Chapter 6

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Something of the savor of life went with the vanners out of Our Square. I missed their broad-ranging and casual talk of politics, art, religion, the fourth dimension, and one another. Yet I felt sure that I should see them both again. There is a spell woven in Our Square--it has held me these sixty years and more, and I wonder at times whether Death himself can break it--which draws back the hearts that have once known the place. It was a long month, though, before the butterfly fluttered back. More radiant than ever she looked, glowing softly in the brave November sun, as she approached my bench. But there was something indefinably wistful about her. She said that she had come to satisfy her awakened appetite for the high art of R. Noovo, as she faced the unaltered and violent frontage of Number 37.

"Empty," said I.

"Then he didn't take my advice and rent it. The painter-man, I mean."

"He's gone."

"Where?"

"I haven't an idea."

"Doesn't he ever come back?"

"You must not assume," said I with severity, "that you are the only devotee of high art. You may perhaps compare your devotion to that of another whom I might mention when you, too, have lost ten pounds and gained ten years--"

"Dominie! Has he?"

"Has he what?"

"G-g-g-gained ten pounds. I mean, lost ten years."

"I haven't said so."

"Dominie, you are a cruel old man," accused the butterfly.

"And you are a wicked woman."

"I'm not. I'm only twenty," was her irrelevant but natural defense.

"Witness, on your oath, answer; were you at any time in the evening or night before you departed from this, Our Square, leaving us desolate--were you, I say, abroad in the park?

"Y-y-yes, your Honor."

"In the immediate vicinity of this bench?"

"Benches are very alike in the dark."

"But occupants of them are not. Don't fence with the court. Were you wearing one or more roses of the general hue and device of those now displayed in your cheeks?"

"The honorable court has nothing to do with my face," said the witness defiantly.

"On the contrary, your face is the _corpus delicti._ Did you, taking advantage of the unconscious and hence defenseless condition of my client, that is, of Mr. Martin Dyke, lean over him and deliberately imprint a--"

"No! No! No! No! _No_!" cried the butterfly with great and unconvincing fervor. "How dare you accuse me of such a thing?"

"On the circumstantial evidence of a pink rose petal. But worse is coming. The charge is unprovoked and willful murder."

Butterflies are strange creatures. This one seemed far less concerned over the latter than the former accusation. "Of whom?" she inquired.

"You have killed a budding poet." Here I violated a sacred if implied confidence by relating what the bewitched sleeper on the bench had said under the spell of the moon.

The result was most gratifying. The butterfly assured me with indignation that it was only a cold in her head, which had been annoying her for days: _that_ was what made her eyes act so, and I was a suspicious and malevolent old gentleman--and--and--and perhaps some day she and Mr. Martin Dyke might happen to meet.

"Is that a message?" I asked.

"No," answered the butterfly with a suspicion of panic in her eyes.

"Then?" I queried.

"He's so--so awfully go-aheadish," she complained.

"I'll drop him a hint," I offered kindly.

"It might do some good. I'm afraid of him," she confessed.

"And a little bit of yourself?" I suggested.

The look of scorn which she bent upon me would have withered incontinently anything less hardy than a butterfly-devouring orchid. It passed and thoughtfulness supplanted it. "If you really think that he could be influenced to be more--well, more conventional--"

"I guarantee nothing; but I'm a pedagogue by profession and have taught some hard subjects in my time."

"Then do you think you could give him a little message, word for word as I give it to you?"

"Senile decay," I admitted, "may have paralyzed most of my faculties, but as a repeater of messages verbatim, I am faithful as a phonograph."

"Tell him this, then." She ticked the message off on her fingers. "A half is not exactly the same as a whole. Don't forget the 'exactly.'"

"Is this an occasion for mathematical axioms?" I demanded. But she had already gone, with a parting injunction to be precise.

When, three days thereafter, I retailed that banality to young Mr. Dyke, it produced a startling though not instantaneous effect.

"I've got it!" he shouted.

"Don't scare me off my bench! What is it you've got?"

"The answer. She said he was not exactly her brother."

"Who?"

"That bully-looking big chap in the roadster who took her away." He delivered this shameless reversal of a passionately asserted opinion without a quiver. "Now she says a half isn't exactly the same as a whole. He wasn't exactly her brother, she said; he's her half brother. 'Toora-loora-loo,' as we say in Patagonia."

"For Patagonia it sounds reasonable. What next?"

"Next and immediately," said Mr. Dyke, "I am obtaining an address from the Mordaunt Estate, and I am then taking this evening off."

"Take some advice also, my boy," said I, mindful of the butterfly's alarms. "Go slow."

"Slow! Haven't I lost time enough already?"

"Perhaps. But now you've got all there is. Don't force the game. You've frightened that poor child so that she never can feel sure what you're going to do next."

"Neither can I, Dominie," confessed the candid youth. "But you're quite right. I'll clamp on the brakes. I'll be as cool and conventional as a slice of lemon on an iced clam. 'How well you're looking to-night, Miss Leffingwell'--that'll be my nearest approach to unguarded personalities. Trust me, Dominie, and thank you for the tip."

The memorial and erratic clock of Our Square was just striking seven of the following morning, meaning approximately eight-forty, when my astonished eyes again beheld Martin Dyke seated on my bench, beautifully though inappropriately clad in full evening dress with a pink rose in his coat lapel, and gazing at Number 37 with a wild, ecstatic glare.

"What have you been doing here all night?" I asked.

"Thinking."

I pointed to the flower. "Where did you get that?"

"A fairy gift."

"Martin," said I, "did you abide by my well-meant and inspired advice?"

"Dominie," replied the youth with a guilty flush, "I did my best. I--I tried to. You mustn't think--Nothing is settled. It's only that--"

"It's only that Age is a fool to advise Youth. Why should I expect you to abide by my silly counsels? Who am I to interfere with the dominant fates! Says the snail to the avalanche: 'Go slow!' and the avalanche--"

"Hey! Hi! You Mordaunt Estate!" broke in young Mr. Dyke, shouting. "I beg your pardon, Dominie, I've got to see the Estate for a minute."

Rushing across the street, he intercepted that institutional gentleman in the act of dipping a brush into a can in front of Number 37.

"Don't, for Heaven's sake, touch that front!" implored the improver of it.

"Why not?" demanded the Estate.

"I want to rent it. As it is. From to-day."

The Mordaunt Estate turned a dull, Wagboomish look of denial upon him. "Nope," said he. "I've had enough of short rentals. It don't pay. I'm going to paint her up and lease her for good."

"I'll take your lease," insisted Martin Dyke.

"For how long a period?" inquired the other, in terms of the Estate again.

The light that never was, on sea or land, the look that I had surprised on the face of illusion-haunted Youth in the moon glow, gleamed in Martin Dyke's eyes.

"Say a million years," he answered softly.

THE GUARDIAN OF GOD'S ACRE

As far as the eye could apprehend him, he was palpably an outlander. No such pink of perfection ever sprung from the simple soil of Our Square. A hard pink it was, suggestive less of the flower than of enameled metal. He was freshly shaved, freshly pressed, freshly anointed, and, as he paced gallantly across my vision, I perceived him to be slightly grizzled at the temples, but nevertheless of a vigorous and grim youthfulness that was almost daunting. Not until he returned and stood before me with his feet planted a little apart, giving an impression of purposeful immovability to his wiry figure, did I note that his eyes belied the general jauntiness of his personality. They were cold, direct eyes, with a filmy appearance, rather like those of a morose and self-centered turtle which had lived in our fountain until the day the Rosser twins fell in, when it crawled out and emigrated.

"Nice day," said the stranger, shifting a patent-leathered foot out of a puddle.

"Very," I agreed. Finical over-accuracy about the weather is likely to discourage a budding acquaintanceship.

"Have one?" He extended a gemmed cigarette-case, and when, removing my pipe, I had declined in suitable terms, lighted up, himself. He then sat down upon the dryest portion of the bench not occupied by my person.

"Whiplash win in the fi'th," he volunteered presently.

"Yes?" said I with a polite but spurious show of interest.

"Under a pull. Spread-eagled his field."

"Who is Whiplash, may I ask?"

"Oh, Gaw!" said the pink man, appalled. He searched my face suspiciously. "A hoss," he stated at length, satisfied of my ignorance.

After several reflective puffs, the smoke of which insufficiently veiled his furtive appraisal of myself, he tried again:

"They give O'Dowd a shade, last night."

"Indeed? Who did?"

"The sporting writers."

"As a testimonial?" I inquired, adding that a shade, whether of the lamp or sun species seemed an unusual sort of gift.

My interlocutor groaned. He drew from the pocket of his gray-check cutaway, purple and fine linen, the purple being an ornate and indecipherable monogram, wherewith to wipe his troubled brow. Susan Gluck's Orphan, who was playing down-wind, paused to inhale deeply and with a beatific expression. Restoring the fragrant square to its repository, the pink one essayed another conversational skirmish.

"The Reds copped again yesterday."

"If you are referring to the raid on Anarchist Headquarters in Avenue C, I should have inferred that the Reds _were_ copped, to use your term."

Curt and contemptuous laughter was his response. "Don't you ever read the papers, down here?"

"Certainly," I retorted with some spirit, for the implied slur upon Our Square stung me. "In fact, I was reading one of our local publications when you inter--when you arrived. It contains some very interesting poetry."

"Yeh?" said the hard, pink man politely.

"For example, in this issue I find the following apostrophe." I proceeded to read aloud:

"Farewell, our dear one, we must part, For thou hast gone to heavenly home, While we below with aching heart Must long for thee and ever moan."

"Swell stuff," commented the sharer of my bench, with determined interest. "Poetry's a little out of my line, but I'm _for_ it. Who wrote that?"

"It is signed 'Loving Father and 3 Sisters.' But the actual authorship rests with the long gentleman in black whom you see leaning on the park fence yonder. His name is Bartholomew Storrs and he is the elegiac or mortuary or memorial laureate of Our Square."

This was said with intent to mortify the soul of my new acquaintance in revenge for his previous display of erudition. The bewilderment in his face told me that I had scored heavily. But he quickly rallied.

"Do I get you right?" he queried. "Does he write those hymns for other folks to sign?"

"He does."

"What does he do that for?"

"Money. He gets as high as five dollars per stanza."

"Some salesman!" My hard-faced companion regarded the lank figure overhanging the fence with new respect. "Looks to me like the original Gloom," he observed. "What's _his_ grouch?"

"Conscience."

"He must have a bum one!"

"He has a busy one. He expends a great amount of time and sorrow repenting of our sins."

"Whose sins?" asked the other, opening wider his dull and weary eyes.

"Ours. His neighbors. Everybody in Our Square."

My interlocutor promptly and fitly put into words the feeling which had long lurked within my consciousness, ashamed to express itself against a monument of dismal pity such as Bartholomew Storrs. "He's got a nerve!" he asserted.

Warming to him for his pithy analysis of character, I enlarged upon my theme. "He rebukes MacLachan for past drunkenness. He mourns for Schepstein, who occasionally helps out a friend at ten per cent, as a usurer. He once accused old Madame Tallafferr of pride, but he'll never do that again. He calls the Little Red Doctor, our local physician, to account for profanity, and gets a fresh sample every time. Even against the Bonnie Lassie, whose sculptures you can just see in that little house near the corner"--I waved an illustrative hand--"he can quote Scripture, as to graven images. We all revere and respect and hate him. He's coming this way now."

"Good day, Dominie," said Bartholomew Storrs, as he passed, in such a tone as a very superior angel might employ toward a particularly damned soul.

"That frown," I explained to my companion, after returning the salutation, "means that I failed to attend church yesterday."

But the hard, pink man had lost interest in Bartholomew. "Called you 'Dominie,' didn't he?" he remarked. "I thought I had you right. Heard of you from a little red-headed ginger-box named Smith."

"You know the Little Red Doctor?"

"I met him," he replied evasively. "He told me to look you up. 'You talk to the Dominie,' he says."

"About what?"

"I'm coming to that." He leaned forward to place a muscular and confidential hand on my knee. "First, I'd like to do you a little favor," he continued in his husky and intimate voice. "If you're looking for some quick and easy money, I got a little tip that I'd like to pass on to you."

"Evidently the Little Red Doctor told you that my mind was a tottering ruin, which may be quite true; but if it's a matter of investing in the Peruvian Gold, Rubber Tree, and Perpetual Motion Concession, I'm reluctantly compelled--"

"Forget it!" adjured the hard, pink man in a tone which secured my silence and almost my confidence. "This is a hoss. Seven to one, and a sure cop. I _know_ hosses. I've owned 'em."

"Thank you, but I can't afford such luxuries as betting."

"You can't afford _not_ to have something down on this if it's only a shoestring. No? Oh--well!"

Again drawing the art-square from his pocket he lifted his pearl-gray derby and dabbed despairingly at his brow. Catching the scent hot and fresh, Susan Gluck's Orphan came dashing up-wind giving tongue, or rather, nose, voluptuously.

"Mm-m-m! Snmmff!" inhaled the Orphan, wrinkling ecstatic nostrils. "Mister, lemme smell it some more!"

Graciously the dispenser of fragrance waved his balm-laden handkerchief. "Like it, kiddie?" he said.

"Oh, it's _grand_!" She stretched out her little grimy paws. "Please, Mister," she entreated, "would you flop it over 'em, just once?"

The pink man tossed it to her. "Take it along and, when you get it all snuffed up, give it back to the Dominie here for me."

"Oh, gracious!" said the Orphan, incredulous at this bounty. "Can I have it till _to-morrah_?"

"Sure! What's the big idea for to-morrow?"

"I'm goin' to a funeral. I want it to cry in," said the Orphan importantly.

"A funeral?" I asked. "In Our Square? Whose?"

"My cousin Minnie. She's goin' to be buried in God's Acre, an' I'm invited 'cause I'm a r'lation. She married a sporting gentleman named Hines an' she died yesterday," said the precocious Orphan.

So Minnie Munn, pretty, blithe, life-loving Minnie, whose going had hurt us so, had come back to Our Square, with all her love of life quenched. She had promised that she would come back, in the little, hysterical, defiant note she left under the door. Her father and mother must wait and not worry. There are thousands of homes, I suppose, in which are buried just such letters as Minnie's farewell to her parents; rebellious, passionate, yearning, pitiful. Ah, well! The moth must break its chrysalis. The flower must rend its bonds toward the light. Little Minnie was "going on the stage." A garish and perilous stage it was, whereon Innocence plays a part as sorry as it is brief. And now she was making her exit, without applause. Memory brought back a picture of Minnie as I had first seen her, a wee thing, blinking and smiling in the arms of her Madonna-faced mother, on a bench in Our Square, and the mother (who could not wait for the promised return--she has lain in God's Acre these three years) crooning to her an unforgettable song, mournfully prophetic:

"Why did I bring thee, Sweet Into a world of sin?-- Into a world of wonder and doubt With sorrows and snares for the little white feet-- Into a world whence the going out Is as dark as the coming in!"

Old lips readily lend themselves to memory; I suppose I must have repeated the final lines aloud, for the pink man said, wearily but politely:

"Very pretty. Something more in the local line?"

"Hardly." I smiled. Between Bartholomew Storr's elegies and William Young's "Wish-makers' Town" stretches an infinite chasm.

"What's this--now--God's Acre the kid was talking about?" was his next question.

"An old local graveyard."

"Anything interesting?" he asked carelessly.

"If you're interested in that sort of thing. Are you an antiquary?"

"Sure!" he replied with such offhand promptitude that I was certain the answer would have been the same had I asked him if he was a dromedary.

"Come along, then. I'll take you there."

To reach that little green space of peace amidst our turmoil of the crowded, encroaching slums, we must pass the Bonnie Lassie's house, where her tiny figurines, touched with the fire of her love and her genius, which are perhaps one and the same, stand ever on guard, looking out over Our Square from her windows. Judging by his appearance and conversation, I should have supposed my companion to be as little concerned with art as with, let us say, poetry or local antiquities. But he stopped dead in his tracks, before the first window. Fingers that were like steel claws buried themselves in my arm. The other hand pointed.

"What's that?" he muttered fiercely.

"That," to which he was pointing, was a pictorial bronze, the figure of a girl, upright in a cockleshell boat, made of a rose-petal, her arms outspread to the breeze that was bearing her out across sunlit ripples. Beneath was the legend: "Far Ports." The face, eager, laughing, passionate, adventurous, was the face of Minnie Munn. Therein the Bonnie Lassie had been prophetess as well as poet and sculptress, for she had finished the bronze before Minnie left us.

"That," I answered the strong, pink man, trying to shake loose his grip, "is a sculpture by Cecily Willard, otherwise Mrs. Cyrus Staten."

"What'll she take for it?"

"It can't be bought." I spoke with authority, for the figurines that the Bonnie Lassie sets in her window are not for sale, but for us of Our Square, who love them.

"Anything can be bought," he retorted, with his quiet, hoarse persuasiveness, "at a price. I've got the price, no matter what it is."

Suddenly I understood my pink and hard acquaintance. I understood that stale look in his eyes. Tears do not bring that. Nothing brings it but sleepless thoughts beyond the assuagement of tears. Behind such eyes the heart is aching cold and the brain searing hot. Who should know better than I, though the kindly years have brought their healing! But here was a wound, raw and fresh and savage. I put my hand on his shoulder.

"What was little Minnie to you?" I asked, and answered myself. "You're Hines. You're the man she married."

"Yes. I'm Chris Hines."

"You've brought her back to us," I said stupidly.

"She made me promise."

Strange how Our Square binds the heartstrings of those who have once lived in it! To find it unendurable in life, to yearn back to it in the hour of death! Many have known the experience. So our tiny God's Acre, shrunk to a small fraction of human acreage through pressure of the encroaching tenements, has filled up until now it has space but for few more of the returning. Laws have been invoked and high and learned courts appealed to for the jealously guarded right to sleep there, as Minnie Munn was so soon to sleep beside her mother.

I told Hines that I would see the Bonnie Lassie about the statuette, and led him on, through the nagged and echoing passage and the iron gate, to the white-studded space of graves. The new excavation showed, brown against the bright verdure. Above it stood the headstone of the Munns, solemn and proud, the cost of a quarter-year's salary, at the pitiful wage which little, broken Mr. Munn drew from his municipal clerkship. Hines's elegant coat rippled on his chest, above what may have been a shudder, as he looked about him.

"It's crowded," he muttered.

"We lie close, as we lived close, in Our Square. I am glad for her father's sake that Minnie wished to come back."

"She said she couldn't rest peaceful anywhere else. She said she had some sort of right to be here."

"The Munns belong to what we call the Inalienables in Our Square," said I, and told him of the high court decision which secured to the descendants of the original "churchyard membership," and to them alone, the inalienable right to lie in God's Acre, provided, as in the ancient charter, they had "died in honorable estate." I added: "Bartholomew Storrs, as sexton, has constituted himself watchdog of our graves and censor of our dead. He carried one case to the Supreme Court in an attempt to keep an unhappy woman from sleeping in that pious company."

"That sour-faced prohibitionist?" growled Mr. Hines, employing what I suspect to be the blackest anathema in his lexicon. "Is he the sexton?"

"The same. Our mortuary genius," I confirmed.

"She was a good girl, Min was," said Mr. Hines firmly, though, it might appear, a trifle inconsequentially: "I don't care what they say. Anyway, after I met up with her"; in which qualifying afterthought lay a whole sorrowful and veiled history.

I waited.

"What did they say about her, down here?" he asked jealously.

"Oh, there were rumors. They didn't reach her father."

"No: tell me," he persisted. "I gotta know."

Because Mr. Hines had already impressed himself upon me as one with whom straight talk would serve best, I acceded.

"Bartholomew Storrs said that her feet took hold on hell."

Mr. Hines's face remained impassive. Only his hands worked slightly, perhaps kneading an imaginary throat. I perceived him to be a person of considerable and perhaps formidable self-control.

"Not that she hadn't her friends. The Bonnie Lassie would have stood by her if she had come back, and little Mrs. Morse, and our Dr. Smith, and MacLachan, who thought he had lost his own girl the same way, and--and others, plenty."

"And you, Dominie," said the hard, pink Mr. Hines.

"My dear sir, old men cannot afford harsh judgments. They are too near their own time."

"Yeh?" said Mr. Hines absently. "I guess that's right." But his mind was plainly elsewhere. "When would you say would be the best time to do business with old Funeral-Clothes?" he asked after a thoughtful pause.

"You want to see Bartholomew Storrs?" I interpreted.

"Sure. I gotta deliver the death certificate to him if he runs the graveyard, haven't I?"

"Such is the procedure, I believe."

"Besides," he added with a leer, "I want to get some of that weepy poetry of his."

"Well; he'll sell it to you readily."

"I'll say he'll sell it to me," returned Mr. Hines with a grimness which I failed to comprehend.

"Now is as good a time as any to catch him in his office." I pointed to a sign at the farther end of the yard.