From a Bench in Our Square

Thus came to Our Square, to be one of us, for better or for worse, Mr. Winslow Merivale, promptly rechristened Stepfather Time.  The Bonnie Lassie gave him the name.  She said that only a stepfather could bring up his charges so badly.  For his clocks were both independent and irresponsible, though through no fault of their own.  When they were wound they went.  When they were unwound they rested.  Seldom were more than half of them simultaneously busy, and their differences of opinion as to the hour were radical and irreconcilable.  The big, emphatic eight-day, opposite the front door, might proclaim that it was eleven, only to be at once contradicted by the little tinkler on the parlor mantel, which announced that it was six, thereby starting up the cathedral case on the stairway and the Grandfather in the dining-room, who held out respectively for eight and two, while all the time it was really half-past one.  Thence arose in the early days painful misunderstandings on the part of Our Square, for we are a simple people and deem it the duty of a timepiece to keep time.  In particular we were befooled by Grandfather, the solemn-voiced Ananias of a clock with a long-range stroke and a most convincing manner.  So that Schepstein, the note-shaver, on his way to a profitable appointment at 11 A.M., heard the hour strike (thirty-five minutes in advance of the best professional opinion) from the House of Silvery Voices, and was impelled to the recklessness of hiring a passing taxi, thereby reaching his destination with half an hour to spare and half a dollar to lack, for which latter he threatened to sue the Mordaunt Estate’s tenant.  To the credit side of the house’s account it must be set down that MacLachan, the tailor, having started one of his disastrous drunks within the precincts of his Home of Fashion, was on his way to finish it in the gutter via the zigzag route from corner saloon to corner saloon, when the Twelve Apostles clock in the basement window lifted up its voice and (presumably through the influence of Peter) thrice denied the hour, which was actually a quarter before midnight.  “Losh!” said MacLachan, who invariably reacted in tongue to the stimulus of Scotch whiskey, “they’ll a’ be closed.  Hame an’ to bed wi’ ye, waster of the priceless hours!” And back he staggered to sleep it off.

Then there was the disastrous case of the Little Red Doctor, who set out to attend a highly interesting consultation at 4 P.M. and, hearing Grandfather Ananias strike three, erroneously concluded that he had spare time to stop in for a peek at Madame Tallafferr’s gout (which was really vanity in the guise of tight shoes), and reached the hospital, only to find it all over and the patient dead.

“It’s an outrage,” declared the Little Red Doctor fiercely, “that an old lunatic can move in here from God-knows-where in a pushcart and play merry hell with a hard-working practitioner’s professional duties.  And you’re the one to tell him so, Dominie.  You’re the diplomat of the Square.”

He even inveigled the Bonnie Lassie into backing him up in this preposterous proposal.  She had her own grievance against the House of Silvery Voices.

“It isn’t the way it plays tricks on time alone,” said she.  “There’s one clock in there that’s worse than conscience.”

And she brought her indictment against a raucous timepiece which was wont to lead up to its striking with a long, preliminary clack-and-whirr, alleging that twice, when she had quit her sculping early because the clay was obdurate and wouldn’t come right, and had gone for a walk to clear her vision, the clock had accosted her in these unjustifiable terms: 

“Clacketty-whirr-rr-rr!  Back-to-yer-worr-rr-rrk!  Yerr-rr-rr-rr wrong! wrong! wrong! wrong!”

“Wherefore,” said the Bonnie Lassie, “your appellant prays that you be a dear, good, stern, forbidding Dominie and go over to Number 37 and ask him what he means by it, anyway, and tell him he’s got to stop it.”

Now, the Bonnie Lassie holds the power of the high, the middle, and the low justice over all Our Square by the divine right of loveliness and kindliness.  So that evening I went while the Little Red Doctor, as a self-constituted Committee in Waiting, sat on my bench.  Stepfather Time himself opened the door to me.

“What might they call you, sir, if I may ask?” he inquired with timid courtesy.

“They might call me the Dominie hereabouts.  And they do.”

“I have heard of you.”  He motioned me to a seat in the bare little room, alive with tickings and clickings.  “You have lived long here, sir?”

“Long.”

From some interminable distance a voice of time mocked me with a subtle and solemn mockery:  “Long.  Long.  Long.”

My host waited for the clock to finish before he spoke again.  As I afterward discovered, this was his invariable custom.

“I, too, am an old man,” he murmured.

“A hardy sixty, I should guess.”

“A long life.  Might I ask you a question, sir,’ as to the folk in this Square?” He hesitated a moment after I had nodded.  “Are they, as one might say, friendly?  Neighborly?”

I was a little taken aback.  “We are not an intrusive people.”

“No one,” he said, “has been to see my clocks.”

I began to perceive that this was a sad little man, and to mislike my errand.  “You live here quite alone?” I asked.

“Oh, no!” said he quickly.  “You see, I have Willy Woolly.  Pardon me.  I have not yet presented him.”

At his call the fluffy poodle ambled over to me, sniffed at my extended hand, and, rearing, set his paws on my knee.

“He greets you as a friend,” said my new acquaintance in a tone which indicated that I had been signally honored.  “I trust that we shall see you here often, Mr. Dominie.  Would you like to inspect my collection now?”

Here was my opening.  “The fact is—­” I began, and stopped from sheer cowardice.  The job was too distasteful.  To wound that gentle pride in his possessions which was obviously the life of the singular being before me—­I couldn’t do it.  “The fact is,” I repeated, “I—­I have a friend outside waiting for me.  The Little Red Doctor—­er—­Dr. Smith, you know.”

“A physician?” he said eagerly.  “Would he come in, do you think?  Willy Woolly has been quite feverish to-day.”

“I’ll ask him,” I replied, and escaped with that excuse.

When I broke it to the Little Red Doctor, the mildest thing he said to me was to ask me why I should take him for a dash-binged vet!

Appeals to his curiosity finally overpersuaded him, and now it was my turn to wait on the bench while he invaded the realm of the Voices.  Happily for me the weather was amiable; it was nearly two hours before my substitute reappeared.  He then tried to sneak away without seeing me.  Balked in this cowardly endeavor, he put on a vague professional expression and observed that it was an obscure case.

“For a man of sixty,” I began, “Mr. Merivale—­”

“Who?” interrupted the Little Red Doctor; “I’m speaking of the dog.”

“Have you, then,” I inquired in insinuating accents, “become a dash-binged vet?”

“A man can’t be a brute, can he!” he retorted angrily.  “When that animated mop put up his paws and stuck his tongue out like a child—­”

“I know,” I said.  “You took on a new patient.  Probably gratis,” I added, with malice, for this was one of the Little Red Doctor’s notoriously weak points.

“Just the same, he’s a fool dog.”

“On the contrary, he is a person of commanding intellect and nice social discrimination,” I asserted, recalling Willy Woolly’s flattering acceptance of myself.

“A faker,” asseverated my friend.  “He pretends to see things.”

I sat up straight on my bench.  “Things?  What kind of things?”

“Things that aren’t there,” returned the Little Red Doctor, and fell to musing.  “They couldn’t be,” he added presently and argumentatively.

Receiving no encouragement when I sought further details, I asked whether he had called the new resident to account for the delinquencies of his clocks.  He shook his head.

“I didn’t have time,” said he doggedly.

“Time?  Why, there’s nothing but time in that house.”

The Little Red Doctor chose to take my feeble joke at par.  “No time at all.  None of the clocks keep it.”

“How does he manage his life, then?”

“Willy Woolly does that for him.  Barks him up in the morning.  Jogs his elbow at mealtimes.  Tucks him in bed at night, for all I know.”

Thus abortively ended Our Square’s protest against Stepfather Time and his House of Silvery Voices.  The Little Red Doctor’s obscure suggestion stuck in my mind, and a few nights later I made a second call.  Curiosity rather than neighborliness was the inciting cause.  Therefore I ought to have been embarrassed at the quiet warmth of my reception by both of the tenants.  Interrupting himself in the work of adjusting a new acquisition’s mechanism, Stepfather Time settled me into the most comfortable chair and immediately began to talk of clocks.

Good talk, it was; quaint and flavorous and erudite.  But my attention kept wandering to Willy Woolly, who, after politely kissing my hand, had settled down behind his master’s chair.  Willy Woolly was seeing things.  No pretense about it.  His mournful eyes yearned hither and thither, following some entity that moved in the room, dimmer than darkness, more ethereal than shadow.  His ears quivered.  A muffled, measured thumping sounded, dull and indeterminate like spirit rapping; it took me an appreciable time to identify it as the noise of the poodle’s tail, beating the floor.  Once he whined, a quick, quivering, eager note.  And still the amateur of clocks murmured his placid lore.  It was rather more than old nerves could stand.

“The dog,” I broke in upon the stream of erudition.  “Surely, Mr. Merivale—­”

“Willy Woolly?” He looked down, and the faithful one withdrew himself from his vision long enough to lick the master hand.  “Does he disturb you?”

“Oh, no,” I answered, a little confused.  “I only thought—­it seemed that he is uneasy about something.”

“There are finer sensibilities than we poor humans have,” said my host gravely.

“Then you have noticed how he watches and follows?”

“He is always like that.  Always, since.”

His “since” was one of the strangest syllables that ever came to my ears.  It implied nothing to follow.  It was finality’s self.

“It is”—­I sought a word—­“interesting and curious,” I concluded lamely, feeling how insufficient the word was.

“She comes back to him,” said my host simply.

No need to ask of whom he spoke.  The pronoun was as final and definitive as his “since.”  Never have I heard such tenderness as he gave to its utterance.  Nor such desolation as dimmed his voice when he added: 

“She never comes back to me.”

That evening he spoke no more of her.  Yet I felt that I had been admitted to an intimacy.  And, as the habit grew upon me thereafter of dropping in to listen to the remote, restful, unworldly quaintnesses of his philosophy, fragments, dropped here and there, built up the outline of the tragedy which had left him stranded in our little backwater of quiet.  She whom he had cherished since they were boy and girl together, had died in the previous winter.  She had formed the whole circle of his existence within which he moved, attended by Willy Woolly, happily gathering his troves.  Her death had left him not so much alone as alien in the world.  He was without companionship except that of Willy Woolly, without interest except that of his timepieces, and without hope except that of rejoining her.  Once he emerged from a long spell of musing, to say in a tone of indescribable conviction: 

“I suppose I was the happiest man in the world.”

Any chance incident or remark might turn his thought and speech, unconscious of the transition, from his favorite technicalities back to the past.  Some comment of mine upon a specimen of that dismal songster, the cuckoo clock, which stood on his mantel, had started him into one of his learned expositions.

“The first cuckoo clock, as you are doubtless aware, sir”—­he was always scrupulous to assume knowledge on the part of his hearer, no matter how abstruse or technical the subject; it was a phase of his inherent courtesy—­“was intended to represent not the cuckoo, but the blackbird.  It had a double pipe for the hours, ‘Pit-weep!  Pit-weep!’ and a single—­”

His voice trailed into silence as the mechanical bird of his own collection popped forth and piped its wooden lay.  Willy Woolly pattered over, sat down before it, and, gazing through and beyond the meaningless face with eyes of adoration whose purport there was no mistaking, whined lovingly.

“When the cuckoo sounded,” continued the collector without the slightest change of intonation, “she used to imitate it to puzzle Willy Woolly.  A merry heart! ...  All was so still after it stopped beating.  The clocks forgot to strike.”

The poodle, turning his absorbed regard from the Presence that moves beyond time and its perishing voices, trotted to his master and nuzzled the frail hand.

The hand fondled him.  “Yes, little dog,” murmured the man.  His eyes, sad as those of the animal, quested the dimness.

“Why does she come to him and not to me?  He loved her dearly, didn’t you, little dog?  But not as I did.”  There was a quivering note of jealousy in his voice.  “Why is my vision blinded to what he sees?”

“You have said yourself that there are finer sensibilities than ours,” I suggested.

He shook his head.  “It lies deeper than that.  I think he is drawing near her.  He used to have a little bark that he kept for her alone.  In the dead of night I have heard him give that bark—­since.  And I knew that she was speaking to him.  I think that he will go first.  Perhaps he will tell her that I am coming….  But I should be very lonely.”

“Willy’s a stout young thing,” I asserted, “with years of life before him.”

“Perhaps,” he returned doubtfully.  A gleam of rare fun lit up his pale, vague eyes.  “Can’t you see him dodging past Saint Peter through the pearly gates” (“I was brought up a Methodist,” he added in apologetic explanation), “trotting along the alabaster streets sniffing about for her among all the Shining Ones, listening for her voice amid the sound of the harps, and when he finds her, hallelujahing with that little bark that was for her alone:  ’Here I am, mistress!  Here I am!  And he’s coming soon, mistress.  Your Old Boy is coming soon.’”

When I retailed that conversation to the Little Red Doctor, he snorted and said that Stepfather Time was one degree crazier than Willy Woolly and that I wasn’t much better than a higher moron myself.  Well, if I’ve got to be called a fool by my best friends, I’d rather be called it in Greek than in English.  It’s more euphonious.

The pair in Number 37 soon settled down to a routine life.  Every morning Stepfather Time got out his big pushcart and set forth in search of treasure, accompanied by Willy Woolly.  Sometimes the dog trotted beneath the cart; sometimes he rode in it.  He was always on the job.  Never did he indulge in those divagations so dear to the normal canine heart.  Other dogs and their ways interested him not.  Cats simply did not exist in his circumscribed life.  Even to the shining mark of a boy on a bicycle he was indifferent, and when a dog has reached that stage one may safely say of him that he has renounced the world and all its vanities.  Willy Woolly’s one concern in life was his master and their joint business.

Soon they became accepted familiars of Our Square.  Despite the general conviction that they were slightly touched, we even became proud of them.  They lent distinction to the locality by getting written up in a Sunday supplement, Willy Woolly being specially photographed therefor, a gleam of transient glory, which, however it may have gratified our local pride, left both of the subjects quite indifferent.  Stepfather Time might have paid more heed to it had he not, at the time, been wholly preoccupied in a difficult quest.

In a basement window, far over on Avenue D, stood an old and battered timepiece of which Stepfather Time had heard the voice but never seen the face.  Each of three attempts to investigate with a view to negotiations had been frustrated by a crabbed and violent-looking man with a repellent club.  Nevertheless, the voice alone had ensnared the connoisseur; it was, by the test of the pipe which he carried on all his quests, D in alt, and would thus complete the major chord of a chime which he had long been building up. (She had loved, best of all, harmonic combinations of the clock bells.) Every day he would halt in front of the place and wait to hear it strike, and its owner would peer out from behind it and shake a wasted fist and curse him with strange, hoarse foreign oaths, while Willy Woolly tugged at his trouser leg and urged him to pass on from that unchancy spot.  All that he could learn about the basement dweller was that his name was Lukisch and he owed for his rent.

Mr. Lukisch had nothing special against the queer old party who made sheep’s eyes at his clock every day.  He hated him quite impartially, as he hated everybody.  Mr. Lukisch had a bad heart in more senses than one, and a grudge against the world which he blamed for the badness of his heart.  Also he had definite ideas of reprisal, which were focused by a dispossess notice, and directed particularly upon the person and property of his landlord.  The clock he needed as the instrument of his vengeance; therefore he would not have sold it at any price to the sheep-eyed old lunatic of the pushcart, who now, on the eve of his eviction, stood gazing in with wistful contemplation.  Presently he passed on and Mr. Lukisch resumed his tinkering with the clock’s insides.  He was very delicate and careful about it, for these were the final touches, preparatory to his leaving the timepiece as a memento when he should quietly depart that evening, shortly before nine.  What might happen after nine, or, rather, on the stroke of nine, was no worry of his, though it might be and probably would be of the landlord’s, provided that heartless extortioner survived it.

Having completed his operations, Mr. Lukisch sat down in a rickety chair and gazed at the clock, face to face, with contemplative satisfaction.  Stepfather Time would have been interested in the contrast between those two physiognomies.  The clock’s face, benign and bland, would have deceived him.  But, innocent though he was in the ways of evil, the man’s face might have warned him.

Something within the clock’s mechanism clicked and checked and went on again.  The sound, quite unexpected, gave Mr. Lukisch a bad start.  Could something have gone wrong with the combination?  Suppose a premature release….  At that panic thought something within Mr. Lukisch’s bad heart clicked and checked and did not go on again.  The fear in his eyes faded and was succeeded by an expression of surprise and inquiry.  Whether the inquiry was answered, nobody could have guessed from the still, unwinking regard on the face of the victim of heart failure.

By and by a crowd gathered on the sidewalk, drawn by that mysterious instinct for sensation which attracts the casual and the idle.  Two bold spirits entered the door and stood, hesitant, just inside, awed because the clock seemed so startlingly alive in that place.  Some one sent upstairs for the landlord, who arrived to bemoan the unjust fates which had not only mulcted him of two months’ rent with nothing to show for it but a rickety clock, but had also saddled him with a wholly superfluous corpse.  He abused both indiscriminately, but chiefly the clock because it gave the effect of being sentient.  So fervently did he curse it that Stepfather Time, repassing with Willy Woolly, heard him and entered.

“And who”—­the landlord addressed high Heaven with a gesture at once pious and pessimistic—­“is to pay me fourteen dollars back rent this dirty beggar owes?”

“The man,” said Stepfather Time gently, “is dead.”

“He is.”  The landlord confirmed the unwelcome fact with objurgations.  “Now must come the po-liss, the coroner, trouble, and expense.  And what have I who run my property honest and respectable got to pay for it?  Some rags and a bum clock.”

Willy Woolly sniffed at one protruding foot and growled.  Dead or alive, this was not Willy Woolly’s kind of man.  “Now, now, Willy Woolly!” reproved his master.  “Who are we that we should judge him?”

“But I don’t like him,” declared Willy Woolly in unequivocal dog language.

“I think from his face that he has suffered much,” said the gentle collector, wise in human pain.

“Me; I suppose I don’t suffer!” pointed out the landlord vehemently.  “Fourteen dollars out.  Two months’ rent.  A bum clock.”

He kicked the shabby case which whizzed and birred and struck five.  The voice of its bell, measured and mellow and pure, was unquestionably D in alt.

“My dear sir,” said Stepfather Time urbanely, but quivering underneath his calm manner with the hot eagerness of the chase, “I will buy your clock.”

A gust of rough laughter passed through the crowd.  The injurious word “nut” floated in the air, and was followed by “Verrichter.”  The landlord took thought and hope.

“It is a very fine clock,” he declared.

“It is a bum clock,” Stepfather Time reminded him mildly.

“Stepnadel, the auctioneer, would pay me much money for it.”

“I will pay you much money for it.”

“How much?”

“Seven dollars.  That is one month’s rent that he owed.”

“Two months’ rent I must have.”

“One,” said Stepfather Time firmly.

“Two,” said the landlord insistently.

“Urff!  Grr—­rr—­rr—­rrff!” said Willy Woolly in emphatic dissuasion.

Stepfather Time was scandalized.  Expert opinion was quite outside of Willy Woolly’s province.  Only once in the course of their years together had he interfered in a purchase.  Justice compelled Stepfather Time to recall that the subject of Willy’s protests on that occasion had subsequently turned out to be far less antique than the worm holes in the woodwork (artificially blown in with powder) would have led the unsuspecting to suppose.  But about the present legacy there could be no such question.  It was genuine.  It was old.  It was valuable.  It possessed a seraphic note pitched true to the long-desired chord.

Extracting a ten-dollar note from his wallet, Stepfather Time waved it beneath the landlord’s wrinkled and covetous nose.  The landlord capitulated.  Willy Woolly, sniffing at the clock with fur abristle, lifted up his voice and wailed.  Perhaps his delicate nose had already detected the faint, unhallowed odor of the chemicals within.  He stubbornly refused to ride back in the cart with the new acquisition, and was accused of being sulky and childish.

The relic of the late unlamented Lukisch was temporarily installed in a high chair before the open window giving on the areaway of Number 37.  There it briefly beamed upon the busy life of Our Square with its bland and hypocritical face, and there, thrice and no more, it sounded the passing of the hours with its sweet and false voice, biding the stroke of nine.  Meantime Willy Woolly settled down to keep watch on it and could not be moved from that duty.  Every time it struck the half he growled.  At the hour he barked and raged.  When Stepfather Time sought to draw him away to dinner he committed the unpardonable sin of dog-dom, he snarled at his master.  Turning this strange manifestation over in his troubled mind, the collector decided that Willy Woolly must be ill, and therefore that evening went to seek the Little Red Doctor and his wisdom.

Together they came across the park space opposite the House of Silvery Voices in time to witness the final scene.

The new clock struck the half after eight as they reached the turn in the path.  A long, quavering howl, mingled of rage and desperation, answered in Willy Woolly’s voice.

“You hear?” said Stepfather Time anxiously to the Little Red Doctor.  “The dog is not himself.”

They saw him rear up against the clock case.  He seemed to be trying to tear it open with his teeth.

“Willy!” cried his master in a tone such as, I suppose, the well-loved companion had not heard twice before in his life.  “Down, Willy!”

The dog drooped back.  But it was not in obedience.  For once he disregarded the master’s command.  Perhaps he did not even hear it in the absorption of his dread and rage.  Step by step he withdrew, then rushed and launched himself straight at the timepiece.  Slight though his bulk was, the impetus of the charge did the work.  The clock reeled, toppled, and fell outward through the window; then—­

From the House of Silvery Voices rose a roar that smote the heavens.  A roar and a belch of flame and a spreading, poisonous stench that struck the two men in the park to earth.  When they struggled to their feet again, the smoke had parted and the House of Silvery Voices gaped open, its front wall stripped bodily away.  But within, the sound of the busy industry of time went on uninterrupted.

Weaving and wobbling on his feet, Stepfather Time staggered toward the pot calling on the name of Willy Woolly.  At the gate he stopped, put forth his hand, and lifted from the railing a wopsy, woolly fragment, no bigger than a sheet of note paper.  It was red and warm and wet.

“He’s gone,” said Stepfather Time.

The Clock of Conscience took up the tale.  “Gone.  Gone.  Gone,” it pealed.

As the collector would not leave the shattered house, they sent for me to stay the night with him.  A strange vigil!  For now it was the man who followed with intent, unworldly eyes that which I, with my lesser vision, could not discern.  And the Unseen moved swiftly about the desolate room, low to the floor, and seemed finally to stop, motionless beneath a caressing hand.  I thought to hear that dull, measured thumping of a grateful tail, but it was only the Twelve Apostles getting ready to strike.

Only once that night did Stepfather Time speak, and then not to me.

“Tell her,” he said in an assured murmur, “that I shan’t be long.”

“Not-long.  Not-long.  Not-long.  Not-long.  Not-long,” confirmed Grandfather from his stance on the stairway.

In that assurance Stepfather Time fell asleep.  He did not go out again with his pushcart, but sat in the rear room while the Mordaunt Estate in person superintended the job of putting a new front on the house.

The night after it was finished I received an urgent telephone call to come there at once.  At the entrance I met the Little Red Doctor coming out.

“The clocks have stopped,” said he gently.

So I turned to cross the park with him.

“I shall certify,” said he, “heart disease.”

“You may certify what you please,” said I.  “But what do you believe?”

The Little Red Doctor, who prides himself on being a hard-bitted materialist, glared at me as injuriously as if my innocent question had been an insult.

“I don’t believe it!” he averred violently.  “Do you take me for a sentimental idiot that I should pin silly labels on my old friend, Death?” His expression underwent a curious change.  “But I never saw such joy on any living face,” he muttered under his breath.