Harry Leon Wilson

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It was true that Miss Caroline would have to come alone now, leaving Little Miss still to teach in the school at Baltimore until a day of renewed surplus. This much Clem confided to me in sorrow. I sympathized with him, truly, but I felt it was a fortunate circumstance. I thought that one of the ladies at a time would be as much as Little Arcady could assimilate.
Slowly the house grew into a home awaiting its mistress, a home whose furnished rooms overflowed into others not furnished but merely crowded. ”

“ 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 a long time our ladies were too aghast even to marvel at it intelligibly. When Aunt Delia McCormick in my hearing said, "Well, now, what a world this is!" and Mrs. Westley Keyts answered, "That's very true!" I knew they referred to the Lansdale furniture. It was typical of the prevailing stupefaction.
"It seems that a collector may be a gentleman," said Miss Caroline, "but Mr. Cohen wasn't even a collector!"
Then I told her the considerable sum now to her credit. She drew a long breath and said, "Now!" and Clem, who stood by, almost cried, "Now, Little Miss!" ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ 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." ”

“ 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. ”

“ Blake! To our lost leaders and our deathless lost cause! To Jefferson Davis and Robert Edmund Lee! To the Confederate States of America!"
A black wind seemed to blow across the face of her servitor's fluttering eyelids. But I drank loyally to Mrs. Caroline Lansdale and whatsoever that woman would. I could see that Clem exhaled a deep breath. How long he had held it I know not.
We resumed our seats, and the dinner went forward with my hostess again herself. It was a dinner not heavy but choice, a repast upon which Clem had magically worked all his spells. ”

“ 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 after noon had qualified them to receive its consolations, and they gathered gratefully about. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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—watch out!" ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Even under her double blow, she was stronger than I. She has been stronger ever since, but she suffered more than I was made to. Oh, it was a fine thing for them to do!"
Her voice rose at the last into a little trembling gust of passion, and I saw again the spirit that gave those women the right to stand with the men. ”

“ Where Little Arcady had looked for the best Brussels carpets, there came only dull-colored rugs of a most aged and depressing lack of gayety. As for silver, we knew the worst when Aunt Delia McCormick declared, "They haven't even a swinging ice-pitcher—nothing but thin battered old stuff that was made in the year one!" ”

“ Billy Durgin told me that Cohen and James Walsingham Price left on the night train going East. Billy noticed that Cohen seemed morose, and heard him exclaim something that sounded like "Goniff! " under his breath, as Price turned away from him after a brief chat.
For Little Arcady the appalling wonder was still to dawn. Load after load of the despised furniture went into freight-cars, until the home of Miss Caroline was only comfortably furnished. This was sensational enough—that the things should be thought worth shipping about the country with freights so high. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Not until Clem announced "Mr. Cohen" did the self-confessed collector cease to be a man.
"Not at home," said Miss Caroline, crisply. Price grinned with appreciation and fell to examining the furniture in strange ways.
It was a busy day for him, but I could see that he found it enjoyable, and strangely was it borne in upon me that Miss Caroline's ancient stuff was in some sense desirable. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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," exclaims an obliging fatalist. "The sequence of every one of those cards was determined when we were yet star-dust." ”

“ 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. ”