From a Bench in Our Square Part 19

"You can't afford _not_ to have something down on this if it's only a shoestring. No? Oh--well!"

Again drawing the art-square from his pocket he lifted his pearl-gray derby and dabbed despairingly at his brow. Catching the scent hot and fresh, Susan Gluck's Orphan came dashing up-wind giving tongue, or rather, nose, voluptuously.

"Mm-m-m! Snmmff!" inhaled the Orphan, wrinkling ecstatic nostrils.

"Mister, lemme smell it some more!"

Graciously the dispenser of fragrance waved his balm-laden handkerchief.

"Like it, kiddie?" he said.

"Oh, it's _grand_!" She stretched out her little grimy paws. "Please, Mister," she entreated, "would you flop it over 'em, just once?"

The pink man tossed it to her. "Take it along and, when you get it all snuffed up, give it back to the Dominie here for me."

"Oh, gracious!" said the Orphan, incredulous at this bounty. "Can I have it till _to-morrah_?"

"Sure! What's the big idea for to-morrow?"

"I'm goin' to a funeral. I want it to cry in," said the Orphan importantly.

"A funeral?" I asked. "In Our Square? Whose?"

"My cousin Minnie. She's goin' to be buried in G.o.d's Acre, an' I'm invited 'cause I'm a r'lation. She married a sporting gentleman named Hines an' she died yesterday," said the precocious Orphan.

So Minnie Munn, pretty, blithe, life-loving Minnie, whose going had hurt us so, had come back to Our Square, with all her love of life quenched.

She had promised that she would come back, in the little, hysterical, defiant note she left under the door. Her father and mother must wait and not worry. There are thousands of homes, I suppose, in which are buried just such letters as Minnie's farewell to her parents; rebellious, pa.s.sionate, yearning, pitiful. Ah, well! The moth must break its chrysalis. The flower must rend its bonds toward the light. Little Minnie was "going on the stage." A garish and perilous stage it was, whereon Innocence plays a part as sorry as it is brief. And now she was making her exit, without applause. Memory brought back a picture of Minnie as I had first seen her, a wee thing, blinking and smiling in the arms of her Madonna-faced mother, on a bench in Our Square, and the mother (who could not wait for the promised return--she has lain in G.o.d's Acre these three years) crooning to her an unforgettable song, mournfully prophetic:

"Why did I bring thee, Sweet Into a world of sin?-- Into a world of wonder and doubt With sorrows and snares for the little white feet-- Into a world whence the going out Is as dark as the coming in!"

Old lips readily lend themselves to memory; I suppose I must have repeated the final lines aloud, for the pink man said, wearily but politely:

"Very pretty. Something more in the local line?"

"Hardly." I smiled. Between Bartholomew Storr's elegies and William Young's "Wish-makers' Town" stretches an infinite chasm.

"What's this--now--G.o.d's Acre the kid was talking about?" was his next question.

"An old local graveyard."

"Anything interesting?" he asked carelessly.

"If you're interested in that sort of thing. Are you an antiquary?"

"Sure!" he replied with such offhand prompt.i.tude that I was certain the answer would have been the same had I asked him if he was a dromedary.

"Come along, then. I'll take you there."

To reach that little green s.p.a.ce of peace amidst our turmoil of the crowded, encroaching slums, we must pa.s.s the Bonnie La.s.sie's house, where her tiny figurines, touched with the fire of her love and her genius, which are perhaps one and the same, stand ever on guard, looking out over Our Square from her windows. Judging by his appearance and conversation, I should have supposed my companion to be as little concerned with art as with, let us say, poetry or local antiquities. But he stopped dead in his tracks, before the first window. Fingers that were like steel claws buried themselves in my arm. The other hand pointed.

"What's that?" he muttered fiercely.

"That," to which he was pointing, was a pictorial bronze, the figure of a girl, upright in a c.o.c.klesh.e.l.l boat, made of a rose-petal, her arms outspread to the breeze that was bearing her out across sunlit ripples.

Beneath was the legend: "Far Ports." The face, eager, laughing, pa.s.sionate, adventurous, was the face of Minnie Munn. Therein the Bonnie La.s.sie had been prophetess as well as poet and sculptress, for she had finished the bronze before Minnie left us.

"That," I answered the strong, pink man, trying to shake loose his grip, "is a sculpture by Cecily Willard, otherwise Mrs. Cyrus Staten."

"What'll she take for it?"

"It can't be bought." I spoke with authority, for the figurines that the Bonnie La.s.sie sets in her window are not for sale, but for us of Our Square, who love them.

"Anything can be bought," he retorted, with his quiet, hoa.r.s.e persuasiveness, "at a price. I've got the price, no matter what it is."

Suddenly I understood my pink and hard acquaintance. I understood that stale look in his eyes. Tears do not bring that. Nothing brings it but sleepless thoughts beyond the a.s.suagement of tears. Behind such eyes the heart is aching cold and the brain searing hot. Who should know better than I, though the kindly years have brought their healing! But here was a wound, raw and fresh and savage. I put my hand on his shoulder.

"What was little Minnie to you?" I asked, and answered myself. "You're Hines. You're the man she married."

"Yes. I'm Chris Hines."

"You've brought her back to us," I said stupidly.

"She made me promise."

Strange how Our Square binds the heartstrings of those who have once lived in it! To find it unendurable in life, to yearn back to it in the hour of death! Many have known the experience. So our tiny G.o.d's Acre, shrunk to a small fraction of human acreage through pressure of the encroaching tenements, has filled up until now it has s.p.a.ce but for few more of the returning. Laws have been invoked and high and learned courts appealed to for the jealously guarded right to sleep there, as Minnie Munn was so soon to sleep beside her mother.

I told Hines that I would see the Bonnie La.s.sie about the statuette, and led him on, through the nagged and echoing pa.s.sage and the iron gate, to the white-studded s.p.a.ce of graves. The new excavation showed, brown against the bright verdure. Above it stood the headstone of the Munns, solemn and proud, the cost of a quarter-year's salary, at the pitiful wage which little, broken Mr. Munn drew from his munic.i.p.al clerkship.

Hines's elegant coat rippled on his chest, above what may have been a shudder, as he looked about him.

"It's crowded," he muttered.

"We lie close, as we lived close, in Our Square. I am glad for her father's sake that Minnie wished to come back."

"She said she couldn't rest peaceful anywhere else. She said she had some sort of right to be here."

"The Munns belong to what we call the Inalienables in Our Square," said I, and told him of the high court decision which secured to the descendants of the original "churchyard membership," and to them alone, the inalienable right to lie in G.o.d's Acre, provided, as in the ancient charter, they had "died in honorable estate." I added: "Bartholomew Storrs, as s.e.xton, has const.i.tuted himself watchdog of our graves and censor of our dead. He carried one case to the Supreme Court in an attempt to keep an unhappy woman from sleeping in that pious company."

"That sour-faced prohibitionist?" growled Mr. Hines, employing what I suspect to be the blackest anathema in his lexicon. "Is he the s.e.xton?"

"The same. Our mortuary genius," I confirmed.

"She was a good girl, Min was," said Mr. Hines firmly, though, it might appear, a trifle inconsequentially: "I don't care what they say. Anyway, after I met up with her"; in which qualifying afterthought lay a whole sorrowful and veiled history.

I waited.

"What did they say about her, down here?" he asked jealously.

"Oh, there were rumors. They didn't reach her father."

"No: tell me," he persisted. "I gotta know."

Because Mr. Hines had already impressed himself upon me as one with whom straight talk would serve best, I acceded.