The Boss of Little Arcady/Chapter 22
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 impassively 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-glass. 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 lust 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 frustrate. 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 gods 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 God 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:—
"King William was King James's son and from the royal race he sprung;
Upon his breast he wore a star that showed the royal points of war.
Go choose your east and choose your west, and choose the one that you love best.
If she's not here to take your part, go choose another with all your heart.
Down on this carpet you must kneel, low as the grass grows in yon field.
Salute your bride and kiss her sweet, and then arise upon your feet."
The sentiment was ill suited to my own at the moment, but the raw-voiced little singers appealed to my ears not unpleasantly. Again the verse came—
"If she's not here to take your part go choose another with all your heart!"
I heard wheels then, nearer than the singing,— the clumsy rumble of our big yellow 'bus. Voices were borne to me,—Clem's voice, Miss Caroline's and another not like her's, a voice firmer, yet a dusky-warm woman's voice. That was all I could think of at the time: perhaps the night suggested it; they had qualities in common. It was a woman's voice, but a determined woman's. I knew of course that Little Miss had come. But also I knew at once—this being her voice—that it would not be in my power to call her Little Miss.