The House Of Silvery Voices

"For a man of sixty," I began, "Mr. Merivale--"

"Who?" interrupted the Little Red Doctor; "I'm speaking of the dog."

"Have you, then," I inquired in insinuating accents, "become a dash-binged vet?"

"A man can't be a brute, can he!" he retorted angrily. "When that animated mop put up his paws and stuck his tongue out like a child--"

"I know," I said. "You took on a new patient. Probably gratis," I added, with malice, for this was one of the Little Red Doctor's notoriously weak points.

"Just the same, he's a fool dog."

"On the contrary, he is a person of commanding intellect and nice social discrimination," I asserted, recalling Willy Woolly's flattering acceptance of myself.

"A faker," asseverated my friend. "He pretends to see things."

I sat up straight on my bench. "Things? What kind of things?"

"Things that aren't there," returned the Little Red Doctor, and fell to musing. "They couldn't be," he added presently and argumentatively.

Receiving no encouragement when I sought further details, I asked whether he had called the new resident to account for the delinquencies of his clocks. He shook his head.

"I didn't have time," said he doggedly.

"Time? Why, there's nothing but time in that house."

The Little Red Doctor chose to take my feeble joke at par. "No time at all. None of the clocks keep it."

"How does he manage his life, then?"

"Willy Woolly does that for him. Barks him up in the morning. Jogs his elbow at mealtimes. Tucks him in bed at night, for all I know."

Thus abortively ended Our Square's protest against Stepfather Time and his House of Silvery Voices. The Little Red Doctor's obscure suggestion stuck in my mind, and a few nights later I made a second call. Curiosity rather than neighborliness was the inciting cause. Therefore I ought to have been embarrassed at the quiet warmth of my reception by both of the tenants. Interrupting himself in the work of adjusting a new acquisition's mechanism, Stepfather Time settled me into the most comfortable chair and immediately began to talk of clocks.

Good talk, it was; quaint and flavorous and erudite. But my attention kept wandering to Willy Woolly, who, after politely kissing my hand, had settled down behind his master's chair. Willy Woolly was seeing things. No pretense about it. His mournful eyes yearned hither and thither, following some entity that moved in the room, dimmer than darkness, more ethereal than shadow. His ears quivered. A muffled, measured thumping sounded, dull and indeterminate like spirit rapping; it took me an appreciable time to identify it as the noise of the poodle's tail, beating the floor. Once he whined, a quick, quivering, eager note. And still the amateur of clocks murmured his placid lore. It was rather more than old nerves could stand.

"The dog," I broke in upon the stream of erudition. "Surely, Mr. Merivale--"

"Willy Woolly?" He looked down, and the faithful one withdrew himself from his vision long enough to lick the master hand. "Does he disturb you?"

"Oh, no," I answered, a little confused. "I only thought--it seemed that he is uneasy about something."

"There are finer sensibilities than we poor humans have," said my host gravely.

"Then you have noticed how he watches and follows?"

"He is always like that. Always, since."

His "since" was one of the strangest syllables that ever came to my ears. It implied nothing to follow. It was finality's self.

"It is"--I sought a word--"interesting and curious," I concluded lamely, feeling how insufficient the word was.

"She comes back to him," said my host simply.

No need to ask of whom he spoke. The pronoun was as final and definitive as his "since." Never have I heard such tenderness as he gave to its utterance. Nor such desolation as dimmed his voice when he added:

"She never comes back to me."

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:

"I suppose I was the happiest man in the world."

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.

"The first cuckoo clock, as you are doubtless aware, sir"--he was always scrupulous to assume knowledge on the part of his hearer, no matter how abstruse or technical the subject; it was a phase of his inherent courtesy--"was intended to represent not the cuckoo, but the blackbird. It had a double pipe for the hours, 'Pit-weep! Pit-weep!' and a single--"

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.

"When the cuckoo sounded," continued the collector without the slightest change of intonation, "she used to imitate it to puzzle Willy Woolly. A merry heart! ... All was so still after it stopped beating. The clocks forgot to strike."

The poodle, turning his absorbed regard from the Presence that moves beyond time and its perishing voices, trotted to his master and nuzzled the frail hand.

The hand fondled him. "Yes, little dog," murmured the man. His eyes, sad as those of the animal, quested the dimness.

"Why does she come to him and not to me? He loved her dearly, didn't you, little dog? But not as I did." There was a quivering note of jealousy in his voice. "Why is my vision blinded to what he sees?"

"You have said yourself that there are finer sensibilities than ours," I suggested.

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