“So does mine. Strange things. Echoes of what you can't forget.”
“Yes, yes. I know.”
“Do you, now? I wonder. Perhaps you do.” He studied my face with his
luminous eyes, and then closed them and fell back, speaking slowly and
dreamily. “In the darkness when I can see the chair just enough to know
that it's empty as--as an empty heart--I hear it stirring, stirring
softly, adjusting itself to--to what is not there. And I hold my breath
and pray. But--nothing more.” He opened his eyes that seemed to gaze out
across barriers of pain and incomprehension. “Dominie, does yours--did
yours keep its secrets?”
That way, obviously, ran the boy's malady toward madness. Regretting
that I had chanced upon so unfortunate a topic, I said nothing. But he
took my assent for granted.
“So does mine,” he sighed. “It has not been moved nor touched since it
was left vacant.”
“Shall I read to you?” I asked, to turn his mind aside.
“No. Talk to me. Tell me what they are doing in the Square.”
So I gave him the news of Tailor Mac-Lachan's latest drunk, and Pushcart
Tonio's luck in the lottery, and Grandma Souchet's _faux pas_ at the
movies (her first experience) when she rose and yelled for the police
to stop the pickpocket in the flagrant act of abstracting the heroine's
aged father's watch, thereby disgracing her (grandma's) progeny and
making them a derision and a byword even unto the third and fourth
generation; and the Morrissey mumps, the whole kit and b'ilin' of
juvenile Morrisseys having been sent to school looking like five little
red balloons, whereby holiday for the rest of the scholars and great
rejoicing, and the unavailing wrath of the authorities upon Mrs.
Morrissey's head; and Terry the Cop's extra stripe; and the passing of
the skat championship into the unworthy but preposterously lucky hands
of the Avenue B Evening Dress Suit Club; and the battle over Orpheus
the Piper (which was a jest of the Lords of High Derision, touching
the boundaries of uttermost tragedy); and the exotic third stage of
the affair, not yet ended, between Mary Moore and the Weeping Scion
of Wealth; and the newspaper discovery of a barroom poet at Schmidt's
free-lunch counter; and the joke which his fashionable uptown club put
up on Cyrus the Gaunt; and politics and social doings, and the whisper
of scandal; exactly as it might be in any other little world than Our
Square; and, finally, for I was leading up to a delicate and difficult
point, my own little smile of fortune, in the form of a small textbook
finally accepted and advance royalty duly paid thereon. For the
difficult and dangerous point was how to help the Gnome in case he
needed it. Offer of charity, even when glossed over with the euphemism
of a “loan,” is not accepted in ease of spirit by the people of Our
Square. In fact, it isn't accepted at all, as a rule. The likelihood
of ability to pay back is too dubious and remote. So it was in my most
offhand manner that I inquired:--
“By the way, how are you off for ready cash?”
Leon fluttered his hand among the papers on the bed. They were opened
envelopes.
“Look inside them,” he directed.
Within were checks. They were on various mercantile and commercial
firms. Mostly the amounts were small; two dollars, two-and-a-half,
three, and four, and the largest for ten dollars. Totaled up they
amounted to affluence as Our Square understands the term.
“Something new?” I asked.
“Yes. Advertising sketches. They've caught on.”
“I didn't know that you could draw, Leon.”
“Neither did I, beyond scratchy, sketchy blobs, until the Bonnie Lassie
told me.
“If the Bonnie Lassie has been giving you lessons, you're in a good
school,” I said, for the local sculptress, nymph, and goddess of Our
Square had already begun to make us and herself famous with her tiny
bronzes.
“Not lessons exactly. But pointers.”
“You're in luck to be making money while you 're laid up.”
“The doc says I oughtn't to work at it. But I had to do something or go
crazy. A man can't live by just waiting; can he? So when I can't sleep I
sketch. And the checks come in. It's like a miracle. Only--it isn't the
miracle that I want. When do you think I'll be strong enough to get out?
Can't you tell me? Can't you find out from doc? I'd get better if I only
had something to go on!”
Always that was the beginning and end of our talks; talks which often
skirted the borders of the secret that was wearing his life down, but
never revealed it. When I sought to shift the burden of the query upon
the Little Red Doctor, he looked glum and shook his head.
“But go there when you can, dominie. He likes to have you. You rest him.
Sometimes he sleeps after you've gone.” Though the Gnome never spoke of
it again, I knew why he liked me with him. The bond of sympathy was that
in my life, too, had been an empty chair that whispered. So the harsh
summer elongated itself like the stretching of a white-hot metal bar,
and through the swelter and hush of long nights I watched the rugged
Gnome slowly dwindle.
My first weekly watch night in September came with one of the savagest
onslaughts of belated heat in the memory of Our Square. For the sake
of what little air there was I had drawn the couch out between the two
windows. Discouraged by the handicap of a forearm which stuck clammily
to his drawing board, the Gnome had turned off his overhead light, and
now lay rigid. But I knew that he did not sleep. From some merciful
cleft in the brazen sky came a waft of coolness. It fanned me into a
doze.
I awoke with a start, to hear the Gnome's voice, in a hard-breathed
whisper: “My heart! Oh, my heart!”
“This,” I thought, “is the end.” I tried to rise, but a paralysis of the
will held me, though my senses seemed preternaturally acute.
From the bedside I heard the stir of the wicker chair. The withes moved
softly upon themselves with delicate, smooth rustlings. The chair,
whispering, sagged and yielded as if to the pressure of some light,
sweet burden. Then the voice of the Gnome came, out of the darkness,
again, and I knew that my fear was without cause, for he was leaning
toward the chair and speaking to that which whispered.
“My Heart! Oh, my Heart! Will you never come back? Don't you know that I
can't come to find you? I've tried. God of pity, how I've tried! Can't
you hear me, can't you feel me calling for you? If I could see you once
again! Only once. It isn't so much to ask. And the time is short. Come
back to me, my Heart!”
I heard the chair whispering, whispering messages beyond the little
reach of human understanding. Then the beggar of ghosts fell back, and
the bed creaked and shook. I knew what made it creak and shake. Chairs
that whisper have no balm for that misery.
Two of us lay still and wakeful through the rest of that night. In the
morning we faced each other pallidly.
“Did you hear me in the night?” asked my host.
“Yes.”
“Then I'm going to tell you the rest, for I think I haven't much longer
time to tell anything.”
“Oh, nonsense!” I protested; but it was lip speech only, and he smiled
at the pretense.
“Of course, nonsense, if you like. But I'll go, shriven of _that_
secret. The wicker chair is where She used to sit.”
“That much I gathered.”
“How can I describe Her to you? How can I make you understand as you
would if you'd seen Her?”
“Perhaps I have.”
“When? Where?”
“Sitting with you on a bench in the Square the week the lilacs bloomed.
She looked afraid.”
“She was. A brute of a foreman had insulted her. So she lost her job
as a feather finisher--did you see her beautiful hands?--and she could
find no other, and there was nobody in the world for her to turn to.
Down below her last dollar, and twenty years old, and lovely. There's
terror enough in that, isn't there?”
My mind went back to certain black-and-scarlet tragedies which Our
Square makes brave pretense of having forgotten; tragedies of its
unforgotten daughters. Terror enough, indeed!
“Was she some one you knew?”
No; she was not some one whom the Gnome knew. How to get to know her
and help her (for help was his one, all-effacing, loyal purpose from
the first moment he looked into her face); there was the heart of the
problem. At any moment she might pass on, out of reach of his aid.
Yet to speak to her was too much risk. She sat poised as ready for
startled flight as a bird. Into which deadlock of fateful chances
intruded Susan Gluck's Orphan, aged six, and with a passion for
scientific pursuits. The immediate object of his research was to
discover what treasure so strongly interested a honeybee in a lilac
bell, and if need be assist in the operation, his honorable purpose also
being to help. Unfortunately the Busy One misunderstood and resented,
whereupon Susan Gluck's Orphan lifted up his voice and smote the far
heavens with his lamentations. To him, running in agonized circles with
his finger in his mouth, the girl extended arms and invitation to come
and be comforted. The voice, with its clear, soft, mothering appeal,
tugged at the Gnome's heart-strings; to Susan Gluck's Orphan it was,
however, but the voice of a stranger, and therefore to be feared. There,
however, sat Leon the Gnome, unnoted before, but now an appreciated
refuge. For to the young of the species in Our Square the Gnome is
a delight, because of his athletic habit of using a child--and
sometimes two--in evening dumb-bell exercises, for the upkeep of his
mighty muscles. To his knees fled the wailful orphan. Gently though
clumsily the Gnome extracted the stinger, in astonished contemplation of
which the sufferer temporarily forgot his woes; presently, however, as
the poison took hold of the nerves, lapsing again into woe.
All this the girl had been watching from the corner of her eye, making,
one may guess, a private estimate of the singular-looking youth who had
been covertly spying upon her fear and despair. Wise in a lore of which
the Gnome was as ignorant as the Orphan, she now offered wet mud. It
was applied, and the adoptive pride of the Glucks raced off to vaunt
his wounds to his fellows, leaving two people with quick-beating hearts
gazing at each other. The Gnome took a quick resolve.
“I have been frightened, too, in my time.”
“He is well over it,” answered the girl, following the now boasting
Orphan with her gaze.
“I don't mean that. I have been hungry too.”
Now she understood, and drew back, flushing. But she, too, was one to
go straight to a point. Perhaps two more direct spirits than those twain
seldom meet. “You mean me?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“I'm not hungry, and I'm not afraid,” she lied.
“Could you believe,” he said slowly, “that I mean as well to you as I
did to that child--and the same?”
She did not answer at once, but the defensive look wavered in her eyes.
“Do you ever gamble?” was his next question.
“Gamble?” she repeated in amazement.
“Like matching pennies. I'll match you for the dinners.”
“I--I've only got a dollar,” she said.
“Plenty.”
“It isn't really a dollar,” she murmured. “I've only got--forty-three
cents--in the world.”
It was her first confidence, and he thrilled to it. But he accepted it
quite as a matter of course.
“Even on that it can be done. Come; where are you any worse off, even
if you lose? And, at dinner, we might figure out some way for you to be
better off.”
She got out a penny and looked at it a long time and then said: “Do I
toss it up?” And of course the Gnome said no; because a tossed penny
shows for itself. So they matched, and he looked at his coin (which
showed the winning side up) and said:--
“I lose; I didn't match you.”
And then her lost misgiving surged over her and they sat and argued it.
That is when I first noticed them. The Gnome won. Of course.
“So I took her to Marot's,” said the young giant, sitting up against his
pillows and letting his gaze fare out into the humming heat of the day;
“because I knew that, on a pinch, Mme. Marot would look after her. And I
had an awful time keeping the bill of fare away from her and making her
believe that she was getting only forty-three cents' worth. Courage came
back to her with the food. She told me a little of her story; not much,
then or afterward. I think she didn't want to claim anything of me,
ever, not even sympathy. You see?”
I did see, if only vaguely. Leon the Gnome was building up a character
to match the curious beauty of the face I had seen that once.
“That foreman brute wasn't her first experience. She had had to fight
before; to leave good employment. To her the world was a jungle full of
men who were only a horrible sort of pursuing ape. That came out later
when I knew her better. My business there at that first dinner at
Marot's was to get her to believe in me. Well,” he sighed, as over the
memory of a formidable task accomplished, “I did it!”
He did it! Think of the gulf between those two; full, for her, of
shameful memories and bristling fears; a gulf to be crossed with a
shrinking heart before she could trust him; and across it he had led her
by the mere power of words. Well, no; not words alone. Something shining
and clear and trust-compelling back of the words; the nature of the man.
Have I said that our Gnome was rather a wonderful person? He was.
“But how did you do it, miracle worker?” I demanded.
“No miracle at all. I don't understand you. I just told her about
myself.”
“Quite so. What, for example?”
“Oh, everything,” he said, with a gesture of his big hands, indicating
a broad generality. “Just a sort of outline of my life. I wanted her to
know me as I was.” I wondered how many youths of my acquaintance in Our
Square, or out, could afford to tell “everything” as a method of winning
a young girl's confidence. But the Gnome, as I have indicated, was
something of a phenomenon.
“So I lent her money and courage to go on with. And that evening, when
we had walked and talked I said to her: 'Where will you go to-night?'
and she said: 'Tell me.' So I brought her here to live.”
“Here?” I exclaimed.
“What are you thinking?” he growled. “Don't think it. Open that door.”
He pointed to the far corner of the room. I did as directed. “Look on the
other side of it. What do you see?”
What I saw on the further side of the door was an oak bar set in iron
clamps. Beyond was a tiny room and a tiny white bed and a flower in
a pot on the window sill, dead and withered in the heat. Opposite the
window an exit led to the hallway.
“There she lived and sang and was happy for fifty-five days. Each day
was more glorious than the last for me. She stopped being afraid almost
at once. It was just an even week after she came that she tapped on the
door, when I had settled down to read my evening away.
“'May I come in?' she asked.
“'Yes,' I said.
“'For quite a time she made no move. Then: 'Are you sure?' she said.
“I understood. That was her way--to make you understand more than she
said.” The sick man leaned out from his pillow toward the little door.
“I can see her now, as she came into the room. She was all in fresh
white, with a touch of some color at her waist. I had bought that dress
for her. Do you know the delight of buying the realities of life for
the woman you love? Oh, yes! I loved her then. I had loved her from
the first sight, when I spoke to her on the bench because she seemed so
desolate and scared.
“She came straight to me, and I stood up and put down my book. She
looked me in the eyes, hard. Then she held out her hand. 'Shake hands,'
she said. I shook. 'I'll keep the bargain,' I said. 'I know you will,'
said she. She sat down in the wicker chair. No one has sat in it since;
not even the Bonnie Lassie when she came. Yes; she sat down in the chair
as if she were adopting it for her own. And we talked.”
“What did you talk about?” I asked. A foolish question, for what do
youth and youth always talk about, when they encounter? But his reply
surprised me.
“Money, mostly, that first evening. We went over accounts. She was
keeping strict record of every cent I spent on her, to pay back when she
got a job. Room rent, too. Oh, it was all very businesslike throughout.
Afterward we talked about life and books and things. I lent her my
books. I read a good deal, you know; all of us in the printing trades
are great readers,” he added with a touch of guild pride. “She was
better educated than I, though. Where did she get it? I never found out.
Of course I didn't ask any questions. That was part of the bargain, as
I understood it. She asked me a million. She turned me inside out and
sometimes she laughed at me. But her laughter never hurt. It wasn't that
kind.”
“Mightn't she have thought that your not asking questions of your own
showed a lack of interest in her?” I suggested.
“How could she? I hadn't the right to ask questions. I hadn't the right
to do anything but watch over her and guard her and keep to my bargain.
Every evening she knocked and came in and sat in the wicker chair,
and we talked. It was the sweetest thing in life to me, that absolute
confidence. But the greater her confidence grew the more I was bound
not to let her see what I felt for her. Isn't it so? You see, I know
nothing about women.”
Having my grave doubts upon the point, I offered no advice.
“She got a job. I don't know where. Next week she began to pay me up.”
“Did you make any protests?” I asked, sounding him.
“Protests? Certainly not. I couldn't, could I? It was a question of her
self-respect.”
“Of course. I beg your pardon for asking.”
“There was one night--we had been to a concert, Dutch treat, of
course--and she came into my room to sit and talk it over for a few
minutes. Passing me on her way back to her own room, she stopped behind
my chair, and I felt something just brush my temple; and then the door
shut behind her and the bar fell, and I heard her voice: 'Good-night,
Gala-had.' For the next three days I never set eyes on her.”
“Did that tell you nothing?”
“What should it tell me?” retorted that pathetic young idiot. “It was
just part of her mystery, of the mystery of woman, I suppose. The next
Saturday night that drunken sot, MacLachan, came and ruined everything.”
“Soft words, Leon,” I protested, for the dour-faced, harsh-spoken,
sore-hearted tailor of Our Square has his own reasons for drink and
forgetfulness, and, drunk or sober, he is my friend.
“I wish he had broken his neck on the stairs,” said the Gnome savagely.
“He sat over there, bleating to me some gibberish about Scotch
philosophy, when Vera came into her room, and knocked as she always did.
It was he that called 'Come in.' She came and stopped, looking at him
with surprise. 'Oh,' she said, 'I didn't know.' 'No more did I,' said
MacLachan, standing up with solemn, drunken politeness. 'I was not aweer
there was a Mrs. Leon Coventry here.' She turned color, but looked him
in the eye. 'There isn't,' said she. 'Then take shame to yerself,' he
said. 'Ye should make at least the pretex'.'
“If she hadn't jumped between us, I would have pitched him out of the
window. But she checked me long enough for him to get away and run down
the stairs. It was the first time I had felt her arms and it turned me
sick with longing. She backed away from me and said: 'I'm sorry, Leon. I
didn't know there was any one here.' 'Wait,' I said. 'We've _got_ to be
married now.' If you could have seen her face, you'd have thought I'd
struck her.” He stopped and swept the beads of sweat from his temples.
“Is that all you said?” I asked.
He stared at me. “That's almost what she asked me?” he replied. “She
said: 'Is that all you have to say to me, Leon?' I didn't get her
meaning. I was intent on the one thing--the bargain: that I mustn't make
love to her; that I mustn't catch her in my arms and hold her against
my heart that was bursting with love of her. The fever was on me, then,
too, and I suppose that kept me to the one idea that was burning in my
brain.
“'We can go to the Greek church, on the other side of the square,' I
said. 'When can you be ready?'
“She walked back into her room, and I never saw her again.”
“God forgive you for a fool!” I said.
“Why didn't you tell her what every woman wants to hear, that you loved
her?”
“Why, she must have known it; she must have realized it a thousand
times, by a thousand signs. Yet she left me--that way.”
“You've had nothing from her since?”
“Yes. A money order for the balance of what she owed me.” An
involuntary, jealous clutch at his pillow told me that the money order
had not been and would not be cashed.
“No word with it?”
“Just gratitude.” The Gnome's sensitive lips quivered. “What do I want
with gratitude? I want _her!_ I want to find her. Suppose she were in
trouble again. She's so young and helpless!”
“MacLachan never meant--”
“I went out to kill MacLachan next day. I was having pretty good luck at
it too, when Terry the Cop came in. They brought me back here and
called the doctor, and MacLachan cried out of one eye, for the other was
closed.”
I recalled the tailor's black eye. Further I recalled that when
some other-world business had taken me to Fifth Avenue I had there
encountered Mac (of all persons) in (of all places) a millinery store.
The fragments of his conversation which I caught related to ostriches.
To my inquiry he replied that he was pursuing a will-o'-the-wisp, and
that it was a lawful occupation. The suspicion now lodged in my mind
that Mac had been searching for a lost trail. Of this I said nothing to
Leon.
“Sometimes at night,” the sick man went on, “when I am not longing to
smash up all the world because I can't get out and find her, she comes
and sits in the wicker chair, and I hear the pressure of her dear body
against the withes, and I feel her breath in the silence, but she never
speaks. Is she dead, do you think?”
I most emphatically declined to entertain any such hypothesis. As for
the Gnome, it seemed that he soon might be. The Little Red Doctor's
visits grew more frequent, and his brow more corrugated, and his eyes
more perplexed. Once he went so far as to observe in my hearing that
nature could go just about so far without sleep and then it cracked.
“Through that crack,” he remarked, “enters sometimes my old friend,
Death, sometimes madness. Let's pray that it won't be madness in the
Gnome's case.”
Indications seemed to point in that direction, however. Leon's
association with the spirit of the chair became closer and more
constant. Night after night I heard him murmuring in the darkness, and
the soft creak and rustle and whisper of the chair in reply, until the
hairs of my neck quivered.
There came a night when the heat broke under a pressure of wild wind and
rain from the northwest that swept Our Square like an aerial charge.
It whirled me, breathless, into No. 7, and pursued me up the stairs,
puffing out the light at the top. The Gnome was working. Beside him on a
stand rustled a little pile of checks, weighted down.
“I'm going to leave a legacy,” he said gayly. “Will you be my executor?
You'll have to find Her, you know.”
“Ask me ten years from now, if I'm alive,” I answered. “What's to-night?
Reading?”
“Sleep, for you. You look done up. Take the couch and a blanket.”
I took them and, with them, what I had originally planned to be a brief
nap, for there was medicine to be given now. When I woke up the room was
dark. It seemed to me that a cold draft had passed over and roused
me. Above the rush and whistle of the wind I could hear the chair
whispering.
“My Heart! Oh, my Heart! Have you come back?” pleaded the Gnome's voice
in the silence.
Then all the blood in my body made one great leap and stopped. The chair
had sobbed.
“It has seemed so often that I could stretch out my hand and touch
you,” went on the piteous, quiet voice from the bed. “But you were never
there. And my soul is tired with waiting and longing.”
The chair rustled again with the sound of release from weight. There was
a broken cry of love and fear and gladness that was of this and not the
other world, and I knew without seeing that it was a woman of flesh and
blood who lay on the Gnome's breast, covering his face with her kisses.
“Darling fool! Darling fool! Why didn't you tell me?” she sobbed. “Why
didn't you tell me that you loved me?”
“I thought that I did,” said the Gnome, and I started at the changed
voice, for it had suddenly taken on life and vigor. “I thought I told
you in every word and look that you were all my world.” There was a
pause, then: “Who _did_ tell you?”
“Mr. MacLachan. He found me at last. He took me by the arm and said:
'Lassie, the love o' you is the life o' him. An' it's going if you
don't come back an' save him!' Is it true, dearest one?” she cried
passionately. “Tell me I'm not too late.”
Then I judged it best to tiptoe quite circumspectly out of the room. On
the landing below I met the Little Red Doctor.
“Who went up the stairs just now?” he cried.
“Love,” said I. “Did you fear it was Death?”