As far as the eye could apprehend him, he was palpably an outlander. No
such pink of perfection ever sprung from the simple soil of Our Square.
A hard pink it was, suggestive less of the flower than of enameled
metal. He was freshly shaved, freshly pressed, freshly anointed, and, as
he paced gallantly across my vision, I perceived him to be slightly
grizzled at the temples, but nevertheless of a vigorous and grim
youthfulness that was almost daunting. Not until he returned and stood
before me with his feet planted a little apart, giving an impression of
purposeful immovability to his wiry figure, did I note that his eyes
belied the general jauntiness of his personality. They were cold, direct
eyes, with a filmy appearance, rather like those of a morose and
self-centered turtle which had lived in our fountain until the day the
Rosser twins fell in, when it crawled out and emigrated.
"Nice day," said the stranger, shifting a patent-leathered foot out of a
puddle.
"Very," I agreed. Finical over-accuracy about the weather is likely to
discourage a budding acquaintanceship.
"Have one?" He extended a gemmed cigarette-case, and when, removing my
pipe, I had declined in suitable terms, lighted up, himself. He then sat
down upon the dryest portion of the bench not occupied by my person.
"Whiplash win in the fi'th," he volunteered presently.
"Yes?" said I with a polite but spurious show of interest.
"Under a pull. Spread-eagled his field."
"Who is Whiplash, may I ask?"
"Oh, Gaw!" said the pink man, appalled. He searched my face
suspiciously. "A hoss," he stated at length, satisfied of my ignorance.
After several reflective puffs, the smoke of which insufficiently veiled
his furtive appraisal of myself, he tried again:
"They give O'Dowd a shade, last night."
"Indeed? Who did?"
"The sporting writers."
"As a testimonial?" I inquired, adding that a shade, whether of the lamp
or sun species seemed an unusual sort of gift.
My interlocutor groaned. He drew from the pocket of his gray-check
cutaway, purple and fine linen, the purple being an ornate and
indecipherable monogram, wherewith to wipe his troubled brow. Susan
Gluck's Orphan, who was playing down-wind, paused to inhale deeply and
with a beatific expression. Restoring the fragrant square to its
repository, the pink one essayed another conversational skirmish.
"The Reds copped again yesterday."
"If you are referring to the raid on Anarchist Headquarters in Avenue C,
I should have inferred that the Reds _were_ copped, to use your term."
Curt and contemptuous laughter was his response. "Don't you ever read
the papers, down here?"
"Certainly," I retorted with some spirit, for the implied slur upon Our
Square stung me. "In fact, I was reading one of our local publications
when you inter--when you arrived. It contains some very
interesting poetry."
"Yeh?" said the hard, pink man politely.
"For example, in this issue I find the following apostrophe." I
proceeded to read aloud:
"Farewell, our dear one, we must part,
For thou hast gone to heavenly home,
While we below with aching heart
Must long for thee and ever moan."
"Swell stuff," commented the sharer of my bench, with determined
interest. "Poetry's a little out of my line, but I'm _for_ it. Who
wrote that?"
"It is signed 'Loving Father and 3 Sisters.' But the actual authorship
rests with the long gentleman in black whom you see leaning on the park
fence yonder. His name is Bartholomew Storrs and he is the elegiac or
mortuary or memorial laureate of Our Square."
This was said with intent to mortify the soul of my new acquaintance in
revenge for his previous display of erudition. The bewilderment in his
face told me that I had scored heavily. But he quickly rallied.
"Do I get you right?" he queried. "Does he write those hymns for other
folks to sign?"
"He does."
"What does he do that for?"
"Money. He gets as high as five dollars per stanza."
"Some salesman!" My hard-faced companion regarded the lank figure
overhanging the fence with new respect. "Looks to me like the original
Gloom," he observed. "What's _his_ grouch?"
"Conscience."
"He must have a bum one!"
"He has a busy one. He expends a great amount of time and sorrow
repenting of our sins."
"Whose sins?" asked the other, opening wider his dull and weary eyes.
"Ours. His neighbors. Everybody in Our Square."
My interlocutor promptly and fitly put into words the feeling which had
long lurked within my consciousness, ashamed to express itself against a
monument of dismal pity such as Bartholomew Storrs. "He's got a nerve!"
he asserted.
Warming to him for his pithy analysis of character, I enlarged upon my
theme. "He rebukes MacLachan for past drunkenness. He mourns for
Schepstein, who occasionally helps out a friend at ten per cent, as a
usurer. He once accused old Madame Tallafferr of pride, but he'll never
do that again. He calls the Little Red Doctor, our local physician, to
account for profanity, and gets a fresh sample every time. Even against
the Bonnie Lassie, whose sculptures you can just see in that little
house near the corner"--I waved an illustrative hand--"he can quote
Scripture, as to graven images. We all revere and respect and hate him.
He's coming this way now."
"Good day, Dominie," said Bartholomew Storrs, as he passed, in such a
tone as a very superior angel might employ toward a particularly
damned soul.
"That frown," I explained to my companion, after returning the
salutation, "means that I failed to attend church yesterday."
But the hard, pink man had lost interest in Bartholomew. "Called you
'Dominie,' didn't he?" he remarked. "I thought I had you right. Heard of
you from a little red-headed ginger-box named Smith."
"You know the Little Red Doctor?"
"I met him," he replied evasively. "He told me to look you up. 'You talk
to the Dominie,' he says."
"About what?"
"I'm coming to that." He leaned forward to place a muscular and
confidential hand on my knee. "First, I'd like to do you a little
favor," he continued in his husky and intimate voice. "If you're looking
for some quick and easy money, I got a little tip that I'd like to pass
on to you."
"Evidently the Little Red Doctor told you that my mind was a tottering
ruin, which may be quite true; but if it's a matter of investing in the
Peruvian Gold, Rubber Tree, and Perpetual Motion Concession, I'm
reluctantly compelled--"
"Forget it!" adjured the hard, pink man in a tone which secured my
silence and almost my confidence. "This is a hoss. Seven to one, and a
sure cop. I _know_ hosses. I've owned 'em."
"Thank you, but I can't afford such luxuries as betting."
"You can't afford _not_ to have something down on this if it's only a
shoestring. No? Oh--well!"
Again drawing the art-square from his pocket he lifted his pearl-gray
derby and dabbed despairingly at his brow. Catching the scent hot and
fresh, Susan Gluck's Orphan came dashing up-wind giving tongue, or
rather, nose, voluptuously.
"Mm-m-m! Snmmff!" inhaled the Orphan, wrinkling ecstatic nostrils.
"Mister, lemme smell it some more!"
Graciously the dispenser of fragrance waved his balm-laden handkerchief.
"Like it, kiddie?" he said.
"Oh, it's _grand_!" She stretched out her little grimy paws. "Please,
Mister," she entreated, "would you flop it over 'em, just once?"
The pink man tossed it to her. "Take it along and, when you get it all
snuffed up, give it back to the Dominie here for me."
"Oh, gracious!" said the Orphan, incredulous at this bounty. "Can I have
it till _to-morrah_?"
"Sure! What's the big idea for to-morrow?"
"I'm goin' to a funeral. I want it to cry in," said the Orphan
importantly.
"A funeral?" I asked. "In Our Square? Whose?"
"My cousin Minnie. She's goin' to be buried in God's Acre, an' I'm
invited 'cause I'm a r'lation. She married a sporting gentleman named
Hines an' she died yesterday," said the precocious Orphan.
So Minnie Munn, pretty, blithe, life-loving Minnie, whose going had hurt
us so, had come back to Our Square, with all her love of life quenched.
She had promised that she would come back, in the little, hysterical,
defiant note she left under the door. Her father and mother must wait
and not worry. There are thousands of homes, I suppose, in which are
buried just such letters as Minnie's farewell to her parents;
rebellious, passionate, yearning, pitiful. Ah, well! The moth must break
its chrysalis. The flower must rend its bonds toward the light. Little
Minnie was "going on the stage." A garish and perilous stage it was,
whereon Innocence plays a part as sorry as it is brief. And now she was
making her exit, without applause. Memory brought back a picture of
Minnie as I had first seen her, a wee thing, blinking and smiling in the
arms of her Madonna-faced mother, on a bench in Our Square, and the
mother (who could not wait for the promised return--she has lain in
God's Acre these three years) crooning to her an unforgettable song,
mournfully prophetic:
"Why did I bring thee, Sweet
Into a world of sin?--
Into a world of wonder and doubt
With sorrows and snares for the little white feet--
Into a world whence the going out
Is as dark as the coming in!"
Old lips readily lend themselves to memory; I suppose I must have
repeated the final lines aloud, for the pink man said, wearily
but politely:
"Very pretty. Something more in the local line?"
"Hardly." I smiled. Between Bartholomew Storr's elegies and William
Young's "Wish-makers' Town" stretches an infinite chasm.
"What's this--now--God's Acre the kid was talking about?" was his next
question.
"An old local graveyard."
"Anything interesting?" he asked carelessly.
"If you're interested in that sort of thing. Are you an antiquary?"
"Sure!" he replied with such offhand promptitude that I was certain the
answer would have been the same had I asked him if he was a dromedary.
"Come along, then. I'll take you there."
To reach that little green space of peace amidst our turmoil of the
crowded, encroaching slums, we must pass the Bonnie Lassie's house,
where her tiny figurines, touched with the fire of her love and her
genius, which are perhaps one and the same, stand ever on guard, looking
out over Our Square from her windows. Judging by his appearance and
conversation, I should have supposed my companion to be as little
concerned with art as with, let us say, poetry or local antiquities. But
he stopped dead in his tracks, before the first window. Fingers that
were like steel claws buried themselves in my arm. The other
hand pointed.
"What's that?" he muttered fiercely.
"That," to which he was pointing, was a pictorial bronze, the figure of
a girl, upright in a cockleshell boat, made of a rose-petal, her arms
outspread to the breeze that was bearing her out across sunlit ripples.
Beneath was the legend: "Far Ports." The face, eager, laughing,
passionate, adventurous, was the face of Minnie Munn. Therein the Bonnie
Lassie had been prophetess as well as poet and sculptress, for she had
finished the bronze before Minnie left us.
"That," I answered the strong, pink man, trying to shake loose his grip,
"is a sculpture by Cecily Willard, otherwise Mrs. Cyrus Staten."
"What'll she take for it?"
"It can't be bought." I spoke with authority, for the figurines that the
Bonnie Lassie sets in her window are not for sale, but for us of Our
Square, who love them.
"Anything can be bought," he retorted, with his quiet, hoarse
persuasiveness, "at a price. I've got the price, no matter what it is."
Suddenly I understood my pink and hard acquaintance. I understood that
stale look in his eyes. Tears do not bring that. Nothing brings it but
sleepless thoughts beyond the assuagement of tears. Behind such eyes the
heart is aching cold and the brain searing hot. Who should know better
than I, though the kindly years have brought their healing! But here was
a wound, raw and fresh and savage. I put my hand on his shoulder.
"What was little Minnie to you?" I asked, and answered myself. "You're
Hines. You're the man she married."
"Yes. I'm Chris Hines."
"You've brought her back to us," I said stupidly.
"She made me promise."
Strange how Our Square binds the heartstrings of those who have once
lived in it! To find it unendurable in life, to yearn back to it in the
hour of death! Many have known the experience. So our tiny God's Acre,
shrunk to a small fraction of human acreage through pressure of the
encroaching tenements, has filled up until now it has space but for few
more of the returning. Laws have been invoked and high and learned
courts appealed to for the jealously guarded right to sleep there, as
Minnie Munn was so soon to sleep beside her mother.
I told Hines that I would see the Bonnie Lassie about the statuette, and
led him on, through the nagged and echoing passage and the iron gate, to
the white-studded space of graves. The new excavation showed, brown
against the bright verdure. Above it stood the headstone of the Munns,
solemn and proud, the cost of a quarter-year's salary, at the pitiful
wage which little, broken Mr. Munn drew from his municipal clerkship.
Hines's elegant coat rippled on his chest, above what may have been a
shudder, as he looked about him.
"It's crowded," he muttered.
"We lie close, as we lived close, in Our Square. I am glad for her
father's sake that Minnie wished to come back."
"She said she couldn't rest peaceful anywhere else. She said she had
some sort of right to be here."
"The Munns belong to what we call the Inalienables in Our Square," said
I, and told him of the high court decision which secured to the
descendants of the original "churchyard membership," and to them alone,
the inalienable right to lie in God's Acre, provided, as in the ancient
charter, they had "died in honorable estate." I added: "Bartholomew
Storrs, as sexton, has constituted himself watchdog of our graves and
censor of our dead. He carried one case to the Supreme Court in an
attempt to keep an unhappy woman from sleeping in that pious company."
"That sour-faced prohibitionist?" growled Mr. Hines, employing what I
suspect to be the blackest anathema in his lexicon. "Is he the sexton?"
"The same. Our mortuary genius," I confirmed.
"She was a good girl, Min was," said Mr. Hines firmly, though, it might
appear, a trifle inconsequentially: "I don't care what they say. Anyway,
after I met up with her"; in which qualifying afterthought lay a whole
sorrowful and veiled history.