Winter comes, stern and sharp, like an unpaid landlord, to Our Square,
with sleet and gale for its agents of eviction. No longer are the
benches blithe with the voice of love or play or gossip. The wind has
blown them all away. A few tenacious leaves still cling, withered,
brown, and clattering, to the trees, “bare, ruin'd choirs where late'
the sweet birds sang,” and a few hardy stragglers beat across the
unprotected spaces, just to maintain, as it were, the human right of way
against the gray rigor of the skies. But, for the most part, we of Our
Square, going about our concerns, huddle as close as may be to the lee
of walls, for--though we would not for the world have it known--many
of us are none too warmly clad. Behind the blank opaqueness of the
bordering windows one may surmise much want and penury and cold, which,
also, we keep to ourselves. Our Square has its pride. We do not publish
our trials.
Perhaps Cyrus the Gaunt knew as much of them as any. For, by
imperceptible gradations, he had become the 'confidant, the judge, the
arbiter of our difficulties, and the friend of the shyest, the hardest,
and the proudest of us alike. His engine-seat was become a throne, from
whence he dispensed every good thing but charity. That word and all that
follows in its train he hated. Which shows that he had learned
Our Square. After hours he would “drop in,” almost secretly, on some
friend; and it was a curious coincidence that Cyrus's friends were
chosen apparently on the basis of need and distress. He had that rare
knack of helping out without involving the aided one in the coils of
obligation. There is nothing Our Square wouldn't have done for Cyrus the
Gaunt. I believe he could even have been elected alderman.
Winter drove Cyrus from his perch and put a brake on the thunder-wagon
before the job was quite finished. There still remained some final
repairs which must now wait for the spring, on the side where the Bonnie
Lassie's little house stood, bleak and desolate. Not wholly deserted,
however, for one brave and happy dancer still stuck to her post in the
window, lifting a thrilled face to the sky. Other employment claimed
Cyrus the Gaunt until his iron steed should come out of the stable; a
day job on a stationary engine around in Pike Street. Our
Square remarked with concern that the indoor employment didn't seem
to suit Cyrus the Gaunt. He became gaunter and thinner and more
melancholy-looking, and more than once he was seen on wild nights,
when nobody was supposed to be out late, staring at the now quite
unembarrassed house with the quaint little door and the broad vestibule.
But though the light and cheer that Our Square had seen grow in Cyrus's
face in the early days of his job, were graying over, there increased
the new understanding and sympathy and determination, in lines that he
had put there himself in the building of his new manhood. Thus, only, in
this perplexing world, does a man lift himself by his own boot-straps.
Though Cyrus the Gaunt could boast a thousand friends, he had accepted
but one intimate. That was MacLachan the tailor. Every day they lunched
on frankfurters and kohlrabi at Schwartz's. Thither Cyrus was wont to
have his scanty mail sent from the house where he lodged. One blustery
December day the tailor arrived late, to find his friend fingering a
pink slip of paper, of suggestive appearance.
“Ye'll have been aimin' a bit ootside!” commented MacLachan.
Cyrus flipped the paper over to him.
“Save us!” cried the awe-stricken Scot. “It's a thousan' dollars. All in
the one piece!”
“Two months overdue. He didn't have my address, I suppose.”
“Ha'e ye been drawin' a lottery?”
“No. It's a bet. Also my release. I'd almost forgotten. My time's up.”
“Ye'll not be leavin' us?” said the tailor. Cyrus avoided his eyes.
“I'm through, Mac,” he said dully. “It's no use. It's not worth while.
Nothing's worth while.” There was a long pause. “Mon,” said MacLachan
finally, “ha'e ye tho't what this'll mean to Our Square?”
Cyrus the Gaunt thought. Behind the curtain of his impenetrable face
there passed a panorama of recent memories; events which had, for the
first time in his career, made him one with the fabric of life. Faces
appealed to him; hands were outstretched to him confidently for the
friendly help that he could give so well; the voices of the children
hailed him as a fellow; the baseball team which did most of its practice
at noon on the asphalt claimed a corner of his memory; his ears rang
with the everyday greetings of his own people, and another panorama,
summoned up by the pink slip, faded away. Cyrus folded the check and put
it carefully in the pocket of his overalls.
“Ye'll be stayin' here,” said MacLachan contentedly, having read his
expression.
Cyrus nodded. Then the tailor's dour-ness fell from him for the moment.
He laid a hand on his friend's shoulder. “Laddie,” he said, “the little
bronze dancer is in the window yet.”
Cyrus turned a haggard face to him. “I know,” he said.
“Do ye make nothin' o' that?”
“Nothing. You know why--what she went away for.”
“I ha'e haird.”
“Well, I'm learning to forget.”
“The little bronze dancer is in the window yet,” repeated the obstinate
Scot.
How Cyrus won through that long winter is his own affair. Our Square
respects other people's troubles. It asked no questions. Finally winter
broke and fled before a southeast wind full of fragrance, and the
trees began to whisper important tidings to each other; and a pioneer
butterfly of the deepest, most luminous purple-black, with buff edges to
its wings, arrived and led the whole juvenile populace such a chase as
surely never was since the Pied Piper fluted his seductions long ago;
and the benches came out of their long retreat, fresh-painted, to stand
sturdy and stiff in their old places; and so did Cyrus's thun-der-wagon,
whereon he perched nightly once more, and was even more than before the
taciturn, humorous, kindly, secret, friendly adviser to all and sundry.
Then, one crisp March evening he became aware of a strong, bent,
feminine figure beckoning him from the curbstone. Clanging to a halt, he
heard a voice, unforgettable through its tinge of foreign accent, say:
--
“How do you do? I have been seeing your face all through my travels.”
Cyrus took off his working-cap and shook hands. “So I have come back to
look at it. It's thin. Would you like to be painted?”
“I don't think so, thank you. I've been sculped within an inch of my
life.”
“So I have understood,” said the Very Great Woman with a smile not
devoid of sympathy. “You are not done with it yet. She is coming.”
The face of Cyrus the Gaunt lighted marvelously.. “Coming back to Our
Square?” he cried. Then the light faded. “But--”
“But me no buts. She is coming. I did it. I found that she had never
finished you. So I told her that if she did not come back and finish, I
would take you away from her and finish you myself. And, oh, I am as bad
a sculptor as I am a good painter---almost!” Her laughter rang in
the chill air. “So she comes. And I have traveled all the way to this
impossible spot to play traitor. The question is: Are you a man? You
look it, at last!”
“The question is--Will you answer me one?”
“No! No! No! No! No! Put your questions where they belong. Farewell, my
Phaëthon of the Slums.”
The world was mad with the wine of the wind the night the Bonnie Lassie
came back to Our Square. All our trees waved their lean arms in welcome
and sent down little buds as messengers of joy over her return. Of
living welcomers there was none, for the gale had swept all humans
before it, except Terry the Cop, and he didn't recognize her, from the
distance, in her other-worldly raiment. That must have cost her a pang.
Unnoticed she crept into the little, old, quaint, friendly house, and
its doors closed behind her like the reassurance of a friendly arm. She
set herself in the dark window where the blithe dancer still tripped it,
faithful and lonely, and waited for Cyrus the Gaunt. But when she saw
his face, the Bonnie Lassie didn't sculp. She cried.
Cyrus mounted to his seat and pulled the lever over. The engine was
running badly that night, and the wind almost blew him from his perch.
Aside from the improbability that the little sculptor would brave such
weather, the charioteer was presently so immersed in his own immediate
concerns that he all but forgot the prospective visit. When he had
brought his charge to its senses and reduced it to some control, he was
interrupted by the plight of a belated push-cart woman, who was dragging
anchor and drifting fast to leeward under the furious impulsion of the
nor'easter. Cyrus had just dragged her almost from under his ponderous
wheels, when a beam flashed in his eyes, and he looked up to see a truck
close upon them. His yell split the darkness. The truck-driver, with
a mighty wrench, swung his vehicle sharp to the left, and up on the
sidewalk.
The uptilted lights shone full into the lower window of the little, old,
friendly house. Pressed against that window Cyrus saw the apparition
of a tear-softened, desolate visage. Reason, prudence, and propriety
deserted their posts in his brain simultaneously. A dozen long-legged
leaps carried him as far as the vestibule of the little house. There his
knees basely weakened. Perhaps her heart divined his step and sent her
forth to meet him; or perhaps it was his old ally, Chance, that brought
her into the vestibule as he stood there shaking.
“Oh!” she cried, and shrank back into a corner, with a deprecatory
movement, which to him was infinitely pathetic.
“I'm sorry,” said Cyrus. “I saw your face and thought you were
in trouble. If--if you wanted me to sit for you again,” he said
composedly, “I should be very glad to, until you've finished your
sketch.”
“Oh, no. I couldn't ask you. I couldn't think of--after--what--what--”
Her voice waned into silence.
“Don't feel that way at all,” he encouraged her with resolved
cheerfulness. “I can be a model and nothing more, again, I assure you.”
Her upturned eyes implored him. “Don't be cruel,” she said.
“Cruel?” he repeated wonderingly.
“Not at all. I'll be polite. It isn't too late to offer my best wishes.
Though I'm not sure I know the name.”
“What name?”
“Your--your married name.”
“Then you don't know?” she gasped. The brain of Cyrus the Gaunt suddenly
went numb. “I know you went away from us to get married.”
“I did,” she quavered. “But I couldn't. I--I--I tried to make myself
go through with it. I couldn't. No woman could when--when--” Her voice
trembled into silence.
A boisterous back-draft of the tempest thrust its way through the door
and puffed out the little vestibule light. With a sense of irreparable
loss impending he felt, rather than heard, her moving from him into the
blackness of the outer world. Yet his mind seemed clogged and chained as
he strove to grasp the meaning of what she had said--or was it what she
had left unsaid?
And in a moment she would be gone forever.
Suddenly--miracle of miracles!--he felt those soft, strong hands on his
arm, and heard her sobbing appeal: “Oh, Cyrus! Aren't you ever going to
smile at me inside again?”
His arms went out. The Bonnie Lassie's hands slipped up to his shoulder.
The flower-face pressed, close and cold and sweet, against his.
[Illustration: Her hands slipped to his shoulder 110]
“Love of my heart!” he cried, “I'll never do anything else all my life
long.”
Summer is tyrant in Our Square now. The leaves droop, flaccid and dusty,
on the trees, and the sun gives a shrewish welcome to the faithful
who still cling to the benches. Gone is Cyrus's chariot of flame and
thunder. The work is done. Gone, too, is Cyrus, and with him the Bonnie
Lassie, after a wedding duly set forth with much pomp and splendor in
the public prints. Among those present was Our Square.
So now the little, quaint, old, friendly house stands vacant, with eager
sunbeams darting about it in search of entry. Vacant but not cheerless,
for behind the panes, against which the Bonnie Lassie once pressed
her sorrowful face, troop the elfin company of her dream-children, the
dancing figurines. Cyrus the Gaunt would have it so. He deeded her the
house as a wedding-gift, that the happy dancers might remain with us
lonely and unforgetting folk. They are the promise that one day Our
Bonnie Lassie will come back to Our Square.