WHAT first struck you about the house was that it frowned. Not angrily,
but with a kind of dull scorn. Perhaps this was its way of emphasizing
its superior aloofness from the other houses in Our Square which had
gone down in the social scale while it maintained its aristocracy
untainted. It was squat and broad and drab, like the first Varick who
had built it, and the succeeding Varicks who had inherited and dwelt
in it even to the sixth and seventh generations. Being numbered 13, it
would naturally have a sinister repute; and this was not improved by the
two suicides which had marked its occupancy; suicides not of despair or
remorse or fury, but of cold, grim disgust. Then there was the episode
of old Vernam Varick, who dabbled in diabolical mixtures in his
secret room on the third floor front under the tutelage of no less an
instructor than the Devil, and, having quarreled with Old Nick over
a moot point in alchemy, chased him out of the window and followed,
himself, to the accompaniment of a loud and sulphurous detonation. What
became of His Satanic Majesty has never been properly determined, but
old Ver-nam arrived upon the pavement in due time, crumpled up,
and thereafter circulated in a wheeled chair, sniffing about after
real-estate investments to pass the time. He it was whose purchases of
uptown property (when anything above Forty-second Street was “uptown”)
severely reprehended by the rest of the clan, subsequently reestablished
the Varick fortunes, piling up riches beyond the imagination of Our
Square. Except that he had more imagination, he was a pattern of all the
Varicks, each broad and squat of architecture like the house they dwelt
in; each, if possible, more crabbed and pigheaded and stupidly haughty
than his predecessor. In time, his son, heritor of the qualities of the
breed, grew up and married. And then the dull generations burst into
flower in Paula Varick. So the Varicks put her in a cage.
Old Vernam built the cage out of gas pipe and thick-meshed wire and
established it on the roof. From my front window, looking diagonally
across Our Square, I command a view of it. How well I remember the day
that little Paula was put into it! A black-and-white-banded nurse led
her in by the hand, held up an admonitory finger for half a minute of
directions, and disappeared down the scuttle door, leaving her alone
in a remote world. One might have expected the little girl to cry. She
didn't. She set about playing, like a happy little squirrel. Presently
there floated across the tree-tops a strange and alien sound for that
grim mansion to be making--a sweet, light, joyous, childish piping. The
little Paula was singing.
Her song disturbed young Carlo and me at our lesson. Carlo was my one
educational luxury. An assistant professor of a forgotten branch of
learning, already in middle age, as I was then, who ekes out his income
by tutoring, cannot well afford to take pupils for love. But Carlo's
father had paid in the beginning, and, when he could no longer pay, the
boy's vivid, leaping imagination and his passionate love for all that
was fine and true in reading had captivated me. I could not let him go.
So we kept up the lessons, and ranged the field of the classics, Greek
and Latin, English, French, and German, together. He was to be a poet,
I foresaw, or perhaps a dramatist, and I believe I bragged of him
unconscionably to my associates. Well, they are kindly souls and have
forborne to taunt the prophet! Carlo's father was a Northern Italian,
the second son of a noble family, who quarreled with the head of the
clan and came to this country and a top floor in Our Square to paint
masterpieces, and subsequently died at three o'clock one winter morning,
pressing another man's coat. MacLachan the Tailor, then just starting
his Home of Fashion, had given him the work to save the pair from being
evicted, after their money gave out. At the last the elder Trentano
took to drink. Then Carlo got jobs as a model, for he was strong and
beautiful like a young woods creature. But he let nothing interfere with
our lessons.
Paula, the happy singer, did interfere, however. From time to time my
pupil's eyes wandered from his book to fix themselves with a puzzled
gaze on the roof beyond the tree-tops. Curiosity proved too much for him
at length.
“Dominie!” he said.
“Well?”
“Why do they put the little girl in a cage?”
“To keep her from falling off the roof.”
“Why do they put her on the roof?”
“To play.”
“Why doesn't she play in Our Square?”
“She is not allowed to play with the children in Our Square.”
Carlo pondered this. A theory born of temporary local conditions
occurred to him. “Has she got measles?”
This was an easy way out. To enlighten Carlo as to the reasons why the
descendant of all the Varicks was not permitted to take part in the
degenerated social activities of Our Square, would be to undermine my
carefully instilled doctrine of the blessings of democracy where all
are free and equal. Therefore with mendacious, though worthy, intent I
answered:--
“Not measles, exactly.”
“Oh!” said Carlo. “She must get lonesome.”
“Doubtless.”
The cheery singing had ceased now, and the child was busy with some
other concern. Carlo's sharper vision identified it.
“She's setting a tea-table.”
“Is she?”
“And nobody will come to tea at it, will they?”
“Perhaps her dolls.”
“I don't see any dolls.” His lustrous eyes brooded on the lonely little
hostess. “Dominie, do you think she'd like it if I came?”
“Are you thinking of storming the house?” I asked, amused.
“That's our roof there.” He pointed to a shabby structure overtopping
the squat Varick domicile by some ten feet, and separated from it by
a well, four or five feet broad. “I could lean over and speak to her,
couldn't I?”
“I hardly think her family would approve.”
“Her family are _mean_,” declared Carlo heatedly, “to shut her up in a
cage.”
“Come back from the realms of romance,” I bade him sternly, “and attend
to the lesson.”
Before it was over the black-and-white-banded nurse had retrieved her
charge and taken her below.
Three days later I beheld two small figures on the Varick roof. One was
inside the cage; one outside. They appeared to be engaged in amicable
discourse. The caged figure was little Paula. As to the free one, I
could scarcely believe my eyes which tried to assure me that it was
Carlo Trentano. It had come about in this way: For two days rain had
kept the little prisoner from the roof. She was swaying to and fro on
a rocking-horse, crooning to herself, and this was the burden of her
improvised chant:--
“I wi-ish I had some one to play-ay-ay wif!
Oh, I wi-ish I had some one to play-ay-ay wif!
Oh, I wi-ish I had somebuddy to play-ay wif!
I don't like to play all alone!”
Perhaps she had sung it over ten or twelve times when her wish
materialized from behind the broad chimney at the rear. She heard his
footfall first and then her sweet, wondering eyes beheld the visitor, a
shabby, clean, and marvelous boy, some years her elder and about twice
her size. Nevertheless, with the superiority of sex she immediately
addressed him as “Little Boy.”
“Little Boy, where did you come from?”
“Up there,” replied her caller, pointing.
The caged one turned her solemn regard “up there” and saw a great,
white, softly rolling mass floating in a sky of azure.
“From that?” she inquired.
Carlo considered the cloud and was pleased with it as a source. “Yes,”
he said.
“It looks soft and sleepy,” she observed, after a more critical
consideration.
They contemplated each other in a silence which threatened to become a
deadlock, when he broke it.
“Do you like gum?” he asked.
“What's gum?”
“Chewing-gum, of course.”
“I don't know what that is.”
He stared at her in utter incredulity. “You honestly never chewed gum?”
A shake of the tawny head answered him. “Nor ate an all-day sucker?”
Another shake. “Nor played marbles?” Still another mute denial. “Nor
flew kites, nor pegged the cat, nor rollered on the asphalt, nor spun
tops?” The questions came too fast for detailed answer, but the child's
face grew more and more dismal as she was thus led, step by step, to
confront a wasted life. Her inquisitor drew a long breath. “What did
they put you in for?” he asked. “In where?”
“In that cage.”
“To play.” Her inventiveness rose in arms to offset the recondite and
mysterious joys which he had enumerated, and with it her spirits. “I
play I'm a wild animal. Gr-rr-rr-rr! If I could get out I'd eat you up,
Little Boy.”
He played up to her. “I know what you are. You're a tiger. A big stripy
tiger.
'Tiger! Tiger! burning bright--
In the forests of the night!'”
“Say some more,” she demanded imperiously. “I like poetry.”
“That's all I remember. I'll tell you; I'll be a keeper, and I'll come
to the cage to feed you.” He felt in his pocket and produced a fresh
stick of gum which he thrust through the wire meshes. Being a realist,
Paula promptly bit him on the finger.
“Ow!” he exclaimed and dropped the gum. She pounced upon it, growling
ferociously. “You play awfully hard, don't you?” he observed, caressing
the mark of a sharp little tooth.
“You have to when you don't have anybody but yourself to play with,
or it isn't real,” replied the child with unconscious pathos. “Now I'm
going to eat this all up!”
“Don't swallow it,” he warned. “You just chew it. It's gum.”
“Um-m-m!” mumbled the Tiger appreciatively. “I like it. I like you. When
do you have to go back to your cloud?” She looked up apprehensively at
that fleecy domicile which was moving rapidly away.
“Oh, any time. No, I'll tell you,” he added confidentially; “I didn't
really come from the cloud. I came from that roof up there.”
“How?”
“Down a rope.”
“Did you? I like that almost as well. Where did you get the rope?”
“It was over the fire escape. I live on the top floor there.”
“S'posen you'd fall right down between the two houses,” surmised the
little Tiger.
“Then I'd be killed.” This, as a matter of fact, was highly probable.
But Carlo, like most of the highland Italians, was strong, supple, and
daring; ingenious, too, for he had made loops in his rope to help him
climb up again.
Paula the Tiger was now considering cognate matters with appropriate
gravity. “I think I'd rather have you live in the cloud,” she decided.
“Angels live in clouds. If you 're an angel, you won't fall and get
killed,” she continued, finding a kindly refuge in theology. “I'd rather
have you an angel.”
“All right. I'll be an angel,” he agreed. “Nurse doesn't let me play
with little boys and girls. Maybe she wouldn't let me play with an angel
either. I think you'd better come when nurse isn't here. When will you
come again, Angel?”
“To-morrow.”
“Must I give back the nice gum?” she asked anxiously.
“No. But you'd better leave it in your cage. Grown-ups don't like gum
around,” he instructed her with precocious worldly wisdom.
“Thank you, Angel. Good-bye, Angel”
“Good-bye, little girl.”
“Gr-rr-rr-rr!” The growl was a savage reminder of the dramatic
proprieties.
Carlo was quick of apprehension. “Good-bye, Tiger,” he amended. And the
Tiger purred.
Often thereafter I saw them, at the hour when the banded nurse took
her outing, playing together on opposite sides of the barrier. Many,
various, and ingenious were the diversions which Carlo the free found to
amuse the captivity of Paula the caged. There were delightful things to
be contrived out of knotted strings, in which Carlo was of incomparable
skill. He invented a game of marbles which could be played by opponents
on different sides of a twelve-foot steel mesh; an abstruse pastime, but
apparently interesting, since it developed into an almost daily contest
in which, to judge from the joyous prancings about the cage at the
conclusion, she was invariably allowed to win. Also, there were gifts
of candy shared, and the delights of the chase with a bean-shooter for
weapon and the indignant sparrows for quarry, and instructions in the
principles of kinetic stasis as exemplified by the rotary or spinning
top. All of which was doubtless very wicked and deceitful and
clandestine, and, being so, should have been stopped by a word from me
before disaster could come. For, any day, Carlo might slip from that
swaying rope and break his precious neck. Or the Varicks might learn of
what was going on above their heads, and banish the little Tiger from
her happy cage, or perhaps even wholly from the contaminated atmosphere
of Our Square. This last would have been a blow to me, for she also was
my pupil, and a profitable one, since her father, Putnam Varick, a dry,
snuffy, stern, lethargic, ill-natured, liverish man, paid me liberally
to come five times a week and give her a grounding in Latin and French.
But I could not find it in my heart to deprive my little Paula of her
one taste of real childhood.
Discovery was, of course, inevitable. One day Paula came into the dim
and solemn Varick library where lessons were conducted with her big,
wistful, gray eyes all wet and wincing, and her queer, sprightly little
face like a mask of grief. Behind her came nurse with the expression
of a hanging judge. The culprit, it appeared, had been found in the
possession of contraband goods--to wit, a wad of much-chewed gum. Worse,
it had been discovered in a most inappropriate place.
“I puh-hut it in my huh-huh-hair,” wept the sorrowful little Tiger,
“and it stu-huh-huck.”
[Illustration: I puh-hut it in my huh-huh-hair 364]
“She won't tell me where she got it,” said nurse.
“I did. I to-hold you an angel gave it to me,” declared the Tiger,
clinging with pathetic resolution to her drama of the roof.
Nurse sniffed. Her theological imagination did not extend to heavenly
visitors who dispensed that kind of manna. It was _her_ opinion for what
it was worth (sniff) that somebody had been throwing things (sniff)
on the roof. Next time it might be (sniff) poison. Nurse _did_ have an
imagination of a kind.
It wasn't poison next time. It was a kite. Carlo had flown it from his
own roof and had brought the twine down in his teeth, and had passed the
ball through the netting to the Tiger. Oh, the thrill of ecstasy running
up her arm, to spread and glow on live wires through every nerve, as she
felt for the first time the tug and tremor of the beautiful, soaring,
captive thing swaying far, far above her, higher than the highest
roof-top she could see, higher than the biggest mountain in her
geography, as high as the vanished cloud whence the beneficent angel of
her happy drama had descended to brighten a hitherto correct and humdrum
existence. Alas for angels' visits! From a bench in Our Square, nurse
saw the aerial messenger and traced the string to the Varick roof. She
hurried home and upstairs to the roof-top a good twenty minutes before
her scheduled return.
But the scuttle stuck, and Carlo's quick ear, catching the sound, warned
him. With a quick word to his playfellow, he dodged behind the chimney
and began to climb the looped rope. There was a little space in which
the climber always emerged above the chimney into the view of the child
in the cage before he surmounted the coping of the upper roof. Paula's
eyes were fixed upon this point. The nurse's glance followed hers. Carlo
appeared, climbing in hot haste. He missed one of the loops. There was
a muffled cry. His body turned, swayed, and plunged down into the
fifty-foot abyss between the two buildings. The nurse, scared out of
her senses, rushed down the scuttle-way and hid in her room, accusing
herself of being an involuntary murderess, while poor Paula tore and
battered with her tender fingers at the cruel iron meshes in a passion
of grief and despair, long after nurse had disappeared.
A low call from above stopped her. Her angel leaned over the roof.
“Has she gone?” he asked.
The child nodded in silent terror and wonder. He came down the rope
swiftly and steadily. When he approached the cage, she saw that he was
bleeding from a gash above his temple.
“I struck on a clothesline,” he said. “It tipped me into a balcony. Just
below your roof. Lucky!”
“I thought you were killed,” she whispered. “Oh, Angel, I thought you
were dead.”
“Not hurt a bit,” he averred valiantly. “Did she see me?”
“Yes.”
“Then they won't let me come any more.”
“They'll take me away,” wailed the Tiger.
There was a pause. “I'll be sorry,” said the boy.
“So'll I.”
“I'll be aw'f'ly sorry,” said the boy painfully.
“So'll I.”
“I'll come and find you when I'm grown up.”
“Will you?” she cried eagerly.
“Cross my heart.”
“And I'll keep your gum forevern--evern--ever,” she promised solemnly.
“I've got a piece yet. Hidden. Listen. Somebody's coming!”
“Good-bye, Tiger,” said the boy.
“Good-bye, Angel,” said the girl.
She put her trembling little lips against the cold mesh of the wires.
For a moment he hesitated in boyish shamefacedness. Then he bent over to
her.
“I'll never forget you--never,” said the free little boy.
“Nor I,” said the caged little girl.
He ran and climbed: climbed out of her sight and out of her life.
For the scandalized Varicks took her from that desecrated roof to the
country, and when they came back Carlo's father was dead, and Carlo
left with very little visible means of support. So they passed on their
sundered ways. He went about his business of the fight for existence
and his place in the world. She went about her business in a life of
developing sunshine and beauty, herself the developing embodiment of
both. The cage stood on the roof, lifeless, grim, and sad.
Outwardly Our Square changes little. Inwardly it suffers from the
depredations of the years and an encroaching populace. No more
significant evidence of its failing fortunes could be adduced than
the sale of the Varick mansion. It was purchased by a Swedish labor
contractor, who sold it to a professional gambler, who in turn leased
it to a boarding-house keeper, and that sinister third-floor front
wherefrom Ver-nam Varick had so vehemently ousted his Satanic mentor
came to be occupied (to what base uses!) by a piano-tuner. The cage of
the wistful Tiger was found convenient for the week's wash.
As for the Varicks, Our Square knew them no more. The fussy, fubsy,
mean-tempered father of Paula became financially venturous (for a
Varick), dipped extensively into water-rights and power-plants in the
Southwest, and, having thus further improved the fortune handed down to
him by Vernam the Devil-Chaser, built himself a smugly splendid palace
on the Park, wherein to house Paula.
This, indeed, was no cage. For the tiny captive of the housetop had
grown beyond all human captivity; had become such a woman as the great
dreamers and poets enshrine in the sunlit mist of verse. It is not for a
simple, old pedagogue who had loved the child to describe the woman. Her
face is the common property of the public, like a ruling monarch's, so
often has it appeared in the Sunday papers, for at twenty-three she was
one of the reigning beauties of a city of lovely women. What no camera
could catch or painter fix was the joyous and joy-giving quality of
her personality. It was as if arrears of happiness from her cramped
and denied childhood had returned upon her tenfold to be scattered
in largess wherever she went. A great painter who had painted a great
portrait of her, which delighted every one but himself, had convicted
himself of failure because, he said, while he had caught the flowerlike
delicacy and the sunlike radiance and the touch of Varick imperiousness
in the background of the face, he had failed to fix the charm that made
her different and more lovely than a dozen other equally lovely women
(he was a dealer in paradox, that great painter); the look of quiet,
unconscious, waiting deep in the wide, gray eyes. And a great poet, who
was also of her adorers, said that was why she had not married. And a
great cynic whose cynicism had fallen before her said that was why she
never would marry unless a star came down from the heavens to claim her.
About the time of the height of her triumphs, Cyrus the Gaunt came to
Our Square to run the ten thousand-pound steam roller at night and sit
for sculpture by day, and eventually marry the Bonnie Lassie and go to
live in the little, quaint, old friendly house with the hospitable door,
almost opposite the Varick mansion. Because Cyrus the Gaunt's forbears
had owned Our Square when it was the Staten Farm and before the first
Varick had arrived upon the scene, Mr. Putnam Varick was willing enough
that his daughter should go to see Mr. and Mrs. Cyrus Staten, albeit
he had heard with misgivings that some of their dinners were laxly
Bohemian, combining, as they did, millionaires, bishops, and diplomats
with musicians, explorers, reformers, and other anarchists. That is how
Paula Varick came back into Our Square after fifteen years of absence
and change.
Another revenant came back about that time, along the dimly blazed
trails of fate. As I was sunning myself on my favorite bench, one
afternoon, I felt two sinewy hands on my shoulders, and turned to face
a big, smiling stranger. There was something in him that told at first
sight of the making of the man; told that the best life of the open had
formed him and the best life of the cities had finished him. There was
a certain gravity and stability about his face, but the lips were mobile
as a boy's and a shining mirthfulness gleamed from the straight-looking
black eyes.
“Dominie!” he said. Then, at my astonished look: “I haven't made a
mistake, have I?”
“Not in the title at least,” I said.
He shook me in his iron grip. “Call on your memory. It's ungrateful to
forget a man who--who owes you money,” he laughed.
“That doesn't help me,” I said, probing the vivid face.
“Have I changed so, where nothing else has changed?” he said, looking
around--“except that they've put a fire escape outside the window where
I used to sleep.” I followed his glance, and memory flashed its belated
recognition: “Carlo Trentano!” He gave me another powerful, affectionate
shake. It was like being petted by a lion. “No longer,” he said. “That's
buried with--with _him_.” He looked again toward the high-roofed house
where his father had died. “I'm all American now, Charles Trent, at your
service.”
“Where have I heard that name?”
“Seen it in the papers probably. They've had their fun with me in the
Senate Committee hearings.”
“Ah! So you're the Trent who's been making all the trouble for the
water-power people in the Southwest! And I thought that wonderful boy's
imagination of yours was going to make a poet of you, or at least a
dramatist.”
“It made me see visions,” he explained with gravity--“visions that had
to be expressed in facts. After I had worked my way through college, I
went out to the desert country. And I saw visions of water brought from
the mountains. What I saw I made other people see. Now there are growing
cities and fertile farms where there used to be only dry sand and my
imagination. Isn't that poetry, dominie,--and drama?”
It was all said quite simply, and without brag, as a man would explain
the working of some power outside of himself.
“But where did you get the money?”
“People brought it to me. The people of the dry country first. Afterward
it came in from all over, much of it from New York; and when I needed
more for my biggest projects I went to Europe and raised it.”
“You know what they say of you now? That you're advocating government
control because you've got all you can get, and wish to shut out the
others.”
“I'm offering to put my companies on the same terms with the others,” he
said impatiently. “All I demand is that eventually, when the development
concerns have made their fair profit, the rights should revert to the
people. So I'm an anarchist,” he laughed. “And I've come here to preach
my anarchy in the face of Wall Street.”
“And fifteen years ago you were a boy of--”
“Sh-h-h-h,” he warned with mock seriousness. “I pass for thirty-five.
It's a studied solemnity of demeanor that does the trick. You should see
me at a board meeting! This is holiday.” He seized and hugged me until
my old ribs cracked.
“Yet you say you're all American,” I protested, extricating myself.
“You'll be a Latin till the day you die.”
“Not enough to impair my business sense. Which reminds me. You've got
a small, accumulated interest in one of my early projects. It isn't
much,--just the debt for my lessons,--but it pays a twenty-five per cent
dividend. Now, dominie, I don't wish to hear any protests. What do you
know about business matters?” He stretched himself like a big, lithe
animal and took another comprehensive glance about Our Square. “Who's
left?” he asked. “Any one I knew?”
“MacLachan the Tailor. And Thomsen of the Élite Restaurant. Calder the
artist is dead. And do you remember--” I cut myself short, on second
thought, of mentioning Paula Varick. A better idea had come to me. The
Bonnie Lassie loves and loves forever the friend who will bring to her
house any one genuinely new and interesting, provided only that he be
presentable. Carlo, otherwise Charles Trent, was all three in an eminent
degree. “Would you care to dine at the pleasantest house in Our Square?”
I amended.
“If I have the time.”
“Make the time,” I advised. “And I'll see if I can make the place.
It'll be Wednesday evening.” For the Bonnie Lassie was giving one of her
little dinners then, and I knew that Paula Varick was to be there.
Carlo agreed, gave me his address at a golden caravansary, and left to
call on MacLachan and Thomsen. I sought out the Bonnie Lassie.
“Madam,” said I, “I am not coming to your dinner.”
“You are,” she retorted. “Paula Varick will be there. You'd crawl to San
Francisco to see Paula.”
“That's the very reason. I've got a substitute.” And I explained.
The Bonnie Lassie, who is an inveterate romanticist, was delighted.
“I'll have him take her in,” she said. “No, I can't do that. The new
Ambassador to Spain is to take her in. He shall sit on her left.”
“When you present him, introduce her as Miss Mumbleplum or something
inarticulate and non-committal of that sort. She won't know his name, of
course. Let's see if they'll discover.”
“And you accuse me of fixing up dramatic situations,” said the Bonnie
Lassie scornfully, for she has never quite forgiven my comments upon
her management of the affair between Ethel Bennington and the Little
Red Doctor, which was so nearly ruined by the hard, prosaic fact of
a toothache. “You're worse than an old maid. But you may come to the
dinner just the same. I don't mind an extra man.”
So I went to the dinner, and a very wonderful dinner it was, as all the
dinners in the Bonnie Lassie's house are. Mr. Charles Trent was very
much present, looking typically American with his severely correct
clothes, and big, graceful figure, until you noticed his eyes, which
weren't American at all, or anything else but individual. Miss Paula
Varick was also very much present, looking--well, looking as only Paula
can look, to the utter wreck and ruin of the peace of mankind's mind. In
presenting Carlo to Miss Mumbleplum (as pre-arranged) the hostess gave
them a lead by saying:--
“Mr. Trent can tell you all about your water-rights. He's a sort of
magic lord of the dry desert.”
“A baron of sand and cactus,” said Trent, smiling. But the new
Ambassador to Spain arrived just then, and nothing more was said.
At the first opportunity afforded by the diplomat, Miss Varick turned to
the guest on her left.
“I'm a landed proprietor in your country,” she said. “I own ten whole
shares of stock in a company of some sort.”
“Then you're my fellow citizen,” he claimed. “Perhaps it's one of the
companies I'm interested in.”
She named it, and he was amused to learn that her little ownership was
in the corporation which was fighting him and his plans most savagely.
She did not mention that her father was a principal stockholder and an
officer in that same corporation. Nor did Trent deem it necessary to
define his position. He didn't wish to talk politics to this wonderful
flower-woman next him. But he did wish, most determinedly, to keep those
luminous eyes turned in his direction. What Charles Trent determinedly
wished he usually got, and he achieved this particular end by talking so
well that the fresh-bloomed diplomat on the farther side began presently
to get fretful. As for Mr. Trent's right side, it mattered not a whit
whether it knew what his left side was doing, for it was on his right
that I sat. Carlo fell to telling Paula of the romance of the hunt for
the treasure of water in a dry land--more thrilling to a pioneer of
imagination than any search for gold or silver or copper because it
meant something more basic than wealth: it meant life in a country
which was dead. There were searches for lost canons and unmapped rivers;
explorations of wild gorges where the adventurers in improvised boats
shot down along thou-sand-foot-deep cracks in the earth toward unknown
rapids, listening for the thunder of possible cataracts; and, out of all
this rude peril, the growth of vast projects and the gathering in from
far cities of dollars, pounds, francs, marks, and even roubles, that a
desert land might flower and new cities arise.
“What about your own hairbreadth 'scapes in the imminent, deadly
thingumbob--I never can remember the whole of a quotation?” she
inquired. “You're very modest about your own share. Tell me the
narrowest escape you ever had.”
He answered, thoughtfully: “Curiously enough, I fancy the narrowest
escape I ever had was less than a block from here. I fell down between
two houses.”
The girl's eyes widened suddenly. “On Our Square?”
“Yes. Except for the prosaic matter of the week's wash on a clothesline
which shunted me off, I probably shouldn't be here to-day.”
“Mr. Trent,” said she slowly, “do you mind turning around this way?
Farther. Thank you. Is that scar over your temple--”
“Yes. I got it there. How could you know?”
Then recognition flashed between them. They laughed excitedly, like two
children. To the scandal of the bewildered Ambassador's ears, they then
entered upon the following incredible conversation:--
“Little Boy, where did you come from?”
“Up there.”
“From that cloud?” (The diplomat looking at the ceiling with pained
amazement.)
“Yes.”
“Let--me--see,” said the girl dreamily. “What comes next? We mustn't
lose it.”
“Do you like gum?” he supplied quickly. (The ambassadorial eyes began to
protrude.)
“What's gum?”
“Chewing-gum, of course. But alas! I haven't any with me,” lamented
Carlo. “Then there was something about a tiger.
“Oh, yes! I'm a tiger in my cage. Gr-rr-rr-rr! If I could get out I'd
eat you up, Little Boy.”
“Of course!
'Tiger! tiger! burning bright--
In the forests of the night!'”
“Say some more. You couldn't remember it, though, could you? Can you
remember it now?”