From a Bench in Our Square Part 14

"Sister of Budge Leffingwell, the Princeton half-back?"

"No. Cousin."

"I knew Old Man Chance had a happy coincidence up his sleeve somewhere,"

he declared with profound and joyous conviction.

"Are you a friend of Budge's?"

"Friend doesn't half express it! He made the touchdown that won me a clean hundred last season. Outside of that I wouldn't know him from Henry Ford. You see how Fate binds us together."

"Will you tell me one thing, please?" pleaded Anne Leffingwell desperately. "Have you ever been examined for this sort of thing?"

"Not yet. But then, you see, I'm only a beginner. This is my first attempt. I'll get better as I go on."

"Will you please crank my car?" requested Anne Leffingwell faintly.

Not until they reached Our Square did they speak again.

All things come to him who, sedulously acting the orchid's part, vegetates and bides his time. To me in the pa.s.sage of days came Anne Leffingwell, to talk of many things, the conversation invariably touching at some point upon Mr. Martin d.y.k.e--and lingering there. She was solicitous, not to say skeptical, regarding Mr. d.y.k.e's reason. Came also Martin d.y.k.e to converse intelligently upon labor, free verse, ouija, the football outlook, O. Henry, Crucible Steel, and Mr.

Leffingwell. He was both solicitous and skeptical regarding Mr.

Leffingwell's existence. Now when two young persons come separately to an old person to discuss each other's affairs, it is a bad sign. Or perhaps a good sign. Just as you choose.

Adopting the Mordaunt Estate's sardonic suggestion, Martin d.y.k.e had settled down to van life in a private alleyway next to Number 37. Anne Leffingwell deemed this criminally extravagant since the rental of a van must be prodigious. ("Tell her not to worry; my family own the storage and moving plant," was one of his many messages that I neglected to deliver.) On his part he worried over the loneliness and simplicity of her establishment--one small but neat maid--which he deemed incongruous with her general effect of luxury and ease of life, and wondered whether she had split with her family. (She hadn't; "I've always been brought up like a--a--an artichoke," she confided to me. "So when father went West for six months, I just moved, and I'm going to be a potato and see how I like it. Besides, I've got some research work to do.")

Every morning a taxi called and took her to an uptown library, and every afternoon she came back to the harlequin-fronted house at Number 37.

d.y.k.e's hours were such that he saw her only when she returned early, for he slept by day in his van, and worked most of the night on electrical experiments which he was conducting over on the river front, and which were to send his name resounding down the halls of fame. (The newspapers have already caught an echo or two.) On his way back from his experiments, he daily stopped at the shop of Eberling the Florist, where, besides chaste and elegant set pieces inscribed "Gates Ajar" and "Gone But Not Forgotten," one may, if expert and insistent, obtain really fresh roses. What connection these visits had with the matutinal arrival of deep pink blossoms addressed to n.o.body, but delivered regularly at the door of Number 37, I shall not divulge; no, not though a base attempt was made to incriminate me in the transaction.

Between the pair who had arrived in Our Square on such friendly and promising terms, there was now no communication when they met. She was steadfastly adhering to that "Never. Never. _Never_!" What less, indeed, could be expected of a faithful wife insulted by ardent hopes of her husband's early demise from a young man whom she had known but four hours? So it might have gone on to a sterile conclusion but for a manifestation of rebellious artistic tastes on her part. The Mordaunt Estate stopped at my bench to complain about them one afternoon when Martin d.y.k.e, having just breakfasted, had strolled over to discuss his favorite topic. (She was, at that very moment, knitting her dainty brows over the fifteenth bunch of pink fragrance and deciding regretfully that this thing must come to an end even if she had to call in Terry the Cop.)

"That lady in Number 37," said the Mordaunt Estate bitterly, "ain't the lady I thought she was."

Martin d.y.k.e, under the impulse of his persistent obsession, looked up hopefully. "You mean that she isn't really _Mrs._ Leffingwell?"

"I mean I'm disappointed in her; that's what I mean. She wants the house front painted over."

"No!" I protested with polite incredulity.

"Where's her artistic sense? I thought she admired your work so deeply."

"She does, too," confirmed the Estate. "But she says it's liable to be misunderstood. She says ladies come there and order tea, and men ask the hired girl when the barbers come on duty, and one old bird with whiskers wanted to know if Ashtaroth, the Master of Destiny, told fortunes there.

So she wants I should tone it down. I guess," pursued the Mordaunt Estate, stricken with gloom over the difficulty of finding the Perfect Tenant in an imperfect world, "I'll have to notice her to quit."

"No; don't do that!" cried the young man. "Here! I'll repaint the whole wall for you free of charge."

"What do _you_ know about R. Noovo art? Besides, paints cost money."

"I'll furnish the paint, too," offered the reckless youth. "I'm crazy about art. It's the only solace of my declining years. And," he added cunningly and with evil intent to flatter and cajole, "I can tone down that design of yours without affecting its beauty and originality at all."

Touched by this ingenuous tribute hardly less than by the appeal to his frugality, the Estate accepted the offer. From four to five on the following afternoon, Martin d.y.k.e, appropriately clad in overalls, sat on a plank and painted. On the afternoon following that the lady of the house came home at four-thirty and caught him at it.

"That's going to be ever so much nicer," she called graciously, not recognizing him from the view of his industrious-appearing back.

"Thank you for those few kind words."

"You!" she exclaimed indignantly as he turned a mild and benevolent beam of the eye upon her. "What are you doing to my house?"

"Art. High art."

"How did you get up there?"

"Ladder. High ladder."

"You know that isn't what I mean at all."

"Oh! Well, I've taken a contract to tone down the Midway aspect of your highly respectable residence. One hour per day."

"If you think that this performance is going to do you any good--" she began with withering intonation.

"It's done that already," he hastened to a.s.sert. "You've recognized my existence again."

"Only through trickery."

"On the contrary, it's no trick at all to improve on the Mordaunt Estate's art. Now that we've made up again, Miss or Mrs. Leffingwell, as the case may be--"

"We haven't made up. There's nothing to make up."

"Amended to 'Now that we're on speaking terms once more.' Accepted?

Thank you. Then let me thank you for those lovely flowers you've been sending me. You can't imagine how they brighten and sweeten my simple and unlovely van life, with their--"

"Mr. d.y.k.e!" Her eyes were flas.h.i.+ng now and her color was deeper than the pink of the roses which she had rejected. "You must know that you had no right to send me flowers and that in returning them--"

"Returning? But, dear lady--or girl, as the case may be [here she stamped a violent foot]--if you feel it your duty to return them, why not return them to the florist or the sender? Marked though my attentions may have been, does that justify you in a.s.suming that I am, so to speak, the only floral prospect in the park? There's the Dominie, for instance. He's notoriously your admirer, and I've seen him at Eberling's quite lately." (Mendacious young scoundrel!)

For the moment she was beguiled by the plausibility of his manner.

"How should he know that pink roses are my favorites?" she said uncertainly.

"How should _I_, for that matter?" he retorted at once. "Though any idiot could see at a glance that you're at least half sister to the whole rose tribe."

"Now you're beginning again," she complained. "You see, it's impossible to treat you as an ordinary acquaintance."

"But what do you think of me as a painter-man?" inquired the bewildering youth.

Preparatory to entering the house she had taken off her gloves, and now one pinky-brown hand rested on the door lintel below him. "The question is," said she, "wasn't it really you that sent the roses, and don't you realize that you mustn't?"

"The question is," he repeated, "whether, being denied the ordinary avenues of approach to a shrine, one is justified in jumping the fence with one's votive offerings. Now I hold--"