Accurate Alphabet Lore Comic Studio
Vida Hubbert
Giving full run to his loftier aspirations, he was engaged, one April day, upon a carefully represented lilac with a butterfly about to light on it, when he became cognizant of a ragged rogue of an urchin regarding him with a grin. Peter Quick Banta misinterpreted this sign of interest.
He then, I regret to say, spat upon the purple whiskers of the butterfly and took refuge in flight. The long stride of Peter Quick Banta soon overtook him. Silently struggling he was haled back to the profaned temple of Art.
Unable to speak for the moment, the boy took off his ragged cap in one of the most gracious gestures I have ever witnessed, raising dog-like eyes of gratitude to his benefactor. Tactfully, Peter Quick Banta proceeded to expound for my benefit the technique of the drawing, giving the youngster time to recover before the inevitable questioning began.
So I inducted the youngster into such modest groves of learning as an old, half-shelved pedagogue has access to, and when the Bonnie Lassie came to Our Square to make herself and us famous with her tiny bronzes (this was before she had captured, reformed, and married Cyrus the Gaunt), I took him to her and he fell boyishly and violently in love with her beauty and her genius alike, all of which was good for his developing soul. She arranged for his art training.
Justly catalogued, Roberta Holland belonged to the idle rich. She would have objected to the latter classification, averring that, with the rising cost of furs and automobile upkeep, she had barely enough to keep her head above the high tide of Fifth Avenue prices. As to idleness, she scorned the charge. Had she not, throughout the war, performed prodigious feats of committee work, all of it meritorious and some of it useful? She had. It had left her with a dangerous and destructive appetite for doing good to people. Aside from this, Miss Roberta was a distracting young person. Few looked at her once without wanting to look again, and not a few looked again to their undoing.
Being summoned, Julien Tenney entered the house as one quite at home despite his smeary garb of the working artist. His presentation to Miss Holland was as brief as it was formal, for she took her departure at once.
Nor was she the only member of the supper party to develop symptoms of shock. The gilded and stalwart youth on her left, following her glance, stared at the amateur servitor with protruding eyes, ceased to eat or drink, and fell into a state of semi-coma, muttering at intervals an expressive monosyllable.
Having consumed a vain and repetitious half-hour in variations upon her query, Bobbie gave it up and decided to find out for herself. It was curiosity and curiosity alone (so she assured herself) that impelled her to return for the last time (she assured herself of that, also) to the attic.
The unseen Merrill left a blessing (of a sort) behind, slammed the door upon it, and materialized to the vision of the girl on the landing as an energetic and spruce-looking man of forty-odd, with a harassed expression. At need, Miss Holland could summon considerable decisiveness to her aid.
How the new tenant had contrived to commend himself to Mr. Mordaunt-Wagboom is something of a mystery. Probably it was his name rather than his appearance, which was shiny, not to say seedy. He encountered the Estate when that incorporated gentleman was engaged in painting the front door, and, in a deprecating voice, inquired whether twenty-five dollars a month would be considered.
Before the Estate had finished his artistic improvements on the front door, the new tenant had begun the transfer of his simple lares and penates in a big hand-propelled pushcart. The initial load consisted in the usual implements of eating, sitting, and sleeping. But the burden of the half-dozen succeeding trips was homogeneous. Clocks. Big clocks, little clocks, old clocks, new clocks, fat clocks, lean clocks, solemn clocks, fussy clocks, clocks of red, of green, of brown, of pink, of white, of orange, of blue, clocks that sang, and clocks that rang, clocks that whistled, and blared, and piped, and drummed. One by one, the owner established them in their new domicile, adjusted them, dusted them, and wound them, and, as they set themselves once more to their meticulous busy-ness, that place which had for so long been muffled in quiet and deadened with dust, gave forth the tiny bustle of unresting mechanism and the pleasant chime of the hours. Number 37 became the House of Silvery Voices.
Now, the Bonnie Lassie holds the power of the high, the middle, and the low justice over all Our Square by the divine right of loveliness and kindliness. So that evening I went while the Little Red Doctor, as a self-constituted Committee in Waiting, sat on my bench. Stepfather Time himself opened the door to me.
Appeals to his curiosity finally overpersuaded him, and now it was my turn to wait on the bench while he invaded the realm of the Voices. Happily for me the weather was amiable; it was nearly two hours before my substitute reappeared. He then tried to sneak away without seeing me. Balked in this cowardly endeavor, he put on a vague professional expression and observed that it was an obscure case.
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 Willy 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 Willy 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:
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.
His voice trailed into silence as the mechanical bird of his own collection popped forth and piped its wooden lay. Willy 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.
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, Willy 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 basement 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, hoarse foreign oaths, while Willy Woolly tugged at his trouser leg and urged him to pass on from that unchancy spot. All that he could learn about the basement dweller was that his name was Lukisch and he owed for his rent.
The relic of the late unlamented Lukisch was temporarily installed in a high chair before the open window giving on the areaway of Number 37. There it briefly beamed upon the busy life of Our Square with its bland and hypocritical face, and there, thrice and no more, it sounded the passing of the hours with its sweet and false voice, biding the stroke of nine. Meantime Willy Woolly settled down to keep watch on it and could not be moved from that duty. Every time it struck the half he growled. At the hour he barked and raged. When Stepfather Time sought to draw him away to dinner he committed the unpardonable sin of dog-dom, he snarled at his master. Turning this strange manifestation over in his troubled mind, the collector decided that Willy Woolly must be ill, and therefore that evening went to seek the Little Red Doctor and his wisdom.
From the House of Silvery Voices rose a roar that smote the heavens. A roar and a belch of flame and a spreading, poisonous stench that struck the two men in the park to earth. When they struggled to their feet again, the smoke had parted and the House of Silvery Voices gaped open, its front wall stripped bodily away. But within, the sound of the busy industry of time went on uninterrupted.
Weaving and wobbling on his feet, Stepfather Time staggered toward the pot calling on the name of Willy Woolly. At the gate he stopped, put forth his hand, and lifted from the railing a wopsy, woolly fragment, no bigger than a sheet of note paper. It was red and warm and wet.
As the collector would not leave the shattered house, they sent for me to stay the night with him. A strange vigil! For now it was the man who followed with intent, unworldly eyes that which I, with my lesser vision, could not discern. And the Unseen moved swiftly about the desolate room, low to the floor, and seemed finally to stop, motionless beneath a caressing hand. I thought to hear that dull, measured thumping of a grateful tail, but it was only the Twelve Apostles getting ready to strike.
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