Part 4

The Little Red Doctor grunted. “His legs have turned to lamp-wicking. I don't vouch for the diagnosis. It's his own.”

“Paralysis?” I hazarded.

“Grip,” was the Little Red Doctor's curt rejoinder.

“Don't tell me that grip turns a young Hercules's legs to lamp-wicks?” I objected.

“Grip does if the young Hercules's legs are fools enough to carry him out and around the city with a temperature of one-naught-four-point-two,” retorted the Little Red Doctor with bitter exactitude. “Under such conditions grip turns to pneumonia. And pneumonia is the favorite ally of my old friend, Death.”

“You don't mean that the Gnome is going to die?”

“Not of pneumonia: that fight was fought out some weeks ago. But what pneumonia doesn't do to a young Hercules worry may. Another aid of my old friend, Death, worry is. That's a bothersome Gnome, tossing about in the heat with his sick brain full of plots to get away and no legs to carry'em out. His next try will be his last.”

“Then he got away once?”

“On all fours. As far as the sidewalk. There Cyrus the Gaunt and the Bonnie Lassie found him and brought him back. Cyrus was on duty again last night.”

“I began to see. I'm to be watchdog. It's No. 7, isn't it? At what hour?”

“No. 7. Top floor. Nine o'clock.”

“I'll be there.”

Thanks for neighborly services, which are a taken-for-granted part of our close-pressed life, are not deemed good form in Our Square. The Little Red Doctor nodded and prepared to pass on to the rounds of his unending bout with his old friend and antagonist, Death. I detained him.

“Just a moment. What is the object of the Gnome's excursions? To get work?”

“No. To search.”

“For what?”

The Little Red Doctor moved toward an approaching horse car, almost the last of that perishing genus in New York City. “Heaven knows!” he called back. “And Mac, the tailor, at least suspects. That's as far as I can get.”

He leaped upon the bobtailed vehicle, was immediately held up by a forehanded conductor, and too tardily bethought himself of a forgotten point. “The chair! The chair!” he bellowed. “Look out for the chair!”

“What chair?” I shouted back.

He made as if he would jump off and return. But he had already paid his nickel, so he only waved despairingly. Nickels count in Our Square.

No. 7 opened to me with a musty smell of stale heat. Built in the magnificent days of the neighborhood, by a senator of the United States, it had fallen to the base uses of machine workers on the lower and furnished lodgings on the upper floors. The very walls seemed to sweat as I made my way up to the dim light at the top, where the Gnome's door stood open, hopelessly inviting a draft. Upon my entrance a huge and fumbling creature from the lithographic plant where the Gnome was an assistant rose and made gloomy and bashful adieus.

Leon Coventry reached a great, thin hand across the littered bed to make me welcome. Even in his illness he preserved that suggestion of bowed and gnarled power, strangely alien to his youthfulness, which had given him his nickname in Our Square. Some would have called him ugly of face. But his mouth had the austere sweetness of a saint or a sufferer, and in his eyes glowed a living fire which might tame beasts or subdue hearts.

“How are you feeling to-night?” I asked perfunctorily.

“Wild,” he answered. “When are they going to let me out? When? When?” The little Red Doctor had given me no hint upon this point. So I said non-committally: “Soon, I think,” and moved around the bed to where an easy-chair invited. It was a wicker chair, broad-seated, wide-armed, and welcoming, a chair made conformable and gracious by long usage, a chair for lovers, for high hopes and for dreams, a chair to solace troubles and soothe weariness. Into it I would have dropped gratefully, when the sick man's fingers closed on my wrist like the jaws of an animal, and I was all but jerked from my feet.

“Not there!” he snarled insanely. “Not there!”

“I beg your pardon,” I said, much discomposed.

“I didn't mean to hurt you,” he returned with a return to that habitual gentleness of address which, by its contrast with his formidable physique, gave him the aspect of a kindly and companionable bear. “But if you don't mind sitting here on the bed? Or yonder on the sofa? Or anywhere except--”

“Not in the least,” I assured him. “The fact is, I detest wicker chairs anyway. I had to get rid of mine.”

“Did you? Why?”

“It was no companion for an old, lonely man.”

The Gnome clutched me again. His fingers quivered as they bit into my arm.

“I know! It whispered. Didn't it?”

I nodded.

“So does mine. Strange things. Echoes of what you can't forget.”

“Yes, yes. I know.”

“Do you, now? I wonder. Perhaps you do.” He studied my face with his luminous eyes, and then closed them and fell back, speaking slowly and dreamily. “In the darkness when I can see the chair just enough to know that it's empty as--as an empty heart--I hear it stirring, stirring softly, adjusting itself to--to what is not there. And I hold my breath and pray. But--nothing more.” He opened his eyes that seemed to gaze out across barriers of pain and incomprehension. “Dominie, does yours--did yours keep its secrets?”

That way, obviously, ran the boy's malady toward madness. Regretting that I had chanced upon so unfortunate a topic, I said nothing. But he took my assent for granted.

“So does mine,” he sighed. “It has not been moved nor touched since it was left vacant.”

“Shall I read to you?” I asked, to turn his mind aside.

“No. Talk to me. Tell me what they are doing in the Square.”

So I gave him the news of Tailor Mac-Lachan's latest drunk, and Pushcart Tonio's luck in the lottery, and Grandma Souchet's _faux pas_ at the movies (her first experience) when she rose and yelled for the police to stop the pickpocket in the flagrant act of abstracting the heroine's aged father's watch, thereby disgracing her (grandma's) progeny and making them a derision and a byword even unto the third and fourth generation; and the Morrissey mumps, the whole kit and b'ilin' of juvenile Morrisseys having been sent to school looking like five little red balloons, whereby holiday for the rest of the scholars and great rejoicing, and the unavailing wrath of the authorities upon Mrs. Morrissey's head; and Terry the Cop's extra stripe; and the passing of the skat championship into the unworthy but preposterously lucky hands of the Avenue B Evening Dress Suit Club; and the battle over Orpheus the Piper (which was a jest of the Lords of High Derision, touching the boundaries of uttermost tragedy); and the exotic third stage of the affair, not yet ended, between Mary Moore and the Weeping Scion of Wealth; and the newspaper discovery of a barroom poet at Schmidt's free-lunch counter; and the joke which his fashionable uptown club put up on Cyrus the Gaunt; and politics and social doings, and the whisper of scandal; exactly as it might be in any other little world than Our Square; and, finally, for I was leading up to a delicate and difficult point, my own little smile of fortune, in the form of a small textbook finally accepted and advance royalty duly paid thereon. For the difficult and dangerous point was how to help the Gnome in case he needed it. Offer of charity, even when glossed over with the euphemism of a “loan,” is not accepted in ease of spirit by the people of Our Square. In fact, it isn't accepted at all, as a rule. The likelihood of ability to pay back is too dubious and remote. So it was in my most offhand manner that I inquired:--

“By the way, how are you off for ready cash?”

Leon fluttered his hand among the papers on the bed. They were opened envelopes.

“Look inside them,” he directed.

Within were checks. They were on various mercantile and commercial firms. Mostly the amounts were small; two dollars, two-and-a-half, three, and four, and the largest for ten dollars. Totaled up they amounted to affluence as Our Square understands the term.

“Something new?” I asked.

“Yes. Advertising sketches. They've caught on.”

“I didn't know that you could draw, Leon.”

“Neither did I, beyond scratchy, sketchy blobs, until the Bonnie Lassie told me.

“If the Bonnie Lassie has been giving you lessons, you're in a good school,” I said, for the local sculptress, nymph, and goddess of Our Square had already begun to make us and herself famous with her tiny bronzes.

“Not lessons exactly. But pointers.”

“You're in luck to be making money while you 're laid up.”

“The doc says I oughtn't to work at it. But I had to do something or go crazy. A man can't live by just waiting; can he? So when I can't sleep I sketch. And the checks come in. It's like a miracle. Only--it isn't the miracle that I want. When do you think I'll be strong enough to get out? Can't you tell me? Can't you find out from doc? I'd get better if I only had something to go on!”

Always that was the beginning and end of our talks; talks which often skirted the borders of the secret that was wearing his life down, but never revealed it. When I sought to shift the burden of the query upon the Little Red Doctor, he looked glum and shook his head.

“But go there when you can, dominie. He likes to have you. You rest him. Sometimes he sleeps after you've gone.” Though the Gnome never spoke of it again, I knew why he liked me with him. The bond of sympathy was that in my life, too, had been an empty chair that whispered. So the harsh summer elongated itself like the stretching of a white-hot metal bar, and through the swelter and hush of long nights I watched the rugged Gnome slowly dwindle.

My first weekly watch night in September came with one of the savagest onslaughts of belated heat in the memory of Our Square. For the sake of what little air there was I had drawn the couch out between the two windows. Discouraged by the handicap of a forearm which stuck clammily to his drawing board, the Gnome had turned off his overhead light, and now lay rigid. But I knew that he did not sleep. From some merciful cleft in the brazen sky came a waft of coolness. It fanned me into a doze.

I awoke with a start, to hear the Gnome's voice, in a hard-breathed whisper: “My heart! Oh, my heart!”

“This,” I thought, “is the end.” I tried to rise, but a paralysis of the will held me, though my senses seemed preternaturally acute.

From the bedside I heard the stir of the wicker chair. The withes moved softly upon themselves with delicate, smooth rustlings. The chair, whispering, sagged and yielded as if to the pressure of some light, sweet burden. Then the voice of the Gnome came, out of the darkness, again, and I knew that my fear was without cause, for he was leaning toward the chair and speaking to that which whispered.

“My Heart! Oh, my Heart! Will you never come back? Don't you know that I can't come to find you? I've tried. God of pity, how I've tried! Can't you hear me, can't you feel me calling for you? If I could see you once again! Only once. It isn't so much to ask. And the time is short. Come back to me, my Heart!”

I heard the chair whispering, whispering messages beyond the little reach of human understanding. Then the beggar of ghosts fell back, and the bed creaked and shook. I knew what made it creak and shake. Chairs that whisper have no balm for that misery.

Two of us lay still and wakeful through the rest of that night. In the morning we faced each other pallidly.

“Did you hear me in the night?” asked my host.

“Yes.”

“Then I'm going to tell you the rest, for I think I haven't much longer time to tell anything.”

“Oh, nonsense!” I protested; but it was lip speech only, and he smiled at the pretense.

“Of course, nonsense, if you like. But I'll go, shriven of _that_ secret. The wicker chair is where She used to sit.”

“That much I gathered.”

“How can I describe Her to you? How can I make you understand as you would if you'd seen Her?”

“Perhaps I have.”

“When? Where?”

“Sitting with you on a bench in the Square the week the lilacs bloomed. She looked afraid.”

“She was. A brute of a foreman had insulted her. So she lost her job as a feather finisher--did you see her beautiful hands?--and she could find no other, and there was nobody in the world for her to turn to. Down below her last dollar, and twenty years old, and lovely. There's terror enough in that, isn't there?”

My mind went back to certain black-and-scarlet tragedies which Our Square makes brave pretense of having forgotten; tragedies of its unforgotten daughters. Terror enough, indeed!

“Was she some one you knew?”

No; she was not some one whom the Gnome knew. How to get to know her and help her (for help was his one, all-effacing, loyal purpose from the first moment he looked into her face); there was the heart of the problem. At any moment she might pass on, out of reach of his aid.

Yet to speak to her was too much risk. She sat poised as ready for startled flight as a bird. Into which deadlock of fateful chances intruded Susan Gluck's Orphan, aged six, and with a passion for scientific pursuits. The immediate object of his research was to discover what treasure so strongly interested a honeybee in a lilac bell, and if need be assist in the operation, his honorable purpose also being to help. Unfortunately the Busy One misunderstood and resented, whereupon Susan Gluck's Orphan lifted up his voice and smote the far heavens with his lamentations. To him, running in agonized circles with his finger in his mouth, the girl extended arms and invitation to come and be comforted. The voice, with its clear, soft, mothering appeal, tugged at the Gnome's heart-strings; to Susan Gluck's Orphan it was, however, but the voice of a stranger, and therefore to be feared. There, however, sat Leon the Gnome, unnoted before, but now an appreciated refuge. For to the young of the species in Our Square the Gnome is a delight, because of his athletic habit of using a child--and sometimes two--in evening dumb-bell exercises, for the upkeep of his mighty muscles. To his knees fled the wailful orphan. Gently though clumsily the Gnome extracted the stinger, in astonished contemplation of which the sufferer temporarily forgot his woes; presently, however, as the poison took hold of the nerves, lapsing again into woe.

All this the girl had been watching from the corner of her eye, making, one may guess, a private estimate of the singular-looking youth who had been covertly spying upon her fear and despair. Wise in a lore of which the Gnome was as ignorant as the Orphan, she now offered wet mud. It was applied, and the adoptive pride of the Glucks raced off to vaunt his wounds to his fellows, leaving two people with quick-beating hearts gazing at each other. The Gnome took a quick resolve.

“I have been frightened, too, in my time.”

“He is well over it,” answered the girl, following the now boasting Orphan with her gaze.

“I don't mean that. I have been hungry too.”

Now she understood, and drew back, flushing. But she, too, was one to go straight to a point. Perhaps two more direct spirits than those twain seldom meet. “You mean me?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“I'm not hungry, and I'm not afraid,” she lied.

“Could you believe,” he said slowly, “that I mean as well to you as I did to that child--and the same?”

She did not answer at once, but the defensive look wavered in her eyes.

“Do you ever gamble?” was his next question.

“Gamble?” she repeated in amazement.

“Like matching pennies. I'll match you for the dinners.”

“I--I've only got a dollar,” she said.

“Plenty.”

“It isn't really a dollar,” she murmured. “I've only got--forty-three cents--in the world.”

It was her first confidence, and he thrilled to it. But he accepted it quite as a matter of course.

“Even on that it can be done. Come; where are you any worse off, even if you lose? And, at dinner, we might figure out some way for you to be better off.”

She got out a penny and looked at it a long time and then said: “Do I toss it up?” And of course the Gnome said no; because a tossed penny shows for itself. So they matched, and he looked at his coin (which showed the winning side up) and said:--

“I lose; I didn't match you.”

And then her lost misgiving surged over her and they sat and argued it. That is when I first noticed them. The Gnome won. Of course.

“So I took her to Marot's,” said the young giant, sitting up against his pillows and letting his gaze fare out into the humming heat of the day; “because I knew that, on a pinch, Mme. Marot would look after her. And I had an awful time keeping the bill of fare away from her and making her believe that she was getting only forty-three cents' worth. Courage came back to her with the food. She told me a little of her story; not much, then or afterward. I think she didn't want to claim anything of me, ever, not even sympathy. You see?”

I did see, if only vaguely. Leon the Gnome was building up a character to match the curious beauty of the face I had seen that once.

“That foreman brute wasn't her first experience. She had had to fight before; to leave good employment. To her the world was a jungle full of men who were only a horrible sort of pursuing ape. That came out later when I knew her better. My business there at that first dinner at Marot's was to get her to believe in me. Well,” he sighed, as over the memory of a formidable task accomplished, “I did it!”

He did it! Think of the gulf between those two; full, for her, of shameful memories and bristling fears; a gulf to be crossed with a shrinking heart before she could trust him; and across it he had led her by the mere power of words. Well, no; not words alone. Something shining and clear and trust-compelling back of the words; the nature of the man. Have I said that our Gnome was rather a wonderful person? He was.

“But how did you do it, miracle worker?” I demanded.

“No miracle at all. I don't understand you. I just told her about myself.”

“Quite so. What, for example?”

“Oh, everything,” he said, with a gesture of his big hands, indicating a broad generality. “Just a sort of outline of my life. I wanted her to know me as I was.” I wondered how many youths of my acquaintance in Our Square, or out, could afford to tell “everything” as a method of winning a young girl's confidence. But the Gnome, as I have indicated, was something of a phenomenon.

“So I lent her money and courage to go on with. And that evening, when we had walked and talked I said to her: 'Where will you go to-night?' and she said: 'Tell me.' So I brought her here to live.”

“Here?” I exclaimed.

“What are you thinking?” he growled. “Don't think it. Open that door.”

He pointed to the far corner of the room. I did as directed. “Look on the other side of it. What do you see?”

What I saw on the further side of the door was an oak bar set in iron clamps. Beyond was a tiny room and a tiny white bed and a flower in a pot on the window sill, dead and withered in the heat. Opposite the window an exit led to the hallway.

“There she lived and sang and was happy for fifty-five days. Each day was more glorious than the last for me. She stopped being afraid almost at once. It was just an even week after she came that she tapped on the door, when I had settled down to read my evening away.

“'May I come in?' she asked.

“'Yes,' I said.

“'For quite a time she made no move. Then: 'Are you sure?' she said.

“I understood. That was her way--to make you understand more than she said.” The sick man leaned out from his pillow toward the little door. “I can see her now, as she came into the room. She was all in fresh white, with a touch of some color at her waist. I had bought that dress for her. Do you know the delight of buying the realities of life for the woman you love? Oh, yes! I loved her then. I had loved her from the first sight, when I spoke to her on the bench because she seemed so desolate and scared.

“She came straight to me, and I stood up and put down my book. She looked me in the eyes, hard. Then she held out her hand. 'Shake hands,' she said. I shook. 'I'll keep the bargain,' I said. 'I know you will,' said she. She sat down in the wicker chair. No one has sat in it since; not even the Bonnie Lassie when she came. Yes; she sat down in the chair as if she were adopting it for her own. And we talked.”

“What did you talk about?” I asked. A foolish question, for what do youth and youth always talk about, when they encounter? But his reply surprised me.

“Money, mostly, that first evening. We went over accounts. She was keeping strict record of every cent I spent on her, to pay back when she got a job. Room rent, too. Oh, it was all very businesslike throughout. Afterward we talked about life and books and things. I lent her my books. I read a good deal, you know; all of us in the printing trades are great readers,” he added with a touch of guild pride. “She was better educated than I, though. Where did she get it? I never found out. Of course I didn't ask any questions. That was part of the bargain, as I understood it. She asked me a million. She turned me inside out and sometimes she laughed at me. But her laughter never hurt. It wasn't that kind.”

“Mightn't she have thought that your not asking questions of your own showed a lack of interest in her?” I suggested.

“How could she? I hadn't the right to ask questions. I hadn't the right to do anything but watch over her and guard her and keep to my bargain. Every evening she knocked and came in and sat in the wicker chair, and we talked. It was the sweetest thing in life to me, that absolute confidence. But the greater her confidence grew the more I was bound not to let her see what I felt for her. Isn't it so? You see, I know nothing about women.”

Having my grave doubts upon the point, I offered no advice.

“She got a job. I don't know where. Next week she began to pay me up.”

“Did you make any protests?” I asked, sounding him.

“Protests? Certainly not. I couldn't, could I? It was a question of her self-respect.”

“Of course. I beg your pardon for asking.”

“There was one night--we had been to a concert, Dutch treat, of course--and she came into my room to sit and talk it over for a few minutes. Passing me on her way back to her own room, she stopped behind my chair, and I felt something just brush my temple; and then the door shut behind her and the bar fell, and I heard her voice: 'Good-night, Gala-had.' For the next three days I never set eyes on her.”

“Did that tell you nothing?”

“What should it tell me?” retorted that pathetic young idiot. “It was just part of her mystery, of the mystery of woman, I suppose. The next Saturday night that drunken sot, MacLachan, came and ruined everything.”

“Soft words, Leon,” I protested, for the dour-faced, harsh-spoken, sore-hearted tailor of Our Square has his own reasons for drink and forgetfulness, and, drunk or sober, he is my friend.

“I wish he had broken his neck on the stairs,” said the Gnome savagely. “He sat over there, bleating to me some gibberish about Scotch philosophy, when Vera came into her room, and knocked as she always did. It was he that called 'Come in.' She came and stopped, looking at him with surprise. 'Oh,' she said, 'I didn't know.' 'No more did I,' said MacLachan, standing up with solemn, drunken politeness. 'I was not aweer there was a Mrs. Leon Coventry here.' She turned color, but looked him in the eye. 'There isn't,' said she. 'Then take shame to yerself,' he said. 'Ye should make at least the pretex'.'

“If she hadn't jumped between us, I would have pitched him out of the window. But she checked me long enough for him to get away and run down the stairs. It was the first time I had felt her arms and it turned me sick with longing. She backed away from me and said: 'I'm sorry, Leon. I didn't know there was any one here.' 'Wait,' I said. 'We've _got_ to be married now.' If you could have seen her face, you'd have thought I'd struck her.” He stopped and swept the beads of sweat from his temples.