Chapter IV (3)

“Nutty!” said the interne to the information official who returned at this point. “Takes'em that way sometimes. Better get him out before he busts loose.”

They got him out without trouble. He wandered into Our Square and watched the children dancing-in the May. They seemed to him like unreal creatures moving in a world of unrealities. More and more unreal grew everything about him until late that night he faced the grim reality of a barred door which kept him from his beloved dead, and that door he attacked with such fury and power that it took two policemen, in addition to the hospital corps, to subdue him. As he was a foreigner and vague and sorrow-stricken, the magistrate naturally gave him two months. He came out dazed but steadied. The one hold he had upon happiness was the delusion to which he so pathetically clung, the pretense, passionately cherished, that she was still alive. Poor Orpheus! He had indeed gone down into Hades for his Eurydice and stayed there. If he could find solace in his limbo of minor madness, perhaps that was best for him.

So thought the Little Red Doctor, wise in human suffering, to whom alone I told the story of Orpheus. Said the Little Red Doctor first: “There are times when I blame my old friend Death for doing a job by halves”; and second: “Cure him? Who wants to cure peace with pain! Let him play his music”; and third: “God help that interne if I ever meet up with him!”

If Death resented his friendly opponent's strictures, he never showed it, but kept on doing business as usual in Our Square. And Orpheus continued to make, among the broken glens of our brick-and-stucco sky line, his music manifold to ears that heard not. As for the interne, the Little Red Doctor did, in the fullness of time, meet up with him, and improved the occasion to lay down certain ethics and principles of conduct as pertaining to the profession of healing. Whereupon the interne, who should have known better, being not more than half again as big as the Little Red Doctor, treated the lesson in a light and flippant vein, and asserted that when he wished to learn his business he wouldn't apply to a half-boiled shrimp.

Thus it happened that he who had come forth from the hospital an interne intact and unafraid returned thereto a battered and terrified patient with a broken nose and two displaced ribs urgently requiring attention. The practice of medicine in Our Square, as exemplified by so thoroughgoing an exponent as the Little Red Doctor, is not wholly a lily-fingered science.

_Minora cano!_ And why should I sing of such lesser matters as the correction of the interne, when there awaits my historical pen a conflict worthy of Euripides's own strophes! Cyrus the Gaunt and the Bonnie Lassie had been serving the midnight rarebit to three of their uptown friends who had dropped down through the slums to the friendly little old house with the dancing figurines in the window, and Cyrus had undertaken to pilot his friends to the corner, lest their evening raiment be locally misinterpreted and resented. Coming, later than my wont, from the Elite Restaurant, I crossed Our Square a few rods in advance of them. Orpheus stood in his corner, piping to his lost young love. From without there approached him swiftly a dark group, close gathered. It was the Shadow Gang, from Second Avenue, bent upon reprisals. There were eight or nine of them, under the leadership of “Mixer” Boyle, a local middle-weight of ill repute. They closed in upon the Greek, and as I ran, shouting for Terry the Cop, I saw him go down under the pack. More than music was in that soul, however. If he was Orpheus, he had something, too, in him of Thersites and Achilles and Agamemnon. Like a bear struggling from beneath an onset of dogs, he up-heaved his big shoulders. From behind me came an answering shout, not Terry the Cop, indeed, but the next best thing, Cyrus the Gaunt, followed closely by the Rev. Morris Cartwright, Gerrit Bascom, and two other visions of white shirt fronts protruding and black coat tails streaming in the wind. They passed me as if I were a milestone, and the battle was joined.

Cyrus the Gaunt is a mighty man of his hands. But the hands are those of an amateur. Mixer Boyle's are those of a professional. They crossed, and Cyrus went down under a left swing. Before the Mixer could turn he was toppled with the blessing (full arm to the ear) of the Rev. Morris Cartwright. Two others fell upon the Rev. Morris and the Rev. Morris fell upon the Mixer, and then they all rose and went at it again.

I am old who once was young, but never do I look upon the stricken field without remembering that in my prime I was a man of deeds and juggled deftly with seventy-five-pound dumb-bells. Talents of this sort are never wholly wasted. Upon attaining the outskirts of the mêlée I selected the largest hostile bulk in reach, seized it around the hips, and lifted it clear. It struggled and developed a solid fist which, in contact with my jaw, utterly destroyed my equilibrium. I fell, but contrived so to twist myself that the hostile bulk fell beneath me. It lay quiet. But when I strove to rise, a paralysis across my shoulders strongly advised against it. So I sat upon my captive's chest and dizzily watched the combat.

Now do I fully understand why war correspondents are not permitted at the front. It destroys their special usefulness. The fighting spirit and historical accuracy are totally incompatible. Nobody could have had a better view of the stirring events which succeeded than I. The forces and topography of the combat were clear in my mind: nearly two to one in favor of the enemy, but with our party fighting on home soil and in momentary hope of reenforcements. Yet all that I can recall is the sound of thumps and stifled curses and a confused mess of strained faces, violently working arms, and broad white shirt fronts now splotched with a harsher color. Then it seemed to me that I saw a little circle cleared about the mighty Greek, and a heavy cane which he brandished by the middle in both hands gave me the clue. The odds were balancing better, though still with the invaders. As if the Fates themselves were concerned to assure a more even field, there sounded a far, furious whoop, and the Little Red Doctor descended joyously upon the riot. At this critical juncture my captive came to and bit me in the leg. I lost all interest, temporarily, in the art and practice of war correspondence.

Having secured a hold (not prescribed by the formal rules of wrestling, I am informed) with my knee upon my opponent's neck, I turned to view the battle again. The defenders were against the fence now; but alas! the Rev. Morris Cartwright was on his hands and knees, and one of the other uptown knights was reeling. The gangsters pressed in hard, striving to edge around the Greek and get him in the rear. Cyrus, with his heavy fists, guarded one side of him; the Little Red Doctor was fighting like a fury on the other. I prayed (kneeling upon my captive's neck) for Heaven's success to the just, and Terry the Cop.

A shrill shout marked the next swift development.

“_Look out! He's got a knife!_”

A bright gleam of steel slanted toward Cyrus's shoulder. But the deft Greek had seen it. He chopped with his stick. The knife whirled free and descended. Like a football team plunging for a loose ball, the contestants dived for it. For a moment they groveled, struggling. Then out of the mass rose a shriek of the uttermost agony. It seemed to me that the group was stricken into sudden silence and immobility. Slowly it disintegrated, drawing apart in two sections. A half-doubled figure ran, staggering and dodging, into the shadows. A policeman's whistle shrilled. The gangsters turned and ran. Mine ran too. He tried, I regret to say, to give me a parting kick as I let him up. On the ground lay the knife. There was just a little trickle of red on it.

Cyrus picked it up and looked around. Every man of our party was battered, but none was stabbed.

“Must have got his own man in the mix-up,” quoth the Little Red Doctor. “Come to my place and get fixed up.” After much minor repairing with plaster and patch we separated upon our respective ways, disheveled, disreputable, but exultant. Orpheus, with his face one mass of cuts and bruises, went back, if you will believe it, to play the final “Bohême” to the little beam of light in the window.

“I hope,” he whispered to me, “that she could not hear the noise. It would frighten her.”

In consideration of my strained back the Little Red Doctor escorted me home. As we set foot to the steps we heard a soft groan from the black areaway. From between two barrels the physician dragged a cowering wretch. His hands were pressed to his abdomen. There was a pool of blood where he had crouched.

“The Samaritan Hospital for you,” said the Little Red Doctor.

“Not me!” snarled the youth. “Guess again.”

“Got any last message?” asked the doctor coolly.

The young fellow's eyelids fluttered. “Am I croaked?” he said.

“Unless you're on the table within the hour.”

The gangster summoned his bravado. “Let'er go as she lies. No Samaritan for mine. I was there oncet. They don't allow you no cigs. 'No smoking.' I'll croak foist.”

The Little Red Doctor scratched his head in perplexity. I looked at the wounded man. His face was sullen and brave, but his hands were quivering.

“Take him up to my room, doctor,” I said.

That is how I came by my first lodger. His name was Pinney the Rat.

After the Little Red Doctor had saved his body, many and various visitors climbed my stair for the purpose of saving the Rat's soul. The Rev. Morris Cartwright came all the way downtown (with an ear tastefully framed in surgeon's plaster) to convert him to decency. Cyrus the Gaunt strove manfully to convert him to the gospel of work with offers of regenerating labor in Canadian wildernesses. MacLachan the Tailor undertook to curse him into sobriety. Our French David and our German Jonathan dropped in separately to forecast to him respectively the Entente and the Alliance arguments of the Great War and to hint at enlistment when he should be recovered. Herman Groll undertook to convert him to music. All of this he accepted with noncommittal and rather contemptuous tolerance. It served to pass the time of his halting recovery. As a patient he was docile; as a guest he was not inconsiderate, though I could hardly say that he was grateful. To Orpheus alone of his visitors he exhibited a distinctive attitude. When the Greek dropped in upon us Pin-ney's face became a mask of cold watchfulness. He would freeze up into silence, following the big, gentle visitor's every movement with his unwinking eyes. The Little Red Doctor noted this with uneasiness.

“That's not a rat,” he warned me. “It's a rattlesnake. And I don't like the way it looks at our Greek friend.”

“What can he have against Orpheus?”

“Probably thinks it was he that knifed him.”

“It wasn't. I can swear to that much.”

“Save your breath. You'll never argue the resolve to get even out of the mind of a gangster.”

“What shall I do? Tell Orpheus to keep away?”

“No. But see that our patient doesn't get his hands on any sort of weapon.” Strangely enough, the wounded man seemed to exercise a strange fascination upon the Greek. Day after day he would come and sit, talking or reading, while the gangster lay silent, maturing murder in his soul. What a pair they made; the secretive, time-abiding, venomous Rat and the gentle madman!

In time the Rat's patience was rewarded. He got his weapon. He got it from the Bonnie Lassie. She had taken to dropping in upon us to see my lodger. She, at least, did not try to convert him. At first she just sat and twinkled at him, and the man does not live who can resist the Bonnie Lassie when she twinkles. On her second visit she brought him cigarettes in profusion and announced that she was going to sculp him in miniature, and proceeded forthwith to do it. Before the job was done they were sworn comrades. She would sit by his couch with her modeling tools and clay and work while he boasted in a hoarse, thin pipe of the evil things he had done. He was openly flattered that she should make him the chief figure of a group to be called “Ambush.” One day while she was absorbed in a difficult line he quietly annexed her compasses. A pair of compasses is two excellent stilettos. Pinney the Rat secreted his booty in the bed. That evening I found him cautiously practicing, first with his right, then with his left hand, what I supposed to be that method pugilistically termed an uppercut. Had I been more expert, I might have noted that his thumb was turned sidewise and upward.

Concern and ignorance were choicely blended in the Rat's manner when, next day, the Bonnie Lassie came in to inquire for her lost tool, bringing as usual some “smokes.”

“Do you like this kind better?” she asked.

“They're all right,” said the Rat. “But, say, lady, not wishin' to ast too much--”

“Go on,” she encouraged him as he--

“Woddya know,” pursued the patient hesitantly, “about a big, fat cig with funny letters like this on?”

“Those look like Greek letters,” said the Bonnie Lassie, studying the marks which he had scrawled. “I'll see if I can get some for you.”

Search for that brand proved unavailing, however. It seemed to be a special importation.

“Where did you ever smoke them?” she asked the Rat.

“Over to th' S'maritan.”

“Do they serve cigarettes in the hospital?”

“They do--I don't think! It was a little lady there give'em to me on the quiet. She seen what them big stiffs o' doctors never seen, that I was goin' batty for a smoke. She sneaked'em in to me. She was one real baby! Some guy outside useter send'em in to her to give me.”

“Was she a nurse?”

“No; a case. Pretty near all in when she came. After she got well nobody wanted her to leave; and she didn't want to, I guess. So they made a job for her. I useter tell her she was hired out for sunshine. I ain't seen her since.” He sighed.

“Would you like to see her?”

Pinney the Rat's eyes became human. “Oh, Gee!” he murmured.

“I'll bring her,” said the Bonnie Lassie. “Whom shall I ask for?”

“Jus' leave word for Miss Tony that Pin--that No. 7, Men's Surgical--is hurted again, but O. K., and could she come and see him, maybe, some day.” She came at once, Pinney the Rat's Miss Tony. She was little and quick and brown and lovely, but not laughing. There was a depth of woe and loss in her big eyes. Let that be my excuse that I did not at once identify her as Eurydice--that and the fact that, as far as I knew, Eurydice was dead and buried these four months and lived only in Orpheus's resolutely self-deluded mind.

For Pinney's sake, his visitor summoned up the phantom of past gayety. She shook, first her finger and then her little fist at him, upbraiding him in quaintly accented English, while he lay and visibly worshiped.

“You haf sayed that you will go straight. An' now voilà you, wit' your pro-mess broke an' a stick in your estomac.”

“Yessum,” said Pinney the Rat.

“That learn you something? That learn you to be'ayve?”

“Yessum,” assented that murderous gangster like an abashed schoolboy.

“You give me your han' now that you be a good boy an' go no more wit' _les Apaches_ an' get you a job?”

The Rat's face hardened. He squirmed away from those clear eyes. “I got one little account to square up,” he muttered. “After that if I make my getaway, I'll join the Salvationists if you tell me to. An' say, Miss Tony, you know them cigs you useta gimme? Them with the dinky letters on?”

The girl's trembling hand went to her throat. She looked at him strangely.

“If I could get a handful o' them,” he continued shyly, “they--I--it'd kinda remind me when--when you ain't here. How's me unknown friend on the outside that useta send'em in?”

Miss Tony leaned her head against the wall and burst into a passion of tears. I led her out, still sobbing, while the ex-Men's Surgical No. 7 sat up in his bed and cursed himself with wild, blasphemous, wondering oaths.

Whatever surmise our young gangster may have entertained he kept to himself. And, on the following morning, sterner matters claimed his attention, for, while I was out, Orpheus, the Greek, dropped in, and Pinney, once more the Rat, saw the hour of his revenge upon his supposed assailant at hand. For the Greek, forgetful of caution, had seated himself well within arm's length of the patient's couch. Beneath the sheet the Rat clutched the needle-pointed compasses and waited. Should he risk the jump and the stroke? No! He might miss. And he knew, from the memory of the Battle of Our Square, the Greek's swiftness of eye and hand. He must get him nearer. It was a time for strategy.

“Hey, sport. Got a smoke on you?”

Orpheus drew a box from his pocket, extracted a fattish cylinder, and leaned forward to the other--not quite far enough. “Gimme a light, will ye?” piped the Rat hoarsely, taking the cigarette in his left hand.

His right was working, wriggling slowly, slowly out from beneath the sheet. Orpheus struck a match and leaned toward the bed. His heart was almost over the lurking point. Slowly advancing the tip for the flame, Pinney the Rat--now the Rattlesnake with death in his stroke--raised his arm to blind his victim's vision against the blow. The movement brought the flimsy-papered cylinder directly before his own eyes. Familiar characters leaped out at him from the paper.

“Gawd!” croaked Pinney the Rat.

Though it had the sound of an oath, it was perhaps as near a prayer as the gangster had ever uttered. His frame, tense as a spring, slumped back among the covers. Orpheus dropped the match. “What is it?” he cried with quick concern. “You suffer?”

“Where didje get that cig?”

“The cigarette? From Greece. I always smoke this kind.”

“Have ye--didje ever send 'em to a little lady in the S'maritan Hospital fer a--a guy she was good to?”

“Yes.” The Greek's eyes widened. He began to shake through all his frame. “My God! You knew her?”

“Did I _know_ her?” The Rat turned away and closed his eyes. His right hand moved furtively under the bed clothing, away from his body. Something fell, with a soft clink between the bed and the wall. The Rat shuddered and sighed like a man freed from a great peril, “Go on. Spiel,” he bade Orpheus.

“Spiel?” queried the trembling Greek. “Spill your talk. Tell me about her.” Orpheus opened his heart and spoke. To that silent listener (for Pinney the Rat uttered no word) he poured forth his love and longing and his delusion, speaking of the girl as if she still lived. One word from Pinney might have brought the climax, perhaps disastrously, for that mind, desperately clinging to its delusion, might have collapsed under too sudden a shock of reality. The Rat lay quiet, drinking it in and revolving tangled problems. There were strange echoes in the Greek's talk which he failed to understand.

As I came in I met, on the stairs, Orpheus going out. His face was alight with a strange radiance.

“That Mr. Pinney knows her,” he said. “He knows my Toinette. She was once good to him.” Then, in a confidential and triumphant whisper: “So she lives in another heart beside my own.” It was as if his delusion, his creed, his religion of love that was stronger than death, had been blessed with convincing proof.

Wondering greatly, I returned to my patient. He was lost in thought and greeted me only with an absent nod. Not until I started the tea for our luncheon did he speak. “Say, boss, about that big wop.”

“Well?”

“He's a good guy, ain't he?”

“He is.”

“But--say. A little bit on the slant here?” He knuckled his head. “Huh?”

“Perhaps. What have you been saying to him?”

“Nothin'. I been listenin'. A great line of talk about the little lady. But--say, boss. What's his kink?”

“Couldn't you tell?”

“Sometimes I thought I got him,” said the Rat reflectively. “And sometimes I don't get him at all. Seems like he speaks of _her_ like she was a dead person.”

“Well, she is.”

The Rat's jaw dropped. “Who is?”

“Orpheus's--the wop, as you call him--the woman he loved.”

“Are _you_ nutty, too? Wasn't she in here to see me only yesterday?”

Light broke in upon me in a great wave. “Merciful powers!” I shouted. “_Your_ Miss Tony--his Toinette? It can't be. She died in a hospital the day before May Day.”

“Ferget it! She moved out _cured_ a week before May Day. Don't I know? Didn't I go humping up to Room 21 to see her, and find an old hen with a face like a mustard plaster and a busted mainspring?” The number woke remembrance within me. “What became of the woman in 21?”

“Croaked a few days later.”

Then the whole tragic comedy of errors was made plain to me. In turn I made it clear to my lodger.

“Who's loony now?” he demanded triumphantly. “You chase out an' find the wop an' let's square this.”

All very simple, but there was the matter of Orpheus's mental condition to be considered. What would be the outcome of so violent a confirmation of his delusion? Or was it a delusion, since it was a fact? Neither the Rat nor I could lay any claim to be metaphysicians. Obviously this was a case for the Little Red Doctor, together with such consultants as he might care to call in.

At the summons of its official physician Our Square mustered its intellectual forces in the Bonnie Lassie's Studio and sat in solemn conclave upon the problem. First of all we sent for the Rat's Miss Tony, and what the Bonnie Lassie said to her in the little back room and what she said to the Bonnie Lassie is a secret of womankind. Not even Cyrus the Gaunt was told. All that we heard of it was a cry and a sound of happy sobbing and another sound of broken laughter; and then the little, quick, brown, lovely face was turned to us from the steps outside, and MacLachan observed that two Bonnie Lassies in one house was a strain on human credulity as well as on human eyesight, and the Bonnie Lassie returned to us with _her_ eyesight looking a trifle strained.

“Somebody at the Greek consulate,” said she, “told her that Mister Phil-il-op--Mr. Orpheopoulos had gone back to Greece, and she's been breaking her poor dear little heart over it. Men are _all_ imbeciles.”

“Thanking you in behalf of one and all,” returned Cyrus the Gaunt, “will the volcano of wisdom whom I have the felicity of calling wife tell us who is to break it to Orpheus?”

“Pinney the Rat.”

Several protests were promptly entered. “That roughneck?” said MacLachan, whose urgency in the cause of abstinence had not been well received. “Take thought of the effect on the poor, stray-witted Greek lad.”

“I'm not thinking of the effect upon him at all,” said the Bonnie Lassie. “I'm thinking of the effect upon Pinney.”

“Think aloud,” invited the Little Red Doctor. “What beneficial effect will the reunion of two loving hearts have upon an incised stab wound in a third party's abdomen?”

“Isn't this wound healed?”

“Practically.”

“Did you ever know any person to go crazy or get crazier from joy?”

“No.”

“There are your two patients disposed of, on the medical side. What I am attempting is an experiment in psychology. You've all had your chance at saving the Rat's soul. I'll have mine.”

She perched herself upon a modeling stool and expounded. The Rat, she explained, had never had an opportunity to do anything but harm in his life. Therefore he did harm with pride, because it was doing something. “He's like all of us; he wants to work to some effect. Give him a chance to make himself effective for good, and you may see a change.”

Upon which theory of vice and virtue the Little Red Doctor commented:--

“Sometimes the Bonnie Lassie thinks around queer corners with her mind, but she's got the wisest heart in Our Square.” So Pinney the Rat got his instructions and reluctant leave from his doctor to indulge in a brief midnight stroll that very night.

Our Square was haunted that midnight by uneasy figures slinking about in shadowy backgrounds. One by one Terry the Cop trailed them down only to be discomfited by successive discoveries of his own particular friends. The one logical object of suspicion, Pinney the Rat, sat openly on a bench and smoked and waited for Orpheus to finish his music. When it was over, the little guttersnipe went to meet the big Olympian. Carefully indeed had we rehearsed the Rat in a modulated method of breaking the news. But the gangster was an undisciplined soul and a direct. At the crisis he reverted to his own way, which perhaps was best. He put a hand on Orpheus's shoulder.

“Say, bo',” he said, “yer in wrong about the lady.”

The Greek's face quivered, in anticipation of another blow at the fabric of his precious dream. “I know,” he said.

“No, yeh don't know. She didn't croak. She's alive.”

Orpheus's hands went to his temples.

“She's alive and waiting for you in the dominie's hallway. Come wit' me. Ready? Hep!”

Then Cyrus the Gaunt, Terry the Cop, and I had to fall on the Little Red Doctor and pin him to a bench to keep him from ruining it all, for the great bulk of the Greek loosened in every fibre and he collapsed into the clutch of the fragile Rat in a manner calculated (so the maddened physician informed us in technical and violent terms) to rip every condemned stitch out of the latter's foreordained peritoneum. Presumably, however, the Little Red Doctor had stitched better than he knew. For Pinney straightened the big man up and marched him across the way. As the strange pair mounted the steps the vestibule door opened. A little, quick figure sped to meet them. We heard across the leafage of Our Square the cry of a man who has come back to life and of a woman who has come back to love. When my eyes, which are growing old and play me strange tricks, had cleared, the doors were closed and Pinney the Rat was playing watchdog on the steps, jealously guarding that sacred vestibule.

Oh, the vestibules of Our Square! What Arcadia has fostered a thousandth part of their romance! Between those narrow walls, behind those ill-guarded doors, in that pathetic travesty of solitude which is all that our teeming hive affords, what heights and depths of love and anguish, what hope and despair, what triumphs, what abnegations, what partings, what “infinite passion and the pain of finite hearts that yearn,” pass, and are forgotten! When the blight of ages shall lie heavy and dusty over a forgotten metropolis, when the last human habitation totters to its fall in some far future cataclysm, two lovers shall stand clasped in its vestibule forgetful of ruin, of death, of all but each other. Oh, for the pen of Euripides to celebrate fittingly those narrow and enchanted spaces! Or the pipe of my friend Orpheus to turn their echoes into golden music!

They came out, those two, arm enlaced in arm, with the glory on their faces, into a world that was theirs alone for the time. They vanished into the shadows, and the watcher on the step lifted his head and saw them go. But the face of Pinney was no longer the face of the Rat.

He rose and slouched down the steps. We went forward to meet him.

“I wanta drink,” he muttered.

The Bonnie Lassie put her hand out to him. “No, you do not,” said she.

“No, I do not,” said Pinney. He turned to Cyrus the Gaunt.

“When do I git that job?” he asked.

“Tazmun”

A TALE OF WHITE MAGIC IN OUR SQUARE

STRANGERS in Our Square stop and stare at No. 17. In itself the house is unremarkable; a dull, brown rectangle with a faintly mildewed air about the cornices. It is this sign on the front which attracts the startled notice of the wayfarer:--

THE ANGEL OF DEATH
One Flight Up and Ring Bell

To us of the Square the placard is a commonplace, and the Angel of Death just Boggs, a chunky, bristly little man with gold teeth and a weak, meek, peanut-whistle voice, who conducts not a private bomb factory or a suicide club.

Taxmun formed romantics hopefully surmise upon a first reading, but a worthy though humble enterprise of hygiene and cleanliness more specifically set forth in the legend running, crimson, across the top of his business card:--

BOGGS KILLS BUGS

Once in the long ago that explicit announcement had flamed upon the house front. It yielded to the more dignified form when Madam Tallafferr took Mr. Boggs's top floor. She said that it was objectionable and that she could not live over it, and the landlord, duly impressed, sacrificed his prized alliteration rather than lose a lodger so elegant and aristocratic. Mr. Boggs had a vast, albeit distant, reverence for aristocracy, and he recognized in Madam Tallafferr a true exponent. So the sign came down and she went up. With her went her furniture, scanty but magnificent, a silver-inlaid lock box locally credited with safeguarding the Pemberton family diamonds, Sempronius, who was fat and black and a cat, and Old Sally, who was fat and black and a thief. For five years Madam Tallafferr dwelt above the lethal Boggs, and at the end of that period Our Square knew hardly more of her than on the day of her arrival. She was polite, but resolutely aloof as befitted her station in life.

For Mr. Boggs's lodger was all that is most glorious in Southern lineage. Her full style and title was Madam Rachel Pinckney Pemberton Tallafferr, with two Is, two fs, and two rs, if you valued her favor. She was passionately devoted to the Lost Cause, and belonged to no less than seven “Daughters-of” organizations with sumptuous stationery. Mr. Boggs was very proud of her mail. He said she had the swellest correspondence in Our Square. When letters arrived bearing her name without the requisite double Is, fs, and rs, they were invariably returned to the postman indorsed in a firm, fine hand: “No such individual known here.” But if the letters appeared important, the kindly and admiring Angel of Death used to intercept them and supply the missing consonants from his own inkwell. In this way he accumulated considerable information, and was able to apprise Our Square that his lodger was superstitious, subscribed to a dream magazine, and belonged to a Spirit Guidance Group. He darkly suspected the spirits of giving her bad advice about investments.

In person Madam Tallafferr was spare, tall, and straight. Her age when she first came to us was, to borrow caution from the war-zone censorship, “somewhere in the sixties,” though to Old Sally she was still “my young mist'ess.” Age had sharpened her personality, like her features, to a fine point. She was, I think, the most serene, incisive, and authoritative person I have ever encountered. Her speech was precise and trenchant. She dressed always in elegant, rustling black. Mr. Boggs said that she walked like a duchess. Quite likely. Though where Mr. Boggs got his data, I don't know. Our Square is not extensively haunted by persons of ducal rank. However, she became known to the locality, behind her back, as the Duchess. She and Old Sally were supposed to live in sumptuous luxury above the sign of the Destroyer. They had come to Our Square for their sojourn because, generations before in the days of its glory, madam's maternal grandfather had visited a distant cousin in that same No. 17. From beneath the ominous signboard she made occasional excursions, going westward and uptown, sometimes actually in an automobile, and always escorted by Old Sally. It was understood (from the boastful Mr. Boggs) that on such occasions his lodger was going into Society.

Once, that Our Square knew of, she put her ante-bellum principles into practice. She undertook disciplinary measures upon Old Sally, who in a moment of exaltation had been bragging indiscreetly of past glories “back in Fuhginia.” With a light but serviceable cane she corrected that indiscretion. Yes, in this emancipated twentieth century, among the populous, crowded habitations of our little metropolitan community, within earshot of Terry the Cop, the conscientious and logical slave-owner committed the startling anachronism of beating her slave. Hearing the resultant groans, Mr. Boggs, the lethal, rushed up to his top floor in great perturbation of spirit and burst in upon the finale of the performance. From what he could observe the castigation was purely formal and innocuous and the outcries merely a concession to what was expected and proper in the circumstances. But when he made his presence known, the Duchess in few cold and measured terms explained to him his exact purport and significance in the cosmic scheme, which he promptly perceived to bean approximate zero. “She wizened me up,” said the Angel of Death, “like a last season's roach.”

One after another she wizened us all up sufficiently to convince Our Square that she desired no personal share in its loosely communal, kindly, and village-like life.

But though aloof she was not alien. As befitted her name and station, she could in time of need descend from her remote Olympus above the insecticidal Mr. Boggs and lend a hand. The first occasion was when a sudden and disastrous spring epidemic of that Herod of diseases, diphtheria, swept down upon Our Square, bringing panic in its train, an insane and bestial panic which barred doors against the authorities, against help, against medicine, against even our fiery and beloved Little Red Doctor, who stands like a bulwark between us and death and the fear of death. Then the Duchess appeared. She consulted briefly with the Little Red Doctor. She put on the black silk of splendor, the Pinckney laces and the Pemberton diamonds, and thus girded for the fray went forth, a spare, thin-lipped, female St. George, against our local dragon. Wherever that sane and confident presence appeared, panic gave way to reason and mutiny to obedience. There were no heroics. She nursed no dying children, saved no sudden emergency. She simply restored and enforced courage through the authority of a valiant and assured personality. Just before the Little Red Doctor collapsed, at the close of the crisis, he delivered his estimate of her.

“Cold nerve and tradition. Our Square ought to put up a statue to her--in steel.”

Against which may be set off the Duchess's complacent and bland summing up of the Little Red Doctor:--

“He seems a worthy young man.”

In retort, Mr. Boggs, for once forgetting his reverential attitude, indignantly piped: “God give you understanding!” The Duchess merely lifted her eyebrows fractionally. Being a Pemberton by birth and a Tallafferr by name, she perceived no necessity of understanding lesser forms of life.

Yet she possessed understanding, too, and of a subtle, fine, and profound kind. Otherwise she could never have done for Schepstein what she did when Schep-stein's twenty-year-old Metta killed herself through taking poison tablets (by mistake of course, as the Little Red Doctor perjuriously certified). In his hour of lonely grief and shame, Our Square turned its back upon the little cross-eyed, cross-grained, agnostic trafficker in old debts, old furniture, old books, old stamps, old silver, and anything else old which he could buy from the uninformed and sell to the covetous; not because he had at one time or another got the better of most of us in some deal and was the best-hated habitant within the four inclosing streets, but because we did not know what to do for him and feared his savage and cynical rebuffs. But when the furtive hearse and the one carriage for Schepstein, which was to have been the whole of little Metta's funeral, drew up at night before the Schepstein flat, Madam Rachel Pinckney Pemberton Tal-lafferr descended her steps, and crossed Our Square, rustling and in the high estate of black silk and lace. She must have been watching. Behind her waddled Old Sally with an armful of white roses. They met Schepstein at the foot of his steps, following his dead. As the casket passed her, Madame Tallafferr took the wealth of bloom from the servant and scattered its snowy purity above the girl. At that the face of Schepstein, which had been cold lead-gray, changed and flushed and softened, and he staggered suddenly where he stood and might have fallen had not that strong old woman thrust an arm under his to help him on his way. So two mourners went in the lone carriage to little Metta's funeral.

Only long afterward was this known to Our Square. What established the Duchess as a local heroine and an Olympian controller of destinies was her handling of MacLachan the Tailor. MacLachan, on his black, alcoholic days, was wont to sing “The Cork Leg” under circumstances which I have set forth elsewhere. On this occasion he sang it, sitting on the coping of the fountain with his legs in the water, and beating time with a revolver which might or might not have been loaded. Nobody knew at the time. Regarding MacLachan there was no such room for doubt. Between stanzas he would announce his purpose of presently ending all his troubles with a bullet, previous to which, candidates for coffins would be considered in the order of their applications. In the natural logic of events this was a case for Terry the Cop, but Polyglot Elsa of the Elite Restaurant had early observed MacLachan's ready weapon, and with more cunning than conscience had dispatched the intrepid Terry to the farther end of the beat upon a purely fictitious Italian riot. For reasons of her own she did not wish Terry punctured. Hence Our Square, deprived of the official protection to which we were entitled, lurked about in the night shadows, watching the balladist from a respectful distance and wondering what would come next.

The Duchess came next. She rustled stiffly up to the fountain and bade MacLachan hold his peace. Old Sally followed with a market basket. MacLachan elevated his voice a pitch.

“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,”

bellowed MacLachan. “I am not aweer,” he added, still rhythmic, though with a change of meter, “that now and here, you possess any legal authority in this Squeer!”

The Duchess pointed a stiletto-like finger at MacLachan. “You are a rum-wastrel,” she pronounced severely.

MacLachan pointed his revolver at the Duchess, though rather waveringly. “I am,” said he, “and proud of it.”

“You will do some harm with that firearm.”

“I will,” said MacLachan, “and glad to do it.”

“Go home to your bed and pray,” ordered the stiff old lady contemptuously.

MacLachan regarded her gravely. “Fly, witch,” he said. “Awa' wi' ye on yer broomstick. I have a silver bullet for yer life.”

“Give me that pistol,” she directed and stretched out a hand for it.

Quietly but firmly MacLachan shot her. At the same moment Old Sally hit him expertly on the head with a bottle which she took from her market basket. MacLachan slumped forward and took his whirling thoughts carefully between his two hands. “I ha' done wrong,” he presently concluded. “I ha' murdered my aged an' respectable aunt in cold blood. Tak' my weepon an' hale me to the gallus.”

He passed his revolver over to a firm grasp. It was that of the Duchess. She was bleeding very slightly, the merest trickle, from the ear which MacLachan's bullet had grazed.

“Do not strike him again,” she bade Old Sally, composedly, and that faithful amazon dropped her bottle and lost fifty cents' worth of catchup.

“Come home before you get into trouble,” was the lady's command to the now cowed and repentant tailor.

Whimpering and rubbing his head, he suffered himself to be marched back to his Home of Fashion. So promptly was the retirement executed that Terry the Cop never knew (officially) what had taken place. Unofficially all of Our Square knew. And the following day a deputation of us marched MacLachan around to No. 17 to apologize. As we stood on the stairway awaiting her pleasure, we could hear Madam Rachel Pinckney Pemberton Tallafferr directing Old Sally to inform the deputation that she had not, to the best of her recollection, evinced any intention of receiving on that particular day, and that she sent her compliments to us, and was not at home.

“That's the high-toned way of saying she don't want to see us,” chirped the admiring Mr. Boggs between gratification and apology. “Aristocrat to the finger tips! Haven't I always told you so?”

He had, to the uttermost wearying of the flesh. But there came a time when he boasted less assuredly of his top-floor grandeur. To the little circle at the Elite Restaurant it became evident that something was preying upon the blithe spirit of the Angel of Death, something having to do with his Duchess. One evening, in a burst of confidence, he unburdened himself to the Little Red Doctor and me. Madam was, he feared, losing interest in the lofty social sphere to which she had been called. Seldom, nowadays, did she go in her full regalia uptown. Automobiles came no more to his flattered door. Worst of all, her fascinating mail had dwindled. Where formerly there would be as many as eight or ten envelopes per week, decorated with splendid and significant insignia and inclosing proud and stiff cardboard, now there was but one regular communication of the sort, the letter bearing the mystic double circle of the Spirit of Guidance Group and, as that was postmarked Brooklyn, Mr. Boggs had a small notion of its social import. Most of her days the aristocratic lodger now spent at solitaire, with Sempronius, the black cat, for critic. Mr. Boggs surmised sadly that the goddess of his top-floor Olympus was growing old.

Very likely the phenomenon would have gone unexplained to this day had not both the Rosser twins fallen into the fountain simultaneously, contrary to their usual custom, which is for one of them to take the careless plunge while the other dances frantically on terra firma and yells till help comes. Madam Tallafferr once termed them “Death's playmates,” because of this ineradicable passion for gambling on the brink of the pool which is just deep enough to cover their two-year-old heads. On this occasion Old Sally was the nearest aid. So she waddled fatly over and hauled them out easily enough. Then, quite inexplicably, she fell in herself and lay gently oscillating at the bottom of three feet of water. Still more inexplicably, she refused to come to properly when Mr. Boggs and I fished her out after not more than thirty seconds' immersion. Also she looked queerly flattened and misshapen and unnatural. So we ran her into the Little Red Doctor's office and awaited the verdict.

It was a long wait. When at length the Little Red Doctor emerged there was a wild kind of glint in his eye.

“D' you know what's the matter with that old black idiot?” he demanded.

“Martyr to her own hee-roism,” suggested Mr. Boggs, the romantic. “Is she drowned?”

The Little Red Doctor snorted: “She's starved. That's what she is!”

“She's as fat as butter,” I protested.

“Fat like a sliver!” retorted the physician scornfully. “Padded!”

“What on earth should she pad for?” I cried.

“To fool her mistress. She's been going without food so as to buy more for madam.”

At this information the eyes of the Destroying Angel bade fair to pop from their sockets and injure the Little Red Doctor toward whom they were violently protruding. “D' ye meantersay they're poor?” he gasped.

The Little Red Doctor outlined the history of the aristocratic pair, as he had extracted it from Old Sally. In the extraction he had grossly violated his professional ethics, as he shamelessly admitted, by giving her a half glass of port, which, on her pinched stomach operated as a tongue-loosener and betrayed her secret into his hands.

“I'm not going to have two aged females dying of want in Our Square just for the sake of a paper ethic or two,” he declared rebelliously.

According to what he had learned, the Duchess had left Virginia to save money and appearances, dragging along like a fetter a debt of honor contracted by a worthless scamp of a brother. Of course it was not in any sense a legal debt, but she, with her old-world ideas, had considered it to be a blot upon the family 'scutcheon, and had been paying interest, and bit by bit the principal, from her rigidly conserved little income. Presently an investment which had been indicated through the Spirit of Guidance Group's interpretation of one of madam's dreams reduced its dividends and madam cut off a few of her filial memberships. Another recommended by the dream magazine went wholly wrong. More memberships were reluctantly resigned. Old Sally, as head of the commissary, with full powers and responsibilities, was compelled to operate on a radically reduced apportionment. Two items took precedence of all else--the rent and the debt.

“You meantertellme,” chirped Mr. Boggs, “that Madam Tallafferr hasn't had enough to eat?”

“I do not,” said the Little Red Doctor emphatically. “She has. Old Sally hasn't. But her mistress doesn't know that.”

Mr. Boggs raised pious eyes to the ceiling. “Wotche going to do about it?” he inquired. He was, I take it, reminding Providence of its responsibility in the matter.

The Little Red Doctor wasn't for leaving it to Providence. “We've got to find a way to help.”

“Charity? To madam?” twittered Mr. Boggs. “I'd hate to try it on.”

The Little Red Doctor scratched his large red head in perplexity. Then he called Old Sally in.

“Now, Sally,” said he, “we're all friends of yours here.”

“Yessuh,” said Old Sally gratefully. “And friends of your mistress's.”

Old Sally bristled. “My young mist'ess ain' needin' no _frien's_ 'roun' yeah. She hol's her haid _high!_”

“Well, admirers, then,” the Little Red Doctor tactfully amended. “The point is, we want to help. Now, haven't you got some things there you could sell without missing them? Some of that old furniture must be valuable.”

“Sell the Tallaffeh homestead fuhni-ture!” cried Old Sally, scandalized.

“Well, perhaps madam has more of that old lace than she needs.”

“The Pinckney lace!” said Old Sally in a tone of flat finality, which settled that point.

“Possibly, then, the diamonds,” I suggested diffidently.

At this Old Sally's lips, which had been pressed firmly inward, inverted themselves. She began to blubber. The blubbering became a sobbing. The sobs waxed to subdued howls. From the midst of the howls one coherent and astounding statement emerged:--

“I stole'em.”

“Stole the Pemberton diamonds!” cried Mr. Boggs in consternation. His structure of social splendor was fast disintegrating. “What did you do with em?”

“Hocked,” wept that sorry and shrunken old negress. “Gossome cheap trash in deir place to fool my young mist'ess. Her sight ain' good no mo'.”

“And the money went for food,” I suggested.

“Some. Rest I put on a dream figgah.”

“Policy,” explained the Little Red Doctor, who is wise in the ways of the world. “She dreamed a number and put her money on it in a policy shop. And it didn't come out. They never do.”

“Ef it had,” said Old Sally eagerly, “I'd'a' had money to pay dat eighteen hund'ed an' fo'ty-five dollahs an' fifty cents debt, an' plenty mo' besides.” Obviously she had been wearing that hair-shirt debt next to her soul's skin. “But I must'a' disremembered my dream figgah.”

“Very likely,” agreed the Little Red Doctor gravely. “Come now, Sally; think. Isn't there anything you could sell out of the house?”

The old face began to work again. “My young mist'ess she'll like to skin me if I tell,” she whimpered.

“I'll cross your eyes like Schepstein's, if you don't,” threatened the Little Red Doctor savagely.

A deep breath signified the termination of her struggle between two fears.

“Tazmun,” she enunciated in a mystical voice.

We looked at each other, puzzled. “What?” queried Mr. Boggs.

“Tazmun. You know, tazmun.”

“What on earth is tazmun?”

“Tazmun,” she repeated determinedly. “Like whut you keep aroun' you to fotch luck.” Seeing us still at a loss, she sought and evolved an illustration.

“Rabbit foot's a tazmun.”

“Talisman,” I translated in a burst of inspiration.

“Dass it, tazmun.”

“But you can't sell a talisman,” objected the Little Red Doctor.

“Dis tazmun you can,” eagerly asserted Old Sally. “Wuth a heap o' money. My young mist'ess keep it locked up in her jool box. Lawzee! How I has tried to get my han's on'at ol' tazmun lettah.'Cause we sho' need de money fo' it.”

“A letter?”

“Dass it. Aut'graph tazmun letter. Fum Gen'al Stonewall Jackson, wrote to ol' Massah Pemberton, befo' de war.”

Mr. Boggs turned to me. “Dominie, you know everything.” (This is one of the perquisites of professing the classics in Our Square; it has also its drawbacks in the shape of disappointed expectations.) “Would that kind of letter be worth real money?”

“It's a fo'tellin' lettah,” put in Old Sally eagerly. “It fo'tells de wah mo' dan ten yeahs befo' de wah.”

In that case, I thought, it might be valuable historically. Anyway it would do no harm to get an offer from an expert. But could “young mist'ess” be induced to let it out of her hands? Young mist'ess's Old Sally thought it doubtful. Young mist'ess, with her passion for the things of the Lost Cause, held that document in sacred veneration. Once a week she took it from its neatly addressed envelope to read it. Her spirit guide had repeatedly advised her of its preciousness, and had declared that it would eventually bring fortune and happiness to her, if she would await the sign. What sign? Old Sally did not know. But she was certain that a marvelous “tazmun” such as General Stonewall Jackson's foretelling letter would furnish a sign beyond all misconception.

“Sign? She shall have a sign,” muttered the Little Red Doctor, who is wholly without conscience in any matter where he can pamper his insatiable appetite for help-ing others. Then to Sally: “But don't you say a word to her of what you have told us.”

“Cotch me!” said that aged crone. “I don' want to get _skint_.”

How to come to negotiations with the secluded and exclusive Madam Rachel Pinckney Pemberton Tallafferr was something of a problem. Strategy was useless against that keen old woman. The direct way was decided upon and Mr. Boggs was appointed emissary. He respectfully petitioned that the lady grant a conference to the Little Red Doctor, myself, and himself upon a matter of business. Prefacing her gracious consent with the comment that she could not conceive what it was about, she set an hour for receiving us. When we climbed to the top floor above the Angel of Death sign, we found her a faded and splendid figure amid the faded splendor of her belongings. She was clad in her stiffest black, she sat in the biggest Tallafferr chair, her throat emerged from the delicate and precious Pinckney lace, and there glittered in her innocent ears a grotesque travesty upon the small but time-honored Pemberton diamonds. I knew on sight what she would say. She said it: “To what am I indebted, sirs, for this visit?”

The Little Red Doctor explained that we were interested, historically, in a document which she possessed. The Duchess's sharp glance passed over me to rest sardonically upon Mr. Boggs, seeming to inquire with what historical interest that insecticidal nemesis might be credited; then leaped upon and fixed the spokesman: “How, may I ask, did you learn of this document?”

“Through a dream,” replied that shameless one.

Her glance livened. “Strange,” she murmured. “You dreamed--what?”

“That there was preserved at the top of this house a prophetic letter of Stonewall Jackson's.”