Part 10

Observe, now, the advantages of living in a small self-centered community like Our Square, where everybody has an intimate (if not invariably friendly) interest in everybody else's affairs. Inky Mike had noted with curiosity our visit to Schepstein. As a press tender, the inky one naturally aspires to be a reporter, but his ideal reporter, being derived mainly from journalism as set forth in the movies, is a species of glorified compromise between Sherlock Holmes and Horace Greeley in a rich variety of disguises. He had no disguise handy, but he washed his face and followed Schepstein when that astute bargainer set forth immediately after our visit. Further, he listened outside the booth while the object of his sleuthing phoned a telegram. As he reported it in great excitement to our trio, it was addressed to a gentleman named Olds, in Cincinnati and read to this esoteric effect:--

“Alexandra local five forty-six perfect. What price? Answer quick.”

“Who's Olds?” asked the Little Red Doctor.

“Olds? Doncher know Olds?” cried Inky Mike. “The oil king? The multamillionaire?”

“What has this to do with us?” I asked. “It seems to be some oil quotation. What does Alexandra local' mean?”

“Search me!” offered the amateur sleuth. “But don'choo fool yourself! It's your business, awright. He snook out after you went, shakin' all over.”

Mr. Boggs, who from the first had been profoundly impressed by his Duchess's tradition-inspired estimate of the autograph, nodded a sagacious head. “Trust old Schep!” he fluted.

“When I've his money in hand; not before,” grunted the Little Red Doctor.

When we called at the dingy and lonely flat on the following morning, Schepstein's face was a mask of smiling craft.

“It's worth possibly--pos-sib-bly fifteen dollars as a spec,” he said.

“No,” cheeped Mr. Boggs.

“But the autograph market is looking up. I'll take a chanst and give you twenty-five. Cash,” he added impressively.

“No,” repeated Mr. Boggs.

“What's the matter with you?” demanded Schepstein with rising truculence. “D' you wan ta sell or don't cha? What's your price?”

“Eighteen hundred and forty-five dollars and fifty cents,” said Mr. Boggs in a clear, businesslike soprano.

Schepstein did not sneer, nor explode, nor curse, nor do any of the things which I confidently expected him to do. His convergent vision seemed to focus on the buff envelope in Mr. Boggs's lumpy hand. He looked thoughtful, and, it seemed to me, almost respectful. “As she stands?” he asks.

“As she stands,” assented Mr. Boggs. “Bought,” said Schepstein. And he wrote out a check to “Bearer.”

At this the Little Red Doctor lost his head and profoundly altered the situation. “By thunder!” he cried, “Madam Tal-lafferr knew what she was talking about all the time.”

Schepstein dropped his pen. “Who?” he asked in a rasping voice.

“Madam Tallafferr, across Our Square in Seventeen.”

“Was that her letter?”

“Yes. We are acting as her agents.”

“Ah, hell!” said Schepstein softly. Then an astounding thing happened. Two small, pinched tears welled out from the ill-matched points of flint which serve Schepstein for eyes. They were followed by two more. The little, gnarly, cross-grained Jew drooped over the desk and his shoulders shook. A voice of falsetto anguish roused him.

“Don't cry on the check! You'll smudge it.”

Schepstein lifted his head and gloomed at Boggs. “Nevamind that; it's all off,” he gulped. “I got something to tell you people.”

Between queer, shamed breath-catch-ings, he told us about his Metta's funeral. At the end he read us a telegram from Quentin Olds. When I was able to assimilate its full meaning, I found myself shaking hands with Schepstein, while Mr. Boggs danced a jig with the Little Red Doctor. Then. Schepstein tore up the check for $1845.50 and invited us around to the Elite Restaurant to luncheon, thereby affording a sensational titbit of news for Polyglot Elsa's relating for a fortnight after. “Mr. Schepstein, he paid the whole compte. Was kennst du about that!” Three days were required to finish the deal. Then through Old Sally the deputation trio sought and obtained another audience from the Duchess. Mr. Boggs did the talking in terms worthy of his environment. “We have successfully terminated the negotiations, Madame Tallafferr,” he began.

The Duchess bowed in silent dignity.

“And I have now the honor of turning over to you eighteen hundred and forty-five dollars and fifty cents, as--”

“Hally-loo-yah, tazmun!” burst out Old Sally. “Hally--hally--hally--” She caught her mistress's austere glance. “I knowed it was cornin' so all along,” she concluded, heroically compressing herself to a calm if belated assurance.

“--as the minimum price stipulated,” pursued Mr. Boggs.

“I thank you,” said the Duchess.

“Also,” concluded the agent, “a balance, after deducting all expenses, of two thousand one hundred and fifty-three dollars and twenty cents.”

The Duchess's face never so much as changed. “That is entirely satisfactory,” she observed. “I have to thank you all for your successful efforts in securing a suitable price. My only regret,” the quiet voice faltered a little, “is that circumstances should have forced me to part with an expression of esteem for my beloved father from one who was the greatest military hero of all history.”

“You're in wrong, lady,” caroled Mr. Boggs, his rhetoric suddenly melting in his excitement. “We sold the envelope alone for four thousand dollars pet. There's only three other of them 1846 Alexandria postmaster's stamps in the world today. So here's your Stonewall letter as good as new.”

“My Gawsh!” said old Sally, and fell down upon the floor and rolled and gave praise after the manner of her race, unrebuked this time of her mistress.

That aged and grand dame took back the letter with a hand which, for all that it had been rock-firm when it received MacLachan's revolver, now trembled a little. But her sole comment was: “And yet there are those so obstinate and shortsighted as to deny that the spirits guide us for our own good.”

Once more, finely embossed stationery came pouring in at No. 17, Our Square, proudly edifying the soul of Mr. Boggs. Once more Madam Tallafferr went forth on missions of social splendor, westward and uptown, sometimes in an automobile. Once more the restored Pemberton diamonds glistened in the fine, withered ears, Old Sally having confessed and been duly beaten and forgiven.

Old Sally herself, replete and pompous, trotted to and fro in Our Square, brimful of smiling hints of a great honor that was to come to us. Her young mist'ess, she let it be known, was graciously pleased to be recognizant of the part, useful though humble, which Our Square had played in her reestablished fortunes, and she was about to acknowledge it in a manner worthy of her family and her traditions. In Old Sally's own words, she was going to “mo' dan even it up wif you all.” Curiosity, speculation, and surmise had become almost morbid in Our Square, when one morning there burst upon us, in an effulgence of glory, a mail as splendid as any which had ever brightened Mr. Boggs's worshiping eyes on its passage upward to his top floor. To Mr. Boggs himself it came, to Schepstein, to the Little Red Doctor, to me, to Polyglot Elsa, and to many others, even down the scale as far as Inky Mike, this big white envelope, sealed with a square of black sealing wax and inclosing a most gratifyingly proud and stiff pasteboard card. That card still stands carefully dusted on many a mantel of Our Square, a guerdon and manifesto of social glory. At the top of it is blazoned the crest of the Tallafferrs, standing between the flag of the Confederacy and the coat of arms of Old Virginia. Below runs this legend--in real engraving if you please:--

MADAM RACHEL PINCKNEY PEMBERTON TALLAFFERR solicits the honor of your presence at Number Seventeen, Our Square, on Friday, November Eighteenth, to view an autograph letter indited to her honored father, the late Major Bently Pemberton,

by

LIEUTENANT (AFTERWARD GENERAL) THOMAS JONATHAN JACKSON

Of the Army of the Confederate States of America.

Refreshments. R. S. V. P

Our Square had won social recognition.

THE MEANEST MAN IN OUR SQUARE

MILES MORSE was his name. He lived over on the north side of Our Square, two doors from the Varick Mansion, in a small, neat, solid, and very private house. His age was uncertain. His appearance was arid. His garb was plain and black. His expression was unfriendly. His business was making money and his pleasure keeping the money when made. He was a fixture of long standing in our little community, as much so as the paving stones in the park space facing his house, and as insensate to the human struggle around him as they. As to his neighbors, he asked nothing and gave nothing. Behind his back, and not always very far behind it, he was called the Meanest Man in Our Square.

Every morning at eight o'clock the Meanest Man went to his office somewhere far downtown where, it was understood, he did something sly and underhanded connected with notes and loans. Every afternoon at four o'clock he visited the local Y. M. C. A., where he was (mistakenly) supposed to put in his hour and a half in reading, on the theory that it was cheaper to patronize that library than to buy books or rent them from the penny circulator. The rest of his life was strictly and determinedly private. Passing to and fro upon his concerns, he faced the denizens of Our Square with the blank regard of huge, horn-rimmed, blue glasses which he always wore out of doors. Only for Terry the Cop, MacLachan, the Little Red Doctor, and Cyrus the Gaunt, did he have a curt, silent nod, and for the Bonnie Lassie an awkward bow. The rest of us might as well not have existed. Naturally there were few who had a good word for him. Of these Terry the Cop was one.

“Anyway, he has a grand pair of hands,” Terry has been heard to aver.

On the strength of this opinion, the Bonnie Lassie, who needed a really superior pair of hands for a sculpture which she was then employed upon, made a point of catching Miles Morse in the park and compelling him to shake hands with her, to his resentful embarrassment. Subsequently she took our guardian of the peace to task.

“I don't know what you could have been thinking of, Terry,” she declared. “His hands are knuckly outside and puffy inside.”

“You should see'em in the court,” said Terry cryptically.

Not clearly comprehending what standing in court Mr. Morse's hands would give him, the Bonnie Lassie dropped the subject. On her own account, however, she had a suspicion of redeeming qualities in the Meanest Man. For one thing, she knew of a battered and disreputable kitten, rescued by Miles Morse from a strong and hostile combination of small boys and big dogs, at no small peril to himself, and taken to the very private house, where it grew into battered and disreputable but competent cathood and now welcomed him home every evening with extravagant demonstrations of regard. Also a certain scene enacted in sight of her studio windows had stuck in her memory; a powerful and half-drunken brute of a teamster flaying an overdone horse; the interposition of the Meanest Man; the infuriated descent, whip in hand, of the driver; the rush at the spare, trim, uncombative-looking man who had removed his spectacles and pocketed them; then the inexplicable and dismayed check in mid onset of the assailant. The Bonnie Lassie couldn't understand it at all; she couldn't see why that avalanche of wrath, profanity, and bulk didn't simply overwhelm its object--until she ran to the door and opened it. Then she saw Miles Morse's face and understood. It had hardened into a contraction of rage so savage, so concentrated, so murderous, that the drink-inspired fury of the human brute paled before it.

“Back on your wagon!” ordered Morse. He spoke not as man speaks to man, but as man speaks to beast.

“Wot--wotcha goin't' do, boss?” faltered the other.

“Put you in jail.”

Sobered now, and cowed, the man jumped to his seat and whipped up his horses, in the hope of escaping. The Meanest Man broke into a long, effortless stride. There was no need to tell the witness that he would not be shaken off until the quarry was in the hands of the police.

Now it happened that the High Gods of Council who unofficially rule Our Square held conference not long thereafter upon a project, advanced by the Little Red Doctor, for a local legal-aid organization with an office and an attendant. Money was needed, and money is one of our rarest phenomena.

It was the Bonnie Lassie who suggested that the Meanest Man in Our Square be approached for a contribution. Polite jeers greeted the proposal. Thereupon the Bonnie Lassie narrated the instance of the beaten horse and backed it up with Emerson:--

“'T is a sin to Heaven above One iota to abate Of a just, impartial hate.”

“Where does that get in with the Meanest Man?” inquired Cyrus the Gaunt.

“He doesn't hate anything except giving up money,” added the Little Red Doctor.

“He hates cruelty,” retorted the Bonnie Lassie. “And he's brave. Two points to his credit. I believe you could do anything with the Meanest Man if you could get him mad enough.”

“Well, my dearest,” said Cyrus the Gaunt with that condescending surrender which is one of his few faults as a husband, “since you have so good an opinion of Mr. Morse, suppose you tackle him for a contribution.”

“I will,” said the Bonnie Lassie. “I'll go now.”

She went. Presently she returned. It was not the return of a victress.

“How much?” asked the Little Red Doctor.

The Bonnie Lassie threw out empty and eloquent hands.

“And what did he say?” inquired Cyrus the Gaunt.

“He indicated that he'd see me in Hades first.”

“Then I'll go over and knock his head off,” declared her husband, reddening. “I've always wanted to do it anyway.”

“Nothing of the sort--goose! I didn't say he _said_ it. I said he indicated it. It was his manner. Verbally he was polite enough. Said he didn't believe in charity.” Cyrus the Gaunt snorted.

“Gave his reasons too. He said he doesn't believe in charity because it makes the recipient think too ill of himself, which is bad, and the giver think too well of himself, which is worse.”

“Something in that,” grudged the Little Red Doctor.

“Isn't there! I tried to explain the usefulness of the Legal Aid Society, but he said that people who got into court were fools and people who hired lawyers to lie for them were knaves. Then”--the Bonnie Lassie dimpled--“he caught me sniffing at his musty old house and asked me what was the matter, and I asked him if it had ever been dusted and aired, and he said that he was afraid he'd have to get a housekeeper and if I'd get him one--the right kind of a one--an old, respectable, honest woman who'd do all the work while he was away so that he'd never have to see her, he'd contribute to our fund”--the Bonnie Lassie paused for effect--“ten dollars.”

When the assembled council had finished expressing its various emotions the speaker continued:--“I've got a month to do it in. So I made him make out the check and hold it, unsigned.”

“What's the idea, Lassie?” asked MacLachan the Tailor.

“The leak-in-the-dike principle,” she explained profoundly. “The ten dollars is just the first trickle. If we ever get him started, Heaven help him before we let him stop. I'm going to get that ten dollars if I have to take the position myself.” But she was not driven to that length. It is a recognized fact in Our Square that when the Bonnie Lassie determines to get anything done, Providence, with rank favoritism, invariably steps in and does it for her. This powerful and unfailing ally it was that brought Molly Dunstan to Our Square, white-faced, hot-eyed, and with a gnawing fire of despair at her heart, plunging blindly against the onset of a furious March wind, until the lights of Schoenkind's drug store guided her to harbor. In the absence of Schoenkind, who was dining late at the Elite Restaurant, young Irvy Levinson was keeping shop, and as Young Irvy is of a cheerful, carefree, and undiscriminating disposition he made no bones of selling the wind-beaten customer a bottle of a certain potent drug which has various properties and virtues back of its skull-and-crossbones label, one of the latter being that it is prompt though painful. With her purchase, Molly plunged back into the storm, turned toward the dim park space, and bumped violently into the Little Red Doctor. Gently releasing her, he caught a glimpse of her face. Its aspect was not reassuring. Young women who come blundering out of drug stores with that expression and make for the nearest quiet spot not infrequently cause needless trouble to the busy authorities. Opening Schoenkind's door, the Little Red Doctor thrust into the aperture his earnest face and this no less earnest query: “What did that last customer buy?”

“Carbolic,” replied Young Irvy light-heartedly. “For a dog. Ast if it hurt much.”

The door slammed with much the effect of an oath, and the questioner sprinted for the park. Being wise in the way of human misery, he knew that mysterious instinct of suicides which guides them, no matter what their chosen method of self-destruction, toward water. Therefore he took the shortest route for Our Fountain.

Young Irvy's customer sat huddled on a bench at the water's edge. The bottle was in her hand, uncorked. She had just made a trial of the liquid on her hand, and was crying softly because it burned. As the Little Red Doctor's grip closed on her wrist, she gasped and sought to raise the drug to her lips.

“Drop it!” said her captor in the voice of authority.

She obeyed. But she misinterpreted the authority. “Is it to jail ye'll be taking me?” she asked despairingly.

The soft appeal of the voice, with its faint touch of the brogue, shook the Little Red Doctor. One glance at the piteously lined young face conquered him. He formulated his program on the spot.

“Jail?” he echoed in affected surprise. “What for?”

She glanced mutely at the shattered bottle.

“Oh, that's foolish stuff to use for warts,” he observed carelessly, lifting the hand, which was as soft and smooth and free from blemish as a moth's wing. “Now, you come with me to a friend of mine, and she'll fix that burnt finger.”

Many men there are in whom dogs confide instinctively; fewer who win offhand the confidence of children, and a rare few whom women trust at sight. Of this few is the Little Red Doctor. His captive followed him without protest to the nestling little house with the quaint old door and the broad, friendly vestibule which had been her husband's wedding gift to the Bonnie Lassie. There, without fuss or query, Molly Dunstan was accepted as a guest, and presently, too worn out even to wonder, she was deep in healing sleep, in the spare room over the studio.

In the morning she presented herself to her hostess's unobtrusive but keen observation: a wistful slip of a woman of perhaps twenty-five, with hollow cheeks, deep-brown, frightened eyes, a softly drooping mouth, and a satiny skin from which the color had ebbed; a woman whose dainty prettiness had been overlaid but not impaired by privation and some stress of existence only to be guessed at. For all her simple and worn dress (all black) and the echo of brogue in her speech, she bore herself with a certain native dignity and confidence.

“It's good ye've been to me, and I'll not know how to thank you, now that I'll be going,” she said, and the silken-soft voice with its touch of accent won the Bonnie Lassie's soft and wise heart from the first.

“But you're not to go yet,” protested the latter. “You must stay until you're well. And then I want to sculp you, if you'll let me. I'm an artist, and I think you would make a wonderful model.”

“It's kind ye are,” returned the other. “But how can I be beholden?”

“You won't be. It's you that will be doing the favor. As soon as you're well enough--”

“I'm well enough now. There's nothing the matter with me.” But her voice was without life or hope.

So, in many slow sittings, the Bonnie Lassie sculped Molly Dunstan; and from those sittings grew the heart-moving bronze, “The Broken Wing,” a figure of a quaintly, pitifully birdlike woman in the foreground of a group in a hospital clinic, with the verdict of science written in her face, looking out upon life in the dread realization of helplessness. As the work progressed the heart of Molly Dunstan opened little by little, and her story came out.

While a young girl in a good Irish school she had met a traveling American, Henry Dunstan, and, half for love and half in the elfin Irish spirit of adventurousness, had run away with him. He was a good husband to her, and they were happy in a little country place which he had bought and which she turned to skillful account, raising ducks and chickens for the market to eke out his income--“until the drink took him.” It took him the full length of its well-beaten path, from debt to ruin; from ruin to broken will and health, and presently to death. When his debts were cleared up the place was gone, and the little widow had a scant two thousand dollars of his life insurance in the bank. Being sturdy, able, and courageous, she had come to New York, had found some fine sewing to do, and had maintained herself, always with the idea of getting back into the country and to her poultry raising, which she loved. Here the simple story came to a full stop with the words: “So I bought a bit of a place, and they took it away from me.”

“Who took it away from you?” asked the Bonnie Lassie.

“Mr. Wiggett,” replied Molly, and fell into such a fit of shuddering that the Bonnie Lassie forebore to question her further concerning the transaction.

Little by little, however, there came out bits of information which the Bonnie Lassie deftly wove together, with the eventual result that Cyrus the Gaunt looked up an advertisement in a certain newspaper famous for its traps and pitfalls, and paid a visit to the office, on St. Mark's Place, of “D. Wiggett & Co., City and Suburban Real Estate.” He returned much depressed, declaring that the laws against homicide ought to provide for exceptions in the case of such persons as D. Wiggett.

“There he sat and grinned, a great, plump, pink, powerful, smirking gorilla; and said that the transaction with Mrs. Dunstan was perfectly legal--perfectly--and there wasn't anything further to be said.”

“Did you say it?” inquired the Bonnie Lassie, who knew her Cyrus.

“I did. And he threatened to have me arrested for defamatory language. But he's right--legally. He's got your little widow's two thousand dollars, every cent of it, and she's got a piece of stamped paper.”

“Why isn't it a case for our Legal Aid?”

“I've just been to Merrivale. There isn't a thing to be done.” Following the “Legal Aid” line, Cyrus's mind took a sudden but logical jump. “I never expected to meet a meaner cuss than the Meanest Man in Our Square,” he observed. “But I have.”

“The very thing!” cried the Bonnie Lassie. “How clever of you, Cyrus! I mean, how clever of me! Molly wants a place. She's all over that foolish suicide notion. She shall be Mr. Miles Morse's housekeeper.”

“But he wanted an _old_ woman,” objected Cyrus.

“How is he to tell if he never sees her? I'll manage that,” retorted his wife confidently. “The only thing is, will she take a place that is almost like domestic service?”