Part 7

A PLAYWRIGHT named Euripides was the means of bringing us together. He sat hunched upon a bench in Our Square--not Euripides, of course, but this strange disciple of his--over a little book. When the church clock struck twelve he arose and unfolded himself to preposterous lengths. He stepped casually over a four-foot wire, strode across forbidden grass plots, and leaned pensively against the northern boundary fence. Although it was a six-foot fence, he jutted considerably above it. I glanced from him back to the bench he had just quitted. There lay his book. I picked it up. It was “The Bacchae.” In the original, if you please!

Now, to find a gigantic and unexplained stranger in the metropolitan hurry and stress of Our Square perusing the classic version of the very 'Greekest and most mystic of dramas, by the spluttering ray of Jove's own lightning pent up and set to work in a two-by-one frosted globe at so many cents per kilowatt, is a startling experience for a quiet, old semi-retired pedagogue like myself. I pocketed the volume (which was in a semiuncial text like running tendrils) and sat down to consider its owner. Another of the Thunderer's bottled bolts diffused its light where he now stood, and set forth his face. It was young and comely and gallant, with a wrapt, intent melancholy; the face of a seeker, baffled but still defiant of despair. It seemed to be turned toward a star that I could not see.

I sat and waited for Terry the Cop to arrive on his stated rounds. If that shrewd young guardian of the local peace did not already know about the classical stranger, he could be depended upon to find out. When his heavy tread paused before my bench I indicated the trespassing giant. “Terry,” said I, “what is that?”

“That,” replied Terry promptly, “is a Nut.”

“Where does it come from?”

“Search me, dominie. It just kinda drops in.”

“Often?”

“Every night.”

“Why haven't I seen it before?”

“You hit the hay too early. This bird is an owl, and it don't begin to hoot till late.”

“Hoot?” I repeated. Terry's symbolism sometimes tends to the obscure.

“Stick around a few minutes,” advised the wise young policeman, “and you'll hear something.”

“Is he an amateur astronomer?” I asked. “Or what is it he is staring at?”

Terry pointed. “Look between those two roofs. See a little light, way up there?” I did. “That's it. That's the window.”

“Ah,” said I. “Romeo, I suppose.”

“Long-distance to the balcony,” returned Terry the Cop, who does not lack literary background. “That's the upper wing of the Samaritan Hospital, two blocks away. Sh-h-h! He's going to begin.” The stranger had taken from his coat a short, slender object which he fitted together with precision. Now he threw up his head and set it to his lips. Faint and pure as the song of a bird, heard across the hushed reaches of a forest, the music came to us. It was a wild, soaring melody unknown to me, but as I listened I thought of all the songs with which reed and pipe have ever answered to the breath of man; Pan's minstrels, and the glorified penny whistle of Svengali and the horns of elfland faintly blowing, and the witchery of the Pied Piper of Hamelin; and it seemed to me that all these and more blended in the rise and fall of those magic measures.

Silence fell. A wakened sleeper in a tree twittered a sleepy request for more. The player had lowered his instrument and was leaning against the rail, gazing. At that distance there could have been no answer from the far hospital window; the tones of his pipe were so soft as hardly to be audible where we stood. Yet he presently nodded and threw up his hand, and his face was transfigured with a wistful passion as he lifted the slender pipe to his lips again. This time, indeed, I knew what he played. It was that music which, above all other, embodies the soul and spirit of immortal youth; youth that hopes and fears and despairs and hopes again; youth that hungers and loves and suffers; youth that ever, through all turmoil and grief and wreckage, is imperishably young and immortally lovely, the music of “Bohême.” Again the strains sank and died in the darkness.

“That's all,” Terry the Cop informed me. “It's their signal. And he always ends on that.”

“Signal? At that distance? Do you mean to tell me she--whoever she is --can hear?”

“Whether she hears or not, she seems to get somethin' over to this Romeo guy.”

“No, Terry,” I said. “Not Romeo. An older singer and a greater.” And, with my hand on the little volume in my pocket, I gave my policeman friend the benefit of Gilbert Murray's matchless translation:--

“In the elm woods and the oaken, There where Orpheus harped of old, And the trees awoke and knew him, And the wild things gathered to him, As he sang amid the broken Glens his music manifold.”

“Some rag!” said Terry the Cop admiringly.

“That, Terry,” said I, indicating the stranger, who was once more lost in watchfulness, “is Orpheus.”

This was too much of a strain on Terry's classic lore. “You're in wrong there, dominie. He don't belong to any Orpheus nor Arion nor Liedertafel. He's a Greek and his name is Philip, two pops, and an oulos.”

“All very well; Terry,” said I, trying him out. “But does that give him the right to play a musical instrument in a public place at an unlawful hour?”

“Come off, dominie,” said Terry the Cop uneasily. “He ain't doing any harm.”

“Disturbing the peace,” I pursued severely, “and tramping down the park grass against the statute thereunto made and provided. What do you let him do it for, Terry?”

“Aw, I kinda like the guy,” admitted Terry shamefacedly. “He's a nut. But he's a good nut. I'm sorry for him. He's up against it with that girl. She ain't ever coming out of the hospital, I guess. Besides, he did me a good turn once.”

The good turn, it appeared, had consisted in the prompt and effective wielding of a cane, unceremoniously borrowed from a passer-by when a contingent of the Shadow Gang from Second Avenue had undertaken, in pure wantonness of spirit, to “jump” Terry. Subsequently, Orpheus had initiated Terry into some technical and abstruse mysteries of stick work, whereby, he explained, the Orthian shepherds defended themselves against robbers and wolves alike.

“I told him to keep a stick with him,” said Terry. “He'll need it, for that bunch will get to him some time. They don't forget.”

No weapon was in the Greek's hand, however, as he turned away toward the nearest exit. Halfway there he paused, felt in his pocket, and hurried over to his bench with a look of dismay. I met him, holding out the precious book. He took it with a sigh of relief, thanking me with precise but curiously accented courtesy.

“It is a beautiful text,” I observed. “You can read it?” he said with kindling eyes. “You read the Greek?”

“Sure,” put in Terry the Cop. “The dominie knows all the languages from Chinese to Williamsburg. Domine, make you acquainted with Mr. Phil.”

Thus I met Orpheus. We sat on a bench until the stroke of three brought me to my senses, while he declaimed selected passages in a voice as of rolling waters. That was the first of many nights of Dionysian revelry on the slopes of Mount Olympus, with “The Bacchae” for guidebook and the strange piper for leader. Never would he pipe for me, however. If I wished to hear the soft marvel of his music I must wait until midnight and stand apart in the shadow to listen while he played to the far-away beam of light in the hospital wing. Though our acquaintance ripened swiftly into a species of intimacy, he made no reference to the devotion in which his life centered. He had the gift of an impenetrable reserve.

Concerning himself, he was only less reticent. From casual references, however, I gathered that he was the son of a merchant of Lamia, educated in England, and sent to this country on an errand of commerce, and that he would long since have returned but for the light in that window.

It is not good for man to live on hope alone. So I sought to involve my Greek in the close-woven interests of Our Square. I took him to dine at the Elite Restaurant, and introduced him to Polyglot Elsa, the cashier (who put a fearful strain on his courtesy with her barbarous modern Greek), and impressed him into the amateur police to escort MacLachan the Tailor home, drunk and singing “The Cork Leg,” and even got him to pipe gay tunes of an early evening for our little asphalt-dancers to practice by; but always back of his gentle courtesy and tolerant kindness there was an aloofness of the spirit, as if he had but stepped out, a godlike spectator, from the limbo of some remote world hidden behind the tendrils and leafage of that wonderful semiuncial text. Then one night, when he had sent his heart and hope and longing out upon the wings of music through the night, I asked him to help me soothe the wakefulness of Leon Coventry. Together we climbed the stifling stairs of the old mansion to the top floor where Leon the Gnome lay eating his heart out and staring from an empty chair that whispered to the door of an empty room, its oaken bar fallen, its little white bed smooth, its one flower withered and dead on the window sill. Little was said between the swarthy Gnome on the bed and the splendid young god sitting beside him, but there passed between them some subtle understanding of the spirit. Orpheus made his music for the sick man; almost such music as he had sent winging through the outer darkness. At the end he took the Gnome's gnarled hand in his own.

“She will come back,” he said. “Believe always that she will come back. It is only by faith that we hold the dreams that are truer than reality.”

Outside Orpheus turned to me. “You believe that, do you not?” he asked.

I muttered something.

“I must believe it,” he said vehemently. “I must--or there is nothing left.” Then, simply, as if he were relating some impersonal anecdote, he told me his story, one of those swift, inevitable, pregnant romances of two outlanders in this great wilderness which we call New York.

“I met her in a language class. We were both taking Spanish. It was to help her in the corporation office where she worked. We lunched at the same place. We used to talk, to help out over lessons. She was French. Her name was Toinette.”

He handed me his watch, open. The print was dim and vague, but in the very poise of the head was the incarnation of mirth and youth. “She is very lovely,” I said. I should have said it in any case. In this case it happened to be true.

“She is little and quick and brown and laughing. We Greeks love laughter. She laughed at me because she said I had solemn eyes like an owl. Then I kissed her and she did not laugh, but clung to me, and I felt her tears. That evening we heard 'La Bohême.' hand in hand, and I played it to her afterward. I have played it to her ever since. When I would speak to her of marriage she would set her fingers to my lips and the joy would die out of her face. Once she said I must go back and forget her. Then it was my turn to laugh. We do not love and forget, we Greeks.

“She had a brother serving in the Argonne. He died dragging a wounded comrade to safety. She was very proud of it. But the heart that had been working so poorly almost stopped working at all when they brought her the news. She sent for me to tell me that she must go to the hospital. That was why she would not let me speak of marriage. Her heart had always been weak, and she feared she might be an invalid and a burden on me. As if that mattered! 'So I could not let you speak,' she said, 'because I loved you so, and I might have been weaker than my heart.' They took her to the Samaritan. That is her room, just beyond where you see the speck of light. Every night I stand where I can see it and make my music for her. So it was arranged between us.”

“But,” I began, and bit my tongue into silence.

“True,” he said equably. “At such a distance she cannot hear. It does not matter. She knows I make my music for her. That is all that matters.”

“How long since you have seen her?”

“April the 24th.”

“And this is August! Four months! Good Heavens, man, how is that?”

“'_Anangke,_ Fate.” he murmured. “It could not be otherwise.”

“Surely it could,” I protested. “Won't they let you see her?”

He shook his head.

“But that's barbarous! Think what she must be suffering.”

“Oh, no. She understands. It is I who suffer.”

“Needlessly,” I cried. “It can be arranged. You _must_ see her. Four months! Will you let me arrange it?”

“It is useless.”

I believe I took him by the shoulder and shook him. “Don't be a fool,” I bade him savagely. “I tell you, you _shall_ see her. At once. To-morrow.”

He turned upon me eyes like those of an animal that pleads dumbly against torture. “It cannot be,” he said.

“Why?”

“She is dead,” he whispered.

“Dead?” I loosed my grasp on him. “But you play--How can she--When did you--” All my thought and speech were jumbled within me. “Dead?” I finally contrived to get out. “When did she die?”

“On the last day of April. When they told me of it the little children were dancing in the park. She was like a little lovely child herself. They told me she was dead, but it is only at times that I am weak enough to believe them.”

I gazed at him, utterly bewildered. He returned my look with a gaze of infinite despair.

“To-morrow,” he said bravely, “I shall again know that she is alive and loving me.”

Later I learned how the blow had fallen; a grim and brutal experience for so gentle a spirit as his.

Three weeks after his Toinette was admitted to the Samaritan a forlorn-hope operation was determined upon. Happily, Orpheus knew nothing about it until it was all over, with unexpected promise of success and even complete cure. Once a week they let him see her. On the other six days he might call at the office for such information as a stolid and blank official chose to dole out. But no official could interpose his stolidity between Orpheus, piping at dead of night, and his Eurydice lying happily awake in the far upper wing of the hospital, knowing that he made his music for her and perhaps hearing it--who knows?--with the finer ear of the spirit. Vary his choice as he might, he told me, she always knew what he had played and could tell when they next saw each other. So all went well with those two young, brave hearts, and the meager reports grew increasingly hopeful, until one bright spring morning Orpheus paid his unfailing daily visit for information. A brusque young brute of an interne was at the desk, the regular official having stepped out.

“Twenty-one?” he repeated in reply to Orpheus's gentle-voiced question. “That's the heart case. Died yesterday afternoon.”

“But last night I played to her,” protested Orpheus in a piteous, stricken whisper, “and she heard and answered. It cannot be.”

“Nutty!” said the interne to the information official who returned at this point. “Takes'em that way sometimes. Better get him out before he busts loose.”

They got him out without trouble. He wandered into Our Square and watched the children dancing-in the May. They seemed to him like unreal creatures moving in a world of unrealities. More and more unreal grew everything about him until late that night he faced the grim reality of a barred door which kept him from his beloved dead, and that door he attacked with such fury and power that it took two policemen, in addition to the hospital corps, to subdue him. As he was a foreigner and vague and sorrow-stricken, the magistrate naturally gave him two months. He came out dazed but steadied. The one hold he had upon happiness was the delusion to which he so pathetically clung, the pretense, passionately cherished, that she was still alive. Poor Orpheus! He had indeed gone down into Hades for his Eurydice and stayed there. If he could find solace in his limbo of minor madness, perhaps that was best for him.

So thought the Little Red Doctor, wise in human suffering, to whom alone I told the story of Orpheus. Said the Little Red Doctor first: “There are times when I blame my old friend Death for doing a job by halves”; and second: “Cure him? Who wants to cure peace with pain! Let him play his music”; and third: “God help that interne if I ever meet up with him!”

If Death resented his friendly opponent's strictures, he never showed it, but kept on doing business as usual in Our Square. And Orpheus continued to make, among the broken glens of our brick-and-stucco sky line, his music manifold to ears that heard not. As for the interne, the Little Red Doctor did, in the fullness of time, meet up with him, and improved the occasion to lay down certain ethics and principles of conduct as pertaining to the profession of healing. Whereupon the interne, who should have known better, being not more than half again as big as the Little Red Doctor, treated the lesson in a light and flippant vein, and asserted that when he wished to learn his business he wouldn't apply to a half-boiled shrimp.

Thus it happened that he who had come forth from the hospital an interne intact and unafraid returned thereto a battered and terrified patient with a broken nose and two displaced ribs urgently requiring attention. The practice of medicine in Our Square, as exemplified by so thoroughgoing an exponent as the Little Red Doctor, is not wholly a lily-fingered science.

_Minora cano!_ And why should I sing of such lesser matters as the correction of the interne, when there awaits my historical pen a conflict worthy of Euripides's own strophes! Cyrus the Gaunt and the Bonnie Lassie had been serving the midnight rarebit to three of their uptown friends who had dropped down through the slums to the friendly little old house with the dancing figurines in the window, and Cyrus had undertaken to pilot his friends to the corner, lest their evening raiment be locally misinterpreted and resented. Coming, later than my wont, from the Elite Restaurant, I crossed Our Square a few rods in advance of them. Orpheus stood in his corner, piping to his lost young love. From without there approached him swiftly a dark group, close gathered. It was the Shadow Gang, from Second Avenue, bent upon reprisals. There were eight or nine of them, under the leadership of “Mixer” Boyle, a local middle-weight of ill repute. They closed in upon the Greek, and as I ran, shouting for Terry the Cop, I saw him go down under the pack. More than music was in that soul, however. If he was Orpheus, he had something, too, in him of Thersites and Achilles and Agamemnon. Like a bear struggling from beneath an onset of dogs, he up-heaved his big shoulders. From behind me came an answering shout, not Terry the Cop, indeed, but the next best thing, Cyrus the Gaunt, followed closely by the Rev. Morris Cartwright, Gerrit Bascom, and two other visions of white shirt fronts protruding and black coat tails streaming in the wind. They passed me as if I were a milestone, and the battle was joined.

Cyrus the Gaunt is a mighty man of his hands. But the hands are those of an amateur. Mixer Boyle's are those of a professional. They crossed, and Cyrus went down under a left swing. Before the Mixer could turn he was toppled with the blessing (full arm to the ear) of the Rev. Morris Cartwright. Two others fell upon the Rev. Morris and the Rev. Morris fell upon the Mixer, and then they all rose and went at it again.

I am old who once was young, but never do I look upon the stricken field without remembering that in my prime I was a man of deeds and juggled deftly with seventy-five-pound dumb-bells. Talents of this sort are never wholly wasted. Upon attaining the outskirts of the mêlée I selected the largest hostile bulk in reach, seized it around the hips, and lifted it clear. It struggled and developed a solid fist which, in contact with my jaw, utterly destroyed my equilibrium. I fell, but contrived so to twist myself that the hostile bulk fell beneath me. It lay quiet. But when I strove to rise, a paralysis across my shoulders strongly advised against it. So I sat upon my captive's chest and dizzily watched the combat.

Now do I fully understand why war correspondents are not permitted at the front. It destroys their special usefulness. The fighting spirit and historical accuracy are totally incompatible. Nobody could have had a better view of the stirring events which succeeded than I. The forces and topography of the combat were clear in my mind: nearly two to one in favor of the enemy, but with our party fighting on home soil and in momentary hope of reenforcements. Yet all that I can recall is the sound of thumps and stifled curses and a confused mess of strained faces, violently working arms, and broad white shirt fronts now splotched with a harsher color. Then it seemed to me that I saw a little circle cleared about the mighty Greek, and a heavy cane which he brandished by the middle in both hands gave me the clue. The odds were balancing better, though still with the invaders. As if the Fates themselves were concerned to assure a more even field, there sounded a far, furious whoop, and the Little Red Doctor descended joyously upon the riot. At this critical juncture my captive came to and bit me in the leg. I lost all interest, temporarily, in the art and practice of war correspondence.

Having secured a hold (not prescribed by the formal rules of wrestling, I am informed) with my knee upon my opponent's neck, I turned to view the battle again. The defenders were against the fence now; but alas! the Rev. Morris Cartwright was on his hands and knees, and one of the other uptown knights was reeling. The gangsters pressed in hard, striving to edge around the Greek and get him in the rear. Cyrus, with his heavy fists, guarded one side of him; the Little Red Doctor was fighting like a fury on the other. I prayed (kneeling upon my captive's neck) for Heaven's success to the just, and Terry the Cop.

A shrill shout marked the next swift development.

“_Look out! He's got a knife!_”

A bright gleam of steel slanted toward Cyrus's shoulder. But the deft Greek had seen it. He chopped with his stick. The knife whirled free and descended. Like a football team plunging for a loose ball, the contestants dived for it. For a moment they groveled, struggling. Then out of the mass rose a shriek of the uttermost agony. It seemed to me that the group was stricken into sudden silence and immobility. Slowly it disintegrated, drawing apart in two sections. A half-doubled figure ran, staggering and dodging, into the shadows. A policeman's whistle shrilled. The gangsters turned and ran. Mine ran too. He tried, I regret to say, to give me a parting kick as I let him up. On the ground lay the knife. There was just a little trickle of red on it.

Cyrus picked it up and looked around. Every man of our party was battered, but none was stabbed.

“Must have got his own man in the mix-up,” quoth the Little Red Doctor. “Come to my place and get fixed up.” After much minor repairing with plaster and patch we separated upon our respective ways, disheveled, disreputable, but exultant. Orpheus, with his face one mass of cuts and bruises, went back, if you will believe it, to play the final “Bohême” to the little beam of light in the window.

“I hope,” he whispered to me, “that she could not hear the noise. It would frighten her.”

In consideration of my strained back the Little Red Doctor escorted me home. As we set foot to the steps we heard a soft groan from the black areaway. From between two barrels the physician dragged a cowering wretch. His hands were pressed to his abdomen. There was a pool of blood where he had crouched.

“The Samaritan Hospital for you,” said the Little Red Doctor.

“Not me!” snarled the youth. “Guess again.”

“Got any last message?” asked the doctor coolly.

The young fellow's eyelids fluttered. “Am I croaked?” he said.

“Unless you're on the table within the hour.”