From a Bench in Our Square | Page 2

lilac bloomed. And--the butterfly hovered. The artist had
spoken through his ordained medium and the presentment of life stood
forth. I hardly dared look at Peter Quick Banta. But beneath his
uncouth exterior there lay a great and magnanimous soul.
"Son," said he, "you're a wonder. Wanta keep them crayons?"
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.
"Where did you learn that?"
"Nowhere. Had a few drawing lessons at No. 19."
"Would you like to work for me?"
"How?"
Peter Quick Banta pointed to the sidewalk.
"That?" The boy laughed happily. "That ain't work. That's fun."
So the partnership was begun, the boy, whose name was Julien Tennier
(soon simplified into Tenney for local use), sharing Peter Quick Banta's

roomy garret. Success, modest but unfailing, attended it from the first
appearance of the junior member of the firm at Coney Island, where, as
the local cognoscenti still maintain, he revolutionized the art and
practice of the "sand-dabs." Out of the joint takings grew a bank
account. Eventually Peter Quick Banta came to me about the boy's
education.
"He's a swell," said Peter Quick Banta. "Look at that face! I don't care
if he did crawl outa the gutter. I'm an artist and I reco'nize aristocracy
when I see it. And I want him brung up accordin'."
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.
"But you know, Dominie," she used to say, wagging her head like a
profound and thoughtful bird; "this is all very foolish and shortsighted
on my part. Five years from now that gutter-godling of yours will be
doing work that will make people forget poor little me and my poor
little figurines."
To which I replied that even if it were true, instead of the veriest
nonsense, about Julien Tenney or any one else ever eclipsing her, she
would help him just the same!
But five years from then Julien had gone over to the Philistines.
II
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-done-good-to is, I understand, much in vogue in the purlieus of
Fifth Avenue where it is practiced with skill and persistence by a large
and needy cult of grateful recipients. Our Square doesn't take to it. As
recipients we are, I fear, grudgingly grateful. So when Miss Holland
transferred her enthusiasms and activities to our far-away corner of the
world she met with a lack of response which might have discouraged
one with a less new and superior sense of duty to the lower orders. She
came to us through the Bonnie Lassie, guardian of the gateway from
the upper strata to our humbler domain, who--Pagan that she
is!--indiscriminately accepts all things beautiful simply for their beauty.
Having arrived, Miss Holland proceeded to organize us with all the
energy of high-blooded sweet-and-twenty and all the imperiousness of
confident wealth and beauty. She organized an evening sewing-circle
for women whose eyelids would not stay open after their long day's
work. She formed cultural improvement classes for such as Leon
Coventry, the printer, who knows half the literatures of the world, and
MacLachan, the tailor, to whom Carlyle is by way of being light
reading. She delivered some edifying exhortations upon the subject of
Americanism to Polyglot Elsa, of the Élite Restaurant (who had taken
upon her sturdy young shoulders the support of an old mother and a
paralytic sister, so that her two brothers might enlist