The Boss of Little Arcady/Chapter 15
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'n that. 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' have no 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 it was heard 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 the Argus office. 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 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. He could put up a 'Come one, come all!' sign and still not get us into 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 States Is
"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 States is, 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 was capable of 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 the Argus sighed 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 the Argus a 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 will do, Calvin!" said his father, shortly. It seemed to me that the still young life of Solon was fast being blighted.