Thus Cyrus the Gaunt became a toiler in, and by slow degrees a citizen
of, Our Square. We are a doubtful people where strangers are concerned.
The ritual of initiation for Cyrus was, at first, chance words and
offhand nods, then an occasional bidding to sit in at Schwartz's, and
finally consultations and confidences on matters of import, political,
social, or private. Thus was Cyrus the Gaunt adopted as one of us. Quite
from the outset of his job he became a notable pictorial asset of the
place, standing out, lank and black, in the intermittent gleam of his
own engine, as he rolled on his appointed course amidst firmamental
thunderings. Acting as chauffeur to ten tons of ill-balanced metal,
he promptly discovered, is an occupation to which the tyro must pay
explicit heed if he would keep within the bounds of his precinct. About
the time when he was beginning to feel at ease with his charger, he came
to a stop, one misty night, directly opposite the window of a taxicab,
and met a pair of eyes which straightway became fixed in a paralysis of
amazed doubt.
“No; it isn't. It can't be,” said the owner of the eyes presently.
“Yes, it is,” contradicted Cyrus.
“Well, I'm jiggered!”
“That's all that the pious young Presbyterian boss of a fashionable
church has a right to be.”
“_What_ are you doing up there?”
“Piloting a submarine under Governor's Island.”
“So I see.” The taxi-door opened, and some six feet of well-tailored
manhood mounted nimbly to Cyrus's side. “What's the fare? And why? Is it
a bet?”
Cyrus the Gaunt grinned amiably in the face of the Reverend Morris
Cartwright, whose appearance in that quarter did not greatly surprise
him. “How did you know? It's leaked out at the club, has it?”
“Not that I know of. I guessed it.”
“Thought nothing short of a bet would account for such a reversal of
form, eh? Keep it to yourself, and I'll tell you the rest.”
“You've hired an ear,” observed the young cleric.
“Maybe you heard that I had a nervous breakdown last spring. Kind of a
mixture of things.”
“Yes; I know the mixture. Three of gin to one of Italian.”
“You know too much for a minister,” growled the other. “Besides, it
was only part that. I just sort of got sick of doing nothing and being
nothing, and the sickness struck in, I expect. Well, one morning, after
a night of bridge, I came out into the breakfast-room nine hundred plus
to the good, and about ready to invest the whole in any kind of painless
dope that would save me from being bored with this life any more. There
sat Doc Gerritt, pink and smooth like a cherry-stone clam. I stuck out
my hand, and it was shaking. I dare say my voice was shaking, too, for
Gerry looked up pretty sharp, when I said, 'Doc, can you do anything for
me?' 'No,' says he. 'Is it as bad as that?' I asked. 'It's worse,' says
he. 'I'm a busy man with no time to waste on sure losses. Flat down,
Cyrus, you aren't worth it.' 'This is all I've got of me,' I said. 'I'm
worth it to myself.' 'Then do it for yourself,' he snapped. 'You're the
only one that can.' 'Will you tell me how?' 'I will,' says he. 'But you
won't do it. You aren't man enough.' 'Gerry,' I said, 'you may be a good
doctor, but you're a damn liar.' 'Am I?' says he. 'Prove it. Cut the
booze and go to work.' 'Work won't do me any good,' I said. 'I've
tried it, and it bored me worse than the other thing. When I'm bored, I
naturally reach for a drink.' (There's a great truth in that, you know,
Carty, if the temperance people would only grab it: boredom and booze
--cause and effect.) 'That's a hot line of advice, Doc,' I said. 'Maybe
you'll think better of it when you get my bill for fifty,' says he. (I
got it, too. I've still got it.) 'I don't mean Wall Street, Cyrus,' says
he. 'I mean work. You've never tried work. You've just played at it.
I'll bet you a thousand,' he went on (he was playing me up to this all
the time, Carty), 'that you'd starve in six months if you tried to make
your living where nobody knows you.' Well, Carty, you know how I am with
a bet. It comes just as natural to me to say 'You're on,' as 'Here's
how,' or 'Have another.' I said it, and here I am. I'll bet Doc
Gerritt's laughing yet,” he concluded with a wry face.
“They say he's the best diagnostician going, in his own line.” The young
clergyman studied Cyrus out of the corner of his eye. “I wouldn't wonder
if it were true. How do you like the prescription so far?”
“Interesting,” said Cyrus the Gaunt. “I've been hungry, and I've been
lonely, and I've been scared, and I've even been near-yellow, but I
haven't been bored for a minute. You never get bored, Carty, when you
have the probabilities of your next meal to speculate on, pro and con.
Odd jobs have been my stay mostly, before I landed this. And when there
wasn't anything in my own line, I kept up my nerve by catching 'em on the
way down and shoving 'em into jobs on Jink Hereford's Canadian preserve.”
“Good man!” approved the Reverend Morris Cartwright. “What'll you have?”
he added.
“Frankfurters and a glass of milk, if it's an open order. But you'll
have to fetch it to me from Schwartz's. I can't leave this here skittish
little pet of mine.”
Then and there some Sunday supplement missed a “throbbing human-interest
story” in that no reporter was present to witness one of New York's
fashionable young pastors emerging from an obscure saloon bearing food
and drink to the grimy driver of an all-night thunder-wagon.
“And now,” said Cyrus the Gaunt, handing down the empty glass, “if it
isn't one of your disgraceful secrets, what are _you_ doing in this
galley? Heading off some poor unfortunate who wants to go to the devil
peacefully, in his own way?”
“No, I leave that to the doctors,” retorted the other mildly.
“Quite so,” chuckled Cyrus. “Throw some water in my face and drag me to
my corner, will you?”
“This is an errand of diplomacy,” continued Cartwright. “I'm an envoy.
Do you happen to know which house--” His ranging vision fell upon the
row of figures joyously dancing in the window. “Never mind,” he
said, “I've found it.” He disappeared between the portals of the
old-fashioned, hospitable door.
Quite a considerable part of his week's wages would Cyrus the Gaunt have
forfeited to interpret the visitor's expression when he came out, a long
hour later. He looked at once harassed, regretful, and yet triumphant,
as one might look who had achieved the object of a thankless errand.
The Bonnie Lassie came to the door with him and stood gazing out across
the flaring lights and quivering shadows of Our Square. It seemed to
Cyrus that the flower-face drooped a little.
And indeed the Bonnie Lassie was not feeling very happy. When one's
adopted world goes well, the claims that draw one back become irksome
ties. The messenger from the world which she had temporarily foregone
was far from welcome. But at least she had claimed and won some months
of respite and freedom for her work.
So engrossed did she become with that work that she saw little or
nothing of Cyrus the Gaunt until Chance brought them together in the
climatic fashion so dear to that Protean arbiter of destinies. Returning
one evening from a call upon a small invalid friend in a tenement quite
remote from Our Square, the Bonnie Lassie essayed a cross-cut which
skirted the mouth of a blind alley. From within there sounded a woman's
scream of pain and fear.
The Bonnie Lassie hesitated. It was a forbidding alley, and the scream
was not inspiriting. It was repeated. Not for nothing is one undisputed
empress of Our Square. The Bonnie Lassie had the courage of one who
rules. She swooped into that black byway like a swallow entering a cave.
Now the screams were muffled, with a grisly, choked sound. They led her
flying feet toward a narrow side passage. But before she reached the
turn, a towering bulk sped by her, almost filling the thin slit between
the walls.
When she came within view, the matter was apparently settled. A swarthy,
vividly clad woman cringed against one wall. Against the other Cyrus had
pinned a swarthier man. The man, helpless, seemed to be wheedling and
promising. With a final shake and a growl--the girl likened it in her
mind to that of a great, magnanimous dog--the gaunt one released
the Sicilian and stopped to pick up his hat, which had fallen in the
struggle. Then the girl's heart leaped and clogged her throat with
terror, for, as Cyrus turned, the pretense fell from the face of his
opponent and it changed to a mask of murder. His hand darted to his
breast and came forth clutching the thin, terrible, homemade stiletto of
the rag-picking tribe, a file ground to a rounded needle-point. The girl
strove to cry out. It seemed to her only the whisper of a nightmare. But
it was enough.
Cyrus spun around and leaped back. His arm went out stiff as a bar.
At the end of it was a formidable something which flashed with an
ugly glint of metal in the Sicilian's face. Whether or not she heard
a report, the terror-stricken onlooker could not have said. But the
would-be murderer screamed, tottered, withered. His weapon tinkled upon
the coping. Then an arm of inordinate size and strength encircled the
Bonnie Lassie, whirled her up out of a pit of blackness, and supported
her through a reeling world. At her ear a quietly urgent voice kept
insisting that she must walk--walk--walk, and not let herself lapse. A
shock jolted her brain. It was the smell of ammonia. The darkness
dissipated, became an almost intolerable light, and she found herself
seated opposite Cyrus the Gaunt at a polished metal table in an ice cream
parlor.
[Illustration: Whirled her out of a pit of darkness 064]
“Don't let go of my hand,” she whispered faintly.
His big, reassuring clasp tightened. “We got away before the crowd
came,” he said. “You have wonderful nerve. I thought you were gone.”
“Don't speak of it,” she shuddered. “I can't stand it.”
Not until, after a slow, silent walk, they were seated on a bench in Our
Square could she gather her resolution for the dreadful question. “Did
you kill him?”
“Good Lord, no!”
Whirled her up out of a pit of blackness, and supported her through a
reeling world.
“But--but--you shot him!”
“Yes, with this.” He thrust his hand in his pocket, and again, as
she closed her eyes against the sight, she caught faintly the pungent
stimulus that had revived her.
“What is it?”
“Ammonia-pop. Model of my own.” Her eyes flew open, the color flooded
into her cheeks, but receded again. “He might have killed you!” she
exclaimed. “I thought when you turned away and I saw the dagger that--
Oh, how could you take such a desperate chance?”
“Just fool-in-the-head, I guess. I supposed he was through. Don't know
that breed, you see. But for you, he'd have got me.”
“But for _you_,” she retorted, “I don't know what might have happened to
me. How came you to be down in that slum?”
“Oh,” said he carelessly, “I prowl.”
“As far away as that?” She looked at him, sidelong.
“All around. I know that neighborhood like a book.”
“What's the name of that alley?”
“Alley? Er--what alley?”
“Mr. Cyrus Murphy, how long have you been following me about?”
He turned an unpicturesque, dull red. “Well, that's no place for a girl
alone,” he growled.
“You know, one evening I thought I saw you, down near Avenue C, but I
couldn't be sure. Was it?”
“It might have been,” he grudged. “Avenue C is a public thoroughfare.”
“And you've been guarding me,” she murmured.
Her eyes brooded on him, and the color was rising in her face to match
his. But, while Cyrus blushed like a brick, the Bonnie Lassie blushed
like the hue of flying clouds after sunset.
“Why don't you take a policeman?” he blurted out. “If anything should
happen to you--It isn't safe,” he concluded lamely.
“Not even when I'm chaperoned with an ammonia popgun?” she smiled. “Why
do you carry that?”
“For dogs. Dogs don't always like me. It's my clothes, I suppose.”
“Any dog who wouldn't like and trust you on sight,” she pronounced with
intense conviction, “is an imbecile.”
He smiled his acknowledgment. At that her face altered.
“There you go, smiling once more,” she said fretfully. “You do it very
seldom, but--”
“I'm always smiling, deep inside me, at you,” he said quietly.
“But when you smile outside, it makes you so different. And I find I've
done you all wrong.”
“Are you still sculping me?” he asked in surprise.
“I--I have been, but I stopped.” She paused, trying again to think of
him as merely a model, and found, to her discomfiture, that it caused a
queer, inexplicable little pang deep inside her heart. Nevertheless, the
artist rose overpoweringly within her at his next question.
“Do you want me to sit for you again?”
“Oh, would you? Now?”
He glanced at the church clock. “I've forty-seven minutes,” he said.
Much may be accomplished in forty-seven minutes. In the studio she
sprang to her work with a sort of contained fury. And as the eager,
intent eyes regarded him with an ever-increasing impersonality, a pain
was born in his heart and grew and burned, because to this woman who had
clung to him in the abandonment of mortal weakness but an hour before,
whose pulses had leaped and fluttered for his peril, he had become only
a subject for exploitation, something to further her talent, wax to her
deft hand.
Perhaps he had been that since the first. Well, what right had he to
expect anything more?
Nothing of this reached the absorbed worker. She was intent upon her
model's mouth and chin, whereon she had caught the sense of significant
changes. Had she but once come forth from her absorption to see and
interpret the man's eyes, she might have known. For only in the eyes
does a brave man's suffering show; the rest of his face he may control
beyond betrayal. Something happily restrained her from offering payment
as usual, when she finally threw the cloth over the unfinished sketch.
“You spoke of dogs not liking your clothes,” she said lightly. “Do you
always sleep in them?”
“Oh, no. They sleep on the floor at the foot of my bed and keep watch.
May I have them pressed?”
“It would be an interesting change. But why ask my permission?”
“Because you told me once to come as is.'”
“So I did,” she laughed. “But that was before you were an honest
workingman. Go and get pressed out.”
“No more use for me as a model?”
“Oh, I don't say that.”
“But I'm to see you sometimes?” he persisted.
“How could it be otherwise, with you doing patrol duty in front of my
door?” she twinkled.
With unnecessary emphasis she shut the door upon the retiring form of
Cyrus the Gaunt. But his double, already inalienable, returned to the
studio with her and formed a severely accusative third party to her dual
self-communion. Said the woman within her, woefully: “I mustn't see him
again. I mustn't! I mustn't!” Said the sculptor within her, exultingly:
“I've got him. I've got what I wanted. It's there and I've fixed it
forever.” Which was a mistake of the sculptor's, however nearly right or
wrong the woman may have been.
Thenceforward, it appeared to Cyrus the Gaunt, the Bonnie Lassie
exhibited an increasing tendency toward invisibility. When he did see
her, there were sure to be other people about, and she seemed subdued
and distrait. Presently the suspicion dawned upon Cyrus that she was
avoiding him. Being a simple, direct person, he laid his theory before
her. She denied it with unnecessary heat; but that didn't go far toward
rehabilitating the old cheerful and friendly status. Cyrus the Gaunt,
despite a wage which assured three excellent meals per day, began to
grow gaunter. Our Square commented upon it with concern.
There came a time when, for ten consecutive days, Cyrus the Gaunt never
set eyes upon the Bonnie Lassie, nor did his ear so much as catch
a single lilt of her laughter. At the end of that period, strolling
moodily past his now flavorless job full two hours early, he beheld
mounting the steps of the funny little mansion a heavy male figure, clad
from head to foot in what had a grisly suggestion of professional black.
The sight sent a chill to Cyrus's heart. The chill froze solid when on a
nearer approach to the house he heard the sound of voices within, joined
in a slow chant. Half-blind and shaking, he made his way to the rail and
clung there. Slowly the words took form and meaning, and this was their
solemn message:--
The Good Man,
When-he-falleth-in-Love
And-getteth-Snubbed,
Breaketh Forth In-to Tears:
But-the-Ungawdly Careth Notta Damn!
For Woman,
She-is-but-Vanity
Ay, Verily, and False-Curls.
And-the-Wooing Thereof Is Bitterness.
For-he-Wasteth-his-Substance-Upon-Her,
Taking-her-Pic-nics and Balls.
And she Danceth with some
Other Feller.
Oh-hh SLUSH!!!
A window-shade floated sideways, revealing to the peerer's gaze a
gnome with blue ears beating out the tempo with the fire-tongs for a
quartette, consisting of an aeroplane, a Salvation Army captain, a white
rabbit, and an Apache, while a motley crowd circulated around them.
In the intensity of his relief, Cyrus the Gaunt took a great resolve:
“Invited or not invited, I'm going to that party.”
MacLachan's “Home of Fashion” on the corner was long since dark,
but Cyrus's pedal fantasia on the panels brought forth the indignant
proprietor.
“What have you got for me to go to a fancy party in, Mac?” demanded his
disturber.
“Turnverein or Pansy Social Circle?” inquired the practical tailor.
“Neither. A dead swell party.”
“Go as ye are-rr, ye fule!” said the Scot, and slammed the door.
“Perfectly simple,” said Cyrus the Gaunt. “I'll do it.”
He hastened around to Schwartz's to wash his hands and smut his face
artistically.