IN WHICH THE GAME WAS PLAYED
The next _Argus_ said of Miss Caroline's afternoon that "the ladies
present one and all report a most enjoyable time." There was another
mysterious paragraph, too, farther down the column of "locals," which
proclaimed that "The immovable body has at last been struck by the
irresistible force and has failed to live up to its reputation. It moved
and moved so you could see it move. Another bubble exploded! We live in
a sensational age."
Now, while it is true that the ladies, "one and all," had spoken with
entire enthusiasm of their afternoon at the unpretentious home of my
neighbor, I, nevertheless, deemed it vital to hold plain speech with
that impulsive woman immediately. I saw, indeed, that I should have
acted after the incident of the mint juleps.
Solon Denney, who had experienced the hospitality of Miss Caroline, and
who could speak from a wider knowledge than our minister or the ladies
of the town, had once said:--
"Those mint juleps are simple, honest things. They taste injurious from
the start. But that punch--it's hypocritical. It steals into your brain
as a little child steals its rosebud hand into yours, beguiling you with
prattle; but afterwards--well, if I had the choice, I'd rather be
chloroformed and struck sharply with an axe. I'd be my old self again
sooner." Whereupon he would have written a guarded piece for the paper
about this had I not dissuaded him. But I saw that I must at once have
with Miss Caroline what in a later day came to be called "a
heart-to-heart talk"; and I forthwith summoned what valor I could for
the ordeal.
"I never dreamed--I never suspected--how _should_ I?" she murmured
pathetically, after my opening speech of a few simple but telling
phrases. She listened in genuine horror while I gave the reasons why she
might justly regard the call of our minister and her entertainment of
the Club as nothing short of adventures--adventures which she had
survived scathless not but by the favor of an indulgent Providence.
"So _that_ is what those little white satin bows mean?" she asked, and I
said that it most emphatically was.
"I suspected it might be some kind of mourning for babies--a local
custom, you know, though it did seem queer. What can they think of me?"
"They don't know what to think now," I said, "and if you are wise, you
will never let them know."
"The Colonel was proud of that punch," she mused.
"I dare say he had reasons," I answered grimly.
"Especially after Cousin Looshe Peavey came to spend Christmas with us
one time. The Colonel had always considered Cousin Looshe rather
arrogant about this punch, and it may have been a special brew. I know
that Cousin had an immense respect for it after he was able--that
is--afterwards--"
"I can easily believe it."
"Cherry brandy--Jamaica rum--pint of Madeira--gill of port--a bit of
cordial--some sherry--I forget if there's anything else."
I grasped the chair in which I sat.
"Heaven forbid!" I cried; "and don't tell me, anyway--I'm reeling now."
"But of course there are lemons and oranges and cherries and tea and
_quantities_ of ice to weaken it--"
"The whole frozen polar sea itself couldn't weaken that mixture of
elemental forces. See to it," I went on sternly, "that you remember only
the innocent parts of it if you are ever asked for the recipe." She
actually cowered.
"Also as to mint juleps--remember that you have forgotten, if you ever
knew how they are made."
"Dear, _dear_--and our Bishop did enjoy his mint julep so!"
"That's different," I said; "they were probably raised together."
"And that afternoon, I thought something of the sort was necessary; do
you know, they seemed rather cold to me at that other meeting--and of
course there wasn't enough of it to hurt them."
"Your intentions were amiable, I concede, but your carelessness was
criminal--nothing short of it. You laid the train for a scandal that
would have shaken Slocum County to its remotest outlying cornfield, and
even made itself felt over this whole sovereign state."
I was gratified to see that she shuddered.
"I shall never learn," she pleaded; "their life is so different."
"Let them at least live it out to its natural end, such as it is," I
urged.
Hereupon, confessing herself unnerved, Miss Caroline led me to the
dining room, and in a glass of Madeira from a cask forwarded by
Second-cousin Colonel Lucius Quintus Peavey, C.S.A., she pledged herself
to preserve the decencies as these had been codified in Little Arcady by
the Sons and Daughters of Temperance. For my part I drank to her
continuance in the wondrous favor of Heaven.
Thereafter, I am bound to say, Miss Caroline conducted herself with a
discretion that was admirable. Upon more than one occasion I was made to
notice this. One of them was at an evening entertainment at the Eubanks
home that autumn, to which it was my privilege to escort her. "A large
and brilliant company was present," to quote from a competent authority,
and the refreshments were "recherche," to quote again, this being, I
believe, the first of our social functions at which Japanese paper
napkins were handed around. Eustace Eubanks entertained "one and all" by
exhibiting and describing lantern views of important scenes in the Holy
Land; Marcella sang "Comin' Thro' the Rye" with such iron restraint that
the most fastidious among us could have found no cause for offence, and
Eustace sang an innocent song of war and bloodshed and death. All went
well until Eustace, being pressed for more, ventured a drinking song.
Whether this had been censored by his household I have never learned.
Perhaps there had been demurs--there were almost certain to have been;
and possibly Eustace had held out for the thing because of the rare
opportunity it afforded for the exercise of his lowest tones. Perhaps it
had been deemed wise to indulge him in this, lest in rebellion he break
all bonds of propriety and revert to the "Bedouin Love Song." At any
rate he sang "Drinking," a song that lauds the wine-cup as chiefest of
godless joys, and terminating in "drinking" thrice reiterated, of which
each individual one finishes so much lower than it begins that the last
one seems to expire in the bottomless pit.
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.
I was persuaded to learn more of it. I played the thing at first, to be
sure, as I have noticed that novices always do, with a mind so bent upon
"getting it" that I was insensible of its curative and refining
agencies.
"You haven't the secret yet," said my mentor, who watched me as I won
for the first time, and was moved to warn me by my unconcealed pride in
this achievement. "After you've played it a few years, you'll learn that
the value of it lies chiefly in losing. You'll try like the devil to
win, of course, but you'll learn not to wish for it. To win is nothing
but an endless piling up of the right cards, beginning with the ace and
ending with the king, and it only means more shuffling for next time.
But every time you lose you will learn things about everything."
It was even as he said,--it took me years to learn this true merit of
the game; and still, as he had said, I learned much from it of life.
There is a fine moment at the last shuffling of the cards, a moment when
free will and fatalism are indistinguishably merged.
I am ready to lay down eight cards in a horizontal row off my double
deck. Who will say that the precise number of shuffles I have given to
it was preordained?
"I do," exclaimed an obliging fatalist. "The sequence of every one of
those cards was determined when we were yet star-dust."
I bring confusion to him by performing half a dozen other shuffles. I am
thus far the master of my unborn game--another last shuffle to prove it,
though I shuffle clumsily enough.
I glance disdainfully at the fatalist whom I have refuted, and prepare
again to lay down the first row of cards. But the fellow comes back
with, "Those last shuffles were also determined, as was this
challenge--"
"Very well!" and I prepare for still another rearrangement. But here I
reflect that this could be endless and not at all interesting.
I dismiss the fatalist as a quibbler and play on. Now there is no
dispute, unless there be other quibblers. Fixed is the order in which
the cards shall fall, eight at a time. There is pure fatalism. But in
the movings after each eight are dealt, I shall consciously choose and
judge, which is pure free will--or an imitation of it sufficiently
colorable to satisfy any, but quibblers. There, for me, is the fatalism
of body, the free will of soul. Of these I learn when I play the game.
Now my first eight cards are down in a horizontal row. There are two
kings among them, which is auspicious, for kings must be placed sometime
at the top. There is a red queen, also auspicious, to be placed on one
of the black kings. There is an ace of diamonds and its deuce. Good,
again! The ace is placed above the row, beginning a row of aces to be
placed there as fast as they fall, and the deuce is placed atop of it,
for in that row the suits will be built _up_, each in its kind. In the
lower rows the suits are to be built down and crossed, as when I played
the red queen on the black king, so that only the top of his crowned
head can be seen. Then I play a red eight on a black nine and a black
seven on the red eight. I am now left most fortunately with five spaces
when I deal off my second row of eight,--five spaces into which, it may
be, a king or two shall happily fall.
The game usually becomes intense after the third eight cards are played.
By that time a choice must be made. Shall this black six or the other be
played on the red seven? One must be wise, for either will release
important cards.
The game has started so well that it promises to play out too
easily--which is one of its tricks. Presently a deuce will be covered by
a king for which no space is ready, a dark queen will be buried under a
succession of smaller cards, crowding along with apparent carelessness,
but relentlessly. Now a space is opened for the king that covers the
deuce, but the king has meantime been covered by an insignificant but
unmanageable four-spot, and cannot be reached. The game is not so
absurdly easy as it promised to be. Still it may be won by clever
playing. There follow eight cards that prove to be immovable, and the
issue is almost in doubt. Now the last eight cards are down, and the
game is suddenly seen to be lost. One small other shuffle might have won
it; if that tray of spades had fallen one place to the right or left,
the thing would now be easy; if it were a deuce or a four, the thing
were easy. One spot on the card has brought ruin. The game has foiled us
with its own peculiar cleverness.
But then, we learn to expect failure; and, most important of all, we
learn to succeed while failing. We learn to see our cards fall
wretchedly without a tremor. We learn to take small gains that offer,
and to watch unmoved while splendid chances come to naught. We learn to
live life and to waste no energy in vain wishing that we had shuffled
differently. We learn even to marvel admiringly at the unobtrusive
cunning which thwarts us of our dream's own--to wonder that cards ever
should come right for any player in that maze of chances and faulty
judgments. And we learn, above all, to brush the things together without
loss of time and to play a new hand with the same old hope.
As I studied the cards, making sure of my defeat--one must be most
careful to do that; a way is sometimes to be found--it was not strange
that I fell to thinking of the face on my neighbor's wall.
I had mused often upon it since that first night. It seemed, curiously
enough, to be a face that had long been mistily afloat in my shut eyes,
a girl's face that had a trick of blending from time to time with the
face of another I had better reason to know. Unaccountably they had come
and gone, one followed by the other. Of that last new face in my vision
I could make nothing, save that some one seemed to have painted it over
there in the other house. How I had come by my own mind copy of it was a
mystery to me beyond solution.
I played the game again to still this perplexity which had a way of
seizing me at odd moments. It is an especially good game for a man who
has had to believe that life will always beat him.