"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 ingrat.i.tude of a woman in love, "is a dear little red idiot. What does he know about _Us!_"
BARBRAN
Immediately upon hearing of my fell design MacLachan, the tailor, paid a visit of protest to my bench.
"Is it true fact that I hear, Dominie?"
"What do you hear, MacLachan?"
"That ye"re to make one of yer silly histories about Barbran?"
"Perfectly true," said I, pa.s.sing over the uncomplimentary adjective.
""Tis a f.e.c.kless waste of time."
"Very likely."
""Twill encourage the pair, when a man of yer age and influence in Our Square should be dissuadin" them."
"Perhaps they need a friendly word."
MacLachan frowned. "Ye"re determined?"
"Oh, quite!"
"Then I"ll give ye a t.i.tle for yer romance."
"That"s very kind of you. Give it."
"The Story of Two Young Fools. By an Old One," said MacLachan witheringly, and turned to depart.
"Mac!"
"What?"
"Wait a moment."
I held him with my glittering eye. Also, in case that should be inadequate, with the crook of my cane firmly fixed upon his ankle.
"I"ll waste na time from the tailorin"," began the Scot disdainfully, but paused as I pointed a loaded finger at his head. "Well?" he said, showing a guilty inclination to flinch.
"Mac, was _I_ an original accomplice in this affair?"
"Will ye purtend to deny--"
"Did _I_ scheme and plot with Cyrus the Gaunt and young Stacey?"
MacLachan mumbled something about undue influence.
"Did _I_ get arrested?"
MacLachan grunted.
"In a cellar?"
MacLachan snorted.
"With my nose painted green?"
MacLachan groaned. "There was others," he pleaded.
"A man of your age and influence in Our Square," I interrupted sternly, "should have been dissuading them."
"Arr ye designin" to put all that in yer sil--in yer interestin"
account?"
"Every detail."
MacLachan dislodged my crook from his leg, gave me such a look as mid-Victorian painters strove for in pictures of the Dying Stag, and retired to his Home of Fashion.
That men of the sobriety and standing of Cyrus the Gaunt, MacLachan, Leon Coventry, the Little Red Doctor, and Boggs (I do not count young Phil Stacey, for he was insane at the time, and has been so, with modifications and glorifications, ever since) should paint their noses green and frequent dubious cellars, calls for explanation. The explanation is Barbran.
Barbran came to us from the immeasurable distances; to wit, Washington Square.
Let me confess at once that we are a bit supercilious in our att.i.tude toward the sister Square far to our West, across the Alps of Broadway.
Our Square was an established center of the social respectabilities when the foot of Fifth Avenue was still frequented by the occasional cow whose wanderings are responsible for the street-plan of Greenwich Village. Our Square remains true to the ancient and simple traditions, whereas Washington Square has grown long hair, smeared its fingers with paint and its lips with free verse, and gone into debt for its inconsiderable laundry bills. Washington Square we suspect of playing at life; Our Square has a sufficiently hard time living it. We have little in common.
Nevertheless, it must be admitted that there are veritable humans, not wholly submerged in the crowd of self-conscious mummers who crowd the Occidental park-s.p.a.ce, and it was at the house of one of these, a woman architect with a golden dream of rebuilding Greenwich Village, street by street, into something simple and beautiful and, in the larger sense urban, that the Bonnie La.s.sie, whose artistic deviations often take her far afield, met Barbran.