Part 12

Opening her morning mail on the following day, the Bonnie Lassie (for whose schemes and stratagems the stars in their courses fight) gave a little cry and let a bit of paper slip through her fingers. Quickly retrieving it, she turned it over to Cyrus the Gaunt. It was the promised check of Mr. Miles Morse to the Legal Aid Society. Between the words “ten” and “dollars” was a caret, and, above, the added word “hundred” with an indorsement. The signature had also undergone an addendum. It now read: “Miles Morse, per Mrs. M. M. M.”

The Meanest Man in Our Square had abdicated.

PAULA OF THE HOUSETOP

WHAT first struck you about the house was that it frowned. Not angrily, but with a kind of dull scorn. Perhaps this was its way of emphasizing its superior aloofness from the other houses in Our Square which had gone down in the social scale while it maintained its aristocracy untainted. It was squat and broad and drab, like the first Varick who had built it, and the succeeding Varicks who had inherited and dwelt in it even to the sixth and seventh generations. Being numbered 13, it would naturally have a sinister repute; and this was not improved by the two suicides which had marked its occupancy; suicides not of despair or remorse or fury, but of cold, grim disgust. Then there was the episode of old Vernam Varick, who dabbled in diabolical mixtures in his secret room on the third floor front under the tutelage of no less an instructor than the Devil, and, having quarreled with Old Nick over a moot point in alchemy, chased him out of the window and followed, himself, to the accompaniment of a loud and sulphurous detonation. What became of His Satanic Majesty has never been properly determined, but old Ver-nam arrived upon the pavement in due time, crumpled up, and thereafter circulated in a wheeled chair, sniffing about after real-estate investments to pass the time. He it was whose purchases of uptown property (when anything above Forty-second Street was “uptown”) severely reprehended by the rest of the clan, subsequently reestablished the Varick fortunes, piling up riches beyond the imagination of Our Square. Except that he had more imagination, he was a pattern of all the Varicks, each broad and squat of architecture like the house they dwelt in; each, if possible, more crabbed and pigheaded and stupidly haughty than his predecessor. In time, his son, heritor of the qualities of the breed, grew up and married. And then the dull generations burst into flower in Paula Varick. So the Varicks put her in a cage.

Old Vernam built the cage out of gas pipe and thick-meshed wire and established it on the roof. From my front window, looking diagonally across Our Square, I command a view of it. How well I remember the day that little Paula was put into it! A black-and-white-banded nurse led her in by the hand, held up an admonitory finger for half a minute of directions, and disappeared down the scuttle door, leaving her alone in a remote world. One might have expected the little girl to cry. She didn't. She set about playing, like a happy little squirrel. Presently there floated across the tree-tops a strange and alien sound for that grim mansion to be making--a sweet, light, joyous, childish piping. The little Paula was singing.

Her song disturbed young Carlo and me at our lesson. Carlo was my one educational luxury. An assistant professor of a forgotten branch of learning, already in middle age, as I was then, who ekes out his income by tutoring, cannot well afford to take pupils for love. But Carlo's father had paid in the beginning, and, when he could no longer pay, the boy's vivid, leaping imagination and his passionate love for all that was fine and true in reading had captivated me. I could not let him go. So we kept up the lessons, and ranged the field of the classics, Greek and Latin, English, French, and German, together. He was to be a poet, I foresaw, or perhaps a dramatist, and I believe I bragged of him unconscionably to my associates. Well, they are kindly souls and have forborne to taunt the prophet! Carlo's father was a Northern Italian, the second son of a noble family, who quarreled with the head of the clan and came to this country and a top floor in Our Square to paint masterpieces, and subsequently died at three o'clock one winter morning, pressing another man's coat. MacLachan the Tailor, then just starting his Home of Fashion, had given him the work to save the pair from being evicted, after their money gave out. At the last the elder Trentano took to drink. Then Carlo got jobs as a model, for he was strong and beautiful like a young woods creature. But he let nothing interfere with our lessons.

Paula, the happy singer, did interfere, however. From time to time my pupil's eyes wandered from his book to fix themselves with a puzzled gaze on the roof beyond the tree-tops. Curiosity proved too much for him at length.

“Dominie!” he said.

“Well?”

“Why do they put the little girl in a cage?”

“To keep her from falling off the roof.”

“Why do they put her on the roof?”

“To play.”

“Why doesn't she play in Our Square?”

“She is not allowed to play with the children in Our Square.”

Carlo pondered this. A theory born of temporary local conditions occurred to him. “Has she got measles?”

This was an easy way out. To enlighten Carlo as to the reasons why the descendant of all the Varicks was not permitted to take part in the degenerated social activities of Our Square, would be to undermine my carefully instilled doctrine of the blessings of democracy where all are free and equal. Therefore with mendacious, though worthy, intent I answered:--

“Not measles, exactly.”

“Oh!” said Carlo. “She must get lonesome.”

“Doubtless.”

The cheery singing had ceased now, and the child was busy with some other concern. Carlo's sharper vision identified it.

“She's setting a tea-table.”

“Is she?”

“And nobody will come to tea at it, will they?”

“Perhaps her dolls.”

“I don't see any dolls.” His lustrous eyes brooded on the lonely little hostess. “Dominie, do you think she'd like it if I came?”

“Are you thinking of storming the house?” I asked, amused.

“That's our roof there.” He pointed to a shabby structure overtopping the squat Varick domicile by some ten feet, and separated from it by a well, four or five feet broad. “I could lean over and speak to her, couldn't I?”

“I hardly think her family would approve.”

“Her family are _mean_,” declared Carlo heatedly, “to shut her up in a cage.”

“Come back from the realms of romance,” I bade him sternly, “and attend to the lesson.”

Before it was over the black-and-white-banded nurse had retrieved her charge and taken her below.

Three days later I beheld two small figures on the Varick roof. One was inside the cage; one outside. They appeared to be engaged in amicable discourse. The caged figure was little Paula. As to the free one, I could scarcely believe my eyes which tried to assure me that it was Carlo Trentano. It had come about in this way: For two days rain had kept the little prisoner from the roof. She was swaying to and fro on a rocking-horse, crooning to herself, and this was the burden of her improvised chant:--

“I wi-ish I had some one to play-ay-ay wif! Oh, I wi-ish I had some one to play-ay-ay wif! Oh, I wi-ish I had somebuddy to play-ay wif! I don't like to play all alone!”

Perhaps she had sung it over ten or twelve times when her wish materialized from behind the broad chimney at the rear. She heard his footfall first and then her sweet, wondering eyes beheld the visitor, a shabby, clean, and marvelous boy, some years her elder and about twice her size. Nevertheless, with the superiority of sex she immediately addressed him as “Little Boy.”

“Little Boy, where did you come from?”

“Up there,” replied her caller, pointing.

The caged one turned her solemn regard “up there” and saw a great, white, softly rolling mass floating in a sky of azure.

“From that?” she inquired.

Carlo considered the cloud and was pleased with it as a source. “Yes,” he said.

“It looks soft and sleepy,” she observed, after a more critical consideration.

They contemplated each other in a silence which threatened to become a deadlock, when he broke it.

“Do you like gum?” he asked.

“What's gum?”

“Chewing-gum, of course.”

“I don't know what that is.”

He stared at her in utter incredulity. “You honestly never chewed gum?” A shake of the tawny head answered him. “Nor ate an all-day sucker?” Another shake. “Nor played marbles?” Still another mute denial. “Nor flew kites, nor pegged the cat, nor rollered on the asphalt, nor spun tops?” The questions came too fast for detailed answer, but the child's face grew more and more dismal as she was thus led, step by step, to confront a wasted life. Her inquisitor drew a long breath. “What did they put you in for?” he asked. “In where?”

“In that cage.”

“To play.” Her inventiveness rose in arms to offset the recondite and mysterious joys which he had enumerated, and with it her spirits. “I play I'm a wild animal. Gr-rr-rr-rr! If I could get out I'd eat you up, Little Boy.”

He played up to her. “I know what you are. You're a tiger. A big stripy tiger.

'Tiger! Tiger! burning bright-- In the forests of the night!'”

“Say some more,” she demanded imperiously. “I like poetry.”

“That's all I remember. I'll tell you; I'll be a keeper, and I'll come to the cage to feed you.” He felt in his pocket and produced a fresh stick of gum which he thrust through the wire meshes. Being a realist, Paula promptly bit him on the finger.

“Ow!” he exclaimed and dropped the gum. She pounced upon it, growling ferociously. “You play awfully hard, don't you?” he observed, caressing the mark of a sharp little tooth.

“You have to when you don't have anybody but yourself to play with, or it isn't real,” replied the child with unconscious pathos. “Now I'm going to eat this all up!”

“Don't swallow it,” he warned. “You just chew it. It's gum.”

“Um-m-m!” mumbled the Tiger appreciatively. “I like it. I like you. When do you have to go back to your cloud?” She looked up apprehensively at that fleecy domicile which was moving rapidly away.

“Oh, any time. No, I'll tell you,” he added confidentially; “I didn't really come from the cloud. I came from that roof up there.”

“How?”

“Down a rope.”

“Did you? I like that almost as well. Where did you get the rope?”

“It was over the fire escape. I live on the top floor there.”

“S'posen you'd fall right down between the two houses,” surmised the little Tiger.

“Then I'd be killed.” This, as a matter of fact, was highly probable. But Carlo, like most of the highland Italians, was strong, supple, and daring; ingenious, too, for he had made loops in his rope to help him climb up again.

Paula the Tiger was now considering cognate matters with appropriate gravity. “I think I'd rather have you live in the cloud,” she decided. “Angels live in clouds. If you 're an angel, you won't fall and get killed,” she continued, finding a kindly refuge in theology. “I'd rather have you an angel.”

“All right. I'll be an angel,” he agreed. “Nurse doesn't let me play with little boys and girls. Maybe she wouldn't let me play with an angel either. I think you'd better come when nurse isn't here. When will you come again, Angel?”

“To-morrow.”

“Must I give back the nice gum?” she asked anxiously.

“No. But you'd better leave it in your cage. Grown-ups don't like gum around,” he instructed her with precocious worldly wisdom.

“Thank you, Angel. Good-bye, Angel”

“Good-bye, little girl.”

“Gr-rr-rr-rr!” The growl was a savage reminder of the dramatic proprieties.

Carlo was quick of apprehension. “Good-bye, Tiger,” he amended. And the Tiger purred.

Often thereafter I saw them, at the hour when the banded nurse took her outing, playing together on opposite sides of the barrier. Many, various, and ingenious were the diversions which Carlo the free found to amuse the captivity of Paula the caged. There were delightful things to be contrived out of knotted strings, in which Carlo was of incomparable skill. He invented a game of marbles which could be played by opponents on different sides of a twelve-foot steel mesh; an abstruse pastime, but apparently interesting, since it developed into an almost daily contest in which, to judge from the joyous prancings about the cage at the conclusion, she was invariably allowed to win. Also, there were gifts of candy shared, and the delights of the chase with a bean-shooter for weapon and the indignant sparrows for quarry, and instructions in the principles of kinetic stasis as exemplified by the rotary or spinning top. All of which was doubtless very wicked and deceitful and clandestine, and, being so, should have been stopped by a word from me before disaster could come. For, any day, Carlo might slip from that swaying rope and break his precious neck. Or the Varicks might learn of what was going on above their heads, and banish the little Tiger from her happy cage, or perhaps even wholly from the contaminated atmosphere of Our Square. This last would have been a blow to me, for she also was my pupil, and a profitable one, since her father, Putnam Varick, a dry, snuffy, stern, lethargic, ill-natured, liverish man, paid me liberally to come five times a week and give her a grounding in Latin and French. But I could not find it in my heart to deprive my little Paula of her one taste of real childhood.

Discovery was, of course, inevitable. One day Paula came into the dim and solemn Varick library where lessons were conducted with her big, wistful, gray eyes all wet and wincing, and her queer, sprightly little face like a mask of grief. Behind her came nurse with the expression of a hanging judge. The culprit, it appeared, had been found in the possession of contraband goods--to wit, a wad of much-chewed gum. Worse, it had been discovered in a most inappropriate place.

“I puh-hut it in my huh-huh-hair,” wept the sorrowful little Tiger, “and it stu-huh-huck.”

“She won't tell me where she got it,” said nurse.

“I did. I to-hold you an angel gave it to me,” declared the Tiger, clinging with pathetic resolution to her drama of the roof.

Nurse sniffed. Her theological imagination did not extend to heavenly visitors who dispensed that kind of manna. It was _her_ opinion for what it was worth (sniff) that somebody had been throwing things (sniff) on the roof. Next time it might be (sniff) poison. Nurse _did_ have an imagination of a kind.

It wasn't poison next time. It was a kite. Carlo had flown it from his own roof and had brought the twine down in his teeth, and had passed the ball through the netting to the Tiger. Oh, the thrill of ecstasy running up her arm, to spread and glow on live wires through every nerve, as she felt for the first time the tug and tremor of the beautiful, soaring, captive thing swaying far, far above her, higher than the highest roof-top she could see, higher than the biggest mountain in her geography, as high as the vanished cloud whence the beneficent angel of her happy drama had descended to brighten a hitherto correct and humdrum existence. Alas for angels' visits! From a bench in Our Square, nurse saw the aerial messenger and traced the string to the Varick roof. She hurried home and upstairs to the roof-top a good twenty minutes before her scheduled return.

But the scuttle stuck, and Carlo's quick ear, catching the sound, warned him. With a quick word to his playfellow, he dodged behind the chimney and began to climb the looped rope. There was a little space in which the climber always emerged above the chimney into the view of the child in the cage before he surmounted the coping of the upper roof. Paula's eyes were fixed upon this point. The nurse's glance followed hers. Carlo appeared, climbing in hot haste. He missed one of the loops. There was a muffled cry. His body turned, swayed, and plunged down into the fifty-foot abyss between the two buildings. The nurse, scared out of her senses, rushed down the scuttle-way and hid in her room, accusing herself of being an involuntary murderess, while poor Paula tore and battered with her tender fingers at the cruel iron meshes in a passion of grief and despair, long after nurse had disappeared.

A low call from above stopped her. Her angel leaned over the roof.

“Has she gone?” he asked.

The child nodded in silent terror and wonder. He came down the rope swiftly and steadily. When he approached the cage, she saw that he was bleeding from a gash above his temple.

“I struck on a clothesline,” he said. “It tipped me into a balcony. Just below your roof. Lucky!”

“I thought you were killed,” she whispered. “Oh, Angel, I thought you were dead.”

“Not hurt a bit,” he averred valiantly. “Did she see me?”

“Yes.”

“Then they won't let me come any more.”

“They'll take me away,” wailed the Tiger.

There was a pause. “I'll be sorry,” said the boy.

“So'll I.”

“I'll be aw'f'ly sorry,” said the boy painfully.

“So'll I.”

“I'll come and find you when I'm grown up.”

“Will you?” she cried eagerly.

“Cross my heart.”

“And I'll keep your gum forevern--evern--ever,” she promised solemnly. “I've got a piece yet. Hidden. Listen. Somebody's coming!”

“Good-bye, Tiger,” said the boy.

“Good-bye, Angel,” said the girl.

She put her trembling little lips against the cold mesh of the wires. For a moment he hesitated in boyish shamefacedness. Then he bent over to her.

“I'll never forget you--never,” said the free little boy.

“Nor I,” said the caged little girl.

He ran and climbed: climbed out of her sight and out of her life. For the scandalized Varicks took her from that desecrated roof to the country, and when they came back Carlo's father was dead, and Carlo left with very little visible means of support. So they passed on their sundered ways. He went about his business of the fight for existence and his place in the world. She went about her business in a life of developing sunshine and beauty, herself the developing embodiment of both. The cage stood on the roof, lifeless, grim, and sad.

Outwardly Our Square changes little. Inwardly it suffers from the depredations of the years and an encroaching populace. No more significant evidence of its failing fortunes could be adduced than the sale of the Varick mansion. It was purchased by a Swedish labor contractor, who sold it to a professional gambler, who in turn leased it to a boarding-house keeper, and that sinister third-floor front wherefrom Ver-nam Varick had so vehemently ousted his Satanic mentor came to be occupied (to what base uses!) by a piano-tuner. The cage of the wistful Tiger was found convenient for the week's wash.

As for the Varicks, Our Square knew them no more. The fussy, fubsy, mean-tempered father of Paula became financially venturous (for a Varick), dipped extensively into water-rights and power-plants in the Southwest, and, having thus further improved the fortune handed down to him by Vernam the Devil-Chaser, built himself a smugly splendid palace on the Park, wherein to house Paula.

This, indeed, was no cage. For the tiny captive of the housetop had grown beyond all human captivity; had become such a woman as the great dreamers and poets enshrine in the sunlit mist of verse. It is not for a simple, old pedagogue who had loved the child to describe the woman. Her face is the common property of the public, like a ruling monarch's, so often has it appeared in the Sunday papers, for at twenty-three she was one of the reigning beauties of a city of lovely women. What no camera could catch or painter fix was the joyous and joy-giving quality of her personality. It was as if arrears of happiness from her cramped and denied childhood had returned upon her tenfold to be scattered in largess wherever she went. A great painter who had painted a great portrait of her, which delighted every one but himself, had convicted himself of failure because, he said, while he had caught the flowerlike delicacy and the sunlike radiance and the touch of Varick imperiousness in the background of the face, he had failed to fix the charm that made her different and more lovely than a dozen other equally lovely women (he was a dealer in paradox, that great painter); the look of quiet, unconscious, waiting deep in the wide, gray eyes. And a great poet, who was also of her adorers, said that was why she had not married. And a great cynic whose cynicism had fallen before her said that was why she never would marry unless a star came down from the heavens to claim her.

About the time of the height of her triumphs, Cyrus the Gaunt came to Our Square to run the ten thousand-pound steam roller at night and sit for sculpture by day, and eventually marry the Bonnie Lassie and go to live in the little, quaint, old friendly house with the hospitable door, almost opposite the Varick mansion. Because Cyrus the Gaunt's forbears had owned Our Square when it was the Staten Farm and before the first Varick had arrived upon the scene, Mr. Putnam Varick was willing enough that his daughter should go to see Mr. and Mrs. Cyrus Staten, albeit he had heard with misgivings that some of their dinners were laxly Bohemian, combining, as they did, millionaires, bishops, and diplomats with musicians, explorers, reformers, and other anarchists. That is how Paula Varick came back into Our Square after fifteen years of absence and change.

Another revenant came back about that time, along the dimly blazed trails of fate. As I was sunning myself on my favorite bench, one afternoon, I felt two sinewy hands on my shoulders, and turned to face a big, smiling stranger. There was something in him that told at first sight of the making of the man; told that the best life of the open had formed him and the best life of the cities had finished him. There was a certain gravity and stability about his face, but the lips were mobile as a boy's and a shining mirthfulness gleamed from the straight-looking black eyes.

“Dominie!” he said. Then, at my astonished look: “I haven't made a mistake, have I?”

“Not in the title at least,” I said.

He shook me in his iron grip. “Call on your memory. It's ungrateful to forget a man who--who owes you money,” he laughed.

“That doesn't help me,” I said, probing the vivid face.

“Have I changed so, where nothing else has changed?” he said, looking around--“except that they've put a fire escape outside the window where I used to sleep.” I followed his glance, and memory flashed its belated recognition: “Carlo Trentano!” He gave me another powerful, affectionate shake. It was like being petted by a lion. “No longer,” he said. “That's buried with--with _him_.” He looked again toward the high-roofed house where his father had died. “I'm all American now, Charles Trent, at your service.”

“Where have I heard that name?”

“Seen it in the papers probably. They've had their fun with me in the Senate Committee hearings.”

“Ah! So you're the Trent who's been making all the trouble for the water-power people in the Southwest! And I thought that wonderful boy's imagination of yours was going to make a poet of you, or at least a dramatist.”

“It made me see visions,” he explained with gravity--“visions that had to be expressed in facts. After I had worked my way through college, I went out to the desert country. And I saw visions of water brought from the mountains. What I saw I made other people see. Now there are growing cities and fertile farms where there used to be only dry sand and my imagination. Isn't that poetry, dominie,--and drama?”

It was all said quite simply, and without brag, as a man would explain the working of some power outside of himself.

“But where did you get the money?”