Chapter 4

A gust of rough laughter passed through the crowd. The injurious word "nut" floated in the air, and was followed by "Verrichter." The landlord took thought and hope.

"It is a very fine clock," he declared.

"It is a bum clock," Stepfather Time reminded him mildly.

"Stepnadel, the auctioneer, would pay me much money for it."

"I will pay you much money for it."

"How much?"

"Seven dollars. That is one month's rent that he owed."

"Two months' rent I must have."

"One," said Stepfather Time firmly.

"Two," said the landlord insistently.

"Urff! Grr--rr--rr--rrff!" said Willy Woolly in emphatic dissuasion.

Stepfather Time was scandalized. Expert opinion was quite outside of Willy Woolly's province. Only once in the course of their years together had he interfered in a purchase. Justice compelled Stepfather Time to recall that the subject of Willy's protests on that occasion had subsequently turned out to be far less antique than the worm holes in the woodwork (artificially blown in with powder) would have led the unsuspecting to suppose. But about the present legacy there could be no such question. It was genuine. It was old. It was valuable. It possessed a seraphic note pitched true to the long-desired chord.

Extracting a ten-dollar note from his wallet, Stepfather Time waved it beneath the landlord's wrinkled and covetous nose. The landlord capitulated. Willy Woolly, sniffing at the clock with fur abristle, lifted up his voice and wailed. Perhaps his delicate nose had already detected the faint, unhallowed odor of the chemicals within. He stubbornly refused to ride back in the cart with the new acquisition, and was accused of being sulky and childish.

* * * * *

The relic of the late unlamented Lukisch was temporarily installed in a high chair before the open window giving on the areaway of Number 37. There it briefly beamed upon the busy life of Our Square with its bland and hypocritical face, and there, thrice and no more, it sounded the passing of the hours with its sweet and false voice, biding the stroke of nine. Meantime Willy Woolly settled down to keep watch on it and could not be moved from that duty. Every time it struck the half he growled. At the hour he barked and raged. When Stepfather Time sought to draw him away to dinner he committed the unpardonable sin of dog-dom, he snarled at his master. Turning this strange manifestation over in his troubled mind, the collector decided that Willy Woolly must be ill, and therefore that evening went to seek the Little Red Doctor and his wisdom.

Together they came across the park space opposite the House of Silvery Voices in time to witness the final scene.

The new clock struck the half after eight as they reached the turn in the path. A long, quavering howl, mingled of rage and desperation, answered in Willy Woolly's voice.

"You hear?" said Stepfather Time anxiously to the Little Red Doctor. "The dog is not himself."

They saw him rear up against the clock case. He seemed to be trying to tear it open with his teeth.

"Willy!" cried his master in a tone such as, I suppose, the well-loved companion had not heard twice before in his life. "Down, Willy!"

The dog drooped back. But it was not in obedience. For once he disregarded the master's command. Perhaps he did not even hear it in the absorption of his dread and rage. Step by step he withdrew, then rushed and launched himself straight at the timepiece. Slight though his bulk was, the impetus of the charge did the work. The clock reeled, toppled, and fell outward through the window; then--

From the House of Silvery Voices rose a roar that smote the heavens. A roar and a belch of flame and a spreading, poisonous stench that struck the two men in the park to earth. When they struggled to their feet again, the smoke had parted and the House of Silvery Voices gaped open, its front wall stripped bodily away. But within, the sound of the busy industry of time went on uninterrupted.

Weaving and wobbling on his feet, Stepfather Time staggered toward the pot calling on the name of Willy Woolly. At the gate he stopped, put forth his hand, and lifted from the railing a wopsy, woolly fragment, no bigger than a sheet of note paper. It was red and warm and wet.

"He's gone," said Stepfather Time.

The Clock of Conscience took up the tale. "Gone. Gone. Gone," it pealed.

As the collector would not leave the shattered house, they sent for me to stay the night with him. A strange vigil! For now it was the man who followed with intent, unworldly eyes that which I, with my lesser vision, could not discern. And the Unseen moved swiftly about the desolate room, low to the floor, and seemed finally to stop, motionless beneath a caressing hand. I thought to hear that dull, measured thumping of a grateful tail, but it was only the Twelve Apostles getting ready to strike.

Only once that night did Stepfather Time speak, and then not to me.

"Tell her," he said in an assured murmur, "that I shan't be long."

"Not-long. Not-long. Not-long. Not-long. Not-long," confirmed Grandfather from his stance on the stairway.

In that assurance Stepfather Time fell asleep. He did not go out again with his pushcart, but sat in the rear room while the Mordaunt Estate in person superintended the job of putting a new front on the house.

The night after it was finished I received an urgent telephone call to come there at once. At the entrance I met the Little Red Doctor coming out.

"The clocks have stopped," said he gently.

So I turned to cross the park with him.

"I shall certify," said he, "heart disease."

"You may certify what you please," said I. "But what do you believe?"

The Little Red Doctor, who prides himself on being a hard-bitted materialist, glared at me as injuriously as if my innocent question had been an insult.

"I don't believe it!" he averred violently. "Do you take me for a sentimental idiot that I should pin silly labels on my old friend, Death?" His expression underwent a curious change. "But I never saw such joy on any living face," he muttered under his breath.

* * * * *

The House of Silvery Voices is silent now. But its echo still lives and makes music in Our Square. For, with the proceeds of Stepfather Time's clocks, an astounding total, we have built a miniature clock tower facing Number 37, with a silvery voice of its own, for memory. The Bonnie Lassie designed the tower, and because there is love and understanding in all that the Bonnie Lassie sets her wonder-working hand to, it is as beautiful as it is simple. Among ourselves we call it the Tower of the Two Faithful Hearts.

The silvery voice within it is the product of a paragon among timepieces, a most superior instrument, of unimpeachable construction and great cost. But it has one invincible peculiarity, the despair of the best consulting experts who have been called in to remedy it and, one and all, have failed for reasons which they cannot fathom. How should they!

It never keeps time.

HOME-SEEKERS' GOAL

Long ago I made an important discovery. It comes under the general head of statics and is this: by occupying an invariable bench in Our Square, looking venerable and contemplative and indigenous, as if you had grown up in that selfsame spot, you will draw people to come to you for information, and they will frequently give more than they get of it. Such, I am informed, is the method whereby the flytrap orchid achieves a satisfying meal. Not that I seek to claim for myself the colorful splendors of the Cypripedium, being only a tired old pedagogue with a taste for the sunlight and for observing the human bubbles that float and bob on the current in our remote eddy of life. Nevertheless, I can follow a worthy example, even though the exemplar be only a carnivorous bloom. And, I may confess, on the afternoon of October 1st, I was in a receptive mood for such flies of information as might come to me concerning two large invading vans which had rumbled into our quiet precincts and, after a pause for inquiry, stopped before the Mordaunt Estate's newly repaired property at Number 37.

The Mordaunt Estate in person was painting the front wall. The design which he practiced was based less upon any previsioned concept of art than upon the purchase, at a price, of a rainbow-end job lot of colors.

The vanners descended, bent on negotiations. Progress was obviously unsatisfactory, the artist, after brief and chill consideration, reverting to his toil. Now, tact and discretion are essential in approaching the Mordaunt Estate, for he is a prickly institution. I was sure that the newcomers had taken the wrong tack with him.

Discomfiture was in their mien as they withdrew in my direction. I mused upon my bench, with a metaphysical expression which I have found useful in such cases. They conferred. They approached. They begged my pardon. With an effort which can hardly have failed to be effective, I dragged myself back to the world of actualities and opened languid eyes upon them. It is possible that I opened them somewhat wider than the normal, for they fell at once upon the nearer and smaller of the pair, a butterfly of the most vivid and delightful appearance.

"Is the house with the 'To Let' sign on it really to let, do you know, sir?" she inquired, adding music to color with her voice.

"So I understand," said I, rising.

"And the party with the yellow nose, who is desecrating the front," put in the butterfly's companion. "Is he a lunatic or a designer of barber poles?"

"He is a proud and reserved ex-butcher, named Wagboom, now doing a limited but high-class business in rentals as the Mordaunt Estate."

"He may be the butcher, but he talks more like the pig. All we could get out of him was a series of grunts when we addressed him by name."

"Ah, but you used the wrong name. For all business purposes he should be addressed as the Mordaunt Estate, his duly incorporated title. Wagboom is an irritant to a haughty property-owner's soul."

"Shall we go back and try a counter-irritant?" asked the young man of his companion.

"With a view to renting?" I inquired.

"Yes."

"Do you keep dogs?"

"No," said the young man.

"Or clocks by the hundred?"

"Certainly not," answered the butterfly.

"Or bombs?"

Upon their combined and emphatic negative they looked at each other with a wild surmise which said plainly: "Are they _all_ crazy down here?"

"If you do," I explained kindly, "you might have trouble in dealing. The latest tenant of Number 37 was a fluffy poodle who pushed one of two hundred clocks into the front area so that it exploded and blew away the front wall." And I outlined the history of that canine clairvoyant, Willy Woolly. "The Mordaunt Estate is sensitive about his tenants, anyway. He rents, not on profits, but on prejudice. Perhaps it would be well for you to flatter him a little; admire his style of house painting."

Accepting this counsel with suitable expressions, they returned to the charge, addressed the proprietor of Number 37 by his official title and delivered the most gratifying opinions regarding his artistry.

"That," said the Mordaunt Estate, wiping his painty hands on his knees with brilliant results, as he turned a fat and smiling face to them, "is after the R. Noovo style. I dunno who R. Noovo was, but he's a bear for color. Are you artists?"

"We're house-hunters," explained the young man.

"As for tenants," said the Mordaunt Estate, "I take 'em or leave 'em as I like 'em or don't. I like you folks. You got an eye for a tasty bit of colorin'. Eight rooms, bath, and kitchen. By the week in case we don't suit each other. Very choice and classy for a young married couple. Eight dollars, in advance. Prices for R. Noovo dwellings has riz."

"We're not married," said the young man.

"Hey? Whaddye mean, not married?" demanded that highly respectable institution, the Mordaunt Estate, severely. His expression mollified as he turned to the butterfly. "Aimin' to be, I s'pose."

"We only met this morning; so we haven't decided yet," answered the young man. "At least," he added blandly, as his companion seemed to be struggling for utterance, "she hasn't informed me of her decision, if she has made it."

Bewilderment spread like a gray mist across the painty features of the Mordaunt Estate. "Nothin' doin'," he began, "until--"

"Don't decide hastily," adjured the young man. "Take this coin." He forced a half-dollar into the reluctant hand of the decorator.

"Nothin' doin' on account, either. Pay as you enter."

"Only one of us is going to enter. The coin decides. Spin it. Your call," he said to the butterfly.

"Heads," cried the butterfly.

"Tails," proclaimed the arbiter, as the silver shivered into silence on the flagging.

"Then the house is yours," said the butterfly. "Good luck go with it." She smiled, gamely covering her disappointment.

"I don't want it," returned the young man.

"Play fair," she exhorted him. "We both agreed solemnly to stand by the toss. Didn't we?"

"What did we agree?"

"That the winner should have the choice."

"Very well. I won, didn't I?"

"You certainly did."

"And I choose not to take the house," he declared triumphantly. "It's a very nice house, but"--he shaded his eyes as he directed them upon the proud-pied façade, blinking significantly--"I'd have to wear smoked glasses if I lived in it, and they don't suit my style of beauty."

"You'd not get it now, young feller, if you was to go down on your knees with a thousand dollars in each hand," asserted the offended Estate.

"See!" said the young man to the butterfly. "Fate decides for you."

"But what will you do?" she asked solicitously.

"Perhaps I can find some other place in the Square."

She held out her hand. "You've been very nice and helpful, but--I think not. Good-bye."

He regarded the hand blankly. "Not--what?"

"Not here in this Square, if you don't mind."

"But where else is there?" he asked piteously. "You know yourself there are countless thousands of homeless drifters floating around on this teeming island in vans, with no place to land."

"Try Jersey. Or Brooklyn," was her hopeful suggestion.

"'And bade betwixt their shores to be The unplumb'd, salt, estranging sea,'"

he quoted with dramatic intonation, adding helpfully: "Matthew Arnold. Or is it Arnold Bennett? Anyway, think how far away those places are," he pleaded. "From you!" he concluded.

A little decided frown crept between her eyebrows. "I've accepted you as a gentleman on trust," she began, when he broke in:

"Don't do it. It's a fearfully depressing thing to be reminded that you're a gentleman on trust and expected to live up to it. Think how it cramps one's style, not to mention limiting one's choice of real estate. A gentleman may stake his future happiness and his hope of a home on the toss of a coin, but he mustn't presume to want to see the other party to the gamble again, even if she's the only thing in the whole sweep of his horizon worth seeing. Is that fair? Where is Eternal Justice, I ask you, when such things--"

"Oh, do stop!" she implored. "I don't think you're sane."

"No such claim is put forth on behalf of the accused. He confesses to complete loss of mental equilibrium since--let me see--since 11.15 A.M."

Here the Mordaunt Estate, who had been doing some shrewd thinking on his own behalf, interposed.

"I'd rather rent to two than one," he said insinuatingly. "More reliable and steady with the rent. Settin' aside the young feller's weak eyes, you're a nice-matched pair. Gittin' a license is easy, if you know the ropes. I'd even be glad to go with you to--"

"As to not being married," broke in the butterfly, with the light of a great resolve in her eye, "this gentleman may speak for himself. I am."

"Am what?" queried the Estate.

"Married."

"Damn!" exploded the young man. "I mean, congratulations and all that sort of thing. I--I'm really awfully sorry. You'll forgive my making such an ass of myself, won't you?"

To her troubled surprise there was real pain in the eyes which he turned rather helplessly away from her. Had she kept her own gaze fixed on them, she would have experienced a second surprise a moment later, at a sudden alteration and hardening of their expression. For his groping regard had fallen upon her left hand, which was gloved. Now, a wedding ring may be put on and off at will, but the glove, beneath which it has been once worn, never thereafter quite regains the maidenly smoothness of the third finger. The butterfly's gloves were not new, yet there showed not the faintest trace of a ridge in the significant locality. While admitting to himself that the evidence fell short of conclusiveness, the young man decided to accept it as a working theory and to act, win or lose, do or die, upon the hopeful hypothesis that his delightful but elusive companion was a li--that is to say, an inventor. He would give that invention the run of its young life!

"We--ell," the Mordaunt Estate was saying, "that's too bad. Ain't a widdah lady are you?"

"My husband is in France."

With a prayer that his theory was correct, the young man rushed in where many an angel might have feared to tread. "Maybe he'll stay there," he surmised.

"What!"

In a musical but unappreciated barytone he hummed the initial line of "The Girl I Left Behind Me."

"'The maids of France are fond and free.'

"Besides," he added, "it's quite unhealthy there at this season. I wouldn't be surprised"--he halted--"at anything," he finished darkly.

Outraged by this ruthless if hypothetical murder of an equally hypothetical spouse, she groped vainly for adequate words. Before she could find them--

"I'll wait around--in hopes," he decided calmly.

So, that was the attitude this ruffian took with a respectable and ostensibly married woman! And she had mistaken him for a gentleman! She had even begun to feel a reluctant sort of liking for him; at any rate, an interest in his ambiguous and perplexing personality. Now--how dared he! She put it to him at once: "How dare you!"

"Flashing eye, stamp of the foot, hands outstretched in gesture of loathing and repulsion; villain registers shame and remorse," prescribed the unimpressed subject of her retort. "As a wife, you are, of course, unapproachable. As a widow, grass-green, crepe-black, or only prospective"--he suddenly assumed a posture made familiar through the public prints by a widely self-exploited savior of the suffering--"there is H-O-P-E!" he intoned solemnly, wagging a benignant forefinger at her.

The butterfly struggled with an agonizing desire to break down into unbridled mirth and confess. Pride restrained her; pride mingled with foreboding as to what this exceedingly progressive and by no means unattractive young suitor--for he could be relegated to no lesser category--might do next. She said coolly and crisply:

"I wish nothing more to do with you whatever."

"Then I needn't quit the Garden of Ed--I mean, Our Square?"

"You may do as you see fit," she replied loftily.

"Act the gent, can't chuh?" reproved the Mordaunt Estate. "You're makin' the lady cry."

"He isn't," denied the lady, with ferocity. "He couldn't."

"He'll find no spot to lay his head in Our Square, ma'am," the polite Estate assured her.

"If he wants to stay, he'll have to live in his van."

"Grand little idea! I'll do it. I'll be a van hermit and fast and watch and pray beneath your windows."

"You may live in your van forever," retorted the justly incensed butterfly, "but I'll never speak to you as long as I live in this house. Never, never, _never_!"

She vanished beyond the outrageous decorations of the wall. The Mordaunt Estate took down the "To Let" sign, and went in search of a helper to unload the van. The deserted and denounced young man crawled into his own van and lay down with his head on a tantalus and his feet on the collected works of Thackeray, to consider what had happened to him. But his immediate memories were not conducive to sober consideration, shot through as they were with the light of deep-gray eyes and the fugitive smile of lips sensitive to every changeful thought. So he fell to dreams. As to the meeting which had brought the now parted twain to Our Square, it had come about in this wise:

Two miles northwest of Our Square as the sparrow flies, on the brink of a maelstrom of traffic, two moving-vans which had belied their name by remaining motionless for five impassioned minutes, disputed the right of way, nose to nose, while the injurious remarks of the respective drivers inflamed the air. A girlish but decided voice from within the recesses of the larger van said: "Don't give an inch."

Deep inside the other vehicle a no less decisive barytone said what sounded like "Give an ell," but probably was not, as there was no corresponding movement of the wheels.

What the van drivers said is the concern of the censor. What they did upon descending to the sidewalk comes under the head of direct action, and as such was the concern of the authorities which pried them asunder and led them away. Thereupon the inner habitants of the deserted equipages emerged from amid their lares and penates, and met face to face. The effect upon the occupant of the smaller van was electric, not to say paralytic.

"Oh, glory!" he murmured faintly, with staring eyes.

"Would you kindly move?" said the girl, in much the same tone that one would employ toward an obnoxious beetle, supposing that one ever addressed a beetle with freezing dignity.

The young man directed a suffering look upon his van. "I've done nothing else for the last three days. Tell me where I can move to and I'll bless you as a benefactress of the homeless."

"Anywhere out of my way," she replied with a severity which the corners of her sensitive mouth were finding it hard to live up to.

"Behold me eliminated, deleted, expunged," he declared humbly. "But first let me explain that when I told my idiot chauffeur to give 'em--that is, to hold his ground, I didn't know who you were."

She wrinkled dainty brows at him. "Well, you don't know who I am now, do you?"

"I don't have to," he responded with fervor. "Just on sight you may have all of this street and as many of the adjoining avenues as you can use. By the way, who _are_ you?" The question was put with an expression of sweet and innocent simplicity.

The girl looked at him hard and straight. "I don't think that introductions are necessary."

He sighed outrageously. "They Met but to Part; Laura Jean Libbey; twenty-fourth large edition," he murmured. "And I was just about to present myself as Martin Dyke, vagrant, but harmless, and very much at your service. However, I perceive with pain that it is, indeed, my move. May I help you up to the wheel of your ship? I infer that you intend driving yourself."

"I'll have to, if I'm to get anywhere." A look of dismay overspread her piquant face. "Oh, dear! I don't in the least understand this machinery. I can't drive this kind of car."

"Glory be!" exclaimed Mr. Dyke. "I mean, that's too bad," he amended gracefully. "Won't you let me take you where you want to go?"

"What'll become of your van, then? Besides, I haven't any idea where I want to go."

"What! Are you, too, like myself, a wandering home-seeker on the face of an overpopulated earth, Miss?"

The "Miss" surprised her. Why the sudden lapse on the part of this extraordinary and self-confident young person into the terminology of the servant class?

"Yes, I am," she admitted.

"A hundred thousand helpless babes in the wood," he announced sonorously, "are wandering about, lost and homeless on this melancholy and moving day of October 1st, waiting for the little robins to come and bury them under the brown and withered leaves. Ain't it harrowing, Miss! Personally I should prefer to have the last sad dirge sung over me by a quail on toast, or maybe a Welsh rabbit. What time did you breakfast, Miss? I had a ruined egg at six-fifteen."