From a Bench in Our Square

Summer was smiting Our Square with white-hot bolts of sun-fire, from which one could scarcely find refuge beneath the scraggly shelter of parched shrubbery, when one morning the Bonnie Lassie approached my bench with a fell and purposeful smile.

“Dominie, you’re a dear old thing,” she began in her most insinuating tones.

“I won’t do it,” I said determinedly, foreboding something serious.

The Bonnie Lassie raised her eyebrows at me, affecting aggrieved innocence.  “Won’t do what?” she inquired.

“Whatever it is that you’re trying to wheedle me into.”

The eyebrows resumed their normal arch, and a dimple flickered in the corner of the soft lips.  By this I knew that the case was hopeless.  “Oh, but you’ve already done it,” she said.

“Help!  Tell me the worst and get it over with.”

“It must be lovely to be rich,” said the Bonnie Lassie meditatively.  “And so generous!”

“How much is it?  What do you want it for?  I haven’t got that much,” I hastily remarked.

“And to keep it an absolute secret from everybody.  Even from Mayme herself.”

“Go on.  Don’t mind me,” I murmured.

“The Little Red Doctor has found the place.  It’s in New Mexico.  And in the fall she’s going on to the Coast.  He’s almost willing to guarantee that a year of it will make her as strong as ever.  And the hundred dollars a month you allow her besides her traveling expenses will be plenty.  You are a good old thing, Dominie!”

“What you mean is that I’m an old good-thing.  How shall I look,” I demanded bitterly, “when Mayme comes to thank me?”

“No foolisher than you do now, trying to raise unreasonable objections to our perfectly good plans,” retorted the Bonnie Lassie.  “Besides, she won’t.  She knows that your way is to do good by stealth and blush to find it fame, and she’s under pledge to pretend to know nothing about it.”

“Where did the Little Red Doctor raise it?” I queried.

“There are times, Dominie, when your mind has real penetrative power.  Think it over.”

“The Weeping Scion of Wealth and Position!” I cried.  “Did our medical friend blackmail him?”

“Not necessarily.  He only dropped a hint that Mayme’s chance here was rather poorer than a soldier’s going to war, unless something could be done and the Weeping Scion fairly begged to be allowed to do it.  ’Do you think she’d take it from you?’ said the Little Red Doctor, ’after what your mother called her?’ ‘Don’t let her know,’ says our ornamental young weeper.  ’Tell her somebody else is doing it.  Tell her it’s from that white-whiskered old—­from the elderly and handsome gentleman with the benevolent expres—­’”

“Yes:  I know,” I broke in.  “Very good.  I’m the goat.  Lying, hypocrisy, false pretense, fake charity; it’s all one to a sin-seared old reprobate like me.  After it’s over I’ll go around the corner and steal what pennies I can find in Blind Simon’s cup, just to make me feel comparatively respectable and decent again.”

It was no easier than I expected it to be, especially when little Mayme, having come to say good-bye, put her lips close to my ear and tried to whisper something, and cried and kissed me instead.

Our Square was a dimmer and duller place after she left.  But her letters helped.  They were so exactly like herself!  Even at the first, when things seemed to be going ill with her, they were all courage, and quaint humor and determination to get well and come back to Our Square, which was the dearest and best place in the world with the dearest and best people in it.  Homesickness!  Poor little, lonely Mayme.  She was reading—­she wrote the Bonnie Lassie—­all the books that the Dominie had listed for her, and she was being tutored by a school-teacher with blue goggles and a weak heart who lived at the same resort.  “Why grow up a Boob,” wrote the philosophic Mayme, “when the lil old world is full of wise guys just aking to spill their wiseness?”

Contemporaneously the Weeping Scion of Wealth was writing back his views on life and the emptiness thereof, in better orthography, but with distinctly less of spirit.

“It appears,” reported the Little Red Doctor, “that every man in his own company has licked our young friend and now the other companies of the regiment are beginning to show interest, and he doesn’t like it.  I believe he’d desert if it weren’t that he’s afraid of what Mayme would think.”

“Still on his mind, is she?” I asked.

The Little Red Doctor produced a letter with a camp postmark from the South and read a passage: 

“You were right when you guessed that I never wanted anything very much before, without having it handed to me.  Perhaps you are right about its being good for me.  But it comes hard.  The promise goes, of course.  I’m going to show you and her that I’m not yellow. [So that was still rankling; salutary, if bitter dose!] But if this war ever finishes, all bets are off and I’m coming back to find her.  And don’t you forget your part of the bargain, to write and let me know how she is getting on.”  The Little Red Doctor was able to send progressively encouraging news.  When the cold weather came, Mayme moved westward to Southern California, and found herself on the edge of one of the strange, tumultuous, semi-insane moving-picture colonies of that region.  Thence issued, presently, stirring tidings.

“What do you think?” wrote our exile.  “They’ve got my funny little monkey mug in the movies.  Five per and steady work.  The director likes me and says he will give me a real chance one of these days.  But, as the Dominie would say, this is a hell of a place. [Graceless imp!] I would not say it myself, because I am a perfect lady.  You have to be, out here.  That reminds me:  I have cut out the Mayme.  Every fresh little frizzle in the colony with a false front and a pneumatic figure calls herself Mayme or Daisye or Tootsye.  Not for me!  I am keeping up my lessons and trying to make my head good for something besides carrying a switch.  Tell the Little Red Doctor that it is so long since I coughed I have forgotten how.  And I love you all so hard that it hurts.

“Your loving

“MARY MCCARTNEY

“P.S.  I am going to be Marie Courtenay when I get my name up in the pictures.  Put that in the Directory and see how it looks.

“P.S.2.  How is my soldier boy getting along?  Poor kid!  I expect he is finding it a lot different from Broadway with money in your pocket.”

About this time the Weeping Scion was finding things very different, indeed, from Broadway, having been shifted to a specially wet and muddy section of France; and was taking them as he found them.  That is to say, he had learned the prime lesson of war.

“And he’s been made corporal,” announced the Little Red Doctor with satisfaction.

“That sounds encouraging,” remarked the Bonnie Lassie.  “How did it happen?”

“He went over on one of the ‘flu ships,’ and when the epidemic began to mow ’em down there was a kind of panic.  From what I can make out, the Scion kept his head and his nerve, and made good.  A corporal’s stripes aren’t much, but they’re something.”

Better was to come.  There was high triumph in the Little Red Doctor’s expression when he came to my bench with the glad tidings of young David’s promotion to a sergeantcy.

“While it’s very gratifying,” I remarked, “it doesn’t seem to me an epoch-making event.”

“Doesn’t it!” retorted my friend.  “That’s because of your abysmal military ignorance, Dominie.  Let me tell you how it is in our army.  A fellow can get himself made a captain by pull, or a major by luck, or a colonel by desk-work, or a general by having a fine martial figure, but to get yourself made a sergeant, by Gosh, you’ve got to show the stuff.  You’ve got to be a man.  You’ve got to have—­”

“Are you going to tell her?” interrupted the Bonnie Lassie who had been sent for to share the news.

The Little Red Doctor fell suddenly grave.  “She’s another matter,” he said.  “I don’t think I shall.”

Matters were going forward with Mayme—­beg her pardon, Mary McCartney, too.

“Better and more of it,” she wrote the Bonnie Lassie.  “They rang me in on one of their local Red Cross shows to do a monologue.  Was I a hit?  Say, I got more flowers than a hearse!  You’ve got to remember, though, that they deliver flowers by the car-load out here.  And the local stock company has made me an offer.  Ingenue parts.  There is not the money that I might get in the pictures, but the chance is better.  So Marie Courtenay moves on to the legit.—­I mean the spoken drama.  Look out for me on Broadway later!”

In the correspondence from Sergeant Berthelin there came a long hiatus followed by a curt bit of official information:  “Seriously wounded.”  The Little Red Doctor brought the news to me, with a queer expression on his face.

“It doesn’t look good, Dominie,” he said.  “You know, my old friend, Death, is a shrewd picker.  He’s got an eye for men.”  He mused, rubbing his tousled, brickish locks with a nervous hand.  “I was getting to kind of like that young pup,” he muttered moodily.

The saying that no news is good news was surely concocted by some one who never chafed through day after lengthening day for that which does not come.  But in the end it did come, in the form of a scrawl from the Weeping Scion himself.  He was mending, but very slowly, and they said it would be a long time—­months, perhaps—­before he could get back to the front.  Meantime, they were still picking odds and ends, chiefly metallic, out of various parts of his system.

“I’m one of the guys you read about that came over here to collect souvenirs,” he commented.  “Well, I’ve got all I need of ’em.  They can have the rest.  All I want now is to get back and present a few to Fritzie before the show is over.”

Thereafter the Little Red Doctor exhibited, but read to us only in small parts, quite bulky communications from overseas.  Some of them, it became known, he was forwarding to our little Mary, out in the Far West.  With her answer came the solution.

“Some of the ‘Grass and Asphalt’ sketches are wonders; some not so good.  I am going to try out ‘Doggy’ if I can find a poodle with enough intelligence to support me.  But you need not have been so mysterious, Doc, about your ‘young amateur writer who seems to have some talent.’  Did you think I would not know it was David?  Why, bless your dear, silly heart, I told him some of those stories myself.  But how does he get a chance to write them?  Is he back on this side?  Or is he invalided?  Or what?  Tell me.  I want to know about him.  You do not have to worry about my—­well, my infatuation for him, any more.  He was a pretty boy, though, wasn’t he?  But I have seen too many of that kind in the picture game.  I’m spoiled for them.  How I would love to smear some of their pretty, smirky faces!  They give me a queer feeling in my breakfast.  Excuse me:  I forgot I was a lady.  But don’t say ‘pretty’ to me any more.  I’m through.  At that, you were all wrong about Buddy.  He was a lot decenter than you thought:  only he was brought up wrong.  Give him my love as one pal to another.  I hope he don’t come back a He-ro.  I’m offen he-roes, too.  Excuse again!”

Wars and exiles alike come to an end in time.  And in time our two wanderers returned, but Mary first, David having been sent into Germany with the Army of Occupation.  Modest announcements in the theatrical columns informed an indifferent theater-going world that Miss Marie Courtenay, an actress new to Broadway, was to play the ingenue part in the latest comedy by a highly popular dramatist.  Immediately upon the production, the theater-going world ceased to be indifferent to the new actress; in fact, it went into one of its occasional furores about her.  Not that she was in any way a great genius, but she had a certain indefinable and winningly individual quality.  The critics discussed it gravely and at length, differing argumentatively as to its nature and constitution.  I could have given them a hint.  My predictions regarding the ancestral potencies of the monkey-face were being abundantly justified.

No announcements, even of the most modest description, heralded the arrival of Sergeant Major (if you please!) David Berthelin upon his native shores.  He came at once to Our Square and tackled the Little Red Doctor.

“Where is she?” he asked.

The Little Red Doctor assumed an air of incredulous surprise.  “Have you still got that bee in your bonnet?” said he.

“Where is she?” repeated the Weeping Scion.

Maneuvering for time and counsel, the Little Red Doctor took him to see the Bonnie Lassie and they sent for me.  We beheld a new and reconstituted David.  He was no longer pretty.  The soft brown eyes were less soft and more alert, and there were little wrinkles at their corners.  He had broadened a foot or so.  That pinky-delicate complexion by which he had, in earlier and easier days, set obvious store, was brownish and looked hardened.  The Cupid’s-bow of his mouth had straightened out.  High on one cheekbone was a not unsightly scar.  His manner was unassertive, but eminently self-respecting, and me, whom aforetime he had stigmatized as a “white-whiskered old goat,” he now addressed as “Sir.”

“Perhaps you’ll tell me where she is, sir,” said he patiently.

“Leave it to me,” said the Bonnie Lassie, who has an unquenchable thirst for the dramatic in real life.  “And keep next Sunday night open.”

She arranged with Mary McCartney to give a reading on that evening, at her studio, of David’s “Doggy” from the “Grass and Asphalt” sketches which he had written in hospital.  It was a quaint, pathetic little conceit, the bewildered philosophy of a waif of the streets, as expressed to his waif of a dog.  For the supporting part we borrowed Willy Woolly from the House of Silvery Voices, and admirably he played it, barking accurately and with true histrionic fervor in the right places (besides promptly falling in love with the star at the first and only rehearsal).  After the try-out, Mary came over to my bench with a check for a rather dazzling sum in her hand, and said that now was the time to settle accounts, but she never could repay—­and so forth and so on; all put so sweetly and genuinely that I heartily wished I might accept the thanks if not the check.  Instead of which I blurted out the truth.

“Oh, Dominie!” said the girl, with such reproach that my heart sank within me.  “Do you think that was fair?  Don’t you know that I never could have taken the money?”

“Precisely.  And we had to find a way to make you take it.  We couldn’t have you dying on the premises,” I argued with a feeble attempt at jocularity.

“But from him!” she said.  “After what had happened—­And his mother.  How could you let me do it!”

“I thought you would have gotten over that feeling by this time,” I ventured.

“Oh, there’s none of the old feeling left,” she answered, so simply that I knew she believed her own statement.  “But to have lived on his money—­Where is he?” she asked abruptly.

I told her that also and about Sunday night; the whole thing.  The Bonnie Lassie would have slain me.  But I couldn’t help it.  I was feeling rather abject.

Sunday night came, and with it Miss Marie Courtenay, escorted by an “ace” covered with decorations, whose name is a household word and who was only too obviously her adoring slave.  Already there had been hints of their engagement.  Had I been that ace, I should have felt no small discomposure at the sight of the girl’s face when she first saw the changed and matured Weeping Scion of three years before.  After the first flash of recognition she had developed on that expressive face of hers a look of wonder and almost pathetic questioning, and, I thought, who knew and loved the child, already something deeper and sweeter.  Young David, after greeting the star of the evening, took a modest rear seat as befitted his rank.  But when the Bonnie Lassie announced “Doggy,” it was his face that was the study.

Of that performance I shall say nothing.  It is now famous and familiar to thousands of theater-goers.  But if ever mortal man spent twenty minutes in fairyland, it was David, while Mary was playing the work of his fancy.  At the close, he disappeared.  I suppose he did not dare trust himself to join in the congratulations with which she was overwhelmed.  I found him, as I rather expected, on the bench where he had sat when Mayme McCartney first found him.  And when the crowd had departed from the studio, I told the girl.  Without even stopping to put on her hat she went out to him.

He was sitting with his elbows on his knees and his fists supporting his cheekbones.  But this time he was not weeping.  He was thinking.  Just as of old she put a hand on his humped shoulder.  Startled, he looked up, and jumped to his feet.  She was holding something out to him.

“What’s that?” he said.

“A check.  For what I owe you.”

“Who told you?  The Little Red Doctor promised—­”

“He’s kept his promise.  The Dominie told me.”

“Oh!  I suppose,” he said slowly, “I’ve got to take this.  You wouldn’t—­no, of course you wouldn’t,” he sighed.

“I’ve tried to keep strict account,” she said.

David adopted a matter-of-fact tone.  “I can’t deny that it’ll come in handy, just now,” he remarked.  “At the present price of clothing, and with my personal exchequer in its depleted state—­”

“Why,” she broke in, “has anything happened?  Your mother—?”

“Cut off,” said David briefly.

“She’s cut you off?  On my account?  Oh—­”

“No.  I’ve cut her off.  Temporarily.  She doesn’t want me to work.  I’m working.  On a newspaper.”

“That’s good,” said the girl warmly.  “Let’s sit down.”

They sat down.  Each, however, found it curiously hard to begin again.  Mary was aching to thank him, but had a dreadful fear that if she tried to, she would cry.  She didn’t want to cry.  She had a feeling that crying would be a highly unstrategic procedure leading to possible alarming developments.  Why didn’t David say something?  Finally he did make a beginning.

“Mayme.”

“No:  not ‘Mayme’ any more.”

He flushed to his temples.  “I beg your pardon, Miss Courtenay.”

“Nonsense!” she said softly.  “Mary.  I’ve discarded the ‘Mayme’ long ago.”

“Mary,” he repeated in a tone of musing content.

“Buddy.”

He caught his breath.  “A few thousand of the best guys in the world,” he said, “call a fellow that.  And every time they said it, it made my heart ache with longing to hear it in your voice.”

“You’re a queer Buddy,” returned the girl, not quite steadily.  “Did you bring me home a German helmet for a souvenir?”

He shook his head.  “I didn’t bring home much of anything, except some experience and the discovery of the fact that when I had to stand on my own feet, I wasn’t much.”

“You got your stripes, didn’t you?” suggested the girl.

“That’s all I did get,” he returned jealously.  “I didn’t get any medal, or palms or decorations or crosses of war:  I didn’t get anything except an occasional calling down and a few scratches.  If I’d had the luck to get into aviation or some of the fancy branches—­” David checked himself.  “There I go,” he said in self-disgust.  “Beefing again.”

It was quite in the old, spoiled-child tone; an echo of indestructible personality, the Weeping Scion of other days; and it went straight to Mary’s swelling, bewildered, groping heart.  She began to laugh and a sob tangled itself in the laughter, and she choked and said: 

“Buddy.”

He turned toward her.

“Don’t be dumb, Buddy,” she said, in the words of their unforgotten first talk.  “You’ve—­you’ve got me—­if you still want me.”

She put out a tremulous hand to him, and it slipped over his shoulder and around his neck, and she was drawn close into his arms.

“The Little Red Doctor,” remarked David after an interlude, in the shaken tone of one who has had undeserved miracles thrust upon him, “said that to want something more than anything in the world and not get it was good for my soul, besides serving me right.”

“The Little Red Doctor,” retorted Mary McCartney, with the reckless ingratitude of a woman in love, “is a dear little red idiot.  What does he know about Us!”