WE MIGHT GET HIM TO MAKE A BARREL OF IT FOR THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL PICNIC
"WE MIGHT GET HIM TO MAKE A BARREL OF IT FOR THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL PICNIC"
"WE MIGHT GET HIM TO MAKE A BARREL OF IT FOR THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL PICNIC"
If it is clearly understood, then, that no one thought of calling for the paper, that even its proud author felt the hours gliding by without any poignant regret, it should be seen that the occasion had strangely come to be one of pure and joyous relaxation, with never an instructive or cultured or studious moment.
There was talk of domestic concerns, sprightly town gossip, mirth, wit, and anecdotes. Aunt Delia McCormick told her parrot story, which wasrisqué, even when no gentlemen were present, for the parrot said "damn it!" in the course of his surprisingly human repartee under difficulties.
Mrs. Westley Keyts, the bars being down, thereupon began another parrot story. But Miss Eubanks, who had observed that all parrot stories have "damn" in them, suddenly conceived that matters had gone far enough inthatdirection. Affecting not to have heard Mrs. Keyts's opening of "A returned missionary made a gift of a parrot to two elderly maiden ladies—" Marcella led the would-be anecdotist to the punch-bowl, and, under the cover of operations there, spoke to her in an undertone. Mrs. Keyts said that the thing had been printed right out on the funny page of "Hearth and Home," but over the cup of punch that Marcella pressed upon her, she consented to forego it on account of the minister's wife being present.
There were other anecdotes, however; not of a parrot character, but chiefly of funny sayings of the little ones at home. Mrs. Judge Robinson, with the artistic mendacity of your trueraconteur, accredited to her own four-year-old a speech about the stars being holes in the floor of heaven, although it was said of this gem in "Harper's Drawer," where she had read it, that "the following good one comes to us from a lady subscriber in the well-known city of X——."
It could not be recalled afterwards how, from this harmless exchange, they had come to be listening to passages from the adventurous life of Childe Harold, read crisply by their hostess. Still less could the ladies later comprehend how some of their number had been guilty of innuendos—or worse—against the well-known Bard of Avon. Yet, so it was.
Miss Caroline herself had refrained from abusing him—had seemed to have forgotten him, indeed; but, as she read Byron to them, their hearts opened to her—rushed out, indeed, with a friendly wholeness that demanded something more than mere cordial applause of her favorite poet. Some intimation of a sympathy with her view of the other poet came to seem not ungraceful. During one of the reader's pauses to impress upon them the splendors of the Byronic imagery, and eke its human heart-warmth, good Aunt Delia, with defiant looks about the circle, broke in with:—
"I shouldn't wonder if Shaksperehasbeen made too much over."
Mrs. Keyts stepped loyally into the breach thus effected.
"Westley thinks Shakspere isn't such anawfulgood book," she said, feeling her way, "though it seems to me it has some very interesting and excellent pieces in it."
"Shakspere isver-ryuneven," remarked Mrs. Judge Robinson, in a tone of dignified concession.
"There is always a word to be said on either side of these matters—there is undeniably room for controversy." Thus Mrs. Potts, in her best manner of authority, from the punch-bowl.
"Let the dead rest!" gently murmured Miss Eubanks, from her dreamy corner of the biggest sofa. Her inflection was archly significant. One had to suspect that Shakspere, alive and a fair target for dispraise, might have learned something to his advantage if not to his delight.
Miss Caroline was both surprised and gratified. At the previous meeting she had detected no sign of this concurring sentiment. She plunged again into Byron with renewed enthusiasm.
The afternoon came to a glorious end, and the ladies departed with many expressions of rejoicing. They had found Miss Caroline so charming that several of them were torn with fresh pity and brought to the verge of tears when they thought of her furniture.
Marcella Eubanks did cry on the way home and had to put down her green barege veil. But that was for thinking of poor little Paul Dombey. She was mourning him as a personal loss. Also must she have adored the genius of a master who could thus move her from a calm that was constitutional with every known Eubanks.
IN WHICH THE GAME WAS PLAYED
IN WHICH THE GAME WAS PLAYED
The nextArgussaid of Miss Caroline's afternoon that "the ladies present one and all report a most enjoyable time." There was another mysterious paragraph, too, farther down the column of "locals," which proclaimed that "The immovable body has at last been struck by the irresistible force and has failed to live up to its reputation. It moved and moved so you could see it move. Another bubble exploded! We live in a sensational age."
Now, while it is true that the ladies, "one and all," had spoken with entire enthusiasm of their afternoon at the unpretentious home of my neighbor, I, nevertheless, deemed it vital to hold plain speech with that impulsive woman immediately. I saw, indeed, that I should have acted after the incident of the mint juleps.
Solon Denney, who had experienced the hospitality of Miss Caroline, and who could speak from a wider knowledge than our minister or the ladies of the town, had once said:—
"Those mint juleps are simple, honest things. They taste injurious from the start. But that punch—it's hypocritical. It steals into your brain as a little child steals its rosebud hand into yours, beguiling you with prattle; but afterwards—well, if I had the choice, I'd rather be chloroformed and struck sharply with an axe. I'd be my old self again sooner." Whereupon he would have written a guarded piece for the paper about this had I not dissuaded him. But I saw that I must at once have with Miss Caroline what in a later day came to be called "a heart-to-heart talk"; and I forthwith summoned what valor I could for the ordeal.
"I never dreamed—I never suspected—howshouldI?" she murmured pathetically, after my opening speech of a few simple but telling phrases. She listened in genuine horror while I gave the reasons why she might justly regard the call of our minister and her entertainment of the Club as nothing short of adventures—adventures which she had survived scathless not but by the favor of an indulgent Providence.
"Sothatis what those little white satin bows mean?" she asked, and I said that it most emphatically was.
"I suspected it might be some kind of mourning for babies—a local custom, you know, though it did seem queer. What can they think of me?"
"They don't know what to think now," I said, "and if you are wise, you will never let them know."
"The Colonel was proud of that punch," she mused.
"I dare say he had reasons," I answered grimly.
"Especially after Cousin Looshe Peavey came to spend Christmas with us one time. The Colonel had always considered Cousin Looshe rather arrogant about this punch, and it may have been a special brew. I know that Cousin had an immense respect for it after he was able—that is—afterwards—"
"I can easily believe it."
"Cherry brandy—Jamaica rum—pint of Madeira—gill of port—a bit of cordial—some sherry—I forget if there's anything else."
I grasped the chair in which I sat.
"Heaven forbid!" I cried; "and don't tell me, anyway—I'm reeling now."
"But of course there are lemons and oranges and cherries and tea andquantitiesof ice to weaken it—"
"The whole frozen polar sea itself couldn't weaken that mixture of elemental forces. See to it," I went on sternly, "that you remember only the innocent parts of it if you are ever asked for the recipe." She actually cowered.
"Also as to mint juleps—remember that you have forgotten, if you ever knew how they are made."
"Dear,dear—and our Bishop did enjoy his mint julep so!"
"That's different," I said; "they were probably raised together."
"And that afternoon, I thought something of the sort was necessary; do you know, they seemed rather cold to me at that other meeting—and of course there wasn't enough of it to hurt them."
"Your intentions were amiable, I concede, but your carelessness was criminal—nothing short of it. You laid the train for a scandal that would have shaken Slocum County to its remotest outlying cornfield, and even made itself felt over this whole sovereign state."
I was gratified to see that she shuddered.
"I shall never learn," she pleaded; "their life is so different."
"Let them at least live it out to its natural end, such as it is," I urged.
Hereupon, confessing herself unnerved, Miss Caroline led me to the dining room, and in a glass of Madeira from a cask forwarded by Second-cousin Colonel Lucius Quintus Peavey, C.S.A., she pledged herself to preserve the decencies as these had been codified in Little Arcady by the Sons and Daughters of Temperance. For my part I drank to her continuance in the wondrous favor of Heaven.
Thereafter, I am bound to say, Miss Caroline conducted herself with a discretion that was admirable. Upon more than one occasion I was made to notice this. One of them was at an evening entertainment at the Eubanks home that autumn, to which it was my privilege to escort her. "A large and brilliant company was present," to quote from a competent authority, and the refreshments were "recherche," to quote again, this being, I believe, the first of our social functions at which Japanese paper napkins were handed around. Eustace Eubanks entertained "one and all" by exhibiting and describing lantern views of important scenes in the Holy Land; Marcella sang "Comin' Thro' the Rye" with such iron restraint that the most fastidious among us could have found no cause for offence, and Eustace sang an innocent song of war and bloodshed and death. All went well until Eustace, being pressed for more, ventured a drinking song. Whether this had been censored by his household I have never learned. Perhaps there had been demurs—there were almost certain to have been; and possibly Eustace had held out for the thing because of the rare opportunity it afforded for the exercise of his lowest tones. Perhaps it had been deemed wise to indulge him in this, lest in rebellion he break all bonds of propriety and revert to the "Bedouin Love Song." At any rate he sang "Drinking," a song that lauds the wine-cup as chiefest of godless joys, and terminating in "drinking" thrice reiterated, of which each individual one finishes so much lower than it begins that the last one seems to expire in the bottomless pit.
Many of those present appeared to enjoy this song. Even Marcella Eubanks seemed for once to have soared above mere principle into the unmoral realm of "Art for Art's sake." But it falls to be said, and I say it with a pride which I think should not excite cavil, that Miss Caroline frowned splendidly from the first moment that the song's true character was revealed. She superbly evinced uneasiness, moreover, when the thing was done, as if to say, "One can't tellwhatmay occur in a place wherethatis permitted!" And her performance was not observed by myself alone. Marcella saw it and sped to her brother, who, after listening to hurried words from her, dashed into "The Lost Chord" with a swift and desperate fervor, as if to allay all alarm in the mind of this sensitive guest. Eustace was at heart as earnestly well meaning as any Eubanks that ever lived, and his vagaries in song were attributable solely to a trusting nature capriciously endowed with a dash of the artistic temperament. It was only a dash, however. Beyond doubt, had his family but known, he could have sung the "Bedouin Love Song," and been none the worse for it.
If Miss Caroline's eloquent pantomime at this time aroused a suspicion that she had been maligned, as to her habits of drink, her behavior on a subsequent evening, when Mrs. Judge Robinson entertained, left no one to doubt it. There was music, too, on this occasion—described elsewhere as "a gala occasion"—after Eustace had concluded his part of the entertainment and gotten his lantern out of the way,—music by a quartet consisting of Messrs. Fancett and Eubanks, first and second bass, and Messrs. Updyke and G. Brown, first and second tenor. In excellent accord these tenors and basses, so blameless in their living, lifted up their voices and sang they "would that the wavelets of ocean were wavelets of sparkling champagne!" It was a blithe and rippling morceau if one could forget the well-nigh cosmic depravity of it; but Miss Caroline, it appeared, was not able to forget. She confided as much to Marcella Eubanks and Aunt Delia McCormick, intimating that while she was doubly desirous to be pleased because of her position as an outsider, she was, nevertheless, a silly old woman, encrusted with prejudice, and she could not deny that she found this songsuggestive. Her eyes glistened when she said it, and Marcella felt like pinning a white ribbon to her then and there.
Escorting Miss Caroline to her home that night, I listened to her account of this colloquy and found myself wishing that matters had been different. It seemed to me that I must ultimately become the victim of a romantic passion for her, and I told her as much when we parted.
Gossip, the yellow-tongued dragon, had been tracked to its lair and done to death, or at least that one of its heads had been smitten off which babbled slander of Miss Caroline.
Thenceforth she and I were free to think upon other matters. And there were these other matters in both our lives.
As to most of them we did not hold speech together. Our intimacy as yet lay quite within a circle so charmed that it might not be entered by things too personal to either of us. By a kind of tacit treaty we brought thither none but those affairs which invited a not too serious tone. Our late common life had provided an abundance of these, and they had been hailed by my friend with an unfailing levity which the widow of J. Rodney Potts, for one, would have found it impossible to condone. "I am a light old woman," she had said to me; "I laugh at the world even when I fear it most." There was a desperate sprite of banter in her eye when she made this confession, a sprite that leaped forth to be gay when I shrived her. But, though we sacredly observed all mirthful conventions in our dallying, I knew that Miss Caroline had more than enough to ponder of matters weighty. I knew that she was likely to have regretted a too-ready sharing of Clem's easy enthusiasm over industrial conditions in the North.
Clem believed by instinct not only that the evil thereof is sufficient unto the day, but that the incidental good sufficeth also. His quality of faith would have seemed a pointed rebuke to the common run of believers in a Providence that watches and sends. Confronted by the spectre of present want he could exorcise it neatly by the device of beholding, in a contrary vision, future limitless pullets of a marketable immaturity, or endless acres of garden produce ripe and ready to sell. Moreover, his experience with "gold money" was as yet insufficient to acquaint him with its truly volatile character. All sums greater than a hundred dollars were blessedly alike to him—equally prodigious. Two hundred, or thousands, or tens of thousands sent the same rays of light through the spectrum of his poetic mind, and a bank was an institution of such abiding grace that, having once established a connection with it, one possessed forever a stout prop in time of need. I was sure indeed that Miss Caroline had defined these limitations of Clem as a financier. It was one of those enjoyable topics which we had been free to discuss. That she had discovered how lamentably his resources had been reduced by freight tolls on her furniture I could only infer. But I knew, at least, that she was aware of the blistering, rainless summer that had laid Clem's high hopes of a garden in dust and cut off half his revenue. Plainly, Miss Caroline had more than enough of matters fit to engage her graver moments.
For my own part I, too, had matters to dwell upon of an equal gravity in their own poor way; though perhaps, too, I could not have defined them as understandingly as I did the perplexities of my neighbor.
Happily the feat need not be attempted; I had the game, in which troubles may be played away at least beyond the necessity for analyzing them—the game which requires two decks and is to be played alone—the most efficacious of those devices for the solitary which cards afford.
I had been made acquainted with its scheme and with some of its cruder virtues by a certain illustrious soldier whom I was once much thrown with. He confessed to me that he played it before a battle to inspire him with coolness, and after a battle to learn wise behavior under victory or defeat, as it might have been.
I was persuaded to learn more of it. I played the thing at first, to be sure, as I have noticed that novices always do, with a mind so bent upon "getting it" that I was insensible of its curative and refining agencies.
"You haven't the secret yet," said my mentor, who watched me as I won for the first time, and was moved to warn me by my unconcealed pride in this achievement. "After you've played it a few years, you'll learn that the value of it lies chiefly in losing. You'll try like the devil to win, of course, but you'll learn not to wish for it. To win is nothing but an endless piling up of the right cards, beginning with the ace and ending with the king, and it only means more shuffling for next time. But every time you lose you will learn things about everything."
It was even as he said,—it took me years to learn this true merit of the game; and still, as he had said, I learned much from it of life.
There is a fine moment at the last shuffling of the cards, a moment when free will and fatalism are indistinguishably merged.
I am ready to lay down eight cards in a horizontal row off my double deck. Who will say that the precise number of shuffles I have given to it was preordained?
"I do," exclaimed an obliging fatalist. "The sequence of every one of those cards was determined when we were yet star-dust."
I bring confusion to him by performing half a dozen other shuffles. I am thus far the master of my unborn game—another last shuffle to prove it, though I shuffle clumsily enough.
I glance disdainfully at the fatalist whom I have refuted, and prepare again to lay down the first row of cards. But the fellow comes back with, "Those last shuffles were also determined, as was this challenge—"
"Very well!" and I prepare for still another rearrangement. But here I reflect that this could be endless and not at all interesting.
I dismiss the fatalist as a quibbler and play on. Now there is no dispute, unless there be other quibblers. Fixed is the order in which the cards shall fall, eight at a time. There is pure fatalism. But in the movings after each eight are dealt, I shall consciously choose and judge, which is pure free will—or an imitation of it sufficiently colorable to satisfy any, but quibblers. There, for me, is the fatalism of body, the free will of soul. Of these I learn when I play the game.
Now my first eight cards are down in a horizontal row. There are two kings among them, which is auspicious, for kings must be placed sometime at the top. There is a red queen, also auspicious, to be placed on one of the black kings. There is an ace of diamonds and its deuce. Good, again! The ace is placed above the row, beginning a row of aces to be placed there as fast as they fall, and the deuce is placed atop of it, for in that row the suits will be builtup, each in its kind. In the lower rows the suits are to be built down and crossed, as when I played the red queen on the black king, so that only the top of his crowned head can be seen. Then I play a red eight on a black nine and a black seven on the red eight. I am now left most fortunately with five spaces when I deal off my second row of eight,—five spaces into which, it may be, a king or two shall happily fall.
The game usually becomes intense after the third eight cards are played. By that time a choice must be made. Shall this black six or the other be played on the red seven? One must be wise, for either will release important cards.
The game has started so well that it promises to play out too easily—which is one of its tricks. Presently a deuce will be covered by a king for which no space is ready, a dark queen will be buried under a succession of smaller cards, crowding along with apparent carelessness, but relentlessly. Now a space is opened for the king that covers the deuce, but the king has meantime been covered by an insignificant but unmanageable four-spot, and cannot be reached. The game is not so absurdly easy as it promised to be. Still it may be won by clever playing. There follow eight cards that prove to be immovable, and the issue is almost in doubt. Now the last eight cards are down, and the game is suddenly seen to be lost. One small other shuffle might have won it; if that tray of spades had fallen one place to the right or left, the thing would now be easy; if it were a deuce or a four, the thing were easy. One spot on the card has brought ruin. The game has foiled us with its own peculiar cleverness.
But then, we learn to expect failure; and, most important of all, we learn to succeed while failing. We learn to see our cards fall wretchedly without a tremor. We learn to take small gains that offer, and to watch unmoved while splendid chances come to naught. We learn to live life and to waste no energy in vain wishing that we had shuffled differently. We learn even to marvel admiringly at the unobtrusive cunning which thwarts us of our dream's own—to wonder that cards ever should come right for any player in that maze of chances and faulty judgments. And we learn, above all, to brush the things together without loss of time and to play a new hand with the same old hope.
As I studied the cards, making sure of my defeat—one must be most careful to do that; a way is sometimes to be found—it was not strange that I fell to thinking of the face on my neighbor's wall.
I had mused often upon it since that first night. It seemed, curiously enough, to be a face that had long been mistily afloat in my shut eyes, a girl's face that had a trick of blending from time to time with the face of another I had better reason to know. Unaccountably they had come and gone, one followed by the other. Of that last new face in my vision I could make nothing, save that some one seemed to have painted it over there in the other house. How I had come by my own mind copy of it was a mystery to me beyond solution.
I played the game again to still this perplexity which had a way of seizing me at odd moments. It is an especially good game for a man who has had to believe that life will always beat him.
A WORTHLESS BLACK HOUND
A WORTHLESS BLACK HOUND
After an autumn speciously benign came our season of cold and snow. It proved to be a season of unwonted severity, every weather expert in town, from Uncle William McCormick, who had kept a diary record for thirty years, to Grandma Steck, who had foretold its coming from a goose-bone, agreeing that the cold was most unusual. The editor of theArgusnot only spoke of "Nature's snowy mantle," but coined another happy phrase about Little Arcady being "locked in the icy embrace of winter." This was admitted to be accurately literal, in spite of its poetic daring.
Miss Caroline confessed homesickness to me after the first heavy snow. She spoke as lightly of it as she should have done, but I could see that her own land pulled at her heart with every blast that shook her casements. No longer, however, was there even a second-cousin whose hospitality she was free to claim, for Colonel Lucius Quintus Peavey, C.S.A., now slept with his fathers in far-off Virginia, leaving behind him only traditions and a little old sherry. The former Miss Caroline had always shared with him, and a cask of the latter he bequeathed to her with his love. And the valley being now void of her kin, she was doubly an exile.
Such new desolation as she must have felt was masked under jesting dispraise of our execrable Northern climate. Surely a land permitted to congeal so utterly had forfeited the grace of its Maker.
Clem's lack of executive genius also earned a meed of my neighbor's disparagement. He was a worthless, trifling "boy," an idling dreamer, an irresponsible, inconsequent visionary, in whose baseless fancies it was astounding that a woman of her years should fatuously place reliance.
I must confess that I was more than once guilty of irritation when Miss Caroline spoke thus slightingly of her "boy"—of one who had been unable to view himself as other than her personal property. Again and again it seemed to me that, fine little creature that she was, her tone toward Clem lacked the right feeling. I should not have demanded gratitude precisely; at least no bald expression of it. But a manner of speech denoting, if not wording, a recognition of his unswerving loyalty would have accorded better with the estimate I had otherwise formed of her character. The absence of any tone or word that even one so devoted as I could construe to her advantage was puzzling in the extreme.
Still, feeling toward her as I did, I was compelled to excuse her as best I might by attributing her hardness to an evil system now happily abolished. But the nerves in my lost arm seemed to tingle with a secret satisfaction when I thought of Clem's empty reward for his life-work and remembered that I had helped, though ever so little, to free him and his kind from a bond so unfortunate for each of the parties to it.
The winter deepened about us, chill and bleak and ravaging. The smoke from our chimneys went up in tall columns that lost themselves in the gray sky. The snow shut us in, and presently the wind lay in wait to blast us when we dared the drifts.
Yet Miss Caroline throve, despite her nostalgia. She was even jaunty in her recital of the weather's minor hardships. To its rigors she brought a front of resolute gayety. A new stove graced the parlor, a stove with the proud nickeled title of "Frost King"; a title seen to be deserved when Clem had it properly gorged with dry wood. Within its tropic radiations Miss Caroline bloomed and was hale of being, like some hardy perennial.
Of Clem, nothing but hardiness was to be anticipated. He had been toughened by four other of our winters, all said to have been unusual for severity. And yet it was Clem, curiously enough, and not Miss Caroline, who found the season most trying. True, he had to be abroad most of the time, procuring sustenance for the insatiable "Frost King," or performing labor for other people by which Miss Caroline should preserve her independence; but it was not supposed that a creature of his sort could be subject to weaknesses natural enough to a superior race.
I believe this was his own view of the matter; for when he admitted to me one morning that he had "took cold in the chest," his manner was one of deprecating confusion, and he swore me against betrayal of his lapse to Miss Caroline.
She discovered his guilt for herself, however, after a few days, from his very annoying cough. She taxed him with it so sturdily that efforts at deception availed him not. His tale that the snow sifted into his "bref-place" and "tickled it" was pitifully unconvincing, for his cough was deeper than Eustace Eubanks's proudest note in the drinking song.
"He's a worthless thing," said Miss Caroline, telling me of his fault, and I said he was indeed—that he hadn't served me four years without my findingthatout. I added that he was undoubtedly shamming, but that at the same time it might be as well to take a few simple precautions. Miss Caroline said that of course he was shamming, in order to get out of work, and that she would soon drivethatnonsense out of his head if she had to wear the black wretch out to do it. She added that she was about tired of his nonsense.
It may be known that I have heretofore lost no opportunity to foist all faults of understanding upon the heads of my fellow-townsmen. And I should have liked to keep my record clear in that matter; but it would be uncandid to pretend, even at this late day, that I have ever divined the precise relationship that exists between Miss Caroline and her slave. I may know a bit more of its intricacies than does Little Arcady at large, but not enough to permit that certain thrill of superior discernment which I have so often been able to enjoy in Slocum County.
Each of the two, considered alone, is fairly comprehensible. But taken together, there is something between them which must always baffle me—something which I cannot believe to have been at all typical of the relation between owner and slave, else many of the facts noted by our discerning and impartial investigators were either imperfectly observed or unintelligently reported.
Up to a certain point my own studies of this slave-holder aligned perfectly with the information which we of the North had been at such pains to gather. And I tried to hold Miss Caroline blameless, remembering that she had been long schooled to the inhumanity of it.
I resolved, nevertheless, to take Clem under my own roof—there was a small unused room almost directly under it—the moment Miss Caroline's impatience with him should move her to the extremes foretold by her abusive fashion of speech. I would not see even a negro turned out in the coldest of winters for no better reason than that he was sick and useless, though I planned to intervene delicately, so as not to affront my neighbor. For my heart was still hers, despite this hardness, for which I saw that she must not be blamed.
As I had feared, Clem's cough became more obtrusive, and with this Miss Caroline's irritation deepened toward him. She declared that his trifling, no-account nature made him all but impossible.
Then one morning—one to be distinguished by its cold even among many unusual mornings—there was no Clem to light my fires and to scent my snug dining room with unparalleled coffee. This brought it definitely home to me that the situation had become grave. I dressed with what speed I could and hurried to Miss Caroline's door. The time had come when I should probably have to do something.
My neighbor met me and said that Clem had meanly decided to remain in bed for the day. I searched her face for some sign of consideration as she said this, but I was disappointed. She seemed to feel only a fierce disgust for his foolishness.
"But you may go up and look at the black good-for-nothing if you like," she said, grudgingly enough I thought.
I climbed the brief flight of stairs. I knew that Clem had not refused to get up without reasons that seemed sufficient to him. In a narrow bed in one of the doll-house rooms he lay coughing.
"So you can't get up this morning?" I asked.
"Yes, seh, Mahstah Majah, Ahwasa-gittin' up, but Ah was fohced to cough raght smahtly an' Miss Cahline she yehs it an' she awdeh me back to baid, seh. Then Ah calls out to huh that Ah ain't go'n' a' have no sech foolishness in this yeh place, an' so she stahts to come up, which fohces me to retiah huhiedly. Then she stands theh at th' head of th' staihs an' she faulted me—yes, seh—shethreatenme, Mahstah Majah, an' she tek mah clothes away, an' so on an' so fothe. Then Ah huhd huh a' mekin' th' fiah an' then she brung this yeh cawfee an' she done mek it that foolish that Ah can't tech it. Yes, seh, she plumb ruined that theh cawfee,that'swhat she done!"
His tone was peevish. Clem himself was not talking as I thought would have been becoming in him. And there was a definite issue of veracity between him and his mistress. I went down again, for the room was cold.
"He has some fever," I said.
"He is a lazy black hound," said Miss Caroline.
"He says you ordered him to stay in bed—threatened him and hid his clothes."
"Oh, never fear but what that fellow will always have an excuse!" she retorted shortly.
Observing that she had a day's supply of wood at hand, I left, not a little annoyed at both of them. I missed my coffee.
When I knocked at the door that evening, no one came to admit me. I went in, hearing Clem's voice in truculent protest from a large room on the first floor which had been called the room of Little Miss. I went to the door of this room.
Clem and his bed were there. We had two physicians in Little Arcady, Old Doc and Young Doc. Young Doc was now present measuring powders into little papers which he folded neatly, while Miss Caroline stood at hand, cowering but stubborn under Clem's violence.
"Miss Cahline, yo' suttinly old enough t' know betteh'n that. Ah do wish yo' Paw was about th' house—he maghty quickly put yo'-all in yo' place. Now Ah tole yo' Ah ain't go'n' a' have none o' this yeh Doctah foolishness. Yo' not go'n' a' stravagate all that theh gole money on sech crazy doin's an' mek us be indigent in ouah ole aige. What Ahwantwith a Doctah? Hanh! Anseh me that! Yo'-all jes' git me a little bit calamus an' some catnip, an' Ah do all th' doctahin' tha's advisable." All this he brought out with difficulty, for his breathing was by no means free.
"He's up to his tricks," said Miss Caroline, contemptuously, to me. Then, to Clem, seeming to draw courage from my presence, "You be quiet, there, you lazy, black good-for-nothing, or I'll get some one here to wear you out!" And Clem was again the vanquished.
"Pneumonia," said Young Doc. "Bad," he added as we stepped into the drawing-room. "Take lots of care."
I thought it as well that Young Doc had come. Old Doc, though well liked, boasted that all any man of his profession needed, really, were calomel and a good knife. Young Doc had always seemed to be subtler. Anyway, he was of a later generation. I learned that Old Doc had scorned to make the call, believing that a "nigger" could not suffer from anything but yellow fever or cracked shins. For this reason he became genuinely interested in Clem's case as it was later reported to him by Young Doc.
To the rest of Little Arcady the case was also of interest. Sympathy had heretofore been with Clem, because Miss Caroline paid him no wages, and was believed to take what he earned from other people.
Now, however, an important number of persons veered—in wonder if not in absolute sympathy. That the woman should watch and nurse the black fellow, apparently with perfect single-heartedness, was not to be squared with any known laws of human association. "Nursing a nigger in her own house with her own hands," was the fashion of describing this untoward spectacle. It was like taking a sick horse into your house, and making play that it was human. The already puzzled town was further mystified, and it is probable that Miss Caroline fell a little in public esteem. Her course was not thought to be edifying. She could have sent Clem to the county poor farm, where he would have been seen to, after a fashion good enough for one of his color, by the proper authorities.
My own bewilderment was at first hardly less than the town's. Had Miss Caroline suddenly changed her manner toward Clem, showing regret, however belated, for her previous abuse of him, I should have understood. That would have been a simple case of awakened sensibility. But she continued to disparage him to his face and to me. She was venomous—scurrilous in her abuse. Yet only with the greatest difficulty could I persuade her to let me share the watch that must be kept over him. She called him an infamous black wretch, in tones befitting her words, but I could not get her to leave him even so long as her own health demanded.
There came nights, however, as the disease ran its course, when she had to give up from sheer lack of force. Then she permitted me to watch, though even at these times she often broke from sleep to come and be assured that the worthless black hound had not changed for the worse.
One dim, early morning, when she thought I had gone, after my night's watch, I returned softly to the half-opened door with a forgotten injunction about the medicines. All night Clem had babbled languidly of many things, of "a hunded thousan' hatchin' aigs," and "a thousan' brillion dollahs," of "Mahstah Jere" and "Little Miss," of a visiting Cousin Peavey whom he had been obliged to "whup" for his repeated misdemeanors; and darkly and often had he whispered, so low I could scarcely hear it, of an enemy that was entering the room with a fell design. "Tha'he is—he go'n' a' sprinkle snake-dust in mah boots—tha' he is—watchout!"
He still maundered weakly as I reached the door, but it was not this that detained me at its threshold. It was Miss Caroline, who had actually knelt at his side. At first I thought she wept over one of his blue-black hands, which she clung eagerly to with both her own. Then I saw that there seemed to be no tears—yet silently, almost impassively, she gave me a sense of hopeless grief that I thought no outburst of weeping could have done.
I wondered wildly then if her fashion of speech for Clem might not mask some real affection for him. But this was unsatisfying. On the spot I gave up all wondering forever about Miss Caroline. I have ever since constrained myself to accept her without question, even in situations of difficulty. There is so much vain knowledge.
That day, too, was the bad day when news came that Little Miss had been stricken with the same dread pneumonia. When she told me this, Miss Caroline had a look in her eyes that I suspect must often have been there in the first half of the sixties. It was calm enough, but there was a resistance in it that promised to be unbreakable. And to my never-ending wonder she seemed still to be more concerned about Clem than about her daughter.
"Will you go to her?" I asked.
She smiled. "That could hardly be afforded just now."
"You could manage it, I think. Clem has some money due from me."
"Even so, I couldn't leave Clem. My daughter will be cared for, but Clem wouldn't have anybody. We'll fight it out on this line, Major."
I now saw that continuous questioning about Miss Caroline would bring one in time to madness, and I was glad of my resolve never again to indulge in this unprofitable occupation.
But even pneumonia has its defeats. Young Doc surprised Old Doc again; for the latter, once convinced that an African could suffer so civilized an affliction as pneumonia, had declined to believe that he could ever "throw it off," and had disclosed good reasons why he could not to an attentive group at the City Drug Store.
Yet after a night when Miss Caroline had refused to let me watch, she met me at the door as Young Doc was leaving. She was wearied but chipper, though there was an unsteady little lift in her voice as she said:—
"That lazy black wretch is going to get well!"
"It's about time," I said grimly. "I've been in a bad way without him. Indeed I'm very glad to hear you say so."
Her eyes twinkled approval upon me, I thought.
"You've behaved excellently, Major. Really, I am glad that we left you that other arm." This was almost in her old manner, though her eyes seemed a little dimmed by her excitement. Then, with a sudden return to the patient:—
"I wonder if you would be good enough to go in and swear at Clem. He's perfectly rational now, and it will hearten him wonderfully. He's dreadfully mortified because he's been sick so long. And it needs a man, you know, really. I'll close the door for you. Do it hard! Call him a damned black hound, if you please, and ask him what he means by it!"
I hurried in, for Miss Caroline's eyes were threatening to betray her.
IN WHICH SOMETHING MUST BE DONE
IN WHICH SOMETHING MUST BE DONE
Clem's prolonged convalescence was a trial to his militant spirit. The month or more of curious weakness in his body, always before so stout, left him with a fear that he had been "pah'lyzed in th' frame." Moreover, there were troubles less intimately personal to him, but not less harassing to the household.
There was Little Miss, who was making a fight like Clem's own in a Baltimore hospital. Each day I bore to Miss Caroline a telegram detailing the progress of her daughter, though it had cost me time and trouble to convince my correspondent that he was not to skimp such encouragement as might be his to offer, merely to comprise it within ten words. There were three days, it is true, when ten words were more than enough in which to be non-committal. And there was a day that came upon the heels of these when the profits of the telegraph company must have been unusual, for only two words came instead of ten—"Recovery doubtful." This might as well have been left unsent, for I tore it up and assured the waiting pair that no news was good news. They tried eagerly to believe this aphorism, which has the authority of age, but which I suspect was coined originally from despair.
The next day's bulletin read "Temperature still up, but making a strong fight." Stupid it was, when these were but eight words, not to have added two more, such as, "Very hopeful." I induced our telegraph operator to rectify this oversight, and felt repaid for my trouble when I showed the message. That last touch seemed to have been needed. Of course Little Miss would make a strong fight. Miss Caroline and Clem both knew that. But they had known other strong fights to be none the less hopeless, and they were grateful for those last two words of qualification.
There were four other days when the report seemed to need judicious editing, and in this I did not prove remiss. As the telegraph company remained indifferent, I could see that no harm was done. For at last came a bulletin of seventeen words which left us assured that Little Miss had conquered. Henceforth we could receive the things without that stifling dread, that eager fearfulness of the eyes to read all the words in one glance. Leisurely could we learn that Little Miss was getting back her strength, and Miss Caroline and I could laugh at Clem's fear that she also would find herself "pah'lyzed in th' frame."
After that Miss Caroline and I were free to consider another matter, weighty enough with pneumonia out of the running. This was a matter of ways and means—of sheer, downright money.
When Clem, in the first days of his sickness, had warned Miss Caroline that she would not be let to waste "all that gold money," his lofty reference, as a matter of cold figures, was to a sum less than nine dollars. I forget the precise amount, but that is near enough—nine dollars, in round numbers. And the winter had been an expensive one.
At the lowest time of doubt, when Miss Caroline had affairs of extreme gravity to face, I had spoken to her incidentally of money that I owed to Clem for services performed, and I had, in fact, paid several instalments of the debt as money seemed to be needed.
When Clem's recovery was assured and I urged Miss Caroline to go to Little Miss, she asked me bluntly what sum I had owed Clem. I felt obliged to confess that it was not more than two hundred dollars.
This must have surprised Miss Caroline as much as it rejoiced her, for she took up the matter with Clem, and in so clumsy a fashion that he, perhaps owing to his enfeebled condition, witlessly made a confession at variance with mine, and with an effect of candor that moved his questioner to take his word rather than that of an officer and a gentleman. Of course this was not at all like Clem. In referring to sums of money due him he had ever been wont to chant them with a bard-like inflation that recognized only sums of a vague but immense rotundity. I had never known him to be thus prosaic, and I suspected that Miss Caroline had, in a sudden impulse of doubt, terrified him into being so brutally explicit.
Whence fell a coldness between Miss Caroline and me, for the discrepancy between Clem's confession and mine was not slight. Even my mutterings about interest having accumulated were put down as the desperate resource of embarrassment. Miss Caroline did not even dignify them with her notice, and the coldness increased.
Yet, while it was a true coldness, it was distinguished by a certain alien quality of warmth, for Miss Caroline, though now on guard against any mere vulgar benevolence of mine, talked to me frankly, as she had never done before, about her situation.
First, it was impossible to think of going to her daughter. There were debts in the town; Clem would be unable to work for many weeks; and not only had Little Miss's contribution from her small wage now failed, but she herself had incurred debts and would be without money to pay them.
My neighbor depicted the gravity of this situation with a spirit that taxed my powers of admiration,—powers not slight, I may explain; for had they not already been developed beyond the ordinary by this same woman? Not even was she downcast in my presence. In fine, she was superbly Miss Caroline to me. If I saw that to herself she was an ill-fated old woman, perversely surviving a wreck with which she should have gone down, alone in a land that seemed unkind because it did not understand, and in desperate straits for the commonest stuff in the world,—why, that was no matter to be opened between us. We affected with mild philosophy to study a situation that not only did not require study but scarcely permitted it by candid souls. But we affected to agree that something must be done, which sounded very well indeed.
As a sign that she bore me no malice it was promised that I might hire a man to plant Clem's garden that spring, with the understanding that I should thus acquire an equity in its product. This seemed to be in the line of that something that must be done, and Miss Caroline and I made much of it, to avoid the situation's more embarrassing aspects.
"If I could only sell something," said my neighbor, with a vacant look about the room—a look of humorous disparagement. "The silver is good, but there's hardly enough of it to pay one of those debts—and I've nothing else but Clem. But if I tried to sell him," she added brightly, "it would only bring on trouble again with your Northern President. I know just how it would be."
We parted on this jest. Miss Caroline, I believe, went to be scolded by Clem for her trifling ways, while I sought out Solon Denney.
When something must be done, I seem never to know what it shall be. I believe Solon is often quite as uncertain, but he will never confess this, so that talk with him under such circumstances stimulates if it does not sustain.
I put Miss Caroline's difficulties before him. As any common catalogue of troubles will not provoke Solon from a happy unconcern which is temperamental, I spared no details in my recital, and I observed at length that my listener was truly aroused to the bad way in which Miss Caroline found herself. He sat forward in his chair, rested one elbow upon his untidy desk, and for several moments of silence jabbed an inky pen rhythmically into the largest rutabaga ever grown in Slocum County. At last he sat back and gazed upon me distantly from inspired eyes. Then, with his characteristic enthusiasm, he exclaimed:—
"Something will have to be done!"
"Wonderful!" I murmured. "Here I've worried over the thing for two months, studied it in court, studied it in my office, studied it in bed—and couldn't make a thing out of it. All at once I am guided to a welling fount of wisdom, and the thing is solved in a flash. Solon, you dazzle me! Denney forever!"
"Now, don't be funny, Calvin—I mean, don't try to be—" but I arose to go.
"You've solved it, Solon.Something must be done.There's the difference between intuition and mere clumsy ratiocination. In another month I might have found this out for myself, but you divine it instantly. You're a clairvoyant. Now I'm going to find Billy Durgin. You've done the heavy work—you've discovered that something must be done. What we need now, I suppose, is a bright young detective to tell us what it is."
But Solon interrupted soothingly. "There, there, something must be done, and, of course, I'll do it."
"What will you do?"
Even then I think he did not know.
"We must use common sense in these matters," he said, to gain time, and narrowed his gaze for an interval of study. At last he drove the pen viciously to its hilt in the rutabaga, and almost shouted:—
"I'll go to see Mrs. Potts!"
Before I could again express my enthusiasm, reawakened by the felicitous adequacy of this device, he had seized his hat and was clattering noisily down the stairway.
Two hours later Solon bustled into my own office, whither I had fled to forget his manifest incompetence. His hat was well back, and he seemed to be inflated with secrecy. I remembered it was thus he had impressed me just previous to thecoupthat had relieved us of Potts. I knew at once that he was going to be mysterious with me.
"I am not to say a word to any one," I began, merely to show him that I was not dense.
He paused, apparently on the point of telling me as much. I saw that I had read him aright.
"I am merely to be quiet and trust everything to you," I continued.
"Oh, well,—if you—"
"One moment—let me take a few more words out of your mouth. You are not certain, I am to remember, that anything will come of it, but you think something will. You think you may saythatmuch. But I am again to remember not to talk about it. There! That's it, isn't it?"
He was entirely serious.
"Well, that'spracticallyit. But I don't mind hinting a little, in strict confidence." He dropped into a chair, sitting earnestly forward.
"You see, Cal, I remembered a little remark Mrs. Potts once made. I believe it was the day after Mrs. Lansdale entertained the ladies' club last summer—I remember she was complaining of a headache—"
"I never knew Mrs. Potts to make a little remark," I said. I was not to be trifled with. Solon grinned.
"Well, perhaps this one wasn't so very little, only I never thought of it again until this morning. It was about Mrs. Lansdale's furniture."
"Indeed," I said in cold disinterest, having designed to be told more.
"Well, Mrs. Potts thinks there may be something in it."
His effort was to seem significant, but those things are apt to fail with me.
"Oh, I see. Well, that's a good idea, Solon, but you and Mrs. Potts are slow. Billy Durgin had the same idea last summer while the furniture was being unloaded. He took a good look at some of those old pieces, and he confided to me in strict secrecy that there were probably missing wills and rolls of banknotes hidden away in them. It seems that they're the kind that have secret drawers. Billy knows a case where a man touched a spring and found thirty thousand dollars in a secret drawer, 'and from there,' as Billy says, 'he fled to Australia.' So you can see it's been thought of. Of course I've never spoken of it, because I promised Billy not to,—but there's nothing in it."
"Bosh!" said Solon.
"Of course it's bosh. I could have told Billy that, but some way I always feel tender about his illusions. You may be sure I've learned enough of the Lansdale family to know that no member of it ever hid any real money—money that wouldspend—and there hasn't been a will missing for at least six generations."
"Bosh again!" said Solon. "It isn't secret drawers!"
"No? What then?"
"Well,—it's worse—and more of it."
"Is that all you have to say?" I asked as he stood up.
"Well, that's all I can say now. We must use common sense in these matters. But—Mrs. Potts has written!" With this cryptic utterance he stalked out.
There had been little need to caution me to secrecy. I was not tempted to speak. Had I known any debtor of Miss Caroline's who would have taken "Mrs. Potts has written" in payment of his account, it might have been otherwise.