Old Vernam built the cage out of gas pipe and thick-meshed wire and established it on the roof. From my front window, looking diagonally across Our Square, I command a view of it. How well I remember the day that little Paula was put into it! A black-and-white-banded nurse led her in by the hand, held up an admonitory finger for half a minute of directions, and disappeared down the scuttle door, leaving her alone in a remote world. One might have expected the little girl to cry. She didn't. She set about playing, like a happy little squirrel. Presently there floated across the tree-tops a strange and alien sound for that grim mansion to be making—a sweet, light, joyous, childish piping. The little Paula was singing.
Her song disturbed young Carlo and me at our lesson. Carlo was my one educational luxury. An assistant professor of a forgotten branch of learning, already in middle age, as I was then, who ekes out his income by tutoring, cannot well afford to take pupils for love. But Carlo's father had paid in the beginning, and, when he could no longer pay, the boy's vivid, leaping imagination and his passionate love for all that was fine and true in reading had captivated me. I could not let him go. So we kept up the lessons, and ranged the field of the classics, Greek and Latin, English, French, and German, together. He was to be a poet, I foresaw, or perhaps a dramatist, and I believe I bragged of him unconscionably to my associates. Well, they are kindly souls and have forborne to taunt the prophet! Carlo's father was a Northern Italian, the second son of a noble family, who quarreled with the head of the clan and came to this country and a top floor in Our Square to paint masterpieces, and subsequently died at three o'clock one winter morning, pressing another man's coat. MacLachan the Tailor, then just starting his Home of Fashion, had given him the work to save the pair from being evicted, after their money gave out. At the last the elder Trentano took to drink. Then Carlo got jobs as a model, for he was strong and beautiful like a young woods creature. But he let nothing interfere with our lessons.
Paula, the happy singer, did interfere, however. From time to time my pupil's eyes wandered from his book to fix themselves with a puzzled gaze on the roof beyond the tree-tops. Curiosity proved too much for him at length.
“Dominie!” he said.
“Well?”
“Why do they put the little girl in a cage?”
“To keep her from falling off the roof.”
“Why do they put her on the roof?”
“To play.”
“Why doesn't she play in Our Square?”