Chapter IV (2)

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.”