No weapon was in the Greek's hand, however, as he turned away toward the nearest exit. Halfway there he paused, felt in his pocket, and hurried over to his bench with a look of dismay. I met him, holding out the precious book. He took it with a sigh of relief, thanking me with precise but curiously accented courtesy.
“It is a beautiful text,” I observed. “You can read it?” he said with kindling eyes. “You read the Greek?”
“Sure,” put in Terry the Cop. “The dominie knows all the languages from Chinese to Williamsburg. Domine, make you acquainted with Mr. Phil.”
Thus I met Orpheus. We sat on a bench until the stroke of three brought me to my senses, while he declaimed selected passages in a voice as of rolling waters. That was the first of many nights of Dionysian revelry on the slopes of Mount Olympus, with “The Bacchae” for guidebook and the strange piper for leader. Never would he pipe for me, however. If I wished to hear the soft marvel of his music I must wait until midnight and stand apart in the shadow to listen while he played to the far-away beam of light in the hospital wing. Though our acquaintance ripened swiftly into a species of intimacy, he made no reference to the devotion in which his life centered. He had the gift of an impenetrable reserve.
Concerning himself, he was only less reticent. From casual references, however, I gathered that he was the son of a merchant of Lamia, educated in England, and sent to this country on an errand of commerce, and that he would long since have returned but for the light in that window.
It is not good for man to live on hope alone. So I sought to involve my Greek in the close-woven interests of Our Square. I took him to dine at the Elite Restaurant, and introduced him to Polyglot Elsa, the cashier (who put a fearful strain on his courtesy with her barbarous modern Greek), and impressed him into the amateur police to escort MacLachan the Tailor home, drunk and singing “The Cork Leg,” and even got him to pipe gay tunes of an early evening for our little asphalt-dancers to practice by; but always back of his gentle courtesy and tolerant kindness there was an aloofness of the spirit, as if he had but stepped out, a godlike spectator, from the limbo of some remote world hidden behind the tendrils and leafage of that wonderful semiuncial text. Then one night, when he had sent his heart and hope and longing out upon the wings of music through the night, I asked him to help me soothe the wakefulness of Leon Coventry. Together we climbed the stifling stairs of the old mansion to the top floor where Leon the Gnome lay eating his heart out and staring from an empty chair that whispered to the door of an empty room, its oaken bar fallen, its little white bed smooth, its one flower withered and dead on the window sill. Little was said between the swarthy Gnome on the bed and the splendid young god sitting beside him, but there passed between them some subtle understanding of the spirit. Orpheus made his music for the sick man; almost such music as he had sent winging through the outer darkness. At the end he took the Gnome's gnarled hand in his own.
“She will come back,” he said. “Believe always that she will come back. It is only by faith that we hold the dreams that are truer than reality.”
Outside Orpheus turned to me. “You believe that, do you not?” he asked.
I muttered something.
“I must believe it,” he said vehemently. “I must—or there is nothing left.” Then, simply, as if he were relating some impersonal anecdote, he told me his story, one of those swift, inevitable, pregnant romances of two outlanders in this great wilderness which we call New York.