LITTLE ARCADY VIEWS A PARADE
LITTLE ARCADY VIEWS A PARADE
And so began the time of Miss Caroline among us,—one effect the more of Fate's mad trickery. It was my privilege to be more intimately aware of her concerns than was the town at large. And even to me in those days she carried off the difficulties of her lot with a manner so plausible that it clenched my admiration if it did not win my belief. I knew that she daily bore a burden of ruin and faced a future of perilous uncertainty. I knew that she must have journeyed into our strange land with a real terror, nerved to that course only by a resolve to be no longer a burden upon her impoverished kinsman. Surely it had been like dying a death for her to leave the land of her own people, devastated though it was and vacant of those who had made the world easy for her.
And I was not a little puzzled by the tie that bound her to her one remaining stay. Both she and Clem, I saw, considered her coming to him to be a thing so natural that it should excite no wonder, a thing familiar in the thought and as little to be puzzled about as their own breathing. I saw that her perplexities lay not at all in this black fellow's unthinking adherence to his life of service, but rather in the circumstance of her spirit-grieving exile and in the necessary doubts of her chattel's competence for the feat he had undertaken.
I despaired very soon of ever comprehending the intricate strands of their relationship. When I understood, as I was not long in doing, that each was in certain ways genuinely afraid of the other, I knew that the problem must always be far beyond my own little powers.
As to Little Arcady at large, some aspects of this complication were simpler than they appeared to me; others were more obscure. Of the tragedy of Miss Caroline's mere coming to us they could suspect nothing, save it might be the humiliation her old-fashioned furniture must put upon her in a prosperous town where so much of the furniture was elegant to the point of extravagance.
In the much-discussed matter of mistress and slave, the town agreed simply that Clem was stupid and had been deluded by Miss Caroline into believing that a certain proclamation had stopped short of her personal property. It was believed that she had terrorized him by threatening to put bloodhounds on his trail if he ever tried to run off—for the town knew its "Uncle Tom's Cabin" as well as it knew "Gaskell's Compendium." It was thought that if Clem proved to be disobedient or rebellious, his mistress would try to hire "Big Joe" Kestril or some equally strong person to whip him with a "black-snake." Also it was said that she had sold his wife away from him, and might try to sell Clem himself if ever she got "hard up," though it was felt that she would be wise not to go too far in that matter.
For the rest, Little Arcady rather rejoiced in the novelty of Miss Caroline's establishment. There was a flavor of much-needed romance in this survival at our very doors of an ante-bellum unrighteousness. The town cherished a hope that Clem would try to run off some time, or that Miss Caroline would have his back cut to ribbons, or try to sell or mortgage him or something, thus creating entertainment of an agreeable and exciting character.
If the town could have overheard Clem scolding the lady with frank irritation in his voice,—as I chanced to do once or twice,—had it beheld his scowl as he raged, "Miss Cahline, yo' sho'ly gittin' old 'nuff to know betteh'nthat. I suttinly do wish yo' Paw was alive an' yeh'bouts. Ah git him afteh yo' maghty quick. Now yo' jes' remembeh Ah ain't go'n' a'haveno sech doin's!"—if it could have noted the quailing consternation of the mistress at these moments, it might have been puzzled; but of such phenomena it never knew. It was aware only that Miss Caroline treated Clem with a despotic severity, issuing commands to him as from a throne of power and in tones of acrid authority that were the envy of all housekeepers among us who kept "hired girls."
Even Mrs. Potts, long before the arrival of Miss Caroline, had despaired of teaching Clem to make something of himself. He had refused to subscribe for a "Compendium," and her cordial assurance that he was, by the law of the land, both a man and a brother, did not even mildly elate him. Mrs. Potts was soon in a like despair regarding Miss Caroline, whom she regarded as too frivolous ever to make anything of herself. These two ladies, indeed, were widely apart. Perhaps I can intimate the extent of their unlikeness by revealing that Mrs. Potts, early in our acquaintance, had observed of me that I was not serious enough; whereas Miss Caroline was presently averring to my face that I was entirely too serious. These judgments of myself seemed to contrast the ladies informingly.
The impression that Miss Caroline was frivolous—or even worse—became current the day after her arrival in Little Arcady. Arrayed in a lavender silk dress of many flounces, with bonnet beribboned gayly beyond her years, shod in low walking shoes of heel iniquitously high, a toe minute and shining and an instep ornate to an unholy degree, bearing a slender gold-tipped staff of polished ebony to assist theatrically in her progress, and bestowing placid, patronizing looks to right and left, she had flounced into Main Street, followed ceremoniously by her black chattel, himself set up with a palpable and shameless pride in his degradation, saluting stiffly and with an artificial grandeur those whom he would otherwise have greeted with the unstudied ease of long association.
This procession regaled both Main and Washington streets, where Miss Caroline visited our shops to make inconsiderable purchases and many friends. It was a function the pleasant data whereof I was not long in collecting.
Her first conquest was Chester Pierce, our excellent hardware merchant, whom she commissioned to make a needed repair to her range. It was a simple business matter, and Chester Pierce is a simple business person of plain manners. But as he slouched comfortably upon his counter and listened to Miss Caroline's condescending exposition of her needs, he became sensible of a strange influence stealing upon him. By degrees he brought himself erect and slowly, dazedly performed an act which had never before been perpetrated within his establishment. It was not that he deliberated, nor that his reason dictated it; but instinctively, almost from a purely reflex muscular action, he removed his hat while Miss Caroline talked, feeling himself thrill with a foreign and most suave deference. It was customary in our town to raise your hat to a lady on the street; but for a merchant, and a solid citizen at that, to do this thing in his own establishment, was a thing unheard of—and a thing of pretentious and sickening foppery when itwasheard of, for that matter, though this need not now concern us.
"And be sure to tell my servant to give you a glass of wine when your work is done," concluded Miss Caroline, as she turned to rustle silkily out. Whereat Chester Pierce, charter member and President of our Sons of Temperance, a man primed with all statistics of the woe resulting traditionally from that first careless glass, murmured words unintelligible but of gratified import, and bowed low after the retreating vision. A moment later he was staring with mystified absorption at the hat in his hands, quite as if the hat were a stranger's—and then he brushed it around and around with the cuff of his coat sleeve as if the stranger had not been careful enough of it.
Thence paraded Miss Caroline to the City Drug Store, to be bowed well out to the sidewalk by young Arthur Updyke when her errand within had been done. But Arthur had attended a college of pharmacy far away from Slocum County, and it was not unnatural that he should exhibit an alien grace in times of emergency.
With Westley Keyts again, to whose shop Miss Caroline next progressed, it was as with Chester Pierce, a phenomenon of instinctive muscular reaction,—that of his hat coming off as he greeted the stately little lady at his threshold and apologized for the sawdust on his floor which was compelling her to raise a froth of skirts above the tops of those sinful-looking shoes. I suspect that Miss Caroline was rather taken with Westley. She called him "my good man," which made him feel that he had been distinguished uncommonly, and she chatted with him at some length, asking cordially about cuts of meat and his family, two matters in which Westley was much absorbed. He declared later that she was "a grand little woman."
There followed pilgrimages that June morning to the First National Bank and to several of our lesser establishments; pilgrimages rarely diverting to Little Arcady and which invariably provoked bows under strangely lifted hats.
But there were Little Arcadians of Miss Caroline's own sex to whom she might not so swiftly fetch confusion. Aunt Delia McCormick devoted a chance view of the newcomer to discovering that the gown of lavender satin had been turned and made over, none too expertly, from one originally built some years before the war. Later she found what our ladies agreed was its primal design, after much turning of the leaves of ancient Godey's magazines.
Mrs. Judge Robinson, from one sidelong glance, brought off detailed intelligence of the bonnet's checkered past.
The elder Miss Eubanks decried the mannishness of cane-bearing; and Mrs. Westley Keyts, entering the shop as Miss Caroline was bowed out, declared that her silk stockings were of a hue hardly respectable, and that she wore shoes "twice too small for her."
The eyes of the suddenly urbane Westley glistened when he overheard this, but he fell to dissecting a beef without further sign.
For better or worse, Miss Caroline and Little Arcady had exchanged impressions of each other.
I met her by chance that morning and was charmed by her flattering implication of reliance upon myself. She made me feel that our understanding was secret and our attachment romantic. To complete her round of our commercial centre I escorted her to theArgusoffice. Her greeting of Solon Denney was a thing to behold with unalloyed delight. They seemed to understand each other at once. Two minutes after Solon had looked up in some astonishment from his dusty, over-piled desk, they were arrayed as North and South in a combat of blithest raillery.
Miss Caroline sat in Solon's battered chair with the missing castor, surveyed his exchange-laden desk with a humorous eye, and seized the lastArgus, skimming its local columns with a lively interest and professing to be enthralled by its word-magic. She read stray items that commended themselves to her critical judgment, such as, "A wind blew last week that you could lean up against like the side of the house;" or "Westley Keyts has a bran-new 'No Admittance!' sign over the door of his slaughter-house. We don't see why. He could put up a 'Come one, come all!' sign and still not getusinto the place. They're messy."
Further she read, "Some fiend with sub-human instincts ravaged our secret hoard of eating-apples while we were out meeting the farmers last Saturday afternoon. We wish they had been of no value to any one except the owner." And then, in her sprightliest manner, and with every sign of enjoyment, she went on to an item during the reading of which I think we both flushed a little, Solon and I:—
"The United StatesIs
"The United StatesIs
"Some grammar sharp down East says you must say 'The United States are.' But we guess not. Opinions to that effect prevailed widely to the south of us some years ago, but the contrary was proved, we believe. The United Statesis, brother, ever since Appomattox, and even the grammar book should testify to its is-ness—to its everlasting and indivisible oneness."
She carried it off so finely that I knew Miss Caroline had recovered from the fatigues of her journey.
"I shall write you an item myself," she exclaimed, and seizing a stubby pencil, she wrote rapidly:—
"A battered and ungrammatical old woman from the valley of Virginia has settled in our midst. She will always believe that the United States are, but she is harmless and otherwise sane."
"Have I caught the style?—have I used 'in our midst' correctly?" she asked Solon. And he protested that her style was faultless but that her matter was grossly misleading.
From this she was presently assuring him, in all pleasantness, that the seed of Cain, descended through Ham, would, by reason of the curse of God, be a "servant of servants" unto the end; while Solon was assuring her, with equal good nature, that this scriptural law had been repealed by President Lincoln.
Her retort, "I dare say your Mr. Lincoln wascapableof wishing to repeal the Bible," was her nearest approach to asperity.
"A battered old woman!" said Solon to me later. "She looks more like a candy saint, if they make such things,—one that a child has been careless with." We agreed that she was an addition to Little Arcady.
The editor of theArgussighed at this point, and I thought he might be wishing that all feminine newcomers could be like the latest. For Mrs. Aurelia Potts, whose leisure Heaven had increased, was now redoubling her efforts to make theArgusa well of English undefiled—undefiled by what she called "journalisms." Solon must not, he confided to me, say "enthuse" nor "we opine" nor "disremember." He might not say that the pastor "was given" a donation party when he really meant that the party was given,—not that the pastor was given. Further, he must be cautious in the uses of "who" and "whom," and try to break himself of the "a good time was enjoyed by all present" habit.
"And she always says 'diddy-you' instead of 'dij-you,'" broke in my namesake, who, loitering near us, had overheard the name of Mrs. Potts.
"That willdo, Calvin!" said his father, shortly. It seemed to me that the still young life of Solon was fast being blighted.
THE SPECTRE OF SCANDAL IS RAISED
THE SPECTRE OF SCANDAL IS RAISED
A graver charge than frivolity was soon to be brought against the widow of the late Colonel Jere Lansdale. Not with her antiquated gown, her assisting staff, the gay bonnet, nor yet with the showy small slippers and silken hose tinted unseasonably to her years did scandal engage itself; but rather with the circumstance that she drank.
To "drink" meant in Little Arcady to get drunk, as "Big Joe" Kestril did every pay-day. Clarence Stull, polishing a stove in the rear of Pierce's hardware store, was swift to divulge that Mrs. Lansdale had "asked Chet Pierce to have a glass of wine,—and him a-bowin' and a-scrapin' like you'd think he was goin' to fly off the handle!"
It was enough for the town. The unfortunate woman had not yet reeled through its streets, but Little Arcady would give her time, and it knew there could be but one result. That sort of thing might be done in tales of vicious high life to point a moral, but in the real world it could not compatibly exist with good conduct. Even Aunt Delia McCormick, good Methodist as she was, who "put up" a little elderberry wine each year for communion purposes, was thought by more than one to strain near to the breaking point the third branch of that concise behest to "Touch not, taste not, handle not!"
The ladies were at once dismayed about Miss Caroline, from Aunt Delia herself, to Marcella Eubanks, who kept conspicuous upon her dressing-table a bedizened motto of the Daughters of Rebecca,—"The lips that touch wine shall never touch mine." It is true that this legend appeared to Marcella to be a bit licentious in its implications as to lipsnottouched by wine. It had, indeed, first been hung in the parlor; but one Creston Fancett, in the course of an evening call upon Miss Eubanks, had read the thing aloud, twice over, and then observed with a sinister significance that wine had never touched his own lips. Whereupon, in a coarsely conceived spirit of humor, he proceeded to act as if he had forgotten that he was a gentleman.
Hence the card's seclusion in Marcella's boudoir. Hence, likewise, Marcella's subsequent preference, in her temperance propaganda, for straightforward means which no gentleman could affect to misunderstand. She relied chiefly thereafter upon some highly colored charts depicting the interior of the human stomach in varying stages of alcoholic degeneration. According to these, "a single glass of wine or a measure of ale," taken daily for a year, suffices to produce some startling effects in color; while the result of "unrestrained indulgence for five years" is spectacular in the extreme.
Besides these disconcerting color effects Marcella enacted a brief but pithy drama in which she touched a lighted match to a tablespoonful of alcohol, to show the true nature of the stuff and to symbolize the fate of its votaries.
With charts and with blazing spirit, with tracts and with figures to prove that we spend "more for the staff of death than for the staff of life," Marcella was prepared to move upon the unsuspicious Miss Caroline. Nor was she alone in such readiness for a good work. The ladies all felt that their profligate sister should be brought to sign the pledge.
And they called upon Miss Caroline with precisely this end in view—called singly, and by twos and threes. But for some reason they seemed always to find obstacles in the way of bringing forward this most vital topic. If they had only discovered Miss Caroline in her cups, or if her shaded rooms had been littered with empty rum bottles and pervaded by the fumes of strong drink, or if she had audaciously offered them wine, doubtless the thing would have been easy. But none of these helpful phenomena could be observed, and Miss Caroline had a way of leading the talk which would have made any reference to her unfortunate habits seem ungraceful. It would be far too much to say that she charmed them, but all of her callers were interested, many of them were entertained, and a few became her warm defenders. Aunt Delia McCormick surprised every one by aligning herself with this latter minority. She declared, after her first call, that Miss Caroline was "a dear"; and after the second call, that she was "a poor dear," and she forthwith became of service to the newcomer in a thousand ways known only to the masonry of housekeeping.
And since none of the ladies, for one reason or another, had found a way to say those things that Mrs. Lansdale sorely needed to hear, it was agreed among them that the minister must say them.
"The minister" in Little Arcady meant him of the Methodist church, the two other clergymen being so young and unimportant as to need identification by name.
Of the official and inspired visit of this good man to Miss Caroline, the version that reached the public was one thing: its secret and true history was another. The latter has never been told until now. It was known abroad only that the minister had called on a warm afternoon in July; that Miss Caroline had received him out of doors, on the shaded east side of the house, where the heat had driven her to await a cooling breeze from the river. One of the dingy rugs had been spread upon the grass close to the lilac clump, and by an unfashionable little table Miss Caroline sat, in a chair sadly out of date, reading of Childe Harold. It was understood that the minister had there sat in another antiquated chair of capacious arms and upholstered in faded green velvet, a chair brought by Clem; and that he had weakly chatted away a pleasant hour or two without ever once daring to bring Miss Caroline's evil state to that attention which it merited from her. His difficulty seemed to have been similar to that experienced by the calling ladies. He could observe no opening that promised anything but an ungracious plunge or an awkward stumble, and the ladies had been wrong in suspecting that his authority as a cleric would nerve him to either of these things.
There was despair next day when it was known that he had come away even lavisher in praise of Miss Caroline than Aunt Delia had become; that he refused with a gentle but unbreakable stubbornness, a thing he was known to be cursed with latently, ever again to approach the lady with a concealed purpose or with aught in his heart but a warm and flagrant esteem.
So much for the public's knowledge; and doubtless the public in every case knows all that it ought to know. But these are the facts as they came to my privileged ears, and to what, I believe, are gifts of interpretation not below the average.
When Clem brought the chair for the minister, Miss Caroline gave him a brief, low-toned order, which he hurried away to execute. Within ten minutes, and before Miss Caroline had finished telling how altogether beautiful she found Arcady of the Little Country, Clem returned, bearing breast-high a napkin-covered tray, from which towered twin pillars of glass, topped with fragrant leafage and pierced each by a yellow straw. This tray he placed upon the table beside the poems of Lord Byron, and the minister permitted himself an oblique look thereat, even though this involved deserting the eyes of his agreeable hostess. The ice in the glasses tinkled a brief phrase of music, the tops burgeoned with a luxuriant summer green, and the straws were of a sweetly pastoral suggestiveness. The fragrance moved one to the heart of some spice-scented dell where a brooklet purled down a pebbled course. The ensemble was indeed overwhelming in its message of a refreshment joyous, satisfying, timely, and of a consummate innocence.
"The day is warm," said Miss Caroline, receiving one of the glasses from her servant, and with a bright look at her guest.
"It is intensely warm, and quite unusually so for this time of year," said the minister, absently taking the other glass now proffered him.
"We shall combat it," said Miss Caroline with some vivacity. She delicately applied her lips to the straw, and a slight depression appeared in each of her acceptable cheeks.
"A cooling beverage at this hour is most grateful," said the minister, rejoicing in the icy feel of the glass, and falling hopefully to his own straw.
"Clem makes them perfectly," said Miss Caroline.
"What do you call them?" asked the minister. He had relinquished his straw, and his kind face shone with a pleased surprise.
"Why, mint juleps," replied Miss Caroline, glancing quickly up.
"Ah, mint! that explains it," said the minister with satisfaction, his broad face clearing of a slight bewilderment.
"Clem found a beautiful patch of it by a spring half a mile up the river," volunteered Miss Caroline, between dainty pulls at her straw.
"It is a lovely plant—alovelyplant, indeed!" rejoined the minister, for a moment setting down his glass to wipe his brow. "I remember now detecting the same fragrance when I watered my horse at that spring. But I did not dream that it—I wonder—" he broke off, taking up his glass—"that its virtues are not more widely apprehended. I have never heard that an acceptable beverage might be made from it."
"Not every one can make a mint julep as Clem can," said his hostess.
A moist and futile splutter from the bottom of the minister's glass was his only reply.
He set the glass back on the table with a pleasant speculation showing in his eyes. The talk became again animated. Chiefly the minister talked, and his hostess found him most companionable.
"Let me offer you another julep," she said, after a little, noting that his eyes had swept the empty glass with a chastened blankness. The minister let her.
"If it would not be troubling you—really? The heat is excessive, and I find that the mint, simple herb though it be, is strangely salutary."
The minister was a man of years and weight and worth. He possessed a reliant simplicity that put him at once close to those he met. Of these, by his manner, he asked all: confidence without reserve, troubles, doubts, distresses, material or otherwise. And this manner of his prevailed. The hearts of his people opened to him as freely as his own opened to receive them. He was a good man and, partly by reason of this ingenuous, unsuspicious mind, an invaluable instrument of grace.
When he had talked to Miss Caroline through the second julep,—digressing only to marvel briefly again that the properties of mint should so long have been Nature's own secret in Little Arcady,—telling her his joys, his griefs, his interests, which were but the joys and griefs and interests of his people, he wrought a spell upon her so that she in turn became confiding.
She was an Episcopalian. Her line had been born Episcopalians since a time whereof no data were obtainable; and this was, of course, not a condition to meddle with in late life, even if one's mind should grow consenting. For that matter, Miss Caroline would be frank and pretend to no change of mind. She was an old woman and fixed. She could not at this day free herself of a doubtless incorrect notion that the outside churches—meaning those not Episcopal—had been intended for people other than her own family and its offshoots. Clem had once been a Baptist, and it was true that he was now a Methodist. He had told her that his new religion was distinguished from the old by being "dry religion". But these were intricacies with which a woman of Miss Caroline's years could not be expected to entangle herself. This she would say, however, that during her residence in Little Arcady she would fling aside the prejudice of a lifetime and worship each Sabbath at the minister's Methodist church.
It did not seem to the minister that she said it as might an explorer who consents for a time to adopt the manner and customs of the tribe among which a spirit of adventure has led him. He accepted her implied tribute modestly and with unaffected gratification, again wiping his brow and his broad, good face.
When I joined them at four o'clock, having been moved by hope of a cooling chat with Miss Caroline, the minister was slightly more flushed, I thought, than the day could warrant. He was about to leave, was, in fact, concluding his choicest anecdote of "Big Joe" Kestril—for he was a man who met all our kinds. "Big Joe," six feet, five, a tower of muscled brawn, standing on a corner, pleasantly inebriated, had watched go feebly by the tottering, palsied form of little old Bolivar Kent, our most aged and richest man. The minister, also passing, had observed Kestril's humorous stare.
"The big fellow called to me," he was saying to Miss Caroline as I came up. "'Parson,' said he—they all know me familiarly, madam—'Parson,' said he, 'I wish I could take all I'm worth and all old Kent is worth and put it in a bunch on the sidewalk there and then fight the old cuss for it!'"
It was a favorite anecdote of the minister's, but I had never known him before to tell it to a lady on the occasion of his first call. Miss Caroline laughed joyously as she turned to greet me.
"I can't tell you how finely I've been entertained," she said to me.
"Nor can I tell him for myself, madam," retorted the minister. I thought indeed he spoke with an effort that made this gallantry seem not altogether baseless in fact.
"I was on the point of leaving," said the minister.
"Are you returning home, or have you more calls in the neighborhood?" I asked, feeling just a tinge of uneasiness about his expansive manner.
"No more calls, no. I had planned, instead, a pleasant walk up along the riverside to a spring some distance above. I mean to procure a supply of this delicious mint—for mint juleps," he added affably.
"Come with me," I urged. I was about to walk out myself. Together we bade adieu to Miss Caroline.
But the minister's walk ended at my own door. In the cool gloom of my little library I asked him if he would be good enough to excuse me a moment, indicating the broad couch beneath the window.
"With pleasure, Major!" and he sank among the restful pillows. "I am ashamed to say that the heat has rendered me a trifle indolent".
When I came softly back five minutes later, he lay in deep slumber, his face cherubically innocent, his breathing soft as a babe's. He awoke freshly two hours later. He apologized for his rudeness and expressed a wish for a glass of cool water. Three of these he drank with evidences of profound relish. Then he drew his large silver watch from his pocket.
"On my word, Major, it's after six, and I shall be late for tea! I have trespassed shamefully upon you!"
"The heat was very trying," I said.
"Quite enervating, indeed! I seem only now to be feeling its effects."
As he walked briskly down the now cooling street, he bared his brow to the gentle breeze of evening.
To the ladies, solicitous about Miss Caroline, who called upon him a few days later, he said, "She is a most admirable and lovely woman—not at all a person one could bring one's self to address on the painful subject of intoxicants. Had she offered me a glass of wine or other stimulant, a way might have been opened, but I am delighted to say that her hospitality went no farther than this innocent beverage." The minister indicated on his study table a glass containing sweetened ice-water in which some leaves of mint had been submerged.
"It is called a mint julep," he added, "though I confess I do not get the same delicate tang from the herb that her black fellow does. As he prepared the decoction I assure you its flavor was capital!"
THE TRUTH ABOUT SHAKSPERE AT LAST
THE TRUTH ABOUT SHAKSPERE AT LAST
Miss Caroline dutifully returned the calls that were paid her, with never a suspicion that her slavery to strong drink had been the secret inspiration of them. She was not yet awake to our sentiments in this matter. She had given strong waters to the minister with a heart as innocent as their disguise of ice and leafage had made them actually appear to that good man. And I, who was well informed, hesitated to warn her, hoping weakly that she would come to understand. For I had seen there were many things that Miss Caroline had not to be told in order to know.
For one, she had quickly divined that the ladies of Little Arcady considered her furniture to be unfortunate. She knew that they scorned it for its unstylishness; that some of them sympathized in the humiliation that such impossible stuff must be to her; while others believed that she was too unsophisticated to have any proper shame in the matter. These latter strove by every device to have her note the right thing in furniture and thus be moved to contrast it instructively with her own: as when Mrs. Judge Robinson borrowed for an afternoon Aunt Delia McCormick's best blue plush rocker, Mrs. Westley Keyts's new sofa, upholstered with gorgeous ingrain, and Mrs. Eubanks's new black walnut combination desk and bookcase with brass trimmings and little spindled balconies, in which could be elegantly placed the mineral specimens picked up along the river bank, and the twin statuettes of the fluting shepherd and his inamorata. As Mrs. Judge Robinson herself possessed new and high-priced furniture, including a gold-and-onyx stand to occupy the bay window and uphold the Rogers group, "Going for the Parson," as well as two fragile gilt chairs, which considerate guests would not sit in but leave exposed to view, and a complete new set of black walnut, the effect that day—which included a grand smell of varnish—was nothing less than sumptuous.
The occasion was a semi-monthly meeting of the Ladies' Home Study and Culture Club, at which Miss Caroline was to be present. There had been a suspension of the Club's meetings while Mrs. Potts was in abeyance, but on this day she was to enter the world again and preside over the meeting as "Madam President," though the ladies sometimes forgot to call her that.
The paper read by Mrs. Potts—who was not at all ineffective in her black—was on "The Lake Poets," with a few pointed selections from Wordsworth and others.
Whether or not Miss Caroline was rightly impressed by the furniture exhibit was a question not easy to determine. True, she stared at it with something in her eyes beyond a mere perception of its lines; but whether this was the longing passion of an awakened soul or the simple awe of the unenlightened was not to be ascertained at the moment.
Testimony as to her enjoyment of the President's paper was more circumstantial. In the midst of this, as the listeners were besought to "dwell a moment on this exquisite delineation of Nature,"—expertly pronounced "Nate-your" by Mrs. Potts,—Miss Caroline turned her head aside as one deeply moved by the poet's magic. But Marcella Eubanks, glancing at that moment into a mirror on the opposite wall,—a mirror in a plush frame on which pansies had been painted,—caught the full and frank exposure of a yawn. It was a thorough yawn. Miss Caroline had surrendered abjectly to it, in the belief—unrecking the mirror—that she could not be detected.
The discussion that followed the paper—as was customary at the meetings—proved to be a bit livelier. Each lady said something she had thought up to say, beginning, "Does it not seem—" or "Are we not forced to conclude—"
I suspect that Miss Caroline was sleepy. Perhaps she was nettled by the boredom she had been made to endure without just provocation; perhaps the fashionable fumes of varnish had been toxic to her unaccustomed senses. At any rate she now compromised herself regrettably.
Mrs. Westley Keyts had been thinking up something to say, something choice that should yet be sufficiently vague not to incriminate her. It had seemed that these requirements would be met if she said, in a tone of easy patronage, "Mr. Wordsworth is certainly a very bright writer of poetry, but as for me—givemeShakspere!"
She had thought of saying "the Bard of Avon," a polished phrase coined for his "Compendium" by the ingenious Mr. Gaskell; but, hearing her own voice strangely break the silence, Mrs. Keyts became timid at the last moment and let it go at "Shakspere."
"Oh, Shakspere—ofcourse!" said most of the ladies at once, and those not quick enough to utter it concertedly looked it almost reprovingly at the speaker.
A silence fell, as if every one must have time to recover from this trivial platitude. But it was a silence outrageously shattered by Miss Caroline, who said:—
"O dear! I've always considered Shakspere such an overrated man!"
The silence grew more intense, only Mrs. Potts emitting a slight but audible gasp. But swift looks flashed from each lady to her horrified sisters. Was it possible that the unfortunate woman had been in no condition to come among them?
"Oh, agreatlyoverrated man!" repeated Miss Caroline, terribly, "far too wordy—too fond of wretched puns—so much of his humor coarse and tiresome. By the way, have you ladies taken up Byron?"
The moment was charged, almost to explosion. A crisis impended, out of the very speechlessness of the gathering. Mrs. Potts was aghast in behalf of William Shakspere, and Marcella Eubanks was crimsoning at the blunt query about Byron, well knowing that he could be taken up by a lady only with the wariest caution, and that he would much better be let alone. The others were torn demoralizingly between these two extremes of distress.
But the situation was saved by the ready wit of Mrs. Judge Robinson.
"I think the hour has come for refreshments, Madam President!" she said urbanely, and the meeting was nervously adjourned. Under the animation thus induced an approximate equilibrium was restored. The ladies gulped down chicken salad, many of them using forks with black thread tied about them to show they were borrowed from Mrs. Eubanks. They drank lemonade from a fine glass pitcher that had come as a gratuitous mark of esteem from the tea merchant patronized by the hostess; and they congealed themselves pleasantly with vanilla ice-cream eaten from dishes of excellent pressed glass that had come one by one as the Robinson family consumed its baking powder.
But Miss Caroline would have been dense indeed had she not divined, even amid that informal babbling, that she was being viewed by the ladies of the Club with a shocked stupefaction.
Precisely what emotion this knowledge left with her I have never known. But I do know that before the meeting broke up, it had been agreed to hold the next one at the house of Miss Caroline herself. It may be that she suggested and urged this in pure desperation, wishing to regain a favor which she had felt unaccountably withdrawn; and it may be that the ladies accepted in a similar desperation, knowing not how to inform her that she was grossly ineligible for membership in a Home Study Club.
The intervening two weeks were filled with tales and talks of Miss Caroline's heresy. Excitement and adverse criticism were almost universally aroused. It was a scandal of proportions almost equal to that of her love for strong drink. About most writers one could be permitted to have an opinion. But it was not thought that one could properly have an opinion about Shakspere, and, so far as we knew, no one had ever before subjected him to this indignity. One might as well have an opinion about Virtue or the law of gravitation. An opinion of any sort was impossible. One favorable would be puny, futile, immodestly patronizing. An unfavorable opinion had heretofore not been within realms of the idlest speculation.
There were but two of us, I believe, who did not promptly condemn Miss Caroline's violence of speech—two men of varying parts. Westley Keyts frankly said he had never been able to "get into" Shakspere, and considered it, as a book for reading purposes, inferior to "Cudjo's Cave," which he had read three times. The minister, whose church Miss Caroline now patronized,—that term being chosen after some deliberation,—held up both his hands at the news and mildly exclaimed, "Well!" Then, after a pause, "Well, well!" And still again, after another pause, "Well, well, well!"
This was thought to be shifty and evasive—certainly not so outspoken as the town had a right to expect.
Solon Denney, though in his heart true to Shakspere, affected to be gleeful. A paragraph, mysterious to many, including Miss Caroline, appeared in the ensuingArgus:—
"An encounter long supposed by scientists to be a mere metaphysical abstraction of almost playful import has at last occurred in sober physics. The irresistible force has met up with the immovable body. We look for results next week."
I knew that Solon considered Miss Caroline to be an irresistible force. I was uncertain whether Shakspere or Mrs. Potts was meant by the immovable body. I knew that he held them in equal awe, and I knew that Mrs. Potts felt, in a way, responsible for Shakspere this far west of Boston, regarding any attack upon him as a personal affront to herself.
On the day of the next meeting the ladies of the Club gathered in the dingy and inelegant drawing-room of Miss Caroline. No vividly flowered carpet decked the floor; only a time-toned rug that left the outer edge of the floor untidily exposing its dull stain; no gilt and onyx table bore its sculptured fantasy by the busy Rogers. The mantel and shelves were bare of those fixed ornaments that should decorate the waste places of all true homes; there were no flint arrow-heads, no "specimens," no varnished pine cones, no "Rock of Ages," no waxen lilies, not even a china cup goldenly emblazoned with "Love the Giver," in German script. And there were no beautiful chairs with delicate gilded spindles—not an elegant and impracticable chair in the whole big room—not one chair which could not be occupied as comfortably as any common kitchen rocker. It was indeed a poor place; obviously the woman's best room, yet showing careless traces of almost daily use. To ladies who never opened their best rooms save to dust and air them on days when company was expected, and who would as soon have lounged in them informally as they would have desecrated a church, this laxity was heinous.
And ordinarily, in the best rooms of one another, the ladies became spontaneously, rigidly formal as they assembled, speaking in tones suitably stiff of the day's paper, or viewing with hushed esteem those art treasures that surrounded them.
But so difficult was it to attain this formality amid the homely surroundings of Miss Caroline that to-day they not only lounged with negligent ease in the big chairs and on the poor, broad sofas, but they talked familiarly of their household concerns quite as if they had been in one of their own second-best rooms on any common day.
On a table in one cool corner was a huge bowl of thin silver, whence issued a baffling fragrance. Discreet observation, as the throng gathered, revealed this to contain a large block of ice and a colored liquid in which floated cherries with slices of lemon and orange. A ladle of generous lines reposed in the bowl, and circling it on the table were many small cups.
There was a feeling of relief when these details had been ascertained. Fear had been felt that Miss Caroline might forget herself and offer them a glass of wine, or something worse, from a large black bottle; for Little Arcady believed, in its innocent remoteness, that the devil's stuff came in no other way than large black bottles. Miss Eubanks had made sure that the ladies wore their white ribbons. Marcella's own satin bow was larger than common, so that no one might mistake the principles of the heart beating beneath it.
But the cool big bowl with its harmless fruit restored confidence at once, and when Miss Caroline urged them to try Clem's punch they refrained not. The walk to the north end of town on a sultry afternoon had qualified them to receive its consolations, and they gathered gratefully about.
Marcella Eubanks quaffed the first beaker, a trifle timorously, it is true, for the word "punch" had stirred within her a vague memory of sinister associations. Sometime she had read a tale in which one Howard Melville had gone to the great city and wrecked a career of much promise by accepting a glass of something from the hands of a beautiful but thoughtless girl, pampered child of the banker with whom he had secured a position. For a dread moment Marcella seemed to recall that the fatal draught was named "punch." But after a tentative sip of the compound at hand, she decided that it must have been something else—doubtless "a glass of sparkling wine." For this punch before her was palpably of a babe's innocence. Indeed it tasted rather like an inferior lemonade. But it was cold, and Marcella tossed off a second cup of it. She could make better lemonade herself, and she murmured slightingly of the stuff to Aunt Delia McCormick.
"It wants more lemons and more sugar," said Marcella, firmly. Aunt Delia pressed back the white satin bow on her bosom in order to manage her second glass with entire safety.
"I don't know, Marcella," she said in a dreamy undertone, after draining the cup to its cherry. "I don't know—it does seem to take hold, for all it tastes so trifling."
As each lady arrived she was led to the punch-bowl. When the last one had been taught the way to that cool nook, there was a pleasant hum of voices in the room. There was still an undercurrent of difference as to the punch's merit—other than mere coolness; though Miss Eubanks now agreed with Aunt Delia that it possessed virtues not to be discerned in the first careless draught. The conversation continued to be general, to the immense delight of the hostess, for she had dreaded the ordeal of that formal opening, with its minutes of the last meeting; and she had dared even to hope that the day's paper might, by tactful management, be averted.
She waxed more daringly hopeful when Clem came to refill the punch-bowl. She felt that she owed much to the heat of the day, which was insuring the thirst of the arrivals. The punch and general conversation seemed to suffice them even after their first thirst had been allayed. She began to wonder if the ladies were not a more unbending and genial lot than she had once suspected.
A considerable group of them now chatted vivaciously about the replenished bowl, including Madam the President, who had arrived very thirsty indeed, and who was now, between sips, accounting for the singular favor which the Adams family had always found in the sight of God and the people of Massachusetts. She seemed to be prevailed over, not without difficulty, by Aunt Delia, who related her failure to learn from Clem the ingredients of his acceptable punch. This was not surprising, for Clem was either never able or never willing to tell how he made anything whatever. Of this punch Aunt Delia had been able to wheedle from him only that it contained "some little fixin's." Insistent questioning did develop, further, that "cold tea" was one of these; but cold tea did not make plain its recondite potencies—did not explain why a beverage so unassuming to the taste should inspire one with a wish to partake of it continuously.
"We might get him to make a barrel of it for the Sunday-school picnic," said Marcella, brightly, over her fourth cup. "If it contains only a little tea, perhaps the effect upon the children would not be deleterious."
"We'll try it," said Aunt Delia, reaching for the ladle at sight of empty cups in the hands of Mrs. Judge Robinson and Mrs. Westley Keyts. "I'llfurnish the cherries and the sugar and the tea."
How it came about was never quite understood by the ladies, but the true and formal note of a Ladies' Home Study Club was never once struck that afternoon. Madam the President did not call the meeting to order, the minutes of the last meeting are unread to this day, and a motion to adjourn never became necessary.
It had been thought wisest to keep entirely away from poetry at this meeting, and the paper for the day, to have been read by Marcella Eubanks, was "The Pathos of Charles Dickens." Marcella had taken unusual pains in its preparation, bringing with her two volumes of the author from which to read at the right moment the deaths of Little Nell and Paul Dombey. She had practised these until she could make her voice quaver effectively, and she had looked forward to a genuine ovation when she sat down.