The Boss of Little Arcady/Chapter 25
The case of Fatty Budlow
Lest Miss Katharine Lansdale seem unduly formidable, I should, perhaps, say that I appeared to be alone in finding her so. Little Arcadians of my own sex younger than myself—and, if I may suggest it, less discerning—were not only not menaced, but she invited them with a cordiality in which the keenest eye among them could detect no flaw. Miss Lansdale's mother had also pleased the masculine element of the town at her first progress through its pleasant streets. But Miss Caroline, despite many details of dress and manner that failed interestingly to corroborate the fact, was an old woman, and one whose way of life made her difficult of comprehension to the Little Country. Socially and industrially, one might say, she did not fit the scheme of things as the town had been taught to conceive it. Whereas, her daughter was a person readily to be understood in all parts of the world where men have eyes—as well by the homekeeping as by the travelled. Eustace Eubanks, more or less a man of the world by virtue of that adventurous trip to the Holy Land, understood her at one glance, as did Arthur Updyke, who had fared abroad to the college of pharmacy and knew things. But she was also lucid as crystal to G. Brown and Creston Fancett, whose knowledge of the outside world was somewhat affected by their experience of it, which was nothing. To all seven of the ages was this woman comprehensible. Old Bolivar Kent, eighty-six and shuffling his short steps to the grave not far ahead, understood her with one look; the but adolescent Guy McCormick, hovering tragically on the verge of his first public shave, divined her quite as capably; the middle-yeared Westley Keyts read her so unerringly on a day when she first regaled his vision that he toiled for half an hour as one entranced, disengaging what he believed to be porter-house steaks long after the porter-house line in the beef under his hand had been passed.
In short, Miss Lansdale was understood spontaneously—to borrow a phrase from the Argus—"by each and all who had the good fortune to be present," for she was dowered with that quick-drawing charm which has worked a familiar spell upon the sons of men in all times. She was incontestably feminine. She gave the woman-call. That she seemed to give it against her wish,—without intention,—that I was alone in detecting this, were trifles beside the point. Masculine Little Arcady cared not that she had been less successful than the late Colonel Potts, for example, in preserving the truly Greek spirit—cared naught for this so long as, meaningly or otherwise, she uttered the immemorial woman-call in its true note wheresoever she fared.
And, curiously, since Miss Lansdale did not appear formidable to masculine Little Arcady—with one negligible exception—she seemed to try perversely not to be so. She was amazingly gracious to it—still with one exception. She melted to frivolity and the dance of mirth. She affected joy in its music and confessed to a new feeling for Jerusalem after attending a lawn party at which Eustace Eubanks did his best to please. She spoke of this to Eustace with a crafty implication that it had remained for him to interpret the antique graces of that storied place to a world all too heedless. Eustace himself felt not only a renewed interest in the land exploited by his magic lantern, but he began to view all the rest of the world in a new and rosy light, of which Miss Lansdale was the iridescent globe that diffused and subdued it to the mellow hue of romance.
It is impossible to believe that Eustace was ever at any pains to conceal the effects of this astral phenomenon from his family, for its members were very quickly excited. If in that vale the woman-call could be heard by ears attuned to its haunting cadences, so also did the frightened mother-call echo its equally primitive note, accompanied by the less well-known sister-call of warning and distress.
The truth is that Eustace was becoming harder to manage with each recurring crisis. For testimony in the present instance, I need only adduce that he wrote poetry, more or less, after meeting Miss Lansdale but a scant half-dozen times. This came to me in confidence, however, and the obliquity of it spread no farther beyond the family lines.
Fluttering with alarm, the mother of Eustace approached me as one presumably familiar with the power of the Lansdales to work disaster in a peaceful and orderly family. She sought to know if I could not prevent her boy from "making a fool of himself." It was never her way to bother with many words when she knew the right few.
With an air that signified her intention of letting me know the worst at once, Mrs. Eubanks drew from her bead reticule a sheet of paper scribbled over in the handwriting of her misguided offspring. It was a rondeau; I knew that by the shape, and the mother apologized for the indelicacy of it before permitting my own cheeks to blush thereat. The dominant line of the composition I saw to be—
"When love lights night to be its day."
I turned from the stricken mother to cough deprecatingly when I had read. She likewise had the delicacy to turn away and cough. But an emergency of this momentous import must be discussed in plain terms, however disconcerting the details, and Mrs. Eubanks had nerved herself for the ordeal.
"I can't think," she began, "where the boy learned such things!"
I had not the courage to tell her that they might be entirely self-taught under certain circumstances.
"Such shameless, brazen things!" she persisted. "We have always been so careful of Euty—striving to keep him—well, wholesome and pure, you understand, Major Blake."
"There are always dangers," I said, but only because she had stopped speaking, and not in any hope of instructing her.
"If only we can keep him from making a fool of himself—"
"It seems rather late," I said, this time with profound conviction. "See there!"
Upon the margin of that captured sheet Eustace had exposed, as it were, the very secret mechanics of his passion. There were written tentative rhymes, one under another, as "Kate—mate—Fate—late"—and eke an unblushing "sate." Also had he, in the frenzy of his poetic rapture, divined and indicated the technical affinities existing among words like "bliss," "kiss," and "miss."
Interference, however delicately managed, seemed hopeless after that, and I said as much. But I added: "Of course, if you let him alone, he may come back to his better self. Perhaps the young lady herself may prove to be your ally."
"Indeed not! She has set out deliberately to ensnare my poor Euty," said the mother, with an incisive drawing in of her expressively thin lips. "I knew it the very first evening I saw them together."
"Mightn't it have been sheer trifling on her part?" I suggested.
"Can you imagine that young woman daring to trifle with Eustace Eubanks?" she demanded.
I could, as a matter of fact; but as her query seemed to repel such a disclosure, I lied.
"True," I said, "she would never dare. I didn't think of that."
"With all her frivolity and lightness of manner and fondness for dress, she must have some sense of fitness—"
"She must, indeed!"
"She could not go that far!"
"Certainly not!"
"Even if she does wear too many ribbons and laces and fancy furbelows, with never a common-sense shoe to her foot!"
"Even if she does," I assented warmly.
And thus we were compelled to leave it. In view of those verses I could suggest no plan for relief, and my one poor morsel of encouragement had been stonily rejected.
Eustace went the mad pace. So did Arthur Updyke. It was rather to be expected of Arthur, however. His duties at the City Drug Store seemed to encourage a debonair lightness of conduct. He treated his blond ringlets assiduously from the stock of pomades; he was as fastidious about his finger-nails as we might expect one to be in an environment of manicure implements and nail beautifiers; it was his privilege to make free with the varied assortment of perfumes—a privilege he forewent in no degree; his taste in tooth-powders was widely respected; and in moments of leisure, while he leaned upon a showcase awaiting custom, he was wont to draw a slender comb from an upper waistcoat pocket and pass it delicately through his small but perfect mustache. Naturally enough, it was said by the ladies of Little Arcady that Arthur's attentions were never serious,—"except them he pays to himself!" Aunt Delia McCormick would often add, for that excellent woman was not above playing venomously with familiar words.
Also did G. Brown and Creston Fancett go the same mad pace. These four were filled with distrust of one another, but as they composed our male quartette, they would gather late on summer nights and conduct themselves in a manner to make me wish that old Azariah Prouse's peculiar belief as to house structure might have included a sound-proof fence about his premises. For, on the insufficient stretch of lawn between that house and my own, the four rivals sang serenades.
"She sleeps—my lady sleeps," they sang, with a volume that seemed bound to insure their inaccuracy as to the lady, and which assuredly left them in the wrong as to her mother's attorney—if their song meant in the least to report conditions at large. As this was, however, the one occasion when they felt that none of the four had any advantage over his fellows, they made the most of it. Then, in the dead of night, I would be very sorry that I had not counselled the mother of Eustace Eubanks to send him around the world on a slow sailing ship; for it was his voice, even in songs of sleep, that rendered this salutary exercise most difficult.
On one of these wakeful summer nights, however, I received a queer little shock. Perhaps I half dreamed it in some fugitive moment of half sleep; but it was as if I were again an awkward, silent boy, worshipping a girl new to the school, a girl who wore two long yellow braids. I worshipped her from afar so that she saw me not, being occupied with many adorers less timid, who made nothing of snatching a hair ribbon. But the face in that instant of dream was the face of Miss Katharine Lansdale, and coupled with the vision was a prescience that in some later life I should again look back and see myself as now, a grown but awkward boy, still holding aloof—still adoring from some remote background while other and bolder gallants captured trophies and lightly carolled their serenades. It seemed like borrowing trouble to look still farther into the future, but the vision was striking. Surely, History does repeat itself. I should have made this discovery for myself had it not been exploited before my day. For on the morrow I found my woman child on the Lansdale lawn when I went home in the afternoon. She had now reached an age when she was beginning to do "pretties" with her lips as she talked—almost at the age when I had first been enraptured by her mother, with the identical two braids, also the tassels dangling from her boot tops. This latter was unexciting as a coincidence, however. I myself had deliberately produced it.
Miss Lansdale turned from talk with the child to greet me. Her face was so little menacing that I called her "Miss Katharine" on the spot. But my business was with the child.
"Lucy," I said, as I took the wicker chair by the hammock in which they both lounged, "there is a boy at school who looks at you a great deal when you're not watching him—you catch him at it—but he never comes near you. He acts as if he were afraid of you. He is an awkward, stupid boy. If he gets up to recite about geography, or about 'a gentleman sent his servant to buy ten and five-eighths yards of fine broadcloth,' or anything of that sort, and if he happens to catch your eye at the moment, he flounders like a caught fish, stares hard at the map of North America on the wall, and sits down in disgrace. And when the other boys are chasing you and pulling off your hair ribbons, he mopes off in a corner of the school yard, though he looks as if he'd like to shoot down all the other boys in cold blood."
"He has nice hair," said my woman child.
"Oh, he has! Very well; does his name happen to be 'Horsehead' or anything like that—the name the boys call him by, you know?"
"Fatty—Fatty Budlow, if that's the one you mean. Do you know him, Uncle Maje?"
"Better than any boy in the world! Haven't I been telling you about him?"
"Once he brought a bag of candy to school, and I thought he was coming up to hand it to me, but he turned red in the face and stuffed it right into his pocket."
"He meant to give it to you, really—he bought it for you—but he couldn't when the time came."
"Oh, did he tell you?"
"It wasn't necessary for him to tell me. I know that boy, I tell you, through and through. Lucy, do you think you could encourage him a little, now and then—be sociable with him—not enough to hurt, of course? You don't know how he'd appreciate the least kindness. He might remember it all his life."
"I might pat his hair—he has such nice hair—if he wouldn't know it—but of course he would know it, and when he looks at you, he is so queer—"
"Yes, I know; I suppose it is hopeless. Couldn't you even ask him to write in your autograph album?"
"Y-e-s—I could, only he'd be sure to write something funny like 'In Memory's wood-box let me be a stick.' He always does write something witty, and I don't much care for ridiculous things in my album; I'm being careful with it."
"Well, if he's as witty as that in your album, it will be to mask a bleeding heart. I happen to know that in a former existence he was never even asked to write, though he always hoped he might be."
"I'm sorry if you like him, Uncle Maje, but I'm positive that Fatty Budlow is not a boy I could ever feel deeply for. I don't believe our acquaintance will even ripen into friendship," and she looked with profound eyes into the wondrous, opening future.
"Of course it won't," I said. "I might have known that. 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."
"Do you know Fatty Budlow?" asked my surprised woman child of Miss Lansdale. But that young woman only reached out one foot to point its toe idly at a creeping green worm and turn its vagrant course. The toe was by no means common-sense, and the heel was simply idiotic.
"Of course she knows him," I said; "she knows he would give his right hand for her, which is a good deal under the circumstances, and she very properly despises him for it. She'd take her picture away from him if she could."
"She wouldn't," said Miss Lansdale, with a gesture of her foot that disconcerted me.
"Miss Kate," I said, "I have lived my life in terror of seeing one of those squashy green worms meet a fearful disaster in my presence. Would you mind—"
With a fillip of the bronzed toe she sent the amazed worm into a country that must have been utterly strange to it.
"She'd take it back quickly enough if she knew what he makes of it," I said, returning to the picture; "if she knew that he had kept it ever since he learned that agriculture, mining, and ship-building are principal industries—only at first it had two long yellow braids, and tassels dangling from its boot tops."
"My mother had beautiful long golden hair," said the woman child, adding simply, "papa says mine is just like it."
Miss Lansdale regarded me narrowly.
"You get me all mixed up," she said.
"I like to. You're heady then—like your mother's punch when it's 'all mixed up.'"
"I must put in more ice," remarked Miss Lansdale, calmly.
"Fatty Budlow is so serious," said the woman child, suspecting that the talk had drifted away from her.
"It's his curse," I admitted. "If he weren't an A No. 1 dreamer, he'd be too serious to live, but he goes dreaming and maundering along—dreaming that things are about as he would like to have them. He sees your face and Miss Lansdale's, and then they get mixed up in a queer way, and Miss Kate's face comes out of the picture with such a look in the eyes that a man of ordinary spirit would call her 'Little Miss' right off without ever stopping to think; but of course this Fatty or Horsehead or whatever it is can't say it right out, so he says it to himself about twenty-three or twenty-four thousand times a day, as nearly as he can reckon—he always was weak in arithmetic."
"You might let him write in your autograph album," said the woman child, brightly, to Miss Lansdale.
"I know what he'd write if he got the chance," I added incitingly. But it did not avail. Miss Lansdale remained incurious and merely said, "Long golden braids," as one trying to picture them.
"And later a little row of curls over each ear, and a tiny chain with a locket around the neck. I had a picture once—"
"You have had many pictures."
"Yes—two are many if you've had nothing else."
But she was now regarding the woman child with a curious, close look, almost troubled in its intensity.
"Do you look like your mother?" she asked.
"Papa says I do, and Uncle Maje thinks so too. She was very pretty." This came with an unconscious placidity.
"She looks almost as her mother's picture did," I said.
When the child had gone, Miss Lansdale searched my face long before speaking. She seemed to hesitate for words, and at length to speak of other matters than those which might have perplexed her.
"Why did they call you Horsehead?" she asked almost kindly.
"I never asked. It seemed to be a common understanding. Doubtless there was good reason for it, as good as there is for calling Budlow 'Fatty.'"
"What did you do?" she asked again.
"I went to the war with what I could take—nothing but a picture."
"And you lost that?"
" Yes—under peculiar circumstances. It seemed a kind thing to do at the time."
"And you came back with—
"With yours, Little Miss!"
Some excitement throbbed between us so that I had involuntarily emphasized my words. Briefly her eyes clung to mine, and very slowly we relaxed from that look.
"I only wanted to say," she began presently, "that I shall have to believe your absurd tale of my picture being with you before you saw me. Something makes me credit it—a strange little notion that I have carried that child's picture in my own mind."
"We are even, then," I answered, "only you are thinking more things than you say. That isn't fair."
But she only nodded her head inscrutably.