From a Bench in Our Square

As Julien had prophesied, it was only a question of time when he would be surprised by his patroness in his true garb and estate.  The event occurred as he was stepping from his touring-car to get his golf-clubs from the hallway of his Gramercy Park apartment at the very moment when Bobbie Holland emerged from the house next door.  Both her hands flew involuntarily to her cheeks, as she took in and wholly misinterpreted his costume, which is not to be wondered at when one considers the similarity of a golfing outfit to a chauffeur’s livery.

“Oh!” she cried out, as if something had hurt her.

Julien, for once startled out of his accustomed poise, uncovered and looked at her apprehensively.

Her voice quivered a little as she asked, very low, “Do you have to do that?”

“Why—­er—­no,” began the puzzled Julien, who failed for the moment to perceive what of tragic portent inhered in a prospective afternoon of golf.  Her next words enlightened him.

“I should think you might have let me help before taking a—­servant’s position.”

“It’s an honest occupation,” he averred.

“Do you do this—­regularly?” she pursued with an effort.

“Off and on.  There’s good money in it.”

“Oh!” she mourned again.  Then:  “You’re doing this so that you can afford to buy paints and canvas and—­and things to paint me,” she accused.  “It isn’t fair!”

“I’d do worse than this for that,” he declared valiantly.

Less than a fortnight later she caught him doing worse.  She had ceased to speak to him of his chauffeurdom because it seemed to cause him painful embarrassment. (It did, and should have!) There had been a big theater party, important enough to get itself detailed in the valuable columns which the papers devote to such matters, and afterward supper at the most expensive uptown restaurant, Miss Roberta Holland being one of the listed guests.  As she took her place at the table, she caught a glimpse of an unmistakable figure disappearing through the waiter’s exit.  And Julien Tenney, who had risen from his little supper party of four (stag) hastily but just too late, on catching sight of her, saw that he was recognized.  Flight, instant and permanent, had been his original intent.  Now it would not do.  Bolder measures must be devised.  He appealed to the head-waiter to help him carry out a joke, and that functionary, developing a sense of humor under the stimulus of a twenty-dollar bill, procured him on the spot an ill-fitting coat and a black string tie, and gave him certain simple directions.  When the patroness of Art next observed the object of her patronage, he was performing the humble but useful duties of an omnibus.

Miss Holland suddenly lost a perfectly good and hitherto reliable appetite.

Nor was she the only member of the supper party to develop symptoms of shock.  The gilded and stalwart youth on her left, following her glance, stared at the amateur servitor with protruding eyes, ceased to eat or drink, and fell into a state of semi-coma, muttering at intervals an expressive monosyllable.

“Why not swear out loud, Caspar?” asked Bobbie presently.  “It’ll do you less harm.”

“D’you see that chap over yonder?  The big, fine-looking one fixing the forks?”

“Yes,” said Bobbie faintly.

“Well, that’s—­No, by thunder, it can’t be!—­Yes, by the red-hot hinges, it is!”

“Do you think you know him?”

“Know him!  I know him?  He bunked in with me for two weeks at Grandpré.  He was captain of a machine-gun outfit sent down to help us clean out that little wasp’s nest.  His name’s Tenney, and if ever there was a hellion in a fight!  And see—­what he’s come to!  My God!”

“Well, don’t cry about it,” advised the girl, serenely, though it was hard for her to keep her voice steady.  “There’s nothing to do about it, is there?”

“Isn’t there!” retorted the youth, rising purposefully.  “I’m going to get him and find him a job that’s fit for him if I have to take him into partnership.  Of all the dash-blanked-dod-blizzened—­”

“Caspar!  What are you going to do?  Don’t.  You’ll embarrass him frightfully.”

But he was already heading off his prey at the exit.  Bobbie saw her painter’s face flame into welcome, then stiffen into dismay.  The pair vanished beyond the watcher’s ken.  On his return the gilded youth behaved strangely.  From time to time he shook his head.  From time to time he chuckled.  And, while Bobbie was talking to her other neighbor, he shot curious and amused glances at her.  He told her nothing.  But his interest in his supper returned.  Bobbie’s didn’t.

To discuss the social aspects of menial service with a practitioner of it who has been admitted to a certain implicit equality is a difficult and delicate matter for a girl brought up in Roberta Holland’s school.  Several times after the restaurant encounter she essayed it; trying both the indirect approach and the method of extreme frankness.  Neither answered.  Julien responded to her advances by alternate moods of extreme gloom and slyly inexplicable amusement.  Bobbie gave it up, concluding that he was in a very queer mood, anyway.  She was right.  He was.

The next episode of their progress took the form of a veritable unmasking which, perversely enough, only fixed the mask tighter upon Julien Tenney.  By way of loosening up his wrist for the open season, Peter Quick Banta had taken advantage of an amiable day to sketch out a composite floral and faunal scheme on the flagging in front of Thornsen’s Élite Restaurant, when Miss Holland, in passing, paused to observe and wonder.  At the same moment, Julien hurrying around the corner, all but ran her down.  She nodded toward the decorator of sidewalks.

“Isn’t he the funny man that you were with the first time I saw you?”

“The very same,” responded Julien with twinkling eyes.

“What is he doing?”

“He’s one of the few remaining examples of the sidewalk or public-view school of art.”

“Yes, but what does he do it for?”

“His living.”

“Do people give him money for it?  Do you think I might give him something?” she asked, looking uncertainly at the artist, who, on hands and knees and with tongue protruding, was putting a green head on a red bird, too absorbed even to notice the onlookers.

“I think he’d be tickled pink.”

She took a quarter from her purse, hesitated, then slipped it into her companion’s hand.

“You give it to him.  I think he’d like it better.”

“Oh, no; I don’t think he’d like it at all.  In fact, I doubt if he’d take it from me.”

“Why not?”

“Well, you see,” explained Julien blandly, “we’re rather intimately connected.”  He raised his voice.  “Hello, Dad!”

The decorator furled his tongue, lifted his head, changed his crayon, replied, “Hello, Lad,” and continued his work.  “What d’ you think of that?” he added, after a moment, triumphantly pointing a yellow crayon at the green-headed red-bird.

“Some parrot!” enthused Julien.

“’T ain’t a parrot.  It’s a nightingale,” retorted the artist indignantly.  “You black-and-white fellows never do understand color.”

“It’s a corker, anyway,” said Julien.  “Dad here’s a—­an art patron who wants to contribute to the cause.”

The girl, whose face had become flushed and almost frightened, held out her quarter.

“I—­I—­don’t know,” she began.  “I was interested in your picture and I thought—­Mr. Tenney said—­”

Peter Quick Banta took the coin with perfect dignity.  “Thank you,” said he.  “There ain’t much appreciation of art just at this season.  But if you’ll come down to Coney about June, I’ll show you some sand-modeling that is sand-modeling—­’s much as five dollars a day I’ve taken in there.”

Miss Holland recovered her social poise.

“I’d like to very much,” she said cheerfully.

She and Julien walked on in silence.  Suddenly he laughed, a little jarringly.  “Well,” he said, “does that help you to place me?”

“I’m not trying to place you,” she answered.

“Is that quite true?” he mocked.

“No; it isn’t.  It’s a downright lie,” said Bobbie finding courage to raise her eyes to his.

“And now, I suppose, I shall be ‘my good man’ or something like that, to you.”

“Do you think it likely?”

“You called MacLachan that, you know,” he reminded her.

“Long ago.  When I was—­when I didn’t understand Our Square.”

“And now, of course, our every feeling and thought is an open book to your penetrating vision.”

Her lip quivered.  “I don’t know why you should want to be so hateful to me.”

For a flashing second his eyes answered that appeal with a look that thrilled and daunted her.  “To keep from being something else that I’ve no right to be,” he muttered.

“How many more sittings do you think it will take to finish the picture?” she asked, striving to get on safer ground.

“Only one or two, I suppose,” he answered morosely.

Such was Julien’s condition of mind after the last sitting that he actually left the precious portrait unguarded by neglecting to lock the door of the studio on going out, and the Bonnie Lassie and I, happening in, beheld it in its fulfillment.  A slow flush burned its way upward in the Bonnie Lassie’s face as she studied it.

“He’s done it!” she exclaimed.  “Flower and flame!  Why did I ever take to sculpture?  One can’t get that in the metal.”

“He’s done it,” I echoed.

“Of course, technically, it’s rather a sloppy picture.”

“It’s a glorious picture!” I cried.

“Naturally that,” returned the exasperating critic.  “It always will be—­when you paint with your heart’s blood.”

“Do you think your friend Bobbie appreciates the medium in which she’s presented?”

“If she doesn’t—­which she probably does,” said the Bonnie Lassie, “she will find out something to her advantage when she sees me to-morrow.  I’m going home to ’phone her.”

In answer to the summons, Bobbie came.  She looked, I thought, as I saw her from my bench, troubled and perplexed and softened, and glowingly lovely.  At the door of the Bonnie Lassie’s house she was met with the challenge direct.

“What have you been doing to my artistic ward?”

“Nothing,” replied Bobbie with unwonted meekness, and to prove it related the incidents of the touring-car, the supper at the Taverne Splendide, and the encounter with the paternal colorist.

“That isn’t Julien’s father,” said the sculptress.  “He’s only an adoptive father.  But Julien adores him, as he ought to.  The real father, so I’ve heard, was a French gentleman—­”

“I don’t care who his father was!” cried Bobbie. (The Bonnie Lassie’s face took on the expression of an exclamation point.) “I can’t bear to think of his having to do servant’s work.  And I told him so yesterday.”

“Did you look like that while you were telling him?”

“Like what?  I suppose so.”

“And what did he do?”

“Do?  He didn’t do anything.”

“Then,” pronounced the Bonnie Lassie, “he’s a stick of wood—­hardwood—­with a knot-hole for a heart.”

“He isn’t!  Well, perhaps he is.  He was very horrid at the last.”

“About what?”

“About taking money.”

“I’m a prophetess!  And you’re a patroness.  Born in us, I suppose.  You did try to give him money.”

“Just to loan it.  Enough so that he could go away to study and paint.  He wouldn’t even let me do that; so I—­I—­I offered to buy the picture of me, and he said—­he said—­Cecily, do you think he’s sometimes a little queer in his head?”

“Not in the head, necessarily. What did he say?”

“He said he’d bought it himself at the highest price ever paid.  And he said it so obstinately that I saw it was no use, so I just told him that I hoped I’d see him when I came back—­”

“Back from where?  Are you going away?”

“Yes; didn’t I tell you?  On a three months’ cruise.”

“Had you told him that?”

“Of course.  That’s when I tried to get him to take the money.  Cecily—­” The girl’s voice shook a little.  “You’ll tell him, won’t you, that he must keep on painting?”

“Why?  Doesn’t he intend to?”

“He said he’d painted himself out and he didn’t think he’d ever look at color again.”

“He will,” said the Bonnie Lassie wisely and comfortably.  “Grief is just as driving a taskmaster as lo—­as other emotions.”

“Grief!” The girl’s color ebbed.  “Cecily!  You don’t think I’ve hurt him?”

The Bonnie Lassie caught her in a sudden hug.

“Bobbie, do you know what I’d do in your place?”

“No.  What?”

“I’d go right—­straight—­back to Julien Tenney’s studio.”  She paused impressively.

“Yes?” said the other faintly.

“And I’d walk right—­straight—­up to Julien Tenney—­” Another pause, even more impressive.

“I d-d-don’t think I’d—­he’d—­”

“And I’d say to him:  ‘Julien, will you marry me?’ Like that.”

“Oh!” said Bobbie in outraged amazement.

“And maybe—­” continued the Bonnie Lassie judicially:  “maybe I’d kiss him.  Yes.  I think I would.”

Suddenly all the bright softness of Bobbie’s large eyes dissolved in tears.  “You ought to be ashamed of yourself,” she sobbed.

“You won’t be ashamed of yourself,” prophesied the other, “if you do just as I say, quickly and naturally.”

“Oh, naturally,” retorted the girl in an indignant whimper.  “I suppose you think that’s natural.  Anyway, he probably doesn’t care about me at all that way.”

“Roberta,” said the sculptress sternly, “did you see his portrait of you?”

“Y-y-yes.”

“And you have the presumption to say that he doesn’t care?  Why, that picture doesn’t simply tell his secret.  It yells it!”

“I don’t care,” said the hard-pressed Bobbie.  “It hasn’t yelled it to me. Nobody’s yelled it to me.  And I c-c-can’t ask a m-m-man to—­to—­”

“Perhaps you can’t,” allowed her adviser magnanimously.  “On second thought, it won’t be necessary.  You just go back—­after powdering your nose a little—­and say that you’ve come to see the picture once more, or that it’s a fine day, or that competition is the life of trade, or that—­oh, anything!  And, if he doesn’t do the rest, I’ll kill and eat him.”

“But, Cecily—­”

“You would be a patroness of Art.  Now I’ve given you something real to patronize.  Don’t you dare fail me.”  Suddenly the speaker gave herself over to an access of mirth.  “Heaven help that young man when he comes to own up.”

“Own up to what?”

“Never mind.”

Having consumed a vain and repetitious half-hour in variations upon her query, Bobbie gave it up and decided to find out for herself.  It was curiosity and curiosity alone (so she assured herself) that impelled her to return for the last time (she assured herself of that, also) to the attic.

A voice raised in vehement protest, echoing through the open door of the studio, checked her on the landing below as she mounted.

“And you’re actually going to let thirty-five thousand a year slip through your fingers, just to pursue a fad?”

To which Julien’s equable accents replied: 

“That’s it, Merrill.  I’m going to paint.”

The unseen Merrill left a blessing (of a sort) behind, slammed the door upon it, and materialized to the vision of the girl on the landing as an energetic and spruce-looking man of forty-odd, with a harassed expression.  At need, Miss Holland could summon considerable decisiveness to her aid.

“Would you think me inexcusably rude,” she said softly, “if I asked who you are?”

The descending man snatched off his hat, stared, seemed on the point of whistling, then, recovering himself, said courteously:  “I’m George Merrill, advertising manager for the Criterion Clothing Company.”

“And Mr. Tenney has been doing drawings for you?”

“He has.  For several years.”

“So that,” said the girl, half to herself, “is his pot-boiling.”

“Not a very complimentary term,” commented Mr. Merrill, “for the best black-and-white work being done in New York to-day.  Between my concern and two others he makes a railroad president’s income out of it.”

“Yes, I overheard what you said to him.  Thank you so much.”

“In return, may I ask you something?”

“Certainly.”

“Will you not, for his own good, dissuade Mr. Tenney from throwing away his career?”

“Why should you suppose me to have any influence with Mr. Tenney?”

Mr. Merrill’s face was grave, as befitted the issue, but a twinkle appeared at the corner of his glasses.  “I’ve seen the portrait,” he replied, and with a bow, went on his way.

Julien opened the door to her knock.  She stepped inside, facing him with bright, inscrutable eyes.

“Why have you been fooling me about your circumstances?” she demanded.

“D—–­n Merrill!” said Julien with fervor.

“It’s true that your ‘pot-boiling’ brings you a big income?”

“Yes.”

“Then why do you take employment as a chauffeur?”

“I don’t.  That car belongs to me.”

“And your being a waiter?  I don’t suppose the Taverne Splendide belongs to you?”

“An impromptu bit of acting,” confessed the abashed Julien.

“And this attic?  Was that hired for the same comedy?”

“No.  This is mine, really.”

“I don’t understand.  Why have you done it all?”

“If you want to know the truth,” he said defiantly, “so that I could keep on seeing you.”

“That’s a very poor excuse,” she retorted.

“The best in the world.  As a successful commercial artist, what possible interest would you have taken in me?  You took me for a struggling young painter—­that was the Bonnie Lassie’s fault, for I never lied to you about it—­and after we’d started on that track I didn’t—­well, I didn’t have the courage to risk losing you by quitting the masquerade.”

“How you must have laughed at me all the time!”

He flushed to his angry eyes.  “Do you think that is fair?” he retorted.  “Or kind?  Or true?”

“I—­I don’t know,” she faltered.  “You let me offer you money.  And you’ve probably got as much as I have.”

“I won’t have from now on, then.  I’m going to paint.  I thought, when you told me you were going away, that I couldn’t look at a canvas again.  But now I know I was wrong.  I’ve got to paint.  You’ll have left me that, at least.”

“Mr. Merrill thinks you’re ruining your career.  And if you do, it’ll be my fault.  I’ll never, never, never,” said the patroness of Art desolately, “try to do any one good again!”

She turned toward the door.

“At least,” said Julien in a voice which threatened to get out of control, “you’ll know that it wasn’t all masquerade.  You’ll know why I’ll always keep the picture, even if I never paint another.”

She stole a look at him over her shoulder and, with a thrill, saw the passion in his eyes and the pride that withheld him from speaking.

“Suppose,” she said, “I asked you to give it up.”

“You wouldn’t,” he retorted quickly.

“No, I wouldn’t.  But—­but—­” Her glance, wandering away from him, fell on the joyous line of Béranger bold above the door.

“‘How good is life in an attic at twenty,’” she murmured.  Then, turning to him, she held out her hands.

“I could find it good,” she said with a soft little falter in her voice, “even at twenty-two.”

Everything passes in review before my bench, sooner or later.  The two, going by with transfigured faces, stopped.

“Let’s tell Dominie,” said Julien.

I waved a jaunty hand.  “I know already,” said I, “even if it hadn’t been announced to a waiting world.”

“Wh-wh-why,” stammered Bobbie with a blush worth a man’s waiting a lifetime to see, “it—­it only just happened.”

“Bless your dear, innocent hearts, both of you!  It’s been happening for weeks.  Come with me.”

I lead them to the sidewalk fronting Thornsen’s Élite Restaurant.  There stood Peter Quick Banta, admiring his latest masterpiece of imaginative symbolism.  It represented a love-bird of eagle size holding in its powerful beak a scroll with a wreath of forget-me-nots on one end and of orange-blossoms on the other, encircling respectively the initials.  “J.T.” and “R.H.”  Below, in no less than four colors, ran the legend, “Cupid’s Token.”

“O Lord!  Dad!” cried the horrified Julien, scuffing it out with frantic feet.  “How long has this been there?”

“What’re you doing?  Leave it be!” cried the anguished artist.  “It’s been there since noon.”

“Never mind,” put in Bobbie softly; “it’s very pretty and tasteful even though it is a little precipitate.  But how”—­she turned the lovely and puzzled inquiry of her eyes upon the symbolist—­“how did you know?”

“Artistic intuition,” said Peter Quick Banta with profound complacency. “I’m an artist.”