“'Victory,'” he read. “Good! He'll like Conrad.”
Perceiving what was expected, I fulfilled the requirements by asking:
“Who will like Conrad?”
“The Gnome.”
I remembered that I had not seen Leon Coventry since the day he passed
me with the girl who had youth and spring and terror in her face.
“Am I to loan it to him?”
“You're to read it to him.”
“When?”
“To-night. It's your turn to sit up.”
“Is the Gnome ill?”
“Worse.”
“Mad?”
“Haunted.”
“Since when has your practice branched out into the supernatural,
doctor?”
“Oh, as for that, his trouble is physical too.”
“Is it anything that a simple lay mind could grasp?”
The Little Red Doctor grunted. “His legs have turned to lamp-wicking. I
don't vouch for the diagnosis. It's his own.”
“Paralysis?” I hazarded.
“Grip,” was the Little Red Doctor's curt rejoinder.
“Don't tell me that grip turns a young Hercules's legs to lamp-wicks?” I
objected.
“Grip does if the young Hercules's legs are fools enough
to carry him out and around the city with a temperature of
one-naught-four-point-two,” retorted the Little Red Doctor with
bitter exactitude. “Under such conditions grip turns to pneumonia.
And pneumonia is the favorite ally of my old friend, Death.”
“You don't mean that the Gnome is going to die?”
“Not of pneumonia: that fight was fought out some weeks ago. But what
pneumonia doesn't do to a young Hercules worry may. Another aid of my
old friend, Death, worry is. That's a bothersome Gnome, tossing about
in the heat with his sick brain full of plots to get away and no legs to
carry'em out. His next try will be his last.”
“Then he got away once?”
“On all fours. As far as the sidewalk. There Cyrus the Gaunt and the
Bonnie Lassie found him and brought him back. Cyrus was on duty again
last night.”
“I began to see. I'm to be watchdog. It's No. 7, isn't it? At what
hour?”
“No. 7. Top floor. Nine o'clock.”
“I'll be there.”
Thanks for neighborly services, which are a taken-for-granted part of
our close-pressed life, are not deemed good form in Our Square. The
Little Red Doctor nodded and prepared to pass on to the rounds of his
unending bout with his old friend and antagonist, Death. I detained him.
“Just a moment. What is the object of the Gnome's excursions? To get
work?”
“No. To search.”
“For what?”
The Little Red Doctor moved toward an approaching horse car, almost the
last of that perishing genus in New York City. “Heaven knows!” he called
back. “And Mac, the tailor, at least suspects. That's as far as I can
get.”
He leaped upon the bobtailed vehicle, was immediately held up by a
forehanded conductor, and too tardily bethought himself of a forgotten
point. “The chair! The chair!” he bellowed. “Look out for the chair!”
“What chair?” I shouted back.
He made as if he would jump off and return. But he had already paid his
nickel, so he only waved despairingly. Nickels count in Our Square.
No. 7 opened to me with a musty smell of stale heat. Built in the
magnificent days of the neighborhood, by a senator of the United States,
it had fallen to the base uses of machine workers on the lower and
furnished lodgings on the upper floors. The very walls seemed to sweat
as I made my way up to the dim light at the top, where the Gnome's door
stood open, hopelessly inviting a draft. Upon my entrance a huge and
fumbling creature from the lithographic plant where the Gnome was an
assistant rose and made gloomy and bashful adieus.
Leon Coventry reached a great, thin hand across the littered bed to make
me welcome. Even in his illness he preserved that suggestion of bowed
and gnarled power, strangely alien to his youthfulness, which had given
him his nickname in Our Square. Some would have called him ugly of face.
But his mouth had the austere sweetness of a saint or a sufferer, and in
his eyes glowed a living fire which might tame beasts or subdue hearts.
“How are you feeling to-night?” I asked perfunctorily.
“Wild,” he answered. “When are they going to let me out? When? When?”
The little Red Doctor had given me no hint upon this point. So I said
non-committally: “Soon, I think,” and moved around the bed to where an
easy-chair invited. It was a wicker chair, broad-seated, wide-armed, and
welcoming, a chair made conformable and gracious by long usage, a chair
for lovers, for high hopes and for dreams, a chair to solace troubles
and soothe weariness. Into it I would have dropped gratefully, when the
sick man's fingers closed on my wrist like the jaws of an animal, and I
was all but jerked from my feet.
“Not there!” he snarled insanely. “Not there!”
“I beg your pardon,” I said, much discomposed.
“I didn't mean to hurt you,” he returned with a return to that habitual
gentleness of address which, by its contrast with his formidable
physique, gave him the aspect of a kindly and companionable bear. “But
if you don't mind sitting here on the bed? Or yonder on the sofa? Or
anywhere except--”
“Not in the least,” I assured him. “The fact is, I detest wicker chairs
anyway. I had to get rid of mine.”
“Did you? Why?”
“It was no companion for an old, lonely man.”
The Gnome clutched me again. His fingers quivered as they bit into my
arm.
“I know! It whispered. Didn't it?”