Part 5

“Is that all you said?” I asked.

He stared at me. “That's almost what she asked me?” he replied. “She said: 'Is that all you have to say to me, Leon?' I didn't get her meaning. I was intent on the one thing--the bargain: that I mustn't make love to her; that I mustn't catch her in my arms and hold her against my heart that was bursting with love of her. The fever was on me, then, too, and I suppose that kept me to the one idea that was burning in my brain.

“'We can go to the Greek church, on the other side of the square,' I said. 'When can you be ready?'

“She walked back into her room, and I never saw her again.”

“God forgive you for a fool!” I said.

“Why didn't you tell her what every woman wants to hear, that you loved her?”

“Why, she must have known it; she must have realized it a thousand times, by a thousand signs. Yet she left me--that way.”

“You've had nothing from her since?”

“Yes. A money order for the balance of what she owed me.” An involuntary, jealous clutch at his pillow told me that the money order had not been and would not be cashed.

“No word with it?”

“Just gratitude.” The Gnome's sensitive lips quivered. “What do I want with gratitude? I want _her!_ I want to find her. Suppose she were in trouble again. She's so young and helpless!”

“MacLachan never meant--”

“I went out to kill MacLachan next day. I was having pretty good luck at it too, when Terry the Cop came in. They brought me back here and called the doctor, and MacLachan cried out of one eye, for the other was closed.”

I recalled the tailor's black eye. Further I recalled that when some other-world business had taken me to Fifth Avenue I had there encountered Mac (of all persons) in (of all places) a millinery store. The fragments of his conversation which I caught related to ostriches. To my inquiry he replied that he was pursuing a will-o'-the-wisp, and that it was a lawful occupation. The suspicion now lodged in my mind that Mac had been searching for a lost trail. Of this I said nothing to Leon.

“Sometimes at night,” the sick man went on, “when I am not longing to smash up all the world because I can't get out and find her, she comes and sits in the wicker chair, and I hear the pressure of her dear body against the withes, and I feel her breath in the silence, but she never speaks. Is she dead, do you think?”

I most emphatically declined to entertain any such hypothesis. As for the Gnome, it seemed that he soon might be. The Little Red Doctor's visits grew more frequent, and his brow more corrugated, and his eyes more perplexed. Once he went so far as to observe in my hearing that nature could go just about so far without sleep and then it cracked.

“Through that crack,” he remarked, “enters sometimes my old friend, Death, sometimes madness. Let's pray that it won't be madness in the Gnome's case.”

Indications seemed to point in that direction, however. Leon's association with the spirit of the chair became closer and more constant. Night after night I heard him murmuring in the darkness, and the soft creak and rustle and whisper of the chair in reply, until the hairs of my neck quivered.

There came a night when the heat broke under a pressure of wild wind and rain from the northwest that swept Our Square like an aerial charge. It whirled me, breathless, into No. 7, and pursued me up the stairs, puffing out the light at the top. The Gnome was working. Beside him on a stand rustled a little pile of checks, weighted down.

“I'm going to leave a legacy,” he said gayly. “Will you be my executor? You'll have to find Her, you know.”

“Ask me ten years from now, if I'm alive,” I answered. “What's to-night? Reading?”

“Sleep, for you. You look done up. Take the couch and a blanket.”

I took them and, with them, what I had originally planned to be a brief nap, for there was medicine to be given now. When I woke up the room was dark. It seemed to me that a cold draft had passed over and roused me. Above the rush and whistle of the wind I could hear the chair whispering.

“My Heart! Oh, my Heart! Have you come back?” pleaded the Gnome's voice in the silence.

Then all the blood in my body made one great leap and stopped. The chair had sobbed.

“It has seemed so often that I could stretch out my hand and touch you,” went on the piteous, quiet voice from the bed. “But you were never there. And my soul is tired with waiting and longing.”

The chair rustled again with the sound of release from weight. There was a broken cry of love and fear and gladness that was of this and not the other world, and I knew without seeing that it was a woman of flesh and blood who lay on the Gnome's breast, covering his face with her kisses.

“Darling fool! Darling fool! Why didn't you tell me?” she sobbed. “Why didn't you tell me that you loved me?”

“I thought that I did,” said the Gnome, and I started at the changed voice, for it had suddenly taken on life and vigor. “I thought I told you in every word and look that you were all my world.” There was a pause, then: “Who _did_ tell you?”

“Mr. MacLachan. He found me at last. He took me by the arm and said: 'Lassie, the love o' you is the life o' him. An' it's going if you don't come back an' save him!' Is it true, dearest one?” she cried passionately. “Tell me I'm not too late.”

Then I judged it best to tiptoe quite circumspectly out of the room. On the landing below I met the Little Red Doctor.

“Who went up the stairs just now?” he cried.

“Love,” said I. “Did you fear it was Death?”

MACLACHAN OF OUR SQUARE

MACLACHAN, the tailor, is as Scotch as his name and as dour as the Scotch. Our Square goes to his Home of Fashion to have its clothes made, repaired, and, on rare and special occasions, pressed, as a matter of local loyalty, which does not in the least imply that it either likes or approves MacLachan. It is, in fact, rather difficult to like him. He has a gray-granite face with a mouth like a snapped spring, toppling brows, and a nose wrinkled into the expression of one suspicious of all mankind and convinced that his worst suspicions are well founded. He has also the Scotch habit of the oracle, and deals largely in second-hand aphorisms.

Once he had a daughter, a wild-rose girl, who lived over the Home of Fashion with him, and kept him and the place in speckless order. But she is gone, three years since, and in her place MacLachan has only a bitter memory and a devouring shame. What they quarreled about Our Square never knew. The hard-bitten tailor was easy to quarrel with at any time. No information was offered by him, and public opinion in the neighborhood does not favor vain and curious inquiries into another man's family troubles. The night that Meg left, with her gray eyes blazing like two clear flames and her little chin so fiercely set that the dimple disappeared from it totally, MacLachan went out blackly glowering, and came back drunk and singing “The Cork Leg.”

What affinity may exist, even in a Scotchman's mind, between that naive and chatty ballad and strong liquor is beyond my imagination. But our dour, sour tailor then and there chose it and has since retained it for the slogan of his spirituous outbreaks, and sings it only when he is, in his own phrase, “a bit drink-taken.” The Bonnie Lassie has one of her queer theories that he used to sing Meg to sleep with it when she was a baby. “And that's why, you see,” says she. I don't see at all; it seems to me a psychologically unsound theory. Still, some of the unsoundest theories I have ever heard from the Bonnie Lassie's lips have been inexplicably borne out by the facts afterward. When I marvel at this she laughs and says that an old pedagogue who has spent his life with books mustn't expect to understand people.

As for the wild-rose Meg, she passed wholly out of the little, close-knit, secluded world of Our Square. Even those few of us who knew MacLachan and counted ourselves his friends feared to mention her name, not so much because of his known temper as of the haunting pain that grew in his eyes. With the temerity of youth, Henry Groll, one of Meg's many local adorers, and the best second tenor in the Amalgamated Glee Clubs, did put it to the tailor, having come to the Home of Fashion on a matter of international complications, viz., to ascertain whether red Hungarian wine would come out of a French piqué waistcoat.

“By the way, what d'you hear from Meg?” inquired the young man.

“What!”.The tailor's heavy shears went off at such a bias across the cloth he was cutting that Lawyer Stedman's coat, when completed, never could be coaxed to set exactly right under the left arm.

“I--I only ast ye,” said the visitor, somewhat disconcerted. “What's Meg doin' now?”

Three inches lower--the Little Red Doctor assured Henry a few moments after his ill-advised query, binding up the spot where the flung scissors had struck--and he would never again have sung second tenor nor anything else calling for the employment of intact vocal cords. Henry sent a messenger after the waistcoat. That night MacLachan reeled home bellowing “The Cork Leg” in a voice that brought Terry the Cop bounding across Our Square like a dissuasive antelope.

My one first-hand experience with the ballad of MacLachan's lapse from sobriety was brought about long after through the Bonnie Lassie's procuring. She thrust a sunny head from her studio window and beckoned me from the sidewalk with her modeling tool.

“Dominie, have you seen MacLachan, the tailor, to-day?” she called when she secured my attention.

“No. Is he looking for me?”

“You should be looking for him.”

I examined my clothing for possible rents or stains. My sober black was respectable if shiny. The Bonnie Lassie made a gesture of annoyance with the modeling tool which nearly cost her latest creation its head.

“Do you know what day this is?”

“Tuesday, the sev--”

“Don't be a calendar, please! What day is it in MacLachan's life?”

I groped. “Is it his birthday?” (Not that we are much given to celebrating birthdays in Our Square.)

“Oh, you men! You men! I've just telephoned the Little Red Doctor and he didn't know either. It's the second anniversary of the day MacLachan's Meg left him. Do you remember what happened last year, dominie?”

Did I remember! When Lawyer Sted-man had lured me to perjure my immortal soul before a magistrate, who let Mac off only upon the strength of a character sketch (by me) that would have overpraised any one of the Twelve Apostles! I did remember.

“Very well, then. You and the doctor are to take him away this evening. Far away and bring him back sober.”

We did our best. And we almost succeeded. For it was close on midnight and Mac was sleepily homebound between us before what he had drunk--against a rising current of our protests--awoke the devil of music in his brain. We were cutting across Second Avenue when he began:

“I'll tell you a story without any sham. In Holland there lived Mynheer van Flam, Who every morning said: 'I am The richest merchant in Rotterdam, Ri-tu, di-nu, di-nu--da--na--day! Ri-tu, di-nu, di-nay!”

From the shadow of a tree there moved one of those brazen and piteous she-ghosts that haunt the locality. She addressed the three of us with hopeful impartiality. MacLachan shook himself free of our arms and walked close to her, staring strangely into her face.

“I've got a daughter in your line of trade,” he said.

He spoke quietly, but the she-ghost read his eyes. She shrank back trembling, stammered something, and hurried away.

Not until we entered Our Square, after ten minutes of strained silence, did MacLachan look up from the pavement.

“Was there a lassie I spoke to?” he asked vaguely. “What did I say to her?” The Little Red Doctor told him circumstantially. “Personally, I think you're a liar,” he added.

“Do ye?” wistfully answered the tailor, slumping upon a bench. “I take it kind of ye that ye do. But I'm no liar. Once and for all I'll tell ye both. Then ye'll know, and we'll bury it. When my Meg left me I began to die--inside. The last thing in me to die was my pride. When that was dead too--or I thought it so--I set out to seek her. I found her. It was just off Sixth Avenue. In the broad o' the afternoon it was, and there she stood bedizened like yon poor hussy that spoke to us. Raddled with paint too; raddled to the eyes. But the eyes had not changed. They looked at me straight and brave and hard. I had meant well by her, however I might find her. God knows I did! But at the sight of her so, my gorge rose. 'What _are_ ye,' says I, 'that ye should come into the light of day wearing shame on yer face?' Her look never wavered--you mind how fearless she always was, dominie--though she must have seen I was near to killing her with my naked hands. 'I'm as you see me. Take me or leave me,' she says. So I left her to go her ways, and I went mine.” There was a long silence. Then the Little Red Doctor deliberately measured off a short inch on MacLachan's forefinger.

“You're not _that_ much of a man, Mac,” said he, and flipped the hand from him. “Do you take him home, dominie; I haven't the stomach for any more of him to-night.”

With any other than the Little Red Doctor it would have been a lasting quarrel. But the official physician and healer of bodies (and souls at times) to Our Square is too full of other and more important things to find room for resentment. So when, a fortnight later, MacLachan sallied forth to the tune of “The Cork Leg,” and came back raving with pneumonia, it was, of course, the Red One who pulled him through it. And in that period of delirium and truth the wise little physician saw deep into the true MacLachan and realized that a spirit as wistful and craving as a child's was beating itself to death against the bars of the dour Scotch tradition of silence and repression.

“He'll kill himself with the drink,” said the Little Red Doctor to me after the tailor was restored to the Home of Fashion. “Though I'll stop him if I can. That's my business. Even so, maybe I'll be wrong. For the man's heart is breaking slowly. I've a notion that my old friend, Death, Our Square might do better with the case than I can.”

At shorter and ever shortening intervals thereafter the booming baritone rendition of “The Cork Leg” apprised Our Square that the tailor was “on it again.” One late August day, as the doctor was passing the Home of Fashion, he heard from behind the closed door the sound of MacLachan's mirthless revelry. He stepped in and found the Scot, cross-legged and with a bottle at his elbow, rocking in time to his own melody while he stylishly braided mine host Schmidt's pants (“trousers” is an effete term not favored by Arbiter MacLachan) for the morrow's picnic and outing of the Pinochle Club:--

“One day when he'd stuffed him as full as an egg A poor relation came to beg, But he kicked him out without broaching a keg, And in kicking him out he broke his own leg. Ri-tu, di-nu, di--”

“Shut up, Mac! Stop it.”

“I've stopped. You've rooned my music. The noblest song, bar Bobbie Burns--What's yer wish, little mannie?”

“I've some work for you.”

“I've no time--”

“It's important. I must surely have it to-morrow.”

“'Must is a master word, but will not is no man's slave,'” pronounced MacLachan, the oracle.

“Listen, Mac,” pleaded the other. “I've a consultation to-morrow, and I must have my other coat fixed up for it.”

“What's wrong wi' the garrment?”

“It's--it's ripped: torn across the skirt,” floundered the Little Red Doctor, who is a weak, unreliable prevaricator at best.

The dour tailor leaned forward and shook his goose at the visitor. “Peril yer salvation with no more black lies about yer black coat,” said he firmly. “It's' the drink ye're strivin' to wean me from. But I'm proof against yer strategy, ye pill-an'-pellet Macchiavelli! Ye've no more rip nor tear in yer black coat than I've a ring in my nose.”

“Well, I'd have made one, then,” returned the shameless doctor.

“Ye'd have wasted time and money. Go yer own gait an' fight yer old friend, Death. But leave me with my friend, the Drink.”

“Listen to me, Mac. As sure as you keep it up, just so sure the dissecting-room will get your kidneys and the devil will get your soul.”

Carefully setting aside the bottle, MacLachan leaned forward to fasten a claw on the Little Red Doctor's shoulder.

“Do _you_ listen now, and I'll tell ye a secret. While I'm still sober I'll tell it ye, so you'll believe it and fash me no more about the drink. Ye say the devil will get my soul. Ye're a backward prophet, mannie. He's got it. Yes, he's got it, an' another of the same blood to boot. An' all he ever gave me in trade is this,” he cried, pointing to the bottle. “So go an' save them as wants it, or stay an' listen:--

“'Mr. Doctor, says he, 'now you've done your work. By your sharp knife I lose one fork, But on two crutches I never will stalk, For I'll have a beautiful leg of cork.'”

“Mac.”

“Don't delay my work. I've to finish these pants before John Nelson comes to fetch me.”

“Who's John Nelson?”

“Friend of my seafarin' days. Now Captain Nelson, if ye please, in the coastwise trade, new back from the deep seas and the roaring trades with a tropical thirst. 'T is he sent me yon messenger,” and he indicated the bottle of rum. “Be easy. I'll not come back to Our Square till I'm sober.”

“If you do, I'll swear you into Bellevue with my own right hand,” declared the Little Red Doctor disgustedly. He slammed the door as he went out.

The next person to open that door was Captain John Nelson. There was a brief ceremonial in which the captain's messenger played an important rôle, the newcomer joined his voice, for old friendship's sake, in the refrain of MacLachan's favorite ballad, and shortly thereafter the twain were seen arm in arm making a straight course across the open for unknown lands. All that we of Our Square had to judge MacLachan's sea comrade by was a stumping gait, a plump figure, a brown and good-humored face, and a most appalling interpretation of the second part in simple harmony.

We were to see him once again, briefly; to hear from his lips the events of that astonishing evening. Of the Odyssey of the sailor and the tailor there is little to be said. Crisscross and back, along Broadway, from Fourteenth Street upward, it ran, coming to a stop shortly before theater-closing time at a small restaurant which, I am told, has a free-and-easy rather than an unsavory repute. There they sat down to a bit of supper, having had, as the captain pathetically stated later, not a bite to eat since dinner at eight o'clock. I still possess the worthy mariner's “chart of the operations,” as he terms it, sketched in order that we landlubbers of Our Square might comprehend fully how it all developed. From this masterpiece of cartography I learn that the two friends occupied a side table some halfway down the room, Captain Nelson facing the rear. At the next table back, and therefore directly in his view, sat a couple, the lady spreading so much canvas that she covered all of ninety degrees, whereby the mariner means, I take it, that his neighbor's hat shut off his view of the prospect beyond. Food and drinks being ordered, MacLachan had just leaned back to a discussion of the relative merits of Burns and Garlyle when the orchestra struck into a tune not unlike “The Cork Leg.” To the scandal and distress of the captain, MacLachan straightway lifted up his voice:--

“A tinker in Rotterdam, 't would seem, Had made cork legs his study and theme, Each joint was as strong as an iron beam And the springs were a compound of clockwork and steam. Ri-tu----

The diplomatic dissuasions of the head waiter, added to the pained and profane protests of his companion, induced the singer to stop at that point. But the lady-under-full-sail arose with a proud, disgusted expression and stalked out, drawing her escort in her wake and uttering loud and refined reflections upon the vulgar environment. Thus was left to Captain Nelson, resuming his seat, a clear view to the far-rear table. This table, he was aesthetically pleased to note, was occupied by a distinctively pretty girl. The girl, as he was humanly affected in perceiving, was exhibiting what, all silly mock modesty apart, he could interpret only as a marked interest in his own romantic and attractive personality.

“What for are you swelling up like a bullpout, John?” inquired his companion, who, having his back turned, had seen nothing of the byplay.

The sailor waved a jaunty hand. “Nothing; nothing at all. It often happens to me. Just a pretty lass in the offing flying signals.”

Without turning, MacLachan made some references of a libelous character concerning a Babylonian lady whose antiquity is the only excuse for her even being mentioned by respectable lips.

“Babylon, Long Island?” queried the captain. “I've got an aunt lives there. You think this young lady comes from those parts?”

“How do I know?” growled the tailor, and explained in biting terms that his citation was symbolic, not geographic.

“Hum!” said the seafarer. “She's a little high-colored, I admit, but that don't make her what you say. Anyway, I'll just run down and speak a word of politeness to her. By the time you've finished that drink and the next I'll be back.”

The incognita received Captain Nelson with a direct and unsmiling handshake.

“You know me,” she instructed him under her breath as a waiter came up. “We're old acquaintances.” Then in full voice: “I hardly recognized you at first. How long is it since I've seen you?” Necessity for immediate invention was obviated by the opportune arrival of the waiter. Glancing at the tall, icy glass in front of his new acquaintance, the bold mariner said: “I'll take the same,” and was considerably disconcerted when the waiter passed along the word: “One lemonade.”

“Now,” said the girl sharply as soon as the waiter had left, “who is your friend that sings?”

“His name's MacLachan. He's all right, only--”

“Bring him here.”

“But first can't I--”

“Bring him here,” repeated the girl inexorably. “I like his voice.”

Sadly the shattered seafarer retraced his course. MacLachan listened, demurred, growled, acquiesced. As the pair walked along, the tailor reeling a bit, the girl was busy searching for something under the table. She did not lift her face until the men were beside her. Then she rose and looked up at MacLachan.

“Dad,” she said.

MacLachan went stark, staring sober in one pulse-beat. But all he said was “Oh!” That is all, I am told, that men say when they are shot through the heart. Nelson slid a chair behind his friend's trembling knees. He sat down. Bending forward, he glared into the garishly splotched face of his daughter and put his hand to his throat, struggling for speech. A door behind closed, and a cheerful, boyish voice said:--

“Hello, little girl. Been waiting long?”

The wild-rose face dimpled and blossomed into sweetness under the layers of paint. “Hello, Jim-boy. Get yourself a chair.”

“Introduce me to your friends,” said the newcomer.

“That one used to be my old dad,” said the girl slowly.

The young man whistled as he drew in his chair. “Quite a family party,” he remarked.

“Who is this?” demanded MacLachan.

“My husband.”

“Your--your husb--” MacLachan took a deep gulp from the lemonade glass which the resourceful captain thoughtfully thrust into his hand. “Why, he--he's a mere laddie. Can he support ye?”

“He's making seventy-five a week every week in the year,” said the girl quietly. “And I'm good for about that average.”

“You? In what trade?” demanded the father slowly and fearfully.

“The movies. Both of us. He's a set designer. I'm an _ingénue_. Why else would I be all gommered up like this” (she touched her cheeks), “not having time to wash off my make-up?”

“How long have ye been in the business?” faltered MacLachan.