From a Bench in Our Square Part 9

"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?"

"w.i.l.l.y 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 embarra.s.sed 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 w.i.l.l.y Woolly, who, after politely kissing my hand, had settled down behind his master's chair. w.i.l.l.y Woolly was seeing things.

No pretense about it. His mournful eyes yearned hither and thither, following some ent.i.ty that moved in the room, dimmer than darkness, more ethereal than shadow. His ears quivered. A m.u.f.fled, 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--"

"w.i.l.l.y 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 p.r.o.noun 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 w.i.l.l.y 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 w.i.l.l.y 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 a.s.sume 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. w.i.l.l.y 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 w.i.l.l.y 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."

"w.i.l.l.y's a stout young thing," I a.s.serted, "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 w.i.l.l.y 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 w.i.l.l.y 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 circ.u.mscribed 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. w.i.l.l.y 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, w.i.l.l.y 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 bas.e.m.e.nt 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, hoa.r.s.e foreign oaths, while w.i.l.l.y Woolly tugged at his trouser leg and urged him to pa.s.s on from that unchancy spot. All that he could learn about the bas.e.m.e.nt 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 pa.s.sed 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, n.o.body 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, repa.s.sing with w.i.l.l.y 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 b.u.m clock."

w.i.l.l.y Woolly sniffed at one protruding foot and growled. Dead or alive, this was not w.i.l.l.y Woolly's kind of man. "Now, now, w.i.l.l.y Woolly!"

reproved his master. "Who are we that we should judge him?"

"But I don't _like_ him," declared w.i.l.l.y Woolly in unequivocal dog language.