“Sometimes the Bonnie Lassie thinks around queer corners with her mind,
but she's got the wisest heart in Our Square.” So Pinney the Rat got his
instructions and reluctant leave from his doctor to indulge in a brief
midnight stroll that very night.
Our Square was haunted that midnight by uneasy figures slinking about in
shadowy backgrounds. One by one Terry the Cop trailed them down only to
be discomfited by successive discoveries of his own particular friends.
The one logical object of suspicion, Pinney the Rat, sat openly on a
bench and smoked and waited for Orpheus to finish his music. When it was
over, the little guttersnipe went to meet the big Olympian. Carefully
indeed had we rehearsed the Rat in a modulated method of breaking the
news. But the gangster was an undisciplined soul and a direct. At the
crisis he reverted to his own way, which perhaps was best. He put a hand
on Orpheus's shoulder.
“Say, bo',” he said, “yer in wrong about the lady.”
The Greek's face quivered, in anticipation of another blow at the fabric
of his precious dream. “I know,” he said.
“No, yeh don't know. She didn't croak. She's alive.”
Orpheus's hands went to his temples.
“She's alive and waiting for you in the dominie's hallway. Come wit' me.
Ready? Hep!”
Then Cyrus the Gaunt, Terry the Cop, and I had to fall on the Little Red
Doctor and pin him to a bench to keep him from ruining it all, for the
great bulk of the Greek loosened in every fibre and he collapsed into
the clutch of the fragile Rat in a manner calculated (so the maddened
physician informed us in technical and violent terms) to rip every
condemned stitch out of the latter's foreordained peritoneum.
Presumably, however, the Little Red Doctor had stitched better than he
knew. For Pinney straightened the big man up and marched him across the
way. As the strange pair mounted the steps the vestibule door opened. A
little, quick figure sped to meet them. We heard across the leafage of
Our Square the cry of a man who has come back to life and of a woman who
has come back to love. When my eyes, which are growing old and play me
strange tricks, had cleared, the doors were closed and Pinney the
Rat was playing watchdog on the steps, jealously guarding that sacred
vestibule.
Oh, the vestibules of Our Square! What Arcadia has fostered a thousandth
part of their romance! Between those narrow walls, behind those
ill-guarded doors, in that pathetic travesty of solitude which is all
that our teeming hive affords, what heights and depths of love and
anguish, what hope and despair, what triumphs, what abnegations, what
partings, what “infinite passion and the pain of finite hearts that
yearn,” pass, and are forgotten! When the blight of ages shall lie heavy
and dusty over a forgotten metropolis, when the last human habitation
totters to its fall in some far future cataclysm, two lovers shall stand
clasped in its vestibule forgetful of ruin, of death, of all but each
other. Oh, for the pen of Euripides to celebrate fittingly those narrow
and enchanted spaces! Or the pipe of my friend Orpheus to turn their
echoes into golden music!
They came out, those two, arm enlaced in arm, with the glory on their
faces, into a world that was theirs alone for the time. They vanished
into the shadows, and the watcher on the step lifted his head and saw
them go. But the face of Pinney was no longer the face of the Rat.
He rose and slouched down the steps. We went forward to meet him.
“I wanta drink,” he muttered.
The Bonnie Lassie put her hand out to him. “No, you do not,” said she.
“No, I do not,” said Pinney. He turned to Cyrus the Gaunt.
“When do I git that job?” he asked.
“Tazmun”