Harry Leon Wilson

“ She shot a look at Clem, under which he blanched visibly, then her eyes were again upon me and she smiled with a rare art.
"Really, you will overlook an old woman's weakness."
It was the inimical, remote, icy superiority of her tone that nettled me—perhaps her implied assumption that I would not know it for such. But also I felt curiously stricken by that swift withdrawal of her confidence, for Mrs. Caroline Lansdale had won me by her laugh and blush of ancient girlishness. Further, I would not now be hurt by any woman, though she were ten times my years, without a show of defence. ”

“ 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." ”

“ They starred the bank that fell away from my porch to the clear-watered river, and they sang of the young spirit that lives in this old earth so deceptively, defacing it with false scars of age, and craftily permitting us to count years by the thousand, yet remaining always as fresh in itself as on the primal morning when the world was found good by that ill-fated but joyous first pair of lovers. I marvel that so many are fooled by the trick; how so few of us detect that the soul of it all is ageless—has never even wearied. ”

“ 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 song suggestive. Her eyes glistened when she said it, and Marcella felt like pinning a white ribbon to her then and there. ”

“ So apprehensive was I that I lingered an hour on my little riverside porch, dreading the events that I felt the day must unfold. Inevitably, however, I was drawn to the centre of things. Turning down Main Street at the City Hotel corner, on the way to my office, I had to pass the barber-shop of Harpin Cust, in front of which I found myself impelled to stop. Looking over the row of potted geraniums in the window, I beheld Colonel Potts in the chair, swathed to the chin in the barber's white cloth, a gaze of dignified admiration riveted upon his counterpart in the mirror. ”

“ It was an early morning hour, when it was easy to believe in the perfect fitness of Little Arcady's name; an hour in a time when the Potts-troubled waters had been mercifully stilled by the hand of God; an hour when the spirit of each Little Arcadian might share to its own fulness in the large serenity of the ageless world-soul.
I recalled Mrs. Potts's paper on "The Lesson of Greek Art," which had enriched two columns of the Argus after its reading to the ladies of the Literary and Home Study Club. ”

“ I thought it kind to hesitate for the word, but Miss Lansdale said, again confidently:—
"Oh, but I really am," and this with a finality that seemed to close the incident.
Her voice had the warm little roughness of a thrush's, which sings through a throat that is loosely strung with wires of soft gold.
"In my day," began Miss Caroline; but here I rebelled, no longer perceiving any good reason to be overborne by her daughter. I could endure only a certain amount of that.
"Your day is to-day," I interrupted, "and to-morrow and many to-morrows. You are a woman bereft of all her yesterdays. ”

“ 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. ”

“ He will continue through the ages to be an impossible boy. Miss Lansdale feels the same way about him. Poor Fatty or Horsehead or whatever they call him stands off and glares at her, and can't say his lesson when he catches her eye—only he seldom does catch it, because she's so busy with other boys of more spirit who crowd about her and snatch hair ribbons and sing 'My lady sleeps' until no one else can. ”

“ 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. ”

“ And I waited no more than a hundred seconds in her presence to applaud his discernment.
I had pictured an old woman—some aged trifle of an elder day, sad, withered, devitalized, intemperately reminiscent—steeped in traditions that would leave her formidable, and impracticable as a friend to me. I had fancied her thus, from Clem's fragmentary and chance descriptions and my own knowledge of what she should be by all laws of the probable; and she was not as I had evolved her.
The day she came was one of Little Arcady's best ”

“ I say it in confidence, but I have again and again been made the sport of a wayward and wanton ridicule. I say, gentlemen, I have always conducted myself as only a Potts knows how to conduct himself—and yet I have been pestered by cheap flings at my personal bearing. Is this courtesy, is it common fairness, is it the boasted civilization of our nineteenth century?"
"AND YET I HAVE BEEN PESTERED BY CHEAP FLINGS AT MY PERSONAL BEARING."
Hoarse expressions of incredulity, of execration, of disgust, came from the crowd as it raised glasses once more. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In a setting less prosaic than Little Arcady, where events might be of a story-fitness, that lover would have been alive by a happy chance, estranged by the misunderstanding but splendidly faithful, and I should have been helper and interested witness to an ideal reconciliation; thereafter to play out my game with a full heart, though with an exterior placidly unconcerned. But with us events halt always a little short of true romance. They are unexcitingly usual. ”

“ While our hero stalked ahead, stroking his luxuriant whiskers ever and anon, we pursued him at an interval so great that not the most alert citizen of Little Arcady could have suspected this sinister undercurrent to his simple life.
It is a long walk to the cemetery, but we reached it to find Billy seated on the steps that lead over the fence, still shielded by his hairy envelope.
"A tough case!" he whispered as we sat by him. "Our man has his spies out, and my every step is dogged both night and day." ”

“ Arcady of the Little Country, however, knows there is neither bitterness nor real cynicism in Solon Denney, founder, editor, and proprietor of the Little Arcady Argus; motto, "Hew to the Line, Let the Chips Fall Where they May!" Indeed, we do know Solon. Often enough has the Argus hewn inexorably to the line, when that line led straight through the heart of its guiding genius and through the hearts of us all. ”

“ Miss Caroline was still where she should have remained in the first place.
"I am very happy, Little Miss!"
"You shall be still happier, Calvin Blake. I haven't waited this long without knowing—"
"Nor I! I know, too."
"I hope Jim will be glad," she suggested.
"He'll be delighted, and vastly relieved. It has puzzled him fearfully of late to see you living away from me."
We sat down, for there seemed much to say.
"I believed more than you did, with all your game," she taunted me.
"But you broke the rules. Anybody can believe anything if he can break all the rules." ”

“ Still further, to make those days not bad days, Miss Kate would cross our little common ground of an early evening to where I played the game on my porch. Often I did this until dusk obscured the faces of the cards. I faintly suspected in the course of these bird-like visits a caprice in Miss Kate to know what it might be that I preferred to the society of her mother on her own porch. She appeared to be more curious than interested. She promptly made those observations which the unillumined have ever considered it witty to make concerning those who play at solitaire. ”

“ Suddenly I knew that honor was not in me. She walked within my lines in imminent peril of the deadliest character. But there was no sign of fear in the look she held me with, and I knew she had not sensed her danger.
"You should play your stupid game to win," she repeated terribly. "You are too ingenious at finding balm in defeat." That little golden roughness in her voice seemed to grate on my bared heart. I left her eyes with a last desperate appeal to the game. My hand shook as it laid down the final eight cards. ”

“ I now saw that blasting was too merciful. He should be removed by a slower process if the thing could as easily be arranged.
That was a bitter recess, even though I learned her wonderful name and the enchanted state "back East" from which she had come. A still more bitter experience awaited me when we were again in the schoolroom. Miss Berham, fastening a steely gaze upon Solon Denney, launched heaven upon him from tightly drawn lips, without in the least meaning to do so.
"Solon Denney, you may return that ribbon at once to its owner!" ”

“ She succeeded admirably, but the smile could not always be there, and ghosts of her dead years came stealthily to haunt her face as surely as the smile went.
When Clem, with an air of having had word from a numerous kitchen crew, stood before us and bowed out, "Miss Cahline, dinneh is suhved!" I gave her my arm with a feeling of vast relief. Not only was Miss Caroline an abiding joy, but apprehension as to my modest complicity in her late distress had, too, evidently been groundless. ”

“ 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. ”

“ And it was behavior that I could palliate only by reminding myself constantly that she was not only a woman but the daughter of Miss Caroline, and by that token subject inevitably to certain infirmities of character. And still did she at times evince for me that shyness which only enhanced my peril.
I managed to refrain, though in so grievous a plight, from wishing for another war; though I did concede that if we must ever again be cursed with war, it might as well come now as later. ”

“ He made it a point to encounter the Colonel on an early day and to address him on Main Street in tones that lacked the least affectation of suavity or diplomatic guile. He had seen diplomacy tried and found wretchedly wanting. He would have no more of it ever. Like the straightaway man he was, he went to the meat of the matter.
"You squandered that hundred dollars we give you to git out of town on," he burst forth to Potts, breathing with an ominous difficulty.
"You just wait till you hear the worst of it," answered Potts, as he confidingly dusted the shoulder of Westley's coat. ”

“ The guise of Solon's subtlety, the touch of his iron hand in a glove of softest velvet, had been in this wise: he had pointed out to the Colonel that there were richer fields of endeavor to the west of us; newer, larger towns, fitter abodes for a man of his parts; communities which had honors and emoluments to lavish upon the worthy,—prizes which it would doubtless never be in our poor power to bestow.
Potts was stirred by all this, but he was not blinded to certain disadvantages,—"a stranger in a strange land," etc., while in Little Arcady he had already "made himself known." ”

“ 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 foresaw, not without a certain wicked cheerfulness, that, even after the coming of Miss Caroline, Clem would be forced to pander to my breakfast appetites for the slight betterment it made in his fortunes, even must this be done surreptitiously. And at least one dinner was secured to me beyond the coming of this mistress ”

“ Miss Caroline sat in Solon's battered chair with the missing castor, surveyed his exchange-laden desk with a humorous eye, and seized the last Argus, 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. ”