Samuel Adams’s From a Bench in Our Square gathers linked stories set in a small New York City square, narrated by an aging pedagogue called the Dominie, who watches the neighborhood’s comedies and griefs from his invariable bench. A recurring cast drifts through the tales—the sidewalk artist Peter Quick Banta, the sculptress known as the Bonnie Lassie, the Little Red Doctor, the tailor MacLachan, and a shifting parade of tenants, lovers, and strays—through courtships, misunderstandings, small disasters, and the occasional quiet death. The book belongs to the early twentieth century, and its Square is a tight little world where everyone knows everyone’s business and where the bench, the fountain, and the lilac tree serve as a stage.
“Son,” said he, “you’re a wonder. Wanta keep them crayons?”
The Sidewalk Artist and His Critic
Peter Quick Banta earns his living in chalk. In summer he models sand at Coney Island; the rest of the year he draws on the flagstones before Thorsen’s Elite Restaurant—ships, prizefighters, the Statue of Liberty—though his heart belongs to symbolic floral pieces with mottoes. One April day a ragged urchin jeers at his lilac and butterfly, spits on the drawing, and runs. Banta catches him and offers the world-old retort of the creative artist: do it better yourself. The boy seizes the crayons, faults the droop of the lilac and the plop of the butterfly, and draws with furious concentration while the two men divert traffic. The result is crude and ill-proportioned, yet the lilac blooms and the butterfly hovers. Banta hands over his crayons; the boy doffs his cap. Julien Tennier—Tenney, as the Square simplifies it—had taken a few lessons at No. 19. He becomes Banta’s partner, shares his garret, and transforms the sand-dabs at Coney Island until joint takings grow into a bank account. Banta asks the Dominie to educate the boy, whom he calls a swell and an aristocrat; the Bonnie Lassie, then new to the Square and making her tiny bronzes, arranges his art training and predicts that in five years the gutter-godling will eclipse her. Five years on, Julien has gone over to the Philistines.
A Patroness Descends on Our Square
Roberta Holland belongs to the idle rich, though she disputes both words. War committee work left her with a dangerous appetite for doing good, and Our Square does not care to be done good to. She arrives through the Bonnie Lassie and sets up a sewing-circle, cultural classes for the printer Coventry and the tailor MacLachan, and lectures on Americanism to Polyglot Elsa, ignoring the old mother and paralytic sister Elsa supports so her brothers could enlist. During a flu epidemic she works efficiently until she crosses the Little Red Doctor, who tells her to take orders or get out. She calls him a bully and a brute; he calls her a brick and promises to send for her again, and the Square softens toward her.
From the Bonnie Lassie’s window she sees Banta and a young man with a lion’s mane of hair making marks on the flagging. The sculptress identifies Julien as the ruin of what might have been a big artist, spoiled by commercial work—drawing glamorous figures for advertisements—because he believes he cannot afford the painting he ought to do. Miss Holland resolves to help him fulfill his destiny. Summoned, Julien is wary of a patron of art. The Bonnie Lassie accuses him of invading with a five-thousand-dollar automobile and keeping a luxurious Gramercy Park apartment while posing as a poor working-man; he keeps the room to work quietly, and because Banta would be heartbroken if he left. Julien abruptly asks whether Miss Holland would let him paint her; the Bonnie Lassie says he cannot, but he insists on a chance at such a model, admitting her face is well-modeled and unusual. She warns him: Dangerous.
Sittings in the Bare Attic
At his attic Miss Holland approves the poverty. He sketches her; she offers ten dollars for a drawing worth far more, and he accepts at the Bonnie Lassie’s stern glance. He asks to try her in oils, and she agrees. The sittings bring laughter; Julien works with passionate intensity, tossing aside remunerative offers, starved for color. A curious relation grows—not friendship, not more—held in check by his punctilious and rigid honor. He has installed Banta below in two rooms, with a bath and a gas stove. Bobbie studies at the Metropolitan Museum to help her protégé form tastes, which nearly chokes the Bonnie Lassie. Julien fears she will catch him at his deception and go away; the Bonnie Lassie notes the portrait will be finished by then. The narrator asks whether she does him as much good as she thinks; she calls the question unjust and Bobbie an adorable little person when you know her.
Béranger in the Studio
The Bonnie Lassie observes that Bobbie is bored and a little spoiled, and that Julien will not spoil her; the affair is making her far less beneficent and bountiful. Her big idea, she says, is that Julien is really painting—and the idea is hers. The narrator warns that the experience may cost Julien dear once Bobbie leaves; she calls him an oracular sphinx. Bobbie shows no signs of leaving. A gust of wind displaces a hanging above the studio door and reveals Béranger’s line: Dans un grenier qu’on est bien à vingt ans! Julien wrote it seven years ago and meant it; he is French-born. Bobbie translates it freely and says she would not have thought life had been so good to him; he answers that it never was so good as now. Asked where he was educated, he says here and there and everywhere—a patchwork. She calls him puzzling, which the Bonnie Lassie takes as deep calling to deep. Bobbie asks who he is; Cecily says Nobody, then a brand snatched from the potboiling, and advises against inviting him to dinner—he might swallow his knife. Bobbie protests his instinctive good manners; Cecily directs her to the Dominie, who says Julien crawled out of a gutter with the manners of a preux chevalier. Bobbie, dreamy and unguarded, says she does not know what she will do with him. Cecily says Umph! and goes on sculpting.
The Patroness Discovers the Truth
As Julien prophesied, his patroness surprises him in his true estate. Stepping from his touring-car to fetch golf-clubs from his Gramercy Park hallway, he meets Bobbie emerging from the house next door.
The Van Standoff and an Unlikely Alliance
The “To Let” sign comes down at the Mordaunt Estate, and the young man who has been “deserted and denounced” lies in his van with his head on a tantalus and his feet on Thackeray, trying to think and instead dreaming of deep-gray eyes and a fugitive smile. The narrative doubles back to explain how the two met: two miles northwest of Our Square, two moving-vans sit nose to nose for five minutes while their drivers trade insults. A girlish but decided voice from the larger van calls “Don’t give an inch”; a decisive barytone from the other answers with what sounds like “Give an ell.” The drivers descend to the sidewalk and to direct action, and the authorities separate and lead them away. The occupants emerge. The smaller van’s occupant is struck “electric, not to say paralytic,” murmuring “Oh, glory!” The girl asks him to move in the tone one uses toward an obnoxious beetle; he says he has done nothing else for three days and asks where to move, promising to bless her as a benefactress of the homeless. She says “Anywhere out of my way,” though her sensitive mouth struggles to keep severity. He declares himself “eliminated, deleted, expunged,” explaining he told his idiot chauffeur to hold ground without knowing who she was. She asks if he knows who she is now; he says he doesn’t have to, offering her the street and adjoining avenues, then asks her name. She says introductions aren’t necessary. He murmurs a mock title—”They Met but to Part; Laura Jean Libbey; twenty-fourth large edition”—and presents himself as Martin Dyke, vagrant but harmless.
He infers she means to drive herself; she admits dismay, since she can’t drive this kind of car. He offers to take her where she wants to go; she asks what becomes of his van and confesses she has no idea where to go. He asks if she too is a wandering home-seeker; his “Miss” surprises her. She admits it. He orates about the hundred thousand helpless babes in the wood lost on October 1st, awaiting robins to bury them under brown leaves, preferring a last dirge sung by a quail on toast or Welsh rabbit, and asks what time she breakfasted (his ruined egg at six-fifteen). She laughs helplessly at his personal questions. He explains he aims to impress her with his individuality so she’ll “grapple me to your soul with hooks of steel,” attributing the phrase variously to Hamlet or Harold Bell Wright, and mentions his library, automatic piano, and patent ice-box. A policeman seems to motion them on. She says she can’t move; he suggests she work his van—it’s simple. She examines it: “almost like my own car.” He says he’ll lead and she’ll follow; she protests she doesn’t want his van. He says they’ll go to jail unless they move now. Overborne by his insistence and the officer’s scowl, she takes the wheel; after involved but triumphant maneuverings the exchanged vans head eastward to Fourth Avenue and downtown.
Luncheon, a Tossed Coin, and a Name
In a side street her leader stops and she follows. Dyke points to a quaint Gothic doorway dispensing the succulent pig’s foot and the innocuous near-but-not-very-beer, and offers to help her down. She says dolefully she wants to go home; he notes she has none. She says she must find one immediately; he says she’ll need help. She wishes he wouldn’t call her “Miss”; he switches to “Lady,” citing Stevenson or R. H. Macy, and proposes luncheon while discussing the housing problem. She objects to “Lady”; he tries “Sister,” then “Duchess,” quoting Tennyson or Burleson, and invokes the Gents’ Handbook of Classy Behavior, chapter “From Introduction’s Uncertainties to Friendship’s Fascinations.” She says they haven’t been introduced; he says they have, by Old Man Chance. She makes him promise not to call her those names during luncheon, after which she may tell her name—”It depends.” He selects a suitable repast from an alien menu; they pool real-estate impressions: no available spot on the West Side or mid-town; she explored Park Avenue and its purlieus without success; only the outer darkness to the southward remains. On her insistence they agree to gamble by tossed coin: “The winner has the choice.” Throughout luncheon she approves his manner as unexceptionable; once at the tête-à-tête, the personal and insistent note leaves his talk though gayety remains. When he pays the bill and she asks her share, he replies “Two-ten” promptly and without protest; she gives her name, Anne Leffingwell; he thanks her gravely, twinkling that “that was rudimentary about the check.” On the sidewalk he stops before her van, studying the painted group in tea-store art style, exclaiming “Suffering Raphael!” and asking what the lady in the pink shroud says to the bearded patriarch in the nightie. She identifies the title: “Swedish Wedding Feast.” He raises an imaginary glass: “prosit omen!” She begins indignantly about taking advantage; he interposes that she isn’t supposed to understand Latin, grows flustered and at a loss—and her heart warms to his.
The Ghost Around the Corner
She does not answer verbally; she points across the road to worn green grass in the park, where a Keep-Off-the-Grass sign faces him. Dyke concludes the sign was placed for his special benefit; she murmurs “Safety first.” Dyke says he never really believed it except when she surprised him, which is why he went ahead. She confirms he went ahead and asks what speed laws mean to him. Dyke admits he has not played by the rules, claiming one must make his own rules when Fate is against him, and calls Fate a cheap thimble-rigger; she calls Fate “the ghost around the corner.”
Mayme’s Challenge and David’s Enlistment
Mayme’s contempt for the Berthelin family lands hardest on David, whom she calls “yellow.” Stung, he protests that she made him this way, but she scorns him as a “Quartermaster’s Department” type practicing “Safety first,” contrasting him with the Emporium’s volunteers who rush toward the fighting. David rises with an ugly expression and demands to be let out. His mother shrieks that he shan’t go; he answers “I will,” then tells her where she can go. Mayme, softening, urges him to think it over, warning that being a private is “no pink-silk picnic.” Mrs. Berthelin cries she would rather see a son dead than a common soldier. The Bonnie Lassie, very white, orders her from the house, saying she is fortunate the hostess cannot betray a guest. David vows to show Mayme, asking her to wait until he returns—if he ever does. The Little Red Doctor predicts the hero stuff will ooze out by tomorrow; David challenges him to show him where to enlist, and the Doctor, glancing bitterly at his twisted foot, agrees to lead the way. Mrs. Berthelin scandalizes Our Square with hysterics. The Doctor returns alone: “He’s done it,” his face tragically envious. David shook hands like a man, he reports, though the old hell-cat of a mother won’t have much chance since he leaves tomorrow. Mayme asks strainedly whether there was a message; the Doctor, censoring ruthlessly, answers only “good-bye and good luck.” The Bonnie Lassie embraces her, saying he isn’t worth it; Mayme agrees but says it won’t be easy: “He was so pretty.”
The Secret Arrangement
Summer brings the Bonnie Lassie to the Dominie with a purposeful smile, calling him “a dear old thing.” She wants money for a secret plan: the Little Red Doctor has found a place in New Mexico, and in the fall Mayme goes on to the Coast; a year should restore her strength, and the hundred dollars a month the Dominie allows, plus traveling expenses, will suffice. The Dominie objects that he’ll look foolish when Mayme thanks him; the Bonnie Lassie says she is pledged to pretend ignorance. The money, she hints, comes from “the Weeping Scion of Wealth and Position”—young Stacey—who begged to do it and asked that Mayme never know. The Dominie accepts being “the goat.” Mayme’s farewell is hard: she tries to whisper something, then cries and kisses him. After she leaves, Our Square is dimmer. Her letters are courageous and humorous, determined to get well and return; she reads the books the Dominie listed and is tutored by a school-teacher with blue goggles and a weak heart. The Scion writes back in better orthography but less spirit. The Doctor reports every man in David’s company has licked him, and he’d desert but for fearing what Mayme would think. A letter from a Southern camp says he never wanted anything before without having it handed to him; perhaps it is good for him, but it comes hard; he will keep the promise and show he isn’t yellow. Encouraging news follows: in cold weather Mayme moves to Southern California, to the edge of a semi-insane moving-picture colony. Her “funny little monkey mug” is in the movies at five per, steady work; the director promises a real chance. She has cut the name “Mayme” because every frizzled extra calls herself Mayme or Daisye or Tootsye, keeps up her lessons, has stopped coughing, and loves them all. She signs MARY MCCARTNEY, planning to become Marie Courtenay, and asks after her soldier boy. Meanwhile the Scion is shifted to a wet, muddy section of France and learns the prime lesson of war; the Doctor announces he’s been made corporal, having kept his head and nerve during an epidemic on a flu ship. Later comes his promotion to sergeantcy—captains come by pull, majors by luck, colonels by desk-work, generals by martial figure, but a sergeant must show the stuff.
MacLachan’s Protest and Barbran’s Arrival
MacLachan the tailor visits the Dominie to protest the plan to write one of his “silly histories” about Barbran, calling it a waste of time and saying a man of the Dominie’s age should be dissuading “the pair.” The Dominie stops him with his cane crook fixed on MacLachan’s ankle and interrogates him: was the Dominie an original accomplice? Was he arrested, in a cellar, with his nose painted green? MacLachan mumbles about undue influence and pleads that “there was others.” The narrator explains that men of standing—Cyrus the Gaunt, MacLachan, Leon Coventry, the Little Red Doctor, and Boggs—painted their noses green and frequented dubious cellars, and the explanation is Barbran. She came from Washington Square, which Our Square suspects of playing at life. At the house of a woman architect, the Bonnie Lassie met Barbran; they went for coffee to a burrow decorated with Lewis Carroll sentiments, and Barbran hinted she might improve on the “Mole’s Hole” idea for fun, not money. The Bonnie Lassie set about catching her; Barbran capitulated, came to Our Square, and rented a room from Boggs above Madame Tallafferr’s apartments. She stopped at the Dominie’s bench; he guessed the Bonnie Lassie sent her. She is the only daughter of a Western millionaire ranch-owner, and she has already rented the basement of Number 26 to start a coffee cellar called “The Coffee Pot.” The Dominie advises against the name via the parable of the tea-shop “The Teacup” versus Tough Bill Manigan’s saloon sign “The Hiccup.” She agrees, reveals her name is Barbara Ann Waterbury but asks to be called “Barbran,” and sketches plans to lure seekers of Bohemia from Harlem, Jersey City, New Haven, and Cohoes, pending her “
The Tall Stranger and the Bonnie Lassie’s Errand
The Bonnie Lassie comes back to the bench with news: a very tall man has stopped Plooie on the street, and Plooie has dropped his kit and is trying to salute. She wonders whether the stranger is a Belgian officer and whether Plooie is being arrested for evading service; the Dominie says it would serve him right. She reports the big man leading Plooie away “all wilted down,” and when the Dominie asks about an official-looking automobile, she sees only a strange car on the Avenue—the men are going into Schepstein’s basement instead. The Dominie, feeling her fidget, asks why she does not take her usual constitutional opposite Schepstein’s; she denies it is her usual constitutional. He quotes “curiosity killed a cat,” she objects that he garbles it, and he amends it to “suppressed curiosity killed a cat.” Rather than have the bench tremble from her clinging to it, he sends her to peek, and she calls him a despicable old man and leaves, promising to return in a minute while he pleads, “Pity the blind.”
She returns without mirth. It is dark inside, but the big man sits on a pile of ribs talking to Plooie, and Annie Oombrella’s face, swollen with crying, shows for a minute in the window. They argue pro and con about what the event may be and how to meet it, so intent that they do not notice a stranger until he is within a few paces. The Dominie perceives only a very tall, straight man in a loose cape. The Bonnie Lassie gasps, rises, and her trembling hand falls on his shoulder; he wonders where the two met, since she is the usually self-controlled wife of Cyrus Staten.
The Comte de Tournon’s Story
The man asks in a deep, curiously melancholy voice whether Madame remembers him: the Comte de Tournon, met at Trouville several years since. She stammers agreement. The Dominie knows she has never been at Trouville, which does not assuage his suspicions. The Count asks whether they are friends of his countryman, Emile Garin. The Dominie says acquaintances would be more accurate. The Count says Garin told him the Dominie befriended him in great need and Madame always, so he has come to thank them. Asked if he is interested in Plooie, he repeats the name doubtfully, laughs gently, and says he is profoundly interested: he has one of Plooie’s finest umbrellas, presented by Plooie’s good wife, and Plooie spoke of a grande dame of great authority; the Dominie feels his eyes twinkling despite the sad voice. The Bonnie Lassie supplies “Madame Tallafferr,” away on a visit. The Count wishes he had met “that queller of mobs,” who ought to be knighted; the Dominie says knighthood would add nothing, she being a Pinckney and a Pemberton besides a Tallafferr, “with two s’s, two t’s, and two r’s.” The Count says he does not comprehend American orders of merit but would have been proud to meet her; the Bonnie Lassie asks to tell her, and he says by all means, when he is gone.
He notes there were others here not so friendly to little Garin. The Bonnie Lassie agrees; the Dominie points out a strong suspicion that Garin is not a deserving case. The Count replies that is only because Garin does not explain himself well; the Dominie corrects that he does not explain himself at all, nor does his wife. The Count says that will clarify itself in time and offers a little story to be passed on to those not his friends, asking Madame to be seated. She resumes her place; standing before them, the big man speaks, and the Dominie wishes he had taken it down verbatim, so gracious, simple, and expressive of a great and generous personality it was.
Emile Garin was a son of Belgium, poor, his people “little folk of nothing-at-all,” and dead. He came to America to make his living. When the enemies invaded Belgium and the call went out to all sons of Belgium, Garin was ashamed because he knew he was physically unfit for military service, but he tried everywhere; mornings they had to sweep him away from the Consul-General’s doorsteps. The Dominie says, “God forgive us!”; the narrator answers, “Amen.” Everywhere rejected as unfit, he became morbid and hid himself away—which, the Bonnie Lassie confirms, is why they left Our Square so mysteriously. He hung about the docks, crawled into a vessel’s hold as a stowaway, starved, was kicked, was arrested—nothing mattered except reaching Belgium. He did reach it at the darkest hour, when Belgium needed every man, but could not be a soldier because he was unable to march: he had weak legs. The Bonnie Lassie murmurs triumphantly that she told the Dominie there was something; he says “Hush!”
The Count says he is glad Garin had one true defender. Though unable to fight in the ranks, there was use for him; he was made driver of a charette—a dump-cart, the Bonnie Lassie supplies—perhaps not evidently glorious unless one makes it so, but the best the little Garin could do. He was faithful and hard-working; they helped build roads near the front, Garin and his big cart. The Bonnie Lassie whispers maliciously, “Not precisely safety-first”; the Dominie says she is interrupting. One day Garin drove a load of mud through a village street, with a hospital on either side. Down the middle walked an idiot sergeant.
Dr. Smith and the Man Under Sentence
The narrator, a physician called Chris, recounts that Ned Worth was both his friend and patient. He went home with Ned as a friend, not as a physician, after pronouncing sentence on him, not wanting him to be alone that first night; yet Ned seemed steadier than the narrator. Ned says there is no danger of his being “
The Bench as Confessional
The Dominie’s bench organizes the book, and it is worth pausing on what it does. He is a tired old pedagogue who has discovered that sitting still, looking venerable and indigenous, draws people to him and makes them talk. Strangers sit down beside him and unburden themselves; lovers quarrel within earshot; the lonely and the guilty find their way to him. He insists he is no moralist—old men cannot afford harsh judgments, he says, being too near their own time—yet he is constantly asked to judge, to warn, to intervene, to write things down. The bench turns him into a kind of secular confessor, and the Square into a parish. What he hears he keeps, mostly, and what he keeps he turns into these stories.
The Bonnie Lassie and the Government of Kindness
If the Dominie is the Square’s memory, Cecily Willard—the Bonnie Lassie, later Mrs. Cyrus Staten—is its government. Adams gives her high, middle, and low justice over Our Square by divine right of loveliness and kindliness, and the stories bear this out. She arranges educations, brokers marriages, scolds the proud, shelters the fallen, and lies cheerfully when a lie will do more good than the truth. Her tiny bronzes, fired by her love and genius, stand guard in her windows; she is prophetess as well as poet, finishing a figure of Minnie Munn before Minnie leaves and predicting exactly what will become of her. She is also the book’s most reliable reader of character: she sees through Julien Tenney’s pose, diagnoses Roberta Holland’s dangerous appetite for doing good, and tells Bobbie flatly to go back and ask the man to marry her. Adams’s comedy works best when her bluntness collides with someone’s self-regard.
The Little Red Doctor and the Long Tilt
The Little Red Doctor gives the collection its recurring argument with death. Twisted of foot, gruff, and professionally unsentimental, he fights his battles in the open—demanding that a volunteer nurse take orders or get out, threatening to break every bone in a cad’s body, certifying heart disease while violently denying he believes it. His friendship with Mayme McCartney is the book’s clearest study of that fight: he calls her an infant and a monkey-faced child, warns her, scolds her, and cannot save her. When he returns from seeing David Berthelin enlist, his face is tragically envious; the man who cannot go himself must send others. Adams never lets the doctor win outright, and never lets him stop.
Pretenders and the Price of Things
A thread runs through nearly every story about people who pretend to be poorer or richer than they are, and about what the pretense costs. Julien Tenney keeps a luxurious apartment while posing as a workingman and waits tables in secret to afford his paints; Barbran invents a millionaire father as a romantic asset and confesses she is a school-teacher’s daughter with debts; Roberta Holland must learn that her beneficence is a kind of vanity. The Square is hard on these deceptions but not cruel—it forgives Julien, marries Barbran to her painter, and grows lenient toward Miss Holland. What it will not forgive is meanness: the landlord who curses a dead man’s clock, the mother who would rather see her son dead than a common soldier, the sexton who makes himself censor of the dead. Adams’s moral arithmetic is consistent—pride and cruelty are the real sins, and kindness, however clumsy, covers a multitude.
What the Square Leaves Behind
The book closes on loss and its memorials. Stepfather Time dies the night after his clocks stop, and the neighborhood builds a miniature clock tower with the proceeds of his collection—the Tower of the Two Faithful Hearts, designed by the Bonnie Lassie, whose one invincible peculiarity is that it never keeps time. Minnie Munn comes home to die and to be buried in God’s Acre beside her mother, and the fight over who may sleep in that crowded ground becomes a small parable of belonging. The Square binds the heartstrings of those who once lived there, the Dominie observes: they find it unendurable in life and yearn back in the hour of death. That is the book’s quiet claim—that a place can hold people the way people hold each other, and that a bench, a fountain, and a lilac tree are enough to make a world.
