The Boss of Little Arcady Part 28

"You have saved me again," he said warmly, in the midst of Clem's dinner. "I a.s.sure you, Major, that hotel is infamous. I'm surprised, you know, that something isn't done about it by the authorities."

I had to confess that the City Hotel was very highly regarded by most of our citizens.

Again, after a brief interval of stupefaction, did James Walsingham Price call upon his Maker. "And yet," he murmured, "we are spending millions annually to impose mere theology upon savages far less benighted. Think for a moment what a t.i.the of that money would do for these poor people. Take the matter of green salads alone--to say nothing of soups--don't you have so simple a thing as lettuce here?"

"We do," I said, "but it's regarded as a trifle. They put vinegar and sugar on it and cut it up with their knives."

My guest shuddered.

"I dare say it's hopeless, but I shall always be glad to remember that _you_ exist away from your City Hotel."

Thus did we reach the coffee and some cognac which the late L.Q. Peavey had gifted me with by the hands of his estimable kinswoman.

"And now to business," said my guest. His whimsical gray eyes had become studious and detached from our surroundings. He had a generous mouth, which he seemed habitually to sew up in a close-drawn seam, but this would suddenly and pleasantly rip in moments of forgetfulness. Being the collector at this moment, the mouth was tightly st.i.tched.

"Let me begin this way," he said. "There are exactly six pieces in that house that will prevent my being honest so long as they are not mine. I am not unmindful of your succor, Major. I'll prove that to you if you look me up in town,--send me a wire and a room shall be waiting for you,--and I am enraptured by that small and lively brown lady.

Nevertheless I shall remain a collector and, humanly speaking, an ingrate, a wolf, a caitiff, until those six articles are mine. Make them mine, and for the remainder of that stuff you shall have the benefit of an experience that has been of incredible cost. Accept my figure, and I promise you as man to man to de-Cohenize myself utterly."

"They are yours," I said--"what are they and what is the figure?

Clem--Mr. Price's gla.s.s."

"There--you disarm me. One bit of haggling or hesitation might have hardened me even now; the serpent within me would have lifted its head and struck. But you have saved yourself--and very well for that! The articles are those six ball-and-claw-foot chairs with violin backs. I will pay fifty dollars apiece for those. Remember--it is the voice of Cohen. The chairs are worth more--some day they'll fetch twice that; but, really, I must throw a sop to that collector-Cerberus within me.

He's ent.i.tled to something. He had the wit to fetch me here."

"The chairs are yours," I said, wondering if I had not mistaken his offer, but determining not to betray this.

"A little memorandum of sale, if you please--and I'll give you my check.

That larger sideboard would also have stood in the way, but those gla.s.s handles aren't the originals."

The formality was soon despatched, and my curious friend became truly human.

"Now, Blake, this is from the grateful wretch whose life you have not only saved but enriched. Well, there's an excellent lot of stuff there.

I've got the pick, from a collector's standpoint--though not from a money valuation. I can't tell what it will bring, but enough to put our youngish old friend easy for some time to come. You box it up, as much as she wants to let go, and send it to the Empire Auction Rooms--here's the card. They're plain auction-room people, you understand,--wouldn't hesitate to rob you in a genteel, auction way,--but I'll be there and see that they don't. Some of those other pieces I may want, but I'll take a bidding chance on them like a man, and I'll watch the whole thing through and see that it's straight."

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.

But after a few weeks came tales that atrophied belief--tales corroborated by a printed catalogue and by certain deposits of money in our bank to the account of Miss Caroline. That six wretched chairs, plain to ugliness, had sold for three hundred dollars spread consternation. The plain old sideboard for a hundred and ten dollars only fed the flames. But there had been sold what the catalogue described as "A Colonial sofa with carved dolphin arms, winged claw feet, and carved back" for two hundred and ten dollars, and after that the emotions aroused in Little Arcady were difficult to cla.s.sify. Upon that very sofa most of the ladies of Little Arcady had sat to pity Miss Caroline for being "lumbered" with it. Again, a "Colonial highboy, hooded," recalled as an especially awkward thing, and "five mahogany side chairs" had gone for three hundred and eighty dollars. A "Heppelwhite mahogany armchair," remembered for its faded red satin, had veritably brought one hundred and sixty dollars; and a carved rosewood screen, said to be of Empire design, but a shabby thing, had sold astonishingly for ninety dollars. A "Hogarth chair-back settee" for two hundred and ten dollars, and "four Hogarth side chairs" for three hundred and fifteen dollars only darkened our visions still further.

Some of us had known that Hogarth was an artist, but not that he had found time from his drawing to make furniture. Of Heppelwhite we had heard not at all, although twelve arm-chairs said to be his had been by some one thought to be worth around seven hundred dollars. Nor of any Sheraton did we know, though one of his sideboards and a "pair of Sheraton knife urns" fetched the incredible sum of five hundred and fifty dollars. Chippendale was another name unfamiliar in Sloc.u.m County, but Chippendale, it seemed, had once made a wing book-case which was now worth two hundred and forty dollars of some enthusiast's money. After that a Chippendale settee for a hundred and forty dollars and an "Empire table with 1830 base" for ninety-three dollars seemed the merest trifles of this insane outbreak.

The amount netted by the late owner of these things was reported with various exaggerations, which I never saw any good reason to correct. As I have said, the thing was, and promises to remain forever in Little Arcady, a phenomenon to be explained by no known natural laws. 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!"

The Book of LITTLE MISS

CHAPTER XXII

THE TIME OF DREAMS

I had Clem to myself for a time. Little Miss, it seemed, was not yet rugged enough for travel into the far Little Country. Nor was she at once to be convinced that she might safely leave her work. I suspect that she had found cause in the past to rank her mother with Clem as a weigher and disburser of moneys. I noticed that she chose to accept Miss Caroline's earliest letters about their good fortune with a sort of half-tolerant attention, as an elder listens to the wonder-tales of an imaginative child, or as I had long listened to Clem's own dreamy-eyed recital of the profits already his from "brillions" of chickens not yet come even to the egg-stage of their careers.

Not until Miss Caroline had ceased from large and beauteous phrases about "the great good fortune that has befallen us in the strangest manner"--not until she descended to actual, dumfounding figures with powerful little dollar-marks back of them, did her daughter seem to permit herself the sweet alarms of hope. Even in that moment she did not forget that she knew her own mother, for she took the precaution to elicit a confirmatory letter from her mother's attorney, under guise of thanking him for the friendly interest he had "ever manifested" in the welfare of the Lansdales.

It occurred to me that Little Miss had been endowed, either by nature or experience, with a marked distrust of mere seemings. The impression conveyed to me by her unenthusiastic though skilfully polite letter was of one who had formed the habit of doubting beyond her years. These I judged to be twenty-eight or thereabouts, while her powers of restraint under provocation to believe savored of more years than even her mother could claim. I had myself been compelled to note the value of negative views, save in that inner and lonely world where I abode of nights and Sundays; I, too, had proved the wisdom of much doubting as to actual, literal events; but Little Miss was making me think of myself as almost raw-and-twenty credulous. In a lawyer's letter of formal conciseness, devoid of humanities, maintaining to the end an atmosphere of unemotional fact and figure that descended not even to conventional felicitations upon the result, I therefore acquainted Little Miss with the situation. So nearly perfect was this letter that it caused her to refer to me, in a later communication to Miss Caroline, as "your dry-and-dusty counting-machine of a lawyer, who doubtless considers the multiplication table as a cycle of sonnets." That, after I had merely determined to meet her palpable needs and had signed myself her obedient servant!

But I had convinced her. She admitted as much in words almost joyous, so that Miss Caroline went to be with her--to fetch her when she should be strong enough for the adventure of travel.

There were three weeks of my neighbor's absence--three weeks in which Clem "cleaned house", polished the battered silver, "neated" the rooms, and tried to arrange the remaining furniture so that it would look like a great deal of furniture indeed; three weeks in which Little Arcady again decked itself with June garlands and seemed not, at first glance, to belie its rather pretentious name; three weeks when I studied a calendar which impa.s.sively averred that I was thirty-five, a mirror which added weight to that testimony, and the game which taught me with some freshness at each failure that the greater game it symbolizes is not meant to be won--only to be played forever with as eager a zest, as daring a hope, as if victory were sure.

The season at hand found me in sore need of this teaching. It was then that errant impulse counselled rebellion against the decrees of calendar and looking-gla.s.s. If vatted wine in dark cellars turns in its bed and mutters seethingly at this time, in a mysterious, intuitive sympathy with the blossoming grape, a man free and above ground, with eyes to behold that miracle, may hardly hope to escape an answering thrill to its call.

Wherefore I played the game diligently, torn by the need of its higher lessons. And at last I was well instructed by it, as all may be who approach it thus, above a trivial l.u.s.t for winning.

Two of us played in that provocative June. One was myself, alert for auspicious falls of the cards, yet stoical and undepressed when a deal promising to be almost too easy for interest was suddenly blocked by some trifling card. Thus was I schooled to expectations of a wise shallowness, not so deep but that they might be overrun by the moderate flow of human happiness. Thus one learned to expect little under much wanting, and to find his most certain profit in observing the freshness of those devices which left him frustrated. Jim, the other player of us, chased gluttonous robins on the lawn, ever with an indifferent success, but with as undimmed a faith, as fatuous a certainty, as the earliest of G.o.ds could have wished to see. And between us we achieved a conviction that the greater game is worth playing, even when one has discovered its terrific percentage of failures.

I was not unpleased to be alone during this period of discipline when my soul was perforce purged of its troublesome ferments. It was well that my neighbor should have gone where she might distract me never so little.

For it was at the season when Nature brews the irresistible philter.

Always, I resolved to forego it like a man; always, like a man, I was overborne by the ancient longing, the formless "heimweh" that haunts the hearts of the unmated, and which in my own case made short work of stoic resolutions. And, since the game had taught me that yielding--where opposition is fated to avail not--is graceful in proportion to its readiness, I surrendered as quietly as might be.

One woman face had been wholly mine for hidden cherishing through all the years. A woman face, be it understood, not the face of a woman. At first it had been that; but with the years it had lost the lines that made it but that one. Imperceptibly, it had taken on an alien, vague softness that but increased its charm while diminishing its power to hurt.

It brought me now only a pensive pleasure and no feeling more acute. It was my ashes of roses, the music of my first love, its poignancies softened by time and memory into an ineffable, faint melody; it was the moon that drenched my bygone youth with wonder-light--a dream-face, exquisite as running water, unfolding flowers and those other sweets that poets try in vain to entangle in the meshes of word and rhythm.

This was the face my fancy brought to go with me into every June garden of familiar surprises. All of which meant that I was a poor thing of clay and many dolors, who still perversely made himself believe that somewhere between him and G.o.d was the one woman, breathing and conscious, perhaps even longing. More plainly, it meant that I was a man whose gift for self-fooling promised ably to survive his hair.

Gravitation would presently pull down my shoulders, my face would flaunt "the wrinkled spoils of age", my voice would waver ominously, and I should forfeit the dignities befitting even this decay by still playing childish games of belief with some foolish dog. I would be a village "character" of the sort that is justly said to "dodder." And the judicious would shun observation by me, or, if it befell them, would affect an intense preoccupation lest I halt and dodder to them of a past unromantically barren.

There were moments in which I made no doubt of all this. But I fought them off as foolishly as did Jim his own intervals of clear seeing.

Sometimes in a half doze he breathes a long, almost human sigh of perfect and despairing comprehension, as if the whole dead weight of his race's history flashed upon him; as if the woful failure of his species to achieve anything worth while, and the daily futilities of himself as an individual dog were suddenly revealed. In such instants he knows, perhaps, that there is little reward in being a dog, unless you cheat yourself by believing more than the facts warrant. But presently he is up to dash at a bird, with a fine forgetfulness, quite as startled by the trick of flight as in his first days. And I, envying him his gift of credulity, weakly strive for it.

As I have said, I had noted that in these free dreamings of mine the painted face above my neighbor's mantel seemed to have had a place long before I looked upon its actual lines. This perplexed me not a little; that the face should seem to have been familiar before I had seen it--the portrait, that it should have blended with and then almost replaced another's, so that now the woman face I saw was eloquent of two, though fittingly harmonized in itself. Must I lay to the philter's magic this audacious notion; that the face of Little Miss had tangibly come to me in some night of the mind? Sober, I was loath to commit this absurdity; but breasting drunkenly that tide of dreams, it ceased to be absurd.

And so I had plunged into the current again one early evening when the growing things seemed to have stopped reluctantly for rest, when the robins had fluted of their household duties the last time for the day, and when only the songs of children at a game were brought to me from a neighboring yard.

Unconsciously my thoughts fell into the rhythm of this song, with the result that I presently listened to catch its words--faint, childish, laughing, yet musical in the scented dusk:--