expert accountant by trade (the term “expert” appears to be rather an empty compliment, since his stipend is only twenty-five dollars a week), perpetrates impressionistic decorations and scenery for such minor theaters as will endure them.
“You’re a grand old man, Dominie!” said he. “Let’s go.”
We went. We found Barbran. We conversed. Half an hour later when I left them—without any strenuous protests on the part of either—they were deeply engrossed in a mutual discussion upon decorations, religion, the high cost of living, free verse, two-cent transfers, Charley Chaplin, aviation, ouija, and other equally safe topics. Did I say safe? Dangerous is what I mean. For when a youth who is as homely as young Phil Stacey and in that particular style of homeliness, and a girl who is as far from homely as Barbran begin, at first sight, to explore each other’s opinions, they are venturing into a dim and haunted region, lighted by will-o’-the-wisps and beset with perils and pitfalls. Usually they smile as they go. Phil was smiling as I left them. So was Barbran. I may have smiled myself.
Anything but a smile was on Phil Stacey’s normally cheerful face when, some three days thereafter, he came to my rooms.
“Dominie,” said he, “I want to tap your library. Have you got any of the works of Harvey Wheelwright?”
“God forbid!” said I.
Phil looked surprised. “Is it as bad as that? I didn’t suppose there was anything wrong with the stuff.”
“Don’t you imperil your decent young soul with it,” I advised earnestly. “It reeks of poisonous piety. The world he paints is so full of nauseating virtues that any self-respecting man would rather live in hell. His characters all talk like a Sunday-school picnic out of the Rollo books. No such people ever lived or ever could live, because a righteously enraged populace would have killed ’em in early childhood. He’s the smuggest fraud and best seller in the United States. Wheelwright? The crudest, shrewdest, most preposterous panderer to weak-minded—”
“Whew! Help! I didn’t know what I was starting,” protested my visitor. “As a literary critic you’re some Big Bertha, Dominie. I begin to suspect that you don’t care an awful lot about Mr. Wheelwright’s style of composition. Just the same, I’ve got to read him. All of him. Do you think I’ll find his stuff in the Penny Circulator?”
“My poor, lost boy! Probably not. It is doubtless all out in the hands of eager readers.”
However, Phil contrived to round it up somewhere. The awful and unsuspected results I beheld on my first visit of patronage to Barbran’s cellar, the occasion being the formal opening. A large and curious crowd of five persons, including myself and Phil Stacey, were there. Outside, an old English design of a signboard with a wheel on it creaked despairingly in the wind. Below was a legend: “At the Sign of the Wheel—The Wrightery.” The interior of the cellar was decorated with scenes from the novels of Harvey Wheelwright, triumphant virtue, discomfited villains, benignant blessings, chaste embraces, edifying death-beds, and orange-blossoms. They were unsigned; but well I knew whose was the shame. Over the fireplace hung a framed letter from the Great Soul. It began, “Dear Young Friend and Admirer,” and ended, “Yours for the Light. Harvey Wheelwright.”
The guests did as well as could be expected. They ate and drank everything in sight. They then left; that is to say, four of them did. Finally Phil departed, glowering at me. I am a patient soul. No sooner had the door slammed behind him than I turned to Barbran, who was looking discouraged.
“Well, what have you to say in your defense?”
The way Barbran’s eyebrows went up constituted in itself a defense fit to move any jury to acquittal.
“For what?” she asked.
“For corrupting my young friend Stacey. You made him paint those pictures.”
“They’re very nice,” returned Barbran demurely. “Quite true to the subject.”
“They’re awful. They’re an offense to civilization. They’re an insult to Our Square. Of all subjects in the world, Harvey Wheelwright! Why, Barbran? Why? Why? Why?”
“Business,” said Barbran.
“Explain, please,” said I.
“I got the idea from a friend of mine in Washington Square. She got up a little cellar café built around Alice. Alice in Wonderland, you know, and the Looking Glass. Though I don’t suppose a learned and serious person like you would ever have read such nonsense.”
“It happened to be Friday and there wasn’t a hippopotamus in the house,” I murmured.
“Oh,” said Barbran, brightening. “Well, I thought if she could do it with Alice, I could do it with Harvey Wheelwright.”
“In the name of Hatta and the March Hare,why?”
“Because, for every one person who reads Alice nowadays, ten read the author of ‘Reborn Through Righteousness’ and ‘Called by the Cause.’ Isn’t it so?”
“Mathematically unimpeachable.”
“Therefore I ought to get ten times as many people as the other place. Don’t you think so?” she inquired wistfully.
Who am I to withhold a comforting fallacy from a hopeful soul. “Undoubtedly,” I agreed. “But do you love him?”
“Who?” said Barbran, with a start. The faint pink color ran up her cheeks.
“Harvey Wheelwright, of course. Whom did you think I meant?”
“He is a very estimable writer,” returned Barbran primly, quite ignoring my other query.
“Good-night, Barbran,” said I sadly. “I’m going out to mourn your lost soul.”
One might reasonably expect to find peace and quiet in the vicinity of one’s own particular bench at 11.45 P.M. in Our Square. But not at all on this occasion. There sat Phil Stacey. I challenged him at once.
“What did you do it for?”
To do him justice he did not dodge or pretend to misunderstand. “Pay,” said he.
“Phil! Did you take money for that stuff?”
“Not exactly. I’m taking it out in trade. I’m going to eat there.”
“You’ll starve to death.”
“I haven’t got much of an appetite.”
“The inevitable effect of overfeeding on sweets. An uninterrupted diet of Harvey Wheelwright—”
“Don’t speak the swine’s name,” implored Phil, “or I’ll be sick.”
“You’ve sold your artistic birthright for a mess of pottage, probably indigestible at that.”
“I don’t care,” he averred stoutly. “I don’t care for anything except—Dominie, who told you her father was a millionaire?”
“It’s well known,” I said vaguely. “He’s a cattle king or an emperor of sheep or the sultan of the piggery or something. A good thing for Barbran, too, if she expects to keep her cellar going. The kind of people who read Har—our unmentionable author, don’t frequent Bohemian coffee cellars. They would regard it as reckless and abandoned debauchery. Barbran has shot at the wrong mark.”
“The place has got to be a success,” declared Phil between his teeth, his plain face expressing a sort of desperate determination.
“Otherwise the butterfly will fly back West,” I suggested. The boy winced.
What man could do to make it a success, Phil Stacey did and heroically. Not only did he eat all his meals there, but he went forth into the highways and byways and haled in other patrons (whom he privately paid for) to an extent which threatened to exhaust his means.
Our Square is conservative, not to say distrustful in its bearing toward innovations. Thornsen’s Élite Restaurant has always sufficed for our inner cravings. We are, I suppose, too old to change. Nor does Harvey Wheelwright exercise an inspirational sway over us. We let the little millionairess and her Washington Square importation pretty well alone. She advertised feebly in the “Where to Eat” columns, catching a few stray outlanders, but for the most part people didn’t come. Until the first of the month, that is. Then too many came. They brought their bills with them.
Evening after evening Barbran and Phil Stacey sat in the cellar almost or quite alone. So far as I could judge from my occasional visits of patronage (Barbran furnished excellent sweet cider and cakes for late comers), they endured the lack of custom with fortitude, not to say indifference. But in the mornings her soft eyes looked heavy, and once, as she was passing my bench deep in thought, I surprised a look of blank terror on her face. One can understand that even a millionaire’s daughter might spend sleepless nights brooding over a failure. But that look of mortal dread! How well I know it! How often have I seen it, preceding some sordid or brave tragedy of want and wretchedness in Our Square! What should it mean, though, on Barbran’s sunny face? Puzzling over the question I put it to the Bonnie Lassie.
“Read me a riddle, O Lady of the Wise Heart. Of what is a child of fortune, young, strong, and charming, afraid?”
At the time we were passing the house in which the insecticidal Angel of Death takes carefully selected and certified lodgers.
“I know whom you mean,” said the Bonnie Lassie, pointing up to the little dormer window which was Barbran’s outlook on life. “Interpret me a signal. What do you see up there?”
“It appears to be a handkerchief pasted to the window,” said I adjusting my glasses.
“Upside down,” said the Bonnie Lassie.
“How can a handkerchief be upside down?” I inquired, in what was intended to be a tone of sweet reasonableness.
Contempt was all that it brought me. “Metaphorically, of course! It’s a signal of distress.”
“In what distress can Barbran be?”
“In what kind of distress are most people who live next under the roof in Our Square?”
“She’s doing that just to get into our atmosphere. She told me so herself. A millionaire’s daughter—”
“Do millionaires’ daughters wash their own handkerchiefs and paste them on windows to dry? Does any woman in or out of Our Squareeversoak her own handkerchiefs in her own washbowl except when she’s desperately saving pennies? Did you ever wash one single handkerchief in your rooms, Dominie?”
“Certainly not. It isn’t manly. Then you think she isn’t a millionairess?”
“Look at her shoes when next you see her,” answered the Bonnie Lassie conclusively. “Ithink the poor little thing has put her every cent in the world into her senseless cellar, and she’s going under.”
“But, good Heavens!” I exclaimed. “Something has got to be done.”
“It’s going to be.”
“Who’s going to do it?”
“Me,” returned the Bonnie Lassie, who is least grammatical when most purposeful.
“Then,” said I, “the Fates may as well shut up shop and Providence take a day off; the universe has temporarily changed its management. Can I help?”
The Bonnie Lassie focused her gaze in a peculiar manner upon the exact center of my countenance. A sort of fairy grin played about her lips. “I wonder if—No,” she sighed. “No. I don’t think it would do, Dominie. Anyway, I’ve got six without you.”
“Including Phil Stacey?”
“Of course,” retorted the Bonnie Lassie. “It was he who came to me for help. I’m really doing this for him.”
“I thought you were doing it for Barbran.”
“Oh; she’s just a transposed Washington Squarer,” answered the tyrant of Our Square. “Though she’s a dear kiddie, too, underneath the nonsense.”
“Do I understand—”
“I don’t see,” interrupted the Bonnie Lassie sweetly, “how you could. I haven’t told you. And the rest are bound to secrecy. But don’t be unduly alarmed at anything queer you may see in Our Square within the next few days.”
Only by virtue of that warning was I able to command the emotions aroused by an encounter with Cyrus the Gaunt some evenings later. He was hurrying across the park space in the furtive manner of one going to a shameful rendezvous, and upon my hailing him he at first essayed to sheer off. When he saw who it was he came up with a rather swaggering and nonchalant effect. I may observe here that nobody has a monopoly of nonchalance in this world.
“Good-evening, Cyrus,” I said.
“Good-evening, Dominie.”
“Beautiful weather we’re having.”
“Couldn’t be finer.”
“Do you think it will hold?”
“The paper says rain to-morrow.”
“Why is the tip of your nose painted green?”
“Is it green?” inquired Cyrus, as if he hadn’t given the matter any special consideration, but thought it quite possible.
“Emerald,” said I. “It looks as if it were mortifying.”
“It would be mortifying,” admitted Cyrus the Gaunt, “if it weren’t in a good cause.”
“What cause?” I asked.
“Come out of there!” said Cyrus the Gaunt, not to me, but to a figure lurking in the shrubbery.
The Little Red Doctor emerged. I took one look at his most distinctive feature.
“You, too!” I said. “What do you mean by it?”
“Ask Cyrus,” returned the Little Red Doctor glumly.
“It’s a cult,” said Cyrus. “The credit of the notion belongs not to me, but to my esteemed better half. A few chosen souls—”
“Here comes another of them,” I conjectured, as a bowed form approached. “Who is it? MacLachan!”
The old Scot appeared to be suffering from a severe cold. His handkerchief was pressed to his face.
“Take it down, Mac,” I ordered. “It’s useless.” He did so, and my worst suspicions were confirmed.
“He bullied me into it,” declared the tailor, glowering at Cyrus the Gaunt.
“It’ll do your nose good,” declared Cyrus jauntily. “Give it a change. Complementary colors, you know. What ho! Our leader.”
Phil Stacey appeared. He appeared serious; that is, as serious as one can appear when his central feature glows like the starboard light of an incoming steamship. Following him were Leon Coventry, huge and shy, and the lethal Boggs looking unhappy.
“Where are you all going?” I demanded.
“To the Wrightery,” said Phil.
“Is it a party?”
“It’s a gathering.”
“Am I included?”
“If you’ll—”
“Not on any account,” I declared firmly. It had just occurred to me why the Bonnie Lassie had centered her gaze upon my features. “Follow your indecent noses as far as you like. I stay.”
Still lost in meditation, I may have dozed on my bench, when heavy, measured footsteps aroused me. I looked up to see Terry the Cop, guardian of our peace, arbiter of differences, conservator of our morals. I peered at him with anxiety.
“Terry,” I inquired, “how is your nose?”
“Keen, Dominie,” said Terry. He sniffed the air. “Don’t you detect the smell of illegal alcohol?”
“I can’t say I do.”
“It’s very plain,” declared the officer wriggling his nasal organ which, I was vastly relieved to observe, retained its original hue. “Wouldn’t you say, Dominie, it comes from yonder cellar?”
“Barbran’s cellar?
“I am informed that a circle of dangerous char-ackters with green noses gather there and drink cider containing more than two-seventy-five per cent of apple juice. I’m about to pull the place.”
“For Heaven’s sake, Terry; don’t do that! You’ll scare—”
“Whisht, Dominie!” interrupted Terry with an elaborate wink. “There’ll be no surprise, except maybe to the Judge in the morning. You better drop in at the court.”
Of the round-up I have no details, except that it seemed to be quietly conducted. The case was called the next day, before Magistrate Wolf Tone Hanrahan, known as the “Human Judge.” Besides being human, his Honor is, as may be inferred from his name, somewhat Irish. He heard the evidence, tested the sample, announced his intention of coming around that evening for some more, and honorably discharged Barbran.
“And what about these min?” he inquired, gazing upon the dauntless six.
“Dangerous suspects, Yeronner,” said Terry the Cop.
“They look mild as goat’s milk to me,” returned the Magistrate, “though now I get me eye on the rid-hidded wan [with a friendly wink at the Little Red Doctor] I reckonize him as a desprit charackter that’d save your life as soon as look at ye. What way are they dang’rous?”
“When apprehended,” replied Terry, looking covertly about to see that the reporters were within hearing distance, “their noses were painted green.”
“Is this true?” asked the Magistrate of the six.
“It is, your Honor,” they replied.
“An’, why not!” demanded the Human Judge hotly. “‘Tis a glorious color! Erin go bragh! Off’cer, ye’ve exceeded yer jooty. D’ ye think this is downtrodden an’ sufferin’ Oireland an’ yerself the tyrant Gineral French? Let ’em paint their noses anny color they loike; but green for preference. I’m tellin’ ye, this is the land of freedom an’ equality, an’ ivery citizen thereof is entitled to life, liberty, and the purshoot of happiness, an’ a man’s nose is his castle, an’ don’t ye fergit it. Dis-charrrrged! Go an’ sin no more. I mane, let the good worruk go awn!”
“Now watch for the evening papers,” said young Phil Stacey exultantly. “The Wrightery will get some free advertising that’ll crowd it for months.”
Alas for youth’s golden hopes! The evening papers ignored the carefully prepared event. One morning paper published a paragraph, attributing the green noses to a masquerade party. The conspirators, gathered at the cellar with their war-paints on (in case of reporters), discussed the fiasco in embittered tones. Young Stacey raged against a stupid and corrupt press. MacLachan expressed the acidulous hope that thereafter Cyrus the Gaunt would be content with making a fool of himself without implicating innocent and confiding friends. The Bonnie Lassie was not present, but sent word (characteristically) that they must have done it all wrong; men had no sense, anyway. The party then sent out for turpentine and broke up to reassemble no more. Only Phil Stacey, inventor of the great idea, was still faithful to and hopeful of it. Each evening he conscientiously greened himself and went to eat with Barbran.
Time justified his faith. One evening there dropped in a plump man who exhaled a mild and comforting benevolence, like a gentle country parson. He smiled sweetly at Phil, and introduced himself as a reporter for the “Sunday World Magazine”—and where was the rest of the circle? In a flurry of excitement, the pair sent for Cyrus the Gaunt to do the talking. Cyrus arrived, breathless and a trifle off color (the Bonnie Lassie had unfortunately got a touch of bronze scenic paint mixed with the green, so that he smelled like an over-ripe banana), and proceeded to exposition.
“This,” he explained, “is a new cult. It is based on the back-to-the-spring idea. The well-spring of life, you know. The—er—spring of eternal youth, and—and so forth. You understand?”
“I hope to,” said the reporter politely. “Why on the nose?”
“I will explain that,” returned Cyrus, getting his second wind; “but first let me get the central idea in your mind. It’s a nature movement; a readjustment of art to nature. All nature is green. Look about you.” Here he paused for effect, which was unfortunate.
“Quite so,” agreed the reporter. “The cable-car, for instance, and the dollar bill, not to mention the croton bug and the polar bear. But, pardon me, I interrupt the flow of your eloquence.”
“You do,” said Cyrus severely. “Inanimate nature I speak of. All inanimate nature is green. But we poor fellow creatures have gotten away from the universal mother-color. We must get back to it. We must learn to think greenly. But first we must learn to see greenly. How shall we accomplish this? Put green in our eyes? Impossible, unfortunately. But, our noses—there is the solution. In direct proximity to the eye, the color, properly applied, tints one’s vision of all things. Green shadows in a green world,” mooned Cyrus the Gaunt poetically. “As the bard puts it: