The Boss of Little Arcady

by Harry Leon Wilson

Many of those present appeared to enjoy this song. Even Marcella Eubanks seemed for once to have soared above mere principle into the unmoral realm of "Art for Art's sake." But it falls to be said, and I say it with a pride which I think should not excite cavil, that Miss Caroline frowned splendidly from the first moment that the song's true character was revealed. She superbly evinced uneasiness, moreover, when the thing was done, as if to say, "One can't tell what may occur in a place where that is permitted!" And her performance was not observed by myself alone. Marcella saw it and sped to her brother, who, after listening to hurried words from her, dashed into "The Lost Chord" with a swift and desperate fervor, as if to allay all alarm in the mind of this sensitive guest. 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 was music, too, on this occasion—described elsewhere as "a gala occasion"—after Eustace had concluded his part of the entertainment and gotten his lantern out of the way,—music by a quartet consisting of Messrs. Fancett and Eubanks, first and second bass, and Messrs. Updyke and G. Brown, first and second tenor. In excellent accord these tenors and basses, so blameless in their living, lifted up their voices and sang they "would that the wavelets of ocean were wavelets of sparkling champagne!" 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.

Escorting Miss Caroline to her home that night, I listened to her account of this colloquy and found myself wishing that matters had been different. It seemed to me that I must ultimately become the victim of a romantic passion for her, and I told her as much when we parted.

Gossip, the yellow-tongued dragon, had been tracked to its lair and done to death, or at least that one of its heads had been smitten off which babbled slander of Miss Caroline.

Thenceforth she and I were free to think upon other matters. And there were these other matters in both our lives.

As to most of them we did not hold speech together. 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." There was a desperate sprite of banter in her eye when she made this confession, a sprite that leaped forth to be gay when I shrived her. But, though we sacredly observed all mirthful conventions in our dallying, I knew that Miss Caroline had more than enough to ponder of matters weighty. I knew that she was likely to have regretted a too-ready sharing of Clem's easy enthusiasm over industrial conditions in the North.

Clem believed by instinct not only that the evil thereof is sufficient unto the day, but that the incidental good sufficeth also. His quality of faith would have seemed a pointed rebuke to the common run of believers in a Providence that watches and sends. Confronted by the spectre of present want he could exorcise it neatly by the device of beholding, in a contrary vision, future limitless pullets of a marketable immaturity, or endless acres of garden produce ripe and ready to sell. Moreover, his experience with "gold money" was as yet insufficient to acquaint him with its truly volatile character. All sums greater than a hundred dollars were blessedly alike to him—equally prodigious. Two hundred, or thousands, or tens of thousands sent the same rays of light through the spectrum of his poetic mind, and a bank was an institution of such abiding grace that, having once established a connection with it, one possessed forever a stout prop in time of need. I was sure indeed that Miss Caroline had defined these limitations of Clem as a financier. It was one of those enjoyable topics which we had been free to discuss. 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. Plainly, Miss Caroline had more than enough of matters fit to engage her graver moments.

For my own part I, too, had matters to dwell upon of an equal gravity in their own poor way; though perhaps, too, I could not have defined them as understandingly as I did the perplexities of my neighbor.

Happily the feat need not be attempted; I had the game, in which troubles may be played away at least beyond the necessity for analyzing them—the game which requires two decks and is to be played alone—the most efficacious of those devices for the solitary which cards afford.

I had been made acquainted with its scheme and with some of its cruder virtues by a certain illustrious soldier whom I was once much thrown with. He confessed to me that he played it before a battle to inspire him with coolness, and after a battle to learn wise behavior under victory or defeat, as it might have been.