TROUBLED WATERS ARE STILLED
It was spring again, a Sunday in early May, warm, humid, scented with
blossoms that were bodied souls of the laughing air. They starred the
bank that fell away from my porch to the clear-watered river, and they
sang of the young spirit that lives in this old earth so deceptively,
defacing it with false scars of age, and craftily permitting us to count
years by the thousand, yet remaining always as fresh in itself as on the
primal morning when the world was found good by that ill-fated but
joyous first pair of lovers. I marvel that so many are fooled by the
trick; how so few of us detect that the soul of it all is ageless--has
never even wearied. The blossoms told this secret now in quiet triumph
over the denials of ancient oaks that towered above them and murmured
solemn falsities in their tops about the incredible oldness of things.
There was the star-shaped bloodroot, with its ten or a dozen petals of
waxen white set with jewel-like precision about a centre of dead gold.
There was the less formal phlox of a pinkish purple; deer's-tongue,
white and yellow; frail anemones, both pink and white; small but
stately violets, and the wake-robin with its wine-red centre among long
green leaves. There was a dogwood in the act of unfolding its little
green tents that would presently be snow-white, and a plum tree ruffled
with tiny flowers of a honied fragrance.
With a fine Japanese restraint, Clem had placed a single bough of these
in a dull-colored vase on my out-of-doors breakfast table.
All these were to say that the soul of the world is ageless, and that
time is but a cheap device to measure our infirmities. Above, the trees
were hinting that life might still be lived acceptably, as in Eden days;
though they seemed to suspect that the stage of it to which they were
amazedly awakening must be at least the autumn, and timidly clothed
themselves accordingly. The elm, the first big tree to stir in its
sleep, showed tiny, curled leaflets of a doubting, yellowish green; and
the later moving oaks were frankly sceptical, one glowing faintly brown
and crimson, another silvery gray and pink. They would need at least ten
more days to convince them into downright summer greenery, even though
slender-throated doves already mated in their tops with a perfect
confidence.
It was an early morning hour, when it was easy to believe in the perfect
fitness of Little Arcady's name; an hour in a time when the
Potts-troubled waters had been mercifully stilled by the hand of God; an
hour when the spirit of each Little Arcadian might share to its own
fulness in the large serenity of the ageless world-soul.
I recalled Mrs. Potts's paper on "The Lesson of Greek Art," which had
enriched two columns of the _Argus_ after its reading to the ladies of
the Literary and Home Study Club. It seemed to me that the Greeks must
have divined this important secret of the vegetable world--the secret of
ageless time--and that therein lay the charm of them; that spirit of
ever freshening joy which they chiselled and sang into tangible grace
for us of a later and heavier age.
At the moment I was on the porch, waiting for my coffee, and my thought
seemed to be shared by Jim, my bony young setter, who, being but a scant
year old, had not yet forgotten the lesson of Greek art. Over the grassy
stretch before the porch he chased robins tirelessly, though with
indifferent success. His was a spirit truly Greek. I knew it by reason
of his inexhaustible enthusiasm for this present sport after a year's
proving that chased birds will rise strangely but expertly into air that
no dog can climb by any device of whining, leaping, or straining.
Living on into the Renaissance, I saw that Jim would be taught the
grievous thing called wisdom--would learn his limitations and to form
habits tamely contrary to his natural Greek likings. Then would he
honorably neglect rabbits and all fur, cease pointing droves of pigs,
and quit the silly chase of robins. Under check-cord and spike-collar he
would become a fast and stylish dog, clean-cut in his bird work,
perhaps a field-trial winner. He would learn to take reproof amiably,
to "heel" at a word, to respect the whistle at any distance, to be
steady to shot and wing, to retrieve promptly from land or water, and
never to bolt or range beyond control or be guilty of false pointing.
I knew that coercion, steadily and tactfully applied, would thus educate
him, for was he not of champion ancestry, wearing his pedigree in his
looks, with the narrow shoulders so desirable and so rarely found, with
just the right number of hairs at the end of his tail, the forelegs
properly feathered, the feet and ankles strong, the right amount of
leather in his ear to the fraction of an inch,--a dog, in short, of
beauty, style, speed, nose, and brains?
But in this full moment of a glad morning I resolved that Jim should
never know the Renaissance; he should never emerge from what Mrs. Potts
had gracefully described as "the golden age of Pericles."
To the end of his days he should be blithely, naïvely Greek; a dog of
wretched field manners, pointing cattle and quail impartially,
shamefully gun-shy, inconsequent, volatile, ignorant, forever paganly
joyous without due cause. For him I should do what no one had been able
to do for me--detain him in that "world of fine fabling" where
everything is true that ought to be; where the earth is a running
course, fascinating in its surprises of open road and tangled hedgerow;
where mere indiscriminate smelling is keenest ecstasy; and where the
fact that robins have eluded one's fleetest rush to-day, by an amazing
and unfair trick of levitation, is not the slightest promise that they
can escape our interested mouthing on the morrow.
Doubtless he would be a remarkably foolish dog in his old age; but I,
growing old beside him, would learn wisely foolish things from his
excellent folly. I knew we should both be happier for it; knew it was
best for us both to prove that my thin white friend had been born
chiefly to display the acute elegance of his bones and the beauty of
hopeful effort.
It was this last that kept him thin. When I took to the road, he
travelled five miles to my every one, circling me widely, ranging far
over the hills in mad dashes, or running straight and swiftly on the
road, vanishing in a white fog of dust. Walking slowly to avoid this, I
would only meet him emerging from a fresh cloud of it with a glad tongue
thrown out to the breeze. Again, there were desperate plunges into
wayside underbrush or down steep ravines, whence I would hear rapid
splashing through a hidden stream and short, plaintive cries to tell
that that wonderful, unseen wood-presence of a thousand provoking scents
had once more cunningly evaded him.
Also did he love to swim stoutly across a field of growing wheat, his
head alone showing above the green waves. And if the wheat were tall, he
still braved it--lost to sight at the bottom. Then one might observe the
mystery of a furrow ploughing itself swiftly across the billows without
visible agency.
When I do not walk, to give countenance to his running, he has a game of
his own. He plays it with an ancient fur cap that he keeps conveniently
stored. The cap represents a prey of considerable dignity which must be
sprung upon and shaken again and again until it is finally disabled.
Then it is to be seized by implacable jaws and swiftly run with about
the yard in a feverish pretence that enemies wish to ravish it from its
captor. Any chance observer is implored to humor this pretence, and upon
his compliance he is fled from madly, or perhaps turned upon and growled
at most directly, if he show signs of losing interest in the game.
This ceaseless motion, with its attendant nervous strains, has prevented
any accumulation of flesh, and explains the name of Slim Jim affixed to
him by my namesake.
Jim consented now to rest for a moment at my feet, though at a loss to
know how I could be calm amid so many exciting smells. I promised him as
he lay there that he should never be compelled to learn any but the
fewest facts necessary to make him as harmless as he was happy; chiefly
not to bark at old ladies and babies, no matter how threatening their
aspect, as they passed our house. A few things he had already
learned--to avoid fences of the barbed wire, to respect the big cat from
across the way who sometimes called and treated him with watchful
disdain, and not to chew a baby robin if by any chance he caught one.
This last had been a hard lesson, his first contact with a problem only
a few days younger than Eden itself. It came to his understanding,
however, that if you mouth a helpless baby robin, a hand or a stick
falls upon you hurtfully, even if you evade it for the moment and
seclude yourself under a porch until it would seem that so trifling an
occurrence must have been utterly forgotten. This was the one big
sin--sin, to the best of our knowledge, being obedience to any natural
desire, the satisfaction of which is unaccountably followed by pain.
I told him this would probably be all that he need ever know; and he
looked up at me in a fashion he has, the silky brown ears falling either
side of the white face. It is a look of languishing, melting adoration,
and if I face him steadily, he must always turn away as if to avoid
being overcome--as if the sight of beauty so great as mine could be
borne full in the eyes only for the briefest of moments.
But Clem came now, ranging my breakfast dishes about the bowl of plum
flowers, and I approached the table with all the ardor he could have
wished at his softly spoken, "Yo' is suhved, Mahstah Majah."
The sight of Clem, however, inevitably suggests the person to whom I am
indebted for his sustaining ministrations. Potts had been a necessary
instrument in one of those complications which the gods devise among us
human ephemera for their mild amusement on a day of _ennui_. And Potts,
having served his purpose, had been neatly removed. I have said that the
Potts-troubled waters of Little Arcady were for the moment stilled. By
the hands of the gods had they been mercifully stilled so that not for a
month had any citizen been asked to subscribe for any improving book or
patented device of culture.
A month before, in a far-off place, J. Rodney Potts had suffered
extinction through the apparently casual agency of a moving railway
train, the intervention of the gods in all such matters being discreetly
veiled so that the denser of us shall suspect nothing but that they were
the merest of accidents.
One could only surmise that the widow viewed this happening with a kind
of trustful resignation, sweetened perhaps by certain ancient memories
attuned to a gentle melancholy. I know that she placed on view in her
parlor for the first time a crayon portrait of Potts in his early
manhood, one made ere life had broken so many of its promises to him,
the portrait of one who might conceivably have enchained the fancy of
even a superior woman. But the widow was not publicly anguished. She
donned a gown and bonnet of black in testimony of her bereavement, but
there was no unnecessary flaunt of crape in her decently symbolic garb.
As Aunt Delia McCormick phrased it, she was not in "heavy
mourning,"--merely "in light distress."
The town was content to let it go at that, especially after the
adjustment of certain formalities which enabled the widow for a time to
suspend her work of ministering to its higher wants.
The railway company had at first, it appeared, been disposed to view
its removal of Potts very lightly indeed; not only because of his
unimposing appearance, but by reason of his well-attested mental
condition at the time of the occurrence--a condition clearly
self-induced, and one that placed him beyond those measures of safety
which a common carrier is obliged to exercise in behalf of its patrons.
But a package of letters had been discovered among the meagre belongings
of the unfortunate man, and these had placed the matter in a very
different light. They showed conclusively that the victim had been of
importance, a citizen of rare values in any community that he might
choose to favor with his presence.
Truman Baird settled the case and, after these letters had been
appraised by the corporation's attorney, he succeeded in extorting the
sum of eight hundred dollars from the railway as recompense to the widow
for the loss of her husband's services. I considered that the company
would have given up at least five hundred more to avoid being sued for
the death of a man who had been able to evoke those letters; but I did
not say so, for the case was Truman's and eight hundred dollars were
many. Westley Keyts thought they were, indeed, a great many, and
outrageously excessive as a cold money valuation of Potts. "She only got
eight hundred dollars, but there's them that thinks she skinned the
company at _that!_" said Westley.
But there was no disposition to begrudge the widow a single dollar of
this modest sum. A jury of Little Arcadians would have multiplied it
tenfold without a blush; for, while that little hoard endured, any
citizen, however public spirited, could flavor with a certain grace his
refusal to subscribe for a book.
To Solon Denney the thing came as a deep and divine relief. In the
satisfaction induced by it, he penned an obituary of Potts in which he
employed the phrase "grim messenger of death" very cleverly indeed. For
matters had been going from bad to worse. Murmurs at the demands of Mrs.
Potts--likened by Asa Bundy to a daughter of the horse leech--had become
passionately loud as our masses toiled expensively up that Potts-defined
path of enlightenment. The old sneer at Solon's Boss-ship was again to
be observed on every hand, that attitude of doubting ridicule,
half-playful, half-contemptuous, which your public man finds more
dangerous to his influence than downright hostility would be.
But the murmurs were again stilled, and Solon might breathe the peace of
a golden age when as yet no Potts, male or female, had come unto us.
It was not felt at all that Solon's genius for the discretion of public
affairs had availed him in this latest crisis. But the benefit was
substantial, none the less, and the columns of the _Argus_ were again
buoyant as of yore. It was at this time, I remember, that the _Argus_
first spoke of our town as "a gem at beauty's throat," and, touching the
rare enterprise of our citizens, declared that, "If you put a Slocum
County man astride a streak of lightning, he'd call for a pair of
spurs."
For myself, I frankly mourned Potts. For I saw now that he had been
truly and finely of that Greek spirit--one accepting gifts from the gods
with a joyous young faith in their continuance. I felt that he had
divined more of the lesson of Greek art than his one-time love could
write down in papers unending. I should not have wished him back in
Little Arcady, but I did breathe a prayer that he might in some early
Greek elysium be indeed "Potts forever." Might it not be? Had not that
other paper on "the message of Emerson" hinted of "compensation" in a
jargon that sounded authoritative?
And now, as I breakfasted, my attention was invited anew to that
fateful, never ending extension of the Potts-made ripples in our little
pool. I was threatened with the loss of my domestic stay; again might I
be forced to the City Hotel's refectory of a thousand blended smells and
spotty table-linen; or even to irksome adventure at the board of the
self-lauded Budd.
There was selfish wonder in my heart as I listened to Clem, who, now
that my second cup of coffee competed with the May blossoms, stood by to
tell me of his worldly advancement and the nearing of a time when Miss
Caroline should come among us to be independent.
His stubborn industry had counted. The vegetable and melon crop of the
year before had been abundant and well sold, despite sundry raids upon
the latter by nameless boys, who, he assured me, "hain't had no raght
raisin'." And he had further swelled that hoard of "reglah gole money"
in Bundy's bank by his performances of house-cleaning, catering, and his
work as janitor; not a little, too, by sales of the fish he caught. He
was believed to possess a secret charm that made his fish-bait
irresistible. Certainly his fortune in this matter was superior to that
of any other frequenter of the bass nooks below the dam.
And now he had waxed so heavy of purse that a woman could come between
us,--a selfish woman, I made no doubt, pampered survival of a pernicious
and now happily destroyed system, who would not only unsettle my
domestic tranquillity, but would, in all likelihood, fetch another alien
ferment into our already sorely tried existence as a town needing
elevation. It seemed, indeed, that we were never to be done with these
consequences.
Separated from my house by a stretch of weedy lawn was a shambling
structure built years before by one Azariah Prouse, who believed among
other strange matters that the earth is flat and that houses are built
higher than one story only at great peril, because of the earth's
proneness to tip if overbalanced. Prouse had compromised with this
belief, however, and made his house a story and a half high, in what I
conceive to have been a dare-devil spirit. The reckless upper rooms were
thus cut off untimely by ceilings of sudden slope, and might not be
walked in uprightly save by persons of an inconsiderable stature.
In a fulness of years Azariah had died and been chested, like Joseph of
old, his soul to be gathered, as he believed, to another horizontal
plane, exalted far above this, as would befit an abode for spirits of
the departed good.
His earthly home, now long vacant, had been rented by Clem for a monthly
sum not particularly cheap in view of its surprising limitations above
stairs. It was of this new home that he chiefly talked to me, of the
persistence required to have it newly painted by the inheriting Prouse,
and repairs made to doors, windows, and the blinds that hung awry from
them.
"An' Ah been cleanin'--yes, seh, Mahstah Majah--fum celleh to gahet.
Them floahs do shine an' them windows is jes' so clean they look lahk
they ain't theah at all. Miss Cahline an' Little Miss, they reside on
th' lowah floah, an' Ah tek mahse'f up to that theh gahet. Yes, seh, Ah
haf to scrooge aw Ah git mah haid knocked off, but Ah reckon Ah sho'
will luhn to remembeh in Gawd's own time. An' they's a tehible grand
hen-house. Ah'm go'n' a' raise a hund'ed thousan' yellow-laiged pullets;
an' theh's a staihway down to th' watah whah Ah kin tie up mah ole
catfish boat, an' a monst'ous big gyahden whah Ah kin keep mah fie'ce
look on them mush an' watah melons. Ah don' want t' git into any mo'
alterations with them boys, but Ah suttinly will weah 'em out if they
don't mind theah cautions. Yes, seh,--we all go'n' a' have a raght
tolable homeplace."
Then my grievance prompted me.
"Yes, and who's going to get my breakfast and dinner for me, then?" I
asked with a dark look, but he beamed upon me placatingly.
"Oh, Ah's still go'n' a' do fo yo', Mahstah Majah. Ah steddied huh all
out twell she's plumb systemous. Miss Cahline sh' ain't wantin' huh
breakfus' twell yo's done, an' she'll tek huh dinneh uhliah. Ah manage,
Mahstah Majah. Ah mek all mah reddiments, yes, seh--yo's go'n' a' be
jes' lahk mah own folks."
I affected to be made more cheerful by this, but I knew that no man can
serve two masters, especially when he is the "pussenal propity" of one;
but I forbore to warn the deluded African of the tribulations ahead of
him.
The Book of MISS CAROLINE