Part 8

The gangster summoned his bravado. “Let'er go as she lies. No Samaritan for mine. I was there oncet. They don't allow you no cigs. 'No smoking.' I'll croak foist.”

The Little Red Doctor scratched his head in perplexity. I looked at the wounded man. His face was sullen and brave, but his hands were quivering.

“Take him up to my room, doctor,” I said.

That is how I came by my first lodger. His name was Pinney the Rat.

After the Little Red Doctor had saved his body, many and various visitors climbed my stair for the purpose of saving the Rat's soul. The Rev. Morris Cartwright came all the way downtown (with an ear tastefully framed in surgeon's plaster) to convert him to decency. Cyrus the Gaunt strove manfully to convert him to the gospel of work with offers of regenerating labor in Canadian wildernesses. MacLachan the Tailor undertook to curse him into sobriety. Our French David and our German Jonathan dropped in separately to forecast to him respectively the Entente and the Alliance arguments of the Great War and to hint at enlistment when he should be recovered. Herman Groll undertook to convert him to music. All of this he accepted with noncommittal and rather contemptuous tolerance. It served to pass the time of his halting recovery. As a patient he was docile; as a guest he was not inconsiderate, though I could hardly say that he was grateful. To Orpheus alone of his visitors he exhibited a distinctive attitude. When the Greek dropped in upon us Pin-ney's face became a mask of cold watchfulness. He would freeze up into silence, following the big, gentle visitor's every movement with his unwinking eyes. The Little Red Doctor noted this with uneasiness.

“That's not a rat,” he warned me. “It's a rattlesnake. And I don't like the way it looks at our Greek friend.”

“What can he have against Orpheus?”

“Probably thinks it was he that knifed him.”

“It wasn't. I can swear to that much.”

“Save your breath. You'll never argue the resolve to get even out of the mind of a gangster.”

“What shall I do? Tell Orpheus to keep away?”

“No. But see that our patient doesn't get his hands on any sort of weapon.” Strangely enough, the wounded man seemed to exercise a strange fascination upon the Greek. Day after day he would come and sit, talking or reading, while the gangster lay silent, maturing murder in his soul. What a pair they made; the secretive, time-abiding, venomous Rat and the gentle madman!

In time the Rat's patience was rewarded. He got his weapon. He got it from the Bonnie Lassie. She had taken to dropping in upon us to see my lodger. She, at least, did not try to convert him. At first she just sat and twinkled at him, and the man does not live who can resist the Bonnie Lassie when she twinkles. On her second visit she brought him cigarettes in profusion and announced that she was going to sculp him in miniature, and proceeded forthwith to do it. Before the job was done they were sworn comrades. She would sit by his couch with her modeling tools and clay and work while he boasted in a hoarse, thin pipe of the evil things he had done. He was openly flattered that she should make him the chief figure of a group to be called “Ambush.” One day while she was absorbed in a difficult line he quietly annexed her compasses. A pair of compasses is two excellent stilettos. Pinney the Rat secreted his booty in the bed. That evening I found him cautiously practicing, first with his right, then with his left hand, what I supposed to be that method pugilistically termed an uppercut. Had I been more expert, I might have noted that his thumb was turned sidewise and upward.

Concern and ignorance were choicely blended in the Rat's manner when, next day, the Bonnie Lassie came in to inquire for her lost tool, bringing as usual some “smokes.”

“Do you like this kind better?” she asked.

“They're all right,” said the Rat. “But, say, lady, not wishin' to ast too much--”

“Go on,” she encouraged him as he--

“Woddya know,” pursued the patient hesitantly, “about a big, fat cig with funny letters like this on?”

“Those look like Greek letters,” said the Bonnie Lassie, studying the marks which he had scrawled. “I'll see if I can get some for you.”

Search for that brand proved unavailing, however. It seemed to be a special importation.

“Where did you ever smoke them?” she asked the Rat.

“Over to th' S'maritan.”

“Do they serve cigarettes in the hospital?”

“They do--I don't think! It was a little lady there give'em to me on the quiet. She seen what them big stiffs o' doctors never seen, that I was goin' batty for a smoke. She sneaked'em in to me. She was one real baby! Some guy outside useter send'em in to her to give me.”

“Was she a nurse?”

“No; a case. Pretty near all in when she came. After she got well nobody wanted her to leave; and she didn't want to, I guess. So they made a job for her. I useter tell her she was hired out for sunshine. I ain't seen her since.” He sighed.

“Would you like to see her?”

Pinney the Rat's eyes became human. “Oh, Gee!” he murmured.

“I'll bring her,” said the Bonnie Lassie. “Whom shall I ask for?”

“Jus' leave word for Miss Tony that Pin--that No. 7, Men's Surgical--is hurted again, but O. K., and could she come and see him, maybe, some day.” She came at once, Pinney the Rat's Miss Tony. She was little and quick and brown and lovely, but not laughing. There was a depth of woe and loss in her big eyes. Let that be my excuse that I did not at once identify her as Eurydice--that and the fact that, as far as I knew, Eurydice was dead and buried these four months and lived only in Orpheus's resolutely self-deluded mind.

For Pinney's sake, his visitor summoned up the phantom of past gayety. She shook, first her finger and then her little fist at him, upbraiding him in quaintly accented English, while he lay and visibly worshiped.

“You haf sayed that you will go straight. An' now voilà you, wit' your pro-mess broke an' a stick in your estomac.”

“Yessum,” said Pinney the Rat.

“That learn you something? That learn you to be'ayve?”

“Yessum,” assented that murderous gangster like an abashed schoolboy.

“You give me your han' now that you be a good boy an' go no more wit' _les Apaches_ an' get you a job?”

The Rat's face hardened. He squirmed away from those clear eyes. “I got one little account to square up,” he muttered. “After that if I make my getaway, I'll join the Salvationists if you tell me to. An' say, Miss Tony, you know them cigs you useta gimme? Them with the dinky letters on?”

The girl's trembling hand went to her throat. She looked at him strangely.

“If I could get a handful o' them,” he continued shyly, “they--I--it'd kinda remind me when--when you ain't here. How's me unknown friend on the outside that useta send'em in?”

Miss Tony leaned her head against the wall and burst into a passion of tears. I led her out, still sobbing, while the ex-Men's Surgical No. 7 sat up in his bed and cursed himself with wild, blasphemous, wondering oaths.

Whatever surmise our young gangster may have entertained he kept to himself. And, on the following morning, sterner matters claimed his attention, for, while I was out, Orpheus, the Greek, dropped in, and Pinney, once more the Rat, saw the hour of his revenge upon his supposed assailant at hand. For the Greek, forgetful of caution, had seated himself well within arm's length of the patient's couch. Beneath the sheet the Rat clutched the needle-pointed compasses and waited. Should he risk the jump and the stroke? No! He might miss. And he knew, from the memory of the Battle of Our Square, the Greek's swiftness of eye and hand. He must get him nearer. It was a time for strategy.

“Hey, sport. Got a smoke on you?”

Orpheus drew a box from his pocket, extracted a fattish cylinder, and leaned forward to the other--not quite far enough. “Gimme a light, will ye?” piped the Rat hoarsely, taking the cigarette in his left hand.

His right was working, wriggling slowly, slowly out from beneath the sheet. Orpheus struck a match and leaned toward the bed. His heart was almost over the lurking point. Slowly advancing the tip for the flame, Pinney the Rat--now the Rattlesnake with death in his stroke--raised his arm to blind his victim's vision against the blow. The movement brought the flimsy-papered cylinder directly before his own eyes. Familiar characters leaped out at him from the paper.

“Gawd!” croaked Pinney the Rat.

Though it had the sound of an oath, it was perhaps as near a prayer as the gangster had ever uttered. His frame, tense as a spring, slumped back among the covers. Orpheus dropped the match. “What is it?” he cried with quick concern. “You suffer?”

“Where didje get that cig?”

“The cigarette? From Greece. I always smoke this kind.”

“Have ye--didje ever send 'em to a little lady in the S'maritan Hospital fer a--a guy she was good to?”

“Yes.” The Greek's eyes widened. He began to shake through all his frame. “My God! You knew her?”

“Did I _know_ her?” The Rat turned away and closed his eyes. His right hand moved furtively under the bed clothing, away from his body. Something fell, with a soft clink between the bed and the wall. The Rat shuddered and sighed like a man freed from a great peril, “Go on. Spiel,” he bade Orpheus.

“Spiel?” queried the trembling Greek. “Spill your talk. Tell me about her.” Orpheus opened his heart and spoke. To that silent listener (for Pinney the Rat uttered no word) he poured forth his love and longing and his delusion, speaking of the girl as if she still lived. One word from Pinney might have brought the climax, perhaps disastrously, for that mind, desperately clinging to its delusion, might have collapsed under too sudden a shock of reality. The Rat lay quiet, drinking it in and revolving tangled problems. There were strange echoes in the Greek's talk which he failed to understand.

As I came in I met, on the stairs, Orpheus going out. His face was alight with a strange radiance.

“That Mr. Pinney knows her,” he said. “He knows my Toinette. She was once good to him.” Then, in a confidential and triumphant whisper: “So she lives in another heart beside my own.” It was as if his delusion, his creed, his religion of love that was stronger than death, had been blessed with convincing proof.

Wondering greatly, I returned to my patient. He was lost in thought and greeted me only with an absent nod. Not until I started the tea for our luncheon did he speak. “Say, boss, about that big wop.”

“Well?”

“He's a good guy, ain't he?”

“He is.”

“But--say. A little bit on the slant here?” He knuckled his head. “Huh?”

“Perhaps. What have you been saying to him?”

“Nothin'. I been listenin'. A great line of talk about the little lady. But--say, boss. What's his kink?”

“Couldn't you tell?”

“Sometimes I thought I got him,” said the Rat reflectively. “And sometimes I don't get him at all. Seems like he speaks of _her_ like she was a dead person.”

“Well, she is.”

The Rat's jaw dropped. “Who is?”

“Orpheus's--the wop, as you call him--the woman he loved.”

“Are _you_ nutty, too? Wasn't she in here to see me only yesterday?”

Light broke in upon me in a great wave. “Merciful powers!” I shouted. “_Your_ Miss Tony--his Toinette? It can't be. She died in a hospital the day before May Day.”

“Ferget it! She moved out _cured_ a week before May Day. Don't I know? Didn't I go humping up to Room 21 to see her, and find an old hen with a face like a mustard plaster and a busted mainspring?” The number woke remembrance within me. “What became of the woman in 21?”

“Croaked a few days later.”

Then the whole tragic comedy of errors was made plain to me. In turn I made it clear to my lodger.

“Who's loony now?” he demanded triumphantly. “You chase out an' find the wop an' let's square this.”

All very simple, but there was the matter of Orpheus's mental condition to be considered. What would be the outcome of so violent a confirmation of his delusion? Or was it a delusion, since it was a fact? Neither the Rat nor I could lay any claim to be metaphysicians. Obviously this was a case for the Little Red Doctor, together with such consultants as he might care to call in.

At the summons of its official physician Our Square mustered its intellectual forces in the Bonnie Lassie's Studio and sat in solemn conclave upon the problem. First of all we sent for the Rat's Miss Tony, and what the Bonnie Lassie said to her in the little back room and what she said to the Bonnie Lassie is a secret of womankind. Not even Cyrus the Gaunt was told. All that we heard of it was a cry and a sound of happy sobbing and another sound of broken laughter; and then the little, quick, brown, lovely face was turned to us from the steps outside, and MacLachan observed that two Bonnie Lassies in one house was a strain on human credulity as well as on human eyesight, and the Bonnie Lassie returned to us with _her_ eyesight looking a trifle strained.

“Somebody at the Greek consulate,” said she, “told her that Mister Phil-il-op--Mr. Orpheopoulos had gone back to Greece, and she's been breaking her poor dear little heart over it. Men are _all_ imbeciles.”

“Thanking you in behalf of one and all,” returned Cyrus the Gaunt, “will the volcano of wisdom whom I have the felicity of calling wife tell us who is to break it to Orpheus?”

“Pinney the Rat.”

Several protests were promptly entered. “That roughneck?” said MacLachan, whose urgency in the cause of abstinence had not been well received. “Take thought of the effect on the poor, stray-witted Greek lad.”

“I'm not thinking of the effect upon him at all,” said the Bonnie Lassie. “I'm thinking of the effect upon Pinney.”

“Think aloud,” invited the Little Red Doctor. “What beneficial effect will the reunion of two loving hearts have upon an incised stab wound in a third party's abdomen?”

“Isn't this wound healed?”

“Practically.”

“Did you ever know any person to go crazy or get crazier from joy?”

“No.”

“There are your two patients disposed of, on the medical side. What I am attempting is an experiment in psychology. You've all had your chance at saving the Rat's soul. I'll have mine.”

She perched herself upon a modeling stool and expounded. The Rat, she explained, had never had an opportunity to do anything but harm in his life. Therefore he did harm with pride, because it was doing something. “He's like all of us; he wants to work to some effect. Give him a chance to make himself effective for good, and you may see a change.”

Upon which theory of vice and virtue the Little Red Doctor commented:--

“Sometimes the Bonnie Lassie thinks around queer corners with her mind, but she's got the wisest heart in Our Square.” So Pinney the Rat got his instructions and reluctant leave from his doctor to indulge in a brief midnight stroll that very night.

Our Square was haunted that midnight by uneasy figures slinking about in shadowy backgrounds. One by one Terry the Cop trailed them down only to be discomfited by successive discoveries of his own particular friends. The one logical object of suspicion, Pinney the Rat, sat openly on a bench and smoked and waited for Orpheus to finish his music. When it was over, the little guttersnipe went to meet the big Olympian. Carefully indeed had we rehearsed the Rat in a modulated method of breaking the news. But the gangster was an undisciplined soul and a direct. At the crisis he reverted to his own way, which perhaps was best. He put a hand on Orpheus's shoulder.

“Say, bo',” he said, “yer in wrong about the lady.”

The Greek's face quivered, in anticipation of another blow at the fabric of his precious dream. “I know,” he said.

“No, yeh don't know. She didn't croak. She's alive.”

Orpheus's hands went to his temples.

“She's alive and waiting for you in the dominie's hallway. Come wit' me. Ready? Hep!”

Then Cyrus the Gaunt, Terry the Cop, and I had to fall on the Little Red Doctor and pin him to a bench to keep him from ruining it all, for the great bulk of the Greek loosened in every fibre and he collapsed into the clutch of the fragile Rat in a manner calculated (so the maddened physician informed us in technical and violent terms) to rip every condemned stitch out of the latter's foreordained peritoneum. Presumably, however, the Little Red Doctor had stitched better than he knew. For Pinney straightened the big man up and marched him across the way. As the strange pair mounted the steps the vestibule door opened. A little, quick figure sped to meet them. We heard across the leafage of Our Square the cry of a man who has come back to life and of a woman who has come back to love. When my eyes, which are growing old and play me strange tricks, had cleared, the doors were closed and Pinney the Rat was playing watchdog on the steps, jealously guarding that sacred vestibule.

Oh, the vestibules of Our Square! What Arcadia has fostered a thousandth part of their romance! Between those narrow walls, behind those ill-guarded doors, in that pathetic travesty of solitude which is all that our teeming hive affords, what heights and depths of love and anguish, what hope and despair, what triumphs, what abnegations, what partings, what “infinite passion and the pain of finite hearts that yearn,” pass, and are forgotten! When the blight of ages shall lie heavy and dusty over a forgotten metropolis, when the last human habitation totters to its fall in some far future cataclysm, two lovers shall stand clasped in its vestibule forgetful of ruin, of death, of all but each other. Oh, for the pen of Euripides to celebrate fittingly those narrow and enchanted spaces! Or the pipe of my friend Orpheus to turn their echoes into golden music!

They came out, those two, arm enlaced in arm, with the glory on their faces, into a world that was theirs alone for the time. They vanished into the shadows, and the watcher on the step lifted his head and saw them go. But the face of Pinney was no longer the face of the Rat.

He rose and slouched down the steps. We went forward to meet him.

“I wanta drink,” he muttered.

The Bonnie Lassie put her hand out to him. “No, you do not,” said she.

“No, I do not,” said Pinney. He turned to Cyrus the Gaunt.

“When do I git that job?” he asked.

“Tazmun”

A TALE OF WHITE MAGIC IN OUR SQUARE

STRANGERS in Our Square stop and stare at No. 17. In itself the house is unremarkable; a dull, brown rectangle with a faintly mildewed air about the cornices. It is this sign on the front which attracts the startled notice of the wayfarer:--

THE ANGEL OF DEATH One Flight Up and Ring Bell

To us of the Square the placard is a commonplace, and the Angel of Death just Boggs, a chunky, bristly little man with gold teeth and a weak, meek, peanut-whistle voice, who conducts not a private bomb factory or a suicide club.

Taxmun formed romantics hopefully surmise upon a first reading, but a worthy though humble enterprise of hygiene and cleanliness more specifically set forth in the legend running, crimson, across the top of his business card:--

BOGGS KILLS BUGS

Once in the long ago that explicit announcement had flamed upon the house front. It yielded to the more dignified form when Madam Tallafferr took Mr. Boggs's top floor. She said that it was objectionable and that she could not live over it, and the landlord, duly impressed, sacrificed his prized alliteration rather than lose a lodger so elegant and aristocratic. Mr. Boggs had a vast, albeit distant, reverence for aristocracy, and he recognized in Madam Tallafferr a true exponent. So the sign came down and she went up. With her went her furniture, scanty but magnificent, a silver-inlaid lock box locally credited with safeguarding the Pemberton family diamonds, Sempronius, who was fat and black and a cat, and Old Sally, who was fat and black and a thief. For five years Madam Tallafferr dwelt above the lethal Boggs, and at the end of that period Our Square knew hardly more of her than on the day of her arrival. She was polite, but resolutely aloof as befitted her station in life.

For Mr. Boggs's lodger was all that is most glorious in Southern lineage. Her full style and title was Madam Rachel Pinckney Pemberton Tallafferr, with two Is, two fs, and two rs, if you valued her favor. She was passionately devoted to the Lost Cause, and belonged to no less than seven “Daughters-of” organizations with sumptuous stationery. Mr. Boggs was very proud of her mail. He said she had the swellest correspondence in Our Square. When letters arrived bearing her name without the requisite double Is, fs, and rs, they were invariably returned to the postman indorsed in a firm, fine hand: “No such individual known here.” But if the letters appeared important, the kindly and admiring Angel of Death used to intercept them and supply the missing consonants from his own inkwell. In this way he accumulated considerable information, and was able to apprise Our Square that his lodger was superstitious, subscribed to a dream magazine, and belonged to a Spirit Guidance Group. He darkly suspected the spirits of giving her bad advice about investments.

In person Madam Tallafferr was spare, tall, and straight. Her age when she first came to us was, to borrow caution from the war-zone censorship, “somewhere in the sixties,” though to Old Sally she was still “my young mist'ess.” Age had sharpened her personality, like her features, to a fine point. She was, I think, the most serene, incisive, and authoritative person I have ever encountered. Her speech was precise and trenchant. She dressed always in elegant, rustling black. Mr. Boggs said that she walked like a duchess. Quite likely. Though where Mr. Boggs got his data, I don't know. Our Square is not extensively haunted by persons of ducal rank. However, she became known to the locality, behind her back, as the Duchess. She and Old Sally were supposed to live in sumptuous luxury above the sign of the Destroyer. They had come to Our Square for their sojourn because, generations before in the days of its glory, madam's maternal grandfather had visited a distant cousin in that same No. 17. From beneath the ominous signboard she made occasional excursions, going westward and uptown, sometimes actually in an automobile, and always escorted by Old Sally. It was understood (from the boastful Mr. Boggs) that on such occasions his lodger was going into Society.

Once, that Our Square knew of, she put her ante-bellum principles into practice. She undertook disciplinary measures upon Old Sally, who in a moment of exaltation had been bragging indiscreetly of past glories “back in Fuhginia.” With a light but serviceable cane she corrected that indiscretion. Yes, in this emancipated twentieth century, among the populous, crowded habitations of our little metropolitan community, within earshot of Terry the Cop, the conscientious and logical slave-owner committed the startling anachronism of beating her slave. Hearing the resultant groans, Mr. Boggs, the lethal, rushed up to his top floor in great perturbation of spirit and burst in upon the finale of the performance. From what he could observe the castigation was purely formal and innocuous and the outcries merely a concession to what was expected and proper in the circumstances. But when he made his presence known, the Duchess in few cold and measured terms explained to him his exact purport and significance in the cosmic scheme, which he promptly perceived to bean approximate zero. “She wizened me up,” said the Angel of Death, “like a last season's roach.”

One after another she wizened us all up sufficiently to convince Our Square that she desired no personal share in its loosely communal, kindly, and village-like life.