I

FOR ten years, now, Pagsbrey and Old Harry had crawled up the steps together, cautioned each other off the green park bus and walked up these steps between the cold stone Graces. All the days were quiet. Even up in the gallery where the prints were hung, Pagsbrey could hear the thin sound of the fountain, the slap and shuffle of Old Harry’s feet in corridors below. People spoke stealthily, and whispered of brutal strength and power. ‘Magnificent! . . . Enormous!’ they whispered. ‘Charming. . . . Delicate. . . .’ And the rustling of their catalogues seemed loud. Pagsbrey sometimes found himself murmuring even in the park where he and Harry went out to eat their lunch together. When Harry laughed aloud he was surprised that the swans did not flap away in terror or the pheasants run and crouch, their gold tufts flattened back with fear. He was astonished sometimes when Mrs. Gobartcn could n’t hear him. He thought she must be getting deaf, poor soul; then he knew it was only his whispering again.

Pagsbrey had been a professor once, taught Greek and Latin and vaguer things. He supposed he had been a failure — most professors were. It all depended on how soon they found you out; but age had found him first. He had long hours now to think back on his life and wonder what it was all about. More time than he would have asked or chosen, for the days were stretched far out and quiet, changed only by new exhibits and the moving out of lecture chairs. There were times when he wished that people would muddy the marble floors so that he could wash them up again, and he watched all suspicious persons hopefully. ‘Go on and steal it,’ he would whisper to himself; ‘go on and steal it.’ But they never did and he always felt wicked and ashamed. He was glad to have something, though — glad he was not like Skel Winkelmann, who rocked and drooped all day at the Old Men’s Home and wandered sometimes in his mind, repeating Catullus and the minor odes. At least he, Pagsbrey, was still living, was still living and had found Old Harry.

He would not let himself think what the days would be like without Old Harry—black empty holes without shape or ending. Harry, he found, was alive, and as spry in mind as if he were eight again. He clutched out and held on to all that Pagsbrey told him, even listened with loving care to Pagsbrey’s long ‘descriptions.’ When he first came, Pagsbrey used to stop and stare a long time at each thing, and at night he would see it all as though it were painted on his eyes — long rows of celadon . . . peach-bloom . . . ox-blood . . . the ivory saints with fingers in their beards. Around about twelve o’clock, when the floor was washed and the cases polished and there was nothing else he could find to do, he would choose one vase or statue and memorize it until he knew it by heart — red crackle glaze . . . round and pudgy . . . old bone stand . . . very quaint legs . . . a carved rose on top . . . squat like a spider belly.

He had tried to tell Mrs. Gobarten about the vase and how he had wondered how long it would take to tell of everything and come round to the vase again, and if it would still look like a spider then, or if he might think it more like a toad, possibly, or if . . . and how his thoughts had wandered off to the patch of sunlight on a medal and the folded fat of an angel’s arm, and how he had once tried to count everything, but forgot where it was he stopped each day and gave it up in a little while. Mrs. Gobarten was very kind, but she was always too busy at night getting hot water for the boarders’ bat hs and clearing up the remnants of their food. ‘They must be pretty,’ she would say vaguely. ‘I’d like to see them sometime . . . ought to go up and see them sometime there.’ Her face would be flushed, peering in the heater, her arms and mind full of soiled towels and lint.

Old Harry, he found, would listen, curious and eager as a child. He liked to hear how the jade things looked, as though carved out of soap, and the strange way the Chinese made their rocks, like giant oyster shells or barnacles stuck around with trees. It took his mind off his feet, he said. He even tried to tell of his own things in return, but did not seem able to make them clear in the way Pagsbrey did. ‘You should’ve done books,’ he said to Pagsbrey once, ‘ then maybe you might of wrote the museum catalogue — the big one they keep up on the desk.’

‘Maybe I might have,’ Pagsbrey said. He noticed that Harry never referred in an open way to his lost professorship, feeling perhaps that Pagsbrey might be shamed by remembrance of this former glory.

Harry himself had been a gardener once, a gardener and then a janitor. He lived with his daughter in a house spore-full and loud with children, and, though Pagsbrey had never seen Loretta, he knew from the lunch that Harry brought exactly what manner of woman she must be. Harry’s sandwich was dry and thick, and in it the rind part of a cheese. ‘She makes bread herself,’ he said to Pagsbrey once, showing him a thick and doughy slice. ‘Wonderful!’ Pagsbrey said, and Harry grinned at him. His eyes had a gnomish, secret look sometimes, but it was only the tufted way his eyebrows grew. ‘Loretta does all the cooking for us. She does it three times a day, and they ’re twelve of us,’ he said. It was a sort of apology for anything she might have said or done.

For almost nine years Pagsbrey had planned to ask Old Harry to dinner in his room. ‘I’d like to give him a real course dinner,’ he announced to Mrs. Gobarten once, and for nine years they had planned what the food was going to be. ‘You let me know a week ahead,’ Mrs. Gobarten warned him; ‘I’ll get you a guinea in from Orpha’s.’ Her face had a warm, benevolent look as though already she saw Old Harry tasting it. But there had always seemed plenty of time, and the days were so alike t hat the next would have done as well as this, and as yet Pagsbrey had never asked him.

II

They met each other every morning, Pagsbrey coming down south from Baker, where shabby houses still carried the grille iron of the nineties and the elms had grown enormous, and Harry riding up north from the river stilts, always a little late and puffing, his side bulged out where the sandwich was. Once off the last bus and up the steps, there was only old Maffit left to pass, and both Pagsbrey and Harry looked forward to this with a mild, accustomed pleasure. Maffit was tall and plump, with a pink and peevish face. He was a stupid man, and there was little worse, Pagsbrey thought, than a stupid man who knew his duty and abided by it.

‘You can’t bring no umbrellas in,’ Maffit would say on the wet days to Old Harry. ‘ You got to check all umbrellas before they’ll let you in. You can’t come in with your rubbers, neither. You got to take all them rubbers off.’ He was always early on wet, snowy days and stood waiting to catch them by the door, saying it quick before they had even a chance to take their rubbers off. He liked to pounce on old ladies with umbrellas and send them trembling to the desk, and he liked to have people try the ‘Out’ stile coming in. Pagsbrey came in a snowstorm once and left his umbrella on the bus, forgotten, but Maffit kept watching him all day, and at noon sneaked through his rooms, believing he must have smuggled it in and hoping to find it opened out to dry somewhere or hung from the Colleoni’s rump.

‘A deplorable old man,’ Pagsbrey said. ‘One scarcely knows how to think of him.’

‘He’s an old fish-bellied snoop,’ Harry answered. ‘Take yer rubbers off! Take yer rubbers off! ’ he squeaked.

‘God’s made him, though,’ Pagsbrey argued. ‘We have to fit him in somewhere.’

‘God should have cooked him longer,’ Old Harry said. ‘He don’t look done to me.’

They grinned at each other, comfortable with hate.

The museum had seemed to Pagsbrey a great and cavernous place when he first came, but now the vaulted mysteriousness was gone and only the quiet left. He stood sometimes in the corridor above the central hall and looked down on the statues and the fountain. People would seem small and ant-like, peering at labels and craning up at the dome above, their little faces small as white spots below him, the tops of old men like pink shining beads. From the gallery Pagsbrey looked down on the iron head of the Collconi and mused on this man without doubt or vacillation in his face. It was some five hundred years ago that the sculptor cast this stern thing into bronze, and here in this one man, riding monstrous and fierce above his horses, was all the great dignity and determination of an age. There was an on-goingness, an iron belief in the divinity of strength, as though the clay had been fashioned by a sword. Five hundred years ago. . . .

At the far end of the hall there was a new colossal horseman riding — a green bronze, strange and ghoul-like. It was high and distorted in its shape, as though the sculptor had found life’s own form inadequate to express itself. The rider sagged and shifted in his seat. An old man with hands that let the reins slip down, and a worn exhausted face. Neither horse nor rider looked before him, and the hoofs seemed shambling on the rocks. Pagsbrey thought often and pondered on the statue, and began after a while to see in it more than an old man seeking for his son, as the words on the label said, but thought it a symbol of the age, and wondered if any man had the will to cast a great Colleoni now. And then again he would wonder if it were, after all, that the times had changed or only that he himself had grown older and uncertain.

Once he spoke to Old Harry of this, but Harry only grunted. ‘I don’t know, Mr. Pagsbrey,’ he said. ‘Only I know that I don’t like it — the green sort of saggy one, I mean. There’s strange enough things here to make a man barmed and mazy, and give his mind a shove loose if it’s tipped that way already. But they won’t ever get mine loose — not mine. Not even that blue one with the wolves that follow the piper creeping. I talk back to them sometimes, Mr. Pagsbrey — not to the wolves, I mean, but to that woman with her mouth wide open and her hair stuck out behind. You know, the red and pop-eyed one.’

‘Cassandra?’ Mr. Pagsbrey asked. ‘Ah yes, Cassandra crying doom. Second gallery, forty-eight to the right as you go in. You have to say that to them, Harry, and even then they go to the left.’

‘That’s the one, Mr. Pagsbrey,’ Harry said, ‘the woman crying doom — her with the mouth wide open so you can see her tongue. “Shut up!” I say to her sometimes; “shut up your screaming blatter!” I don’t care if she is an art objict, she’s a woman, Mr. Pagsbrey, and a woman ought to keep still somewheres on earth — in pictures at least, if no place else in life!’

Pagsbrey thought of Loretta and agreed. He hardly liked to confess that he himself had stood in front of a bland and torpid saint and reviled her for trying to seem more wise than mortals were. ‘You’re no better than any of us,’ he told her. ‘You’ve only got sense enough to keep your mouth unopened so the hollow won’t show!’ But after a while he had forgiven her, deciding that this was the ultimate wisdom after all.

III

Through the slow hours of the morning Pagsbrey looked forward to his noon. He liked to think of his lunch box sitting there on the window sill with the things that Mrs. Gobarten had put inside. There was always a meat slice and a cake, and sometimes a walnut or a fudge. He never knew which it was going to be, if at all, and would stand in front of a saint or blessing Buddha, seeing with his eyes the thin and ivory folds, but teasing his mind with whether it was a nut or fudge or neither. It was n’t so much the lunch, though, as the time he could spend with Harry. Harry always had something new to tell, there being always a birth or death or wedding somewhere in the sprawl of houses where he lived; and if it were fudge, then Harry would take a piece, so that there was this to look forward to even on days when nothing else ever happened.

But of late Old Harry had begun to walk more slowly. He told as often his story about the time he lowered himself in the gold seat of a ‘Looey Sez’ when nobody was around, and decided it did n’t fit good enough to trade in even his rice-box rocker for; but he began to look worried at the end as though it occurred to him that perhaps this was n’t so funny after all. It was his feet, he told Pagsbrey; he thought maybe the arches were sagging down a bit, and some corns on his toes tormented him.

‘You ought to soak them, Harry,’ Pagsbrey told him. ‘You ought to soak them in hot water every night.’

‘Loretta’s always used it up,’ Old Harry said. ‘I asked could I stick ’em in with the clothes that was soaking in some tubs, but she would n’t let me. She swore some too, if I remember right.’ He grinned, but Pagsbrey noticed how suddenly his cheeks, which had used to look like red-speckled buttons, were all pulled in and drawn.

He plodded around each day and was afraid to sit down much for fear someone would see him. ‘Can’t set down here,’ he’d say. ‘Can’t let nobody see me sag like this. “It’s too much for Old Harry,” they’ll say, Pagsbrey, “too much for the poor old guy.” Then they’ll look sad and understanding and “relieve” me of the job. I know how it is, Pagsbrey — I ’ve seen it done before. Kind — they’ll be kind; but I got to have the money!’

Pagsbrey discovered that of all the twelve Koffmans only Harry had any certain work, and that there was no Mr. Koffman any more, Loretta’s husband having gone off in search of some place where results followed less surely on their causes, and now being only a name that Loretta used as a sort of hook to hang her swearing on. ‘What’ll they do when I can’t work no more? What’ll they do with me when I’m nothin’ more than a grinning old mouth to feed? Nobody has time to tote me back and forth from stove to windy, or money to feed a sack of bones! And I don’t want to go no place else. They ain’t much, Pagsbrey, but they’re mine!’

Pagsbrey was shocked and worried. It was as though some other had come in place of Harry — a querulous old man with red-rimmed eyes and drooping pants, an old man grown suddenly too small for his great uniform. But he tried to pretend that he noticed nothing. ‘You aren’t changed a leaf’s breadth, Harry,’ he said. ‘You’re as spry and young as you ever were.’

‘No, I ain’t,’ Old Harry whined. ‘I’m afraid — I’m afraid all the time. I hate the rain and the dark, and my feet hurt like there was pins and daggers in ’em, and I don’t know what’ll become of them when I got to give up here, with me to take care of, earnin’ nothing. And my back, Pagsbrey! There ain’t no stuff I can take will make it stop!’ He sat down suddenly on the bench. ‘I don’t care if they do see me. I don’t care about nothing but my feet!’ His old face was pulled and wild-looking with despair.

Poor Pagsbrey fumbled in his mind for words. ‘You come live with me,’ he wanted to offer, and then he thought that would be a rash thing to say without seeing Mrs. Gobarten first. And how would he pay for him if he did? Even then there was Loretta, and Mira and Otto and Leslie and — what was the next child’s name? Ferna, Ferna — something foolish, and no Mr. Koffman, and no salary coming. . . . Poor old Harry . . . Poor old soul. . . . Pagsbrey’s eyes began to smart, and he stood there patting timidly.

‘We’ll have him out this Sunday certain,’ he told Mrs. Gobarten. ‘He’s cast down and bilious, and his feet have gone back on him completely.’

‘You’ll have to pay for his bus ride here and back,’ Mrs. Gobarten reminded him. ‘And where will you get the money to do that?’

Pagsbrey admitted that he did n’t know. Every cent was so carefully calculated that he felt sometimes that his life was shaped by pennies. Still there was something that could be left or reduced or done without, and after long figuring Pagsbrey discovered he could pay for Harry’s bus by doing without an evening paper over a certain length of time, and suddenly he felt very rich and bounteous again.

IV

It was a sweet chill morning on the Saturday before. The daft old man at the corner who thought he directed traffic had a bunch of red balloons. Pagsbrey noticed forsythia coming into flower, and the sky was a light cold blue. He thought, ‘Old Harry’s still got a long time yet.’ He felt brisk and wealthy and young himself. If there had been violets hawked about, he might have bought Mrs. Gobarten a bunch — well, no — a half bunch, maybe. Sparrows shouted from bushes near the zoo, but Harry’s bus was late and he had to go on without him.

On the steps he waited; it seemed a shame to go in and putter through the halls. The white marble Graces towered above him. They looked fresh and cool with their robes slipped down around the waist and their round arms bare to the wind. It occurred to him after a while that maybe Old Harry had been early, and he hurried up the steps, knowing that Maffit would be waiting there, and had been there all the time, hoping that Pagsbrey would stay longer and be a full ten minutes tardy.

‘You’re late!’ Maffit gloated. ‘You’re late, Pagsbrey! Old Harry come an hour ago. Hi there, Pagsbrey! You can’t go in with your rubbers on! ’

But Pagsbrey paid no attention to his bleating. He hurried on past the warped green horseman and past the Colleoni. He wanted to give Old Harry his invitation quickly, give him something to think about and look forward to all day. But nobody seemed to know where he had gone. Pagsbrey went puffing through all the galleries, even peered behind the bronze Buddha in its niche. His rubbers left wet and shuffling footprints on the floor, and his breath began to come rather oddly. Hawes of the Gothic rooms said he had seen Old Harry go out through the basement door some time ago, but he did n’t know where he had set off to.

Stiff and breathless now, Pagsbrey hurried himself out in the back. ‘Harry!’ he kept calling. ‘Harry! Where’d you go, Harry?’ He thought he was shouting, but the words came out in a mumbled mutter. Out in the back, where the twigs made a forest of yellow switches near the door and garbage cans from the basement tearoom were set out to air, he stopped and peered around toward the edges of the park. His neat old face was wrinkled and ugly in its terror. There was a scum of clouds across the sky, and the breeze had turned cold and chilly.

V

It occurred to Pagsbrey sometimes, in the long slow plod of after weeks, that Old Harry too had kept his rubbers on that morning, and he hoped that Maffit knew. They had found him out near a bunch of pines. His guard cap and the little bottle were thrown a few feet off; his light old body almost lost inside the coat, he lay face down in the needles and his legs were stuck out behind with the mud-speckled rubbers on his feet.

‘The poor old man!’ Mrs. Gobarten said. ‘The poor old man! I would have liked to meet him.’ She sewed up a hole in Pagsbrey’s sock and made it a lump instead.

Pagsbrey was tired and lonely. He lost all heart in describing things or looking at them, now that there was no one left to listen. The new guard was young. He was forty-five, and callous and disturbing. Pagsbrey ate his lunch alone in the basement room, and he wondered sometimes if Harry had been the living part of him, he felt so lost and stone-like now. Once or twice he tried to rouse himself and talk to the visitors that came, but after a while he realized that they came to the place as a sort of sanctuary, came looking for something that was not already in their lives. They thought of this as a great, quiet place where the scratch and scrawl of breath and the twisted desires had been transformed into something permanent and beautiful, and where they could find the small moment of vision held and lengthened into the longer life of stone and wood. Well, that was right, it seemed to Pagsbrey; that was the thing it ought to be — not just a high-ceilinged place full of these shapes and pedestals and forms no longer seen because familiar, not just a place where old men wandered in and out of quiet rooms thinking of supper and their feet. He learned to let them be and tried to make up something else to give the long hours meaning, but could not fill up his loneliness, and the galleries seemed to grow more still. Perhaps he was getting deaf, he thought, but did not care very much any more.

He went after hours sometimes into the rooms where Harry used to be, and looked in the niches and grooves of chairs to see if t he new guard left them dusty, half hoping he would, because Old Harry had been slovenly.

There was a marble statue there — a young man lying on a rock, his arms wound tight with anguish, even his feet taut-curled with pain. He lay strained and heavy as though trying to merge himself with the rock and so endure this suffering. The light flowed down on his back and arms in white hard undulations. The sculptor had named his work ‘Despair,’ and Pagsbrey would stand a long time peering at it and wondering if this was what it was, and if the sculptor was right in making him young that way, believing perhaps that things seemed more huge in youth, more wholly dark and finished. And then he would think of the way Old Harry had looked, bent and shriveled like a burnt fire-ash, and leaning heavily against this marble stand while he slyly eased one foot and then the other.

And at times Pagsbrey would talk to the sculptor, sneering at his work. ‘You did n’t make “Despair,”’ he’d mutter. ‘That’s not despair — that’s not the way it is. You don’t know anything of it even! I could make you a better one than that,’ he would say, and instead of the marble he would see Old Harry lying there on the pedestal, his face turned down on stone, and his skinny old arms and legs flung out on either side.

But after a while the days seemed to reach out beyond Pagsbrey and stretch behind into vague darkness, and somewhere back in the darkness Harry was. At last he stopped seeing Old Harry there on the pedestal, and came, in his long, slow crawling through the quiet, to feel that perhaps after all this marble thing held all that Old Harry had felt and said, and held even more than this — a timeless and measureless thing of which he had only been a part. And it seemed to Pagsbrey that this was somehow an answer or perhaps the beginning of an answer to his own unformed and groping pain. But because he was old and tired, and his thoughts shifted often and faded out when he tried to follow them, he let this go back into the darkness, keeping only the comfort it had been.