From a Bench in Our Square Part 26

"Just good-bye and good luck," answered the Little Red Doctor, censoring ruthlessly.

The Bonnie La.s.sie went over and put her arms around Mayme McCartney.

"My dear," she said softly. "It wouldn't do. It really wouldn't. He isn't worth it. You're going to forget him."

"All right." Suddenly Mayme looked like a very helpless and sorrowful little girl. "Only, it--it isn't goin' to be as easy as you think. He was so pretty," said Mayme McCartney wistfully.

II

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 La.s.sie 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 La.s.sie 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 La.s.sie 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 La.s.sie. "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 La.s.sie--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 b.o.o.b," 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 pa.s.sage:

"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 h.e.l.l 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 s.h.i.+fted 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 La.s.sie. "How did it happen?"

"He went over on one of the 'flu s.h.i.+ps,' 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 La.s.sie 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 La.s.sie. "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 hea.r.s.e! 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!"