BOGGS KILLS BUGS
Once in the long ago that explicit announcement had flamed upon the house front. It yielded to the more dignified form when Madam Tallafferr took Mr. Boggs's top floor. She said that it was objectionable and that she could not live over it, and the landlord, duly impressed, sacrificed his prized alliteration rather than lose a lodger so elegant and aristocratic. Mr. Boggs had a vast, albeit distant, reverence for aristocracy, and he recognized in Madam Tallafferr a true exponent. So the sign came down and she went up. With her went her furniture, scanty but magnificent, a silver-inlaid lock box locally credited with safeguarding the Pemberton family diamonds, Sempronius, who was fat and black and a cat, and Old Sally, who was fat and black and a thief. For five years Madam Tallafferr dwelt above the lethal Boggs, and at the end of that period Our Square knew hardly more of her than on the day of her arrival. She was polite, but resolutely aloof as befitted her station in life.
For Mr. Boggs's lodger was all that is most glorious in Southern lineage. Her full style and title was Madam Rachel Pinckney Pemberton Tallafferr, with two Is, two fs, and two rs, if you valued her favor. She was passionately devoted to the Lost Cause, and belonged to no less than seven “Daughters-of” organizations with sumptuous stationery. Mr. Boggs was very proud of her mail. He said she had the swellest correspondence in Our Square. When letters arrived bearing her name without the requisite double Is, fs, and rs, they were invariably returned to the postman indorsed in a firm, fine hand: “No such individual known here.” But if the letters appeared important, the kindly and admiring Angel of Death used to intercept them and supply the missing consonants from his own inkwell. In this way he accumulated considerable information, and was able to apprise Our Square that his lodger was superstitious, subscribed to a dream magazine, and belonged to a Spirit Guidance Group. He darkly suspected the spirits of giving her bad advice about investments.
In person Madam Tallafferr was spare, tall, and straight. Her age when she first came to us was, to borrow caution from the war-zone censorship, “somewhere in the sixties,” though to Old Sally she was still “my young mist'ess.” Age had sharpened her personality, like her features, to a fine point. She was, I think, the most serene, incisive, and authoritative person I have ever encountered. Her speech was precise and trenchant. She dressed always in elegant, rustling black. Mr. Boggs said that she walked like a duchess. Quite likely. Though where Mr. Boggs got his data, I don't know. Our Square is not extensively haunted by persons of ducal rank. However, she became known to the locality, behind her back, as the Duchess. She and Old Sally were supposed to live in sumptuous luxury above the sign of the Destroyer. They had come to Our Square for their sojourn because, generations before in the days of its glory, madam's maternal grandfather had visited a distant cousin in that same No. 17. From beneath the ominous signboard she made occasional excursions, going westward and uptown, sometimes actually in an automobile, and always escorted by Old Sally. It was understood (from the boastful Mr. Boggs) that on such occasions his lodger was going into Society.
Once, that Our Square knew of, she put her ante-bellum principles into practice. She undertook disciplinary measures upon Old Sally, who in a moment of exaltation had been bragging indiscreetly of past glories “back in Fuhginia.” With a light but serviceable cane she corrected that indiscretion. Yes, in this emancipated twentieth century, among the populous, crowded habitations of our little metropolitan community, within earshot of Terry the Cop, the conscientious and logical slave-owner committed the startling anachronism of beating her slave. Hearing the resultant groans, Mr. Boggs, the lethal, rushed up to his top floor in great perturbation of spirit and burst in upon the finale of the performance. From what he could observe the castigation was purely formal and innocuous and the outcries merely a concession to what was expected and proper in the circumstances. But when he made his presence known, the Duchess in few cold and measured terms explained to him his exact purport and significance in the cosmic scheme, which he promptly perceived to bean approximate zero. “She wizened me up,” said the Angel of Death, “like a last season's roach.”
One after another she wizened us all up sufficiently to convince Our Square that she desired no personal share in its loosely communal, kindly, and village-like life.
But though aloof she was not alien. As befitted her name and station, she could in time of need descend from her remote Olympus above the insecticidal Mr. Boggs and lend a hand. The first occasion was when a sudden and disastrous spring epidemic of that Herod of diseases, diphtheria, swept down upon Our Square, bringing panic in its train, an insane and bestial panic which barred doors against the authorities, against help, against medicine, against even our fiery and beloved Little Red Doctor, who stands like a bulwark between us and death and the fear of death. Then the Duchess appeared. She consulted briefly with the Little Red Doctor. She put on the black silk of splendor, the Pinckney laces and the Pemberton diamonds, and thus girded for the fray went forth, a spare, thin-lipped, female St. George, against our local dragon. Wherever that sane and confident presence appeared, panic gave way to reason and mutiny to obedience. There were no heroics. She nursed no dying children, saved no sudden emergency. She simply restored and enforced courage through the authority of a valiant and assured personality. Just before the Little Red Doctor collapsed, at the close of the crisis, he delivered his estimate of her.
“Cold nerve and tradition. Our Square ought to put up a statue to her—in steel.”
Against which may be set off the Duchess's complacent and bland summing up of the Little Red Doctor:—
“He seems a worthy young man.”