A PLAYWRIGHT named Euripides was the means of bringing us together. He
sat hunched upon a bench in Our Square--not Euripides, of course, but
this strange disciple of his--over a little book. When the church clock
struck twelve he arose and unfolded himself to preposterous lengths. He
stepped casually over a four-foot wire, strode across forbidden grass
plots, and leaned pensively against the northern boundary fence.
Although it was a six-foot fence, he jutted considerably above it. I
glanced from him back to the bench he had just quitted. There lay his
book. I picked it up. It was “The Bacchae.” In the original, if you
please!
Now, to find a gigantic and unexplained stranger in the metropolitan
hurry and stress of Our Square perusing the classic version of the very
'Greekest and most mystic of dramas, by the spluttering ray of Jove's
own lightning pent up and set to work in a two-by-one frosted globe at
so many cents per kilowatt, is a startling experience for a quiet, old
semi-retired pedagogue like myself. I pocketed the volume (which was in
a semiuncial text like running tendrils) and sat down to consider its
owner. Another of the Thunderer's bottled bolts diffused its light
where he now stood, and set forth his face. It was young and comely and
gallant, with a wrapt, intent melancholy; the face of a seeker, baffled
but still defiant of despair. It seemed to be turned toward a star that
I could not see.
I sat and waited for Terry the Cop to arrive on his stated rounds. If
that shrewd young guardian of the local peace did not already know about
the classical stranger, he could be depended upon to find out. When his
heavy tread paused before my bench I indicated the trespassing giant.
“Terry,” said I, “what is that?”
“That,” replied Terry promptly, “is a Nut.”
“Where does it come from?”
“Search me, dominie. It just kinda drops in.”
“Often?”
“Every night.”
“Why haven't I seen it before?”
“You hit the hay too early. This bird is an owl, and it don't begin to
hoot till late.”
“Hoot?” I repeated. Terry's symbolism sometimes tends to the obscure.
“Stick around a few minutes,” advised the wise young policeman, “and
you'll hear something.”
“Is he an amateur astronomer?” I asked. “Or what is it he is staring
at?”
Terry pointed. “Look between those two roofs. See a little light, way up
there?” I did. “That's it. That's the window.”
“Ah,” said I. “Romeo, I suppose.”
“Long-distance to the balcony,” returned Terry the Cop, who does not
lack literary background. “That's the upper wing of the Samaritan
Hospital, two blocks away. Sh-h-h! He's going to begin.” The stranger
had taken from his coat a short, slender object which he fitted together
with precision. Now he threw up his head and set it to his lips. Faint
and pure as the song of a bird, heard across the hushed reaches of a
forest, the music came to us. It was a wild, soaring melody unknown to
me, but as I listened I thought of all the songs with which reed and
pipe have ever answered to the breath of man; Pan's minstrels, and the
glorified penny whistle of Svengali and the horns of elfland faintly
blowing, and the witchery of the Pied Piper of Hamelin; and it seemed to
me that all these and more blended in the rise and fall of those magic
measures.
Silence fell. A wakened sleeper in a tree twittered a sleepy request for
more. The player had lowered his instrument and was leaning against the
rail, gazing. At that distance there could have been no answer from the
far hospital window; the tones of his pipe were so soft as hardly to be
audible where we stood. Yet he presently nodded and threw up his hand,
and his face was transfigured with a wistful passion as he lifted
the slender pipe to his lips again. This time, indeed, I knew what he
played. It was that music which, above all other, embodies the soul and
spirit of immortal youth; youth that hopes and fears and despairs and
hopes again; youth that hungers and loves and suffers; youth that ever,
through all turmoil and grief and wreckage, is imperishably young and
immortally lovely, the music of “Bohême.” Again the strains sank and
died in the darkness.
“That's all,” Terry the Cop informed me. “It's their signal. And he
always ends on that.”
“Signal? At that distance? Do you mean to tell me she--whoever she is
--can hear?”
“Whether she hears or not, she seems to get somethin' over to this Romeo
guy.”
“No, Terry,” I said. “Not Romeo. An older singer and a greater.” And,
with my hand on the little volume in my pocket, I gave my policeman
friend the benefit of Gilbert Murray's matchless translation:--
“In the elm woods and the oaken,
There where Orpheus harped of old,
And the trees awoke and knew him,
And the wild things gathered to him,
As he sang amid the broken
Glens his music manifold.”
“Some rag!” said Terry the Cop admiringly.
“That, Terry,” said I, indicating the stranger, who was once more lost
in watchfulness, “is Orpheus.”
This was too much of a strain on Terry's classic lore. “You're in
wrong there, dominie. He don't belong to any Orpheus nor Arion nor
Liedertafel. He's a Greek and his name is Philip, two pops, and an
oulos.”
“All very well; Terry,” said I, trying him out. “But does that give him
the right to play a musical instrument in a public place at an unlawful
hour?”
“Come off, dominie,” said Terry the Cop uneasily. “He ain't doing any
harm.”
“Disturbing the peace,” I pursued severely, “and tramping down the park
grass against the statute thereunto made and provided. What do you let
him do it for, Terry?”
“Aw, I kinda like the guy,” admitted Terry shamefacedly. “He's a nut.
But he's a good nut. I'm sorry for him. He's up against it with that
girl. She ain't ever coming out of the hospital, I guess. Besides, he
did me a good turn once.”
The good turn, it appeared, had consisted in the prompt and effective
wielding of a cane, unceremoniously borrowed from a passer-by when a
contingent of the Shadow Gang from Second Avenue had undertaken, in
pure wantonness of spirit, to “jump” Terry. Subsequently, Orpheus had
initiated Terry into some technical and abstruse mysteries of stick
work, whereby, he explained, the Orthian shepherds defended themselves
against robbers and wolves alike.
“I told him to keep a stick with him,” said Terry. “He'll need it, for
that bunch will get to him some time. They don't forget.”
No weapon was in the Greek's hand, however, as he turned away toward the
nearest exit. Halfway there he paused, felt in his pocket, and hurried
over to his bench with a look of dismay. I met him, holding out the
precious book. He took it with a sigh of relief, thanking me with
precise but curiously accented courtesy.
“It is a beautiful text,” I observed. “You can read it?” he said with
kindling eyes. “You read the Greek?”
“Sure,” put in Terry the Cop. “The dominie knows all the languages from
Chinese to Williamsburg. Domine, make you acquainted with Mr. Phil.”
Thus I met Orpheus. We sat on a bench until the stroke of three brought
me to my senses, while he declaimed selected passages in a voice as of
rolling waters. That was the first of many nights of Dionysian revelry
on the slopes of Mount Olympus, with “The Bacchae” for guidebook and
the strange piper for leader. Never would he pipe for me, however. If I
wished to hear the soft marvel of his music I must wait until midnight
and stand apart in the shadow to listen while he played to the far-away
beam of light in the hospital wing. Though our acquaintance ripened
swiftly into a species of intimacy, he made no reference to the devotion
in which his life centered. He had the gift of an impenetrable reserve.
Concerning himself, he was only less reticent. From casual references,
however, I gathered that he was the son of a merchant of Lamia, educated
in England, and sent to this country on an errand of commerce, and that
he would long since have returned but for the light in that window.
It is not good for man to live on hope alone. So I sought to involve my
Greek in the close-woven interests of Our Square. I took him to dine at
the Elite Restaurant, and introduced him to Polyglot Elsa, the cashier
(who put a fearful strain on his courtesy with her barbarous modern
Greek), and impressed him into the amateur police to escort MacLachan
the Tailor home, drunk and singing “The Cork Leg,” and even got him to
pipe gay tunes of an early evening for our little asphalt-dancers
to practice by; but always back of his gentle courtesy and tolerant
kindness there was an aloofness of the spirit, as if he had but stepped
out, a godlike spectator, from the limbo of some remote world hidden
behind the tendrils and leafage of that wonderful semiuncial text. Then
one night, when he had sent his heart and hope and longing out upon
the wings of music through the night, I asked him to help me soothe the
wakefulness of Leon Coventry. Together we climbed the stifling stairs
of the old mansion to the top floor where Leon the Gnome lay eating his
heart out and staring from an empty chair that whispered to the door of
an empty room, its oaken bar fallen, its little white bed smooth, its
one flower withered and dead on the window sill. Little was said between
the swarthy Gnome on the bed and the splendid young god sitting beside
him, but there passed between them some subtle understanding of the
spirit. Orpheus made his music for the sick man; almost such music as
he had sent winging through the outer darkness. At the end he took the
Gnome's gnarled hand in his own.
“She will come back,” he said. “Believe always that she will come
back. It is only by faith that we hold the dreams that are truer than
reality.”
Outside Orpheus turned to me. “You believe that, do you not?” he asked.