By Wolcott LeCléar Beard
BECAUSE I had been a captain-doctor in France, where inconsiderate Teutons injected some mustard-gas and a few bits of H.E. shell into my system, my uncle and only relative purchased for me the practice of old Doctor Jenkins, who was anxious to retire. These facts are here given because they serve to explain me and my domiciliary advent in Greenwich Village. My advent is of importance, so far as this story is concerned, only because it placed me in a position to narrate said story.
Having thus attended to the above matters, I can begin fairly at the moment when I alighted at the Christopher Street Station from a Ninth Avenue train, dressed in brand-new civilian clothes. Setting my suitcase down on the platform, and assuming the attitude best calculated to ease the leg with a limp in it, I drew two keys from my pocket and proceeded to examine the tags that were fastened to them. They bore the inscriptions "Front Door" and "Back Door," respectively, with an address under each. The latter address was on Christopher Street.
"‘Back Door' has the jump on 'Front Door' by nearly five blocks," said I to myself. "It mayn't be a very dignified manner in which to enter my new domain, but this gimpy leg of mine isn't strong on dignity, just now. 'Back Door' wins!"
So I stumped eastward, and soon found the door I sought. It was set in a brick wall and led, as nearly as I could make out, into the back room of a corner saloon. Upon entering, however, I discovered my mistake.
I found myself in a narrow, flagged alley which evidently, when New York still lay south of Canal Street, and Greenwich Village really was a village, had led from a back lane through a garden. To one side grew an ailanthus-tree, with the sunshine of late spring filtering greenly through its leaves. A stone arch, within which the original garden-gate must have swung, still was standing, just inside the doorway that had admitted me. On the flat top of this arch stood a large flower pot with a dead geranium in it.
I am not likely soon to forget that flower-pot. It, the arch, the flagged alley, and the tree together formed, as it seemed to me, a quaintly picturesque fragment of old New York. I had paused, half turning, fully to take it in, and my eyes happened for the instant to be resting on the flower-pot in question.
At that instant there came a sound as though all the clocks in New York had tripped their winding pawls—or whatever the proper technical name of those things may be—had tripped their pawls and allowed their mainsprings to run unchecked. While this was still in progress there came a sort of "whish!" short but emphatic, followed by a report that might have been made by a rather heavy shotgun.
Coincidently with the report, that flower-pot behaved like a bursting shell. It started the dead geranium in business as a rocket, in which capacity it vanished into space. Its earth and shards were distributed impartially, far and wide. One of the latter struck me, and promptly I "took the count." Leaning against the alley wall, I slid downward until I sat on the flagged pavement and for a little the world, so far as I was aware, ceased to exist.
How long I sat there I don't know, but it could not have been very long. My bad leg regulated that matter, for it had fallen in a constrained position, and its emphatic protests brought me to myself. Slowly I climbed to my feet, feeling as though I had been kicked by a mule. The shard fortunately had hit me with its flat side, so the skin of my face was unbroken, but my eye was swelling so that already it was nearly closed, and I knew that soon it must look as though it had been operated upon by the late John L. Sullivan in his palmy days.
In this plight, covered with dust and dirt, limping worse than ever, I slunk in through the back door of the house for which I was bound. Mounting the basement stairs, one step at a time, I sank, an exhausted heap, into a chair of the office that was henceforward to be mine. It couldn't be called a really auspicious entrance upon the scene of my future labors.
Naturally I desired to rest a little, to brush myself off and bathe my eye before exploring my new domain. These moderate though heartfelt wishes were, however, denied me. I heard, as I thought, a rapping, coming from some point I could not locate. Then there came a voice—a girl's voice.
"Doctor!" it cried. "Doctor—oh, doctor!"