Little Roscoe coughed sympathetically and remarked, before he lost his chance for a word: "The boy of to-day is the man of to-morrow. Parents cannot be too careful about what their little ones will read during the long winter evenings that will soon be upon us." He coughed again when he had finished.

"The press is a mighty lever of civilization," continued the mother, with an approving glance at her boy, "and you, Mr. Denney, should feel proud indeed of your sacred mission to instruct and elevate these poor people. Of course I shall have other duties to occupy my time--"

Solon had glanced up brightly, but gloom again overspread his face as she continued:--

"Yet I shall make it not the least of my works--if a poor weak woman may so presume--to help you in correcting certain faults of style and taste in your sheet, for it goes each week into many homes where the light must be sorely needed, and surely you and I would not be adequately sensible of our responsibilities if we continued to let it go as it is.

_Would_ we?" And again she glowed upon Solon with the condescending sweetness of a Sabbath-school teacher to the littlest boy in her cla.s.s.

But now we both breathed more freely, for she allowed the wretched _Argus_ to drop from her disapproving fingers, and began to ask us questions, as to a place of worship, a house suitable for residence purposes, a school for little Roscoe, and the nature of those clubs or societies for mental improvement that might exist among us. And she asked about Families. We were obliged to confess that there were no Families in Little Arcady, in the true sense of the term, though we did not divine its true sense until she favored us with the detail that her second cousin had married a relative of the Adams family. We said honestly that we were devoid of Families in that sense. None of us had ever been able to marry an Adams. No Adams with a consenting mind--not even a partial Adams--had ever come among us.

Still, Mrs. Potts wore her distinction gracefully, and was even a little apologetic.

"In Boston, you know, we rather like to know 'who's who,' as the saying is."

"Out here," said Solon, "we like to know what's what." He had revived wonderfully after his beloved _Argus_ was dropped. But at his retort the lady merely elevated her rather fine brows and remarked, "Really, Mr.

Denney, you speak much as you write--you must not let me forget to give you that little book I spoke of."

As we went down the stairs Solon placed "One Hundred Common Errors in Speaking and Writing" close under his arm, adroitly shielding the t.i.tle from public scrutiny. We stood a moment in the autumn silence outside the hotel door, watching a maple across the street, the line of its boughs showing strong and black amid its airy yellow plumage. The still air was full of leaves that sailed to earth in leisurely sadness. We were both thoughtful.

"Mrs. Potts is a very alert and capable woman," I said at last, having decided that this would be the most suitable thing to say.

"I tell you she has _powers_," said Solon, in a tone almost of awe.

"She will teach you to make something of yourself," I hazarded.

"One minute she makes me want to fight, and the next I surrender," he answered pathetically.

We separated on this, Solon going toward the _Argus_ office with slow steps and bowed head, while I went thoughtfully abroad to ease my nerves by watching the splendid death of summer. Above the hills, now royally colored, as by great rugs of brown and crimson velvet flung over their flanks, I seemed to hear the echoes of ironic laughter--the laughter of perverse G.o.ds who had chosen to avenge the slight put upon an inferior Potts.

CHAPTER XI

HOW LITTLE ARCADY WAS UPLIFTED

The winter that followed proved to be a season of unrest for our town.

Mrs. Aurelia Potts was a leaven of yeast that fermented its social waters, erstwhile calm, not to say stagnant.

Early in November an evening affair was held in her honor at the Eubanks home. The Eubankses being our leading Presbyterians, and Mrs. Potts having allied herself with that church, it was felt that they were best fitted to give the lady her initial impression of Little Arcady's society. Not only were the three Eubanks girls talented, but the mother was a social leader, Eustace was travelled, having been one of an excursion party to the Holy Land, and the family had relatives living in Philadelphia. None of the girls had married, nor had Eustace. The girls, it was said, had not wished to marry. Eustace had earnestly wished to, it was known; but two of our young women who had successively found favor in his sight had failed to please his mother and sisters, and Eustace was said to be watching and waiting for one upon whom all could agree, though every one but Eustace himself knew this was an utterly hopeless vigil. Meantime the mother and sisters looked up to him, guarding him jealously from corrupting a.s.sociations, saw that he wore his overshoes when clouds lowered, and knitted him chest protectors, gloves, and pulse warmers which he was not allowed to forget. He taught the Bible Cla.s.s in the Presbyterian Sabbath school, sang ba.s.s in the choir, and, on occasion, gave an excellent entertainment with his magic lantern, with views of the Holy Land, which he explained with a running fire of comment both instructive and entertaining.

The Eubanks home that evening was said by a subsequent _Argus_ to have been "ablaze with lights" and "its handsome and s.p.a.cious parlors thronged with the elite of the town who had gathered to do honor to the noted guest of the evening."

There first occurred a piano duet, rendered expertly by the two younger Misses Eubanks, "Listen to the Mocking Bird," with some bewildering variations of an imitative value, done by the Miss Eubanks seated at the right.

Then the front parlor was darkened and, after the consequent t.i.ttering among the younger set had died away, Eustace threw his pictures upon a hanging sheet and delivered his agreeable lecture about them, beginning with the exciting trip from Jaffa to Jerusalem. Most of those present had enjoyed the privilege of this lecture enough times to know what picture was coming next and what Eustace would say about it. But it was thought graceful now, considering the presence of a stranger, to simulate the expectancy of the uninformed, and to emit little gasps of astonished delight when Eustace would say, "Pa.s.sing from the city gates, we next come upon a view that is well worthy a moment of our attention."

With the lights up again, a small flask of water from the river Jordan was handed about, to be examined, by those who knew it too well, in the same loyal spirit of curiosity. A guest would hold it reverently a moment, then glance up in search of some one to whom it might be heartily extended.

This over, the elder Miss Eubanks--Marcella of the severe mien--sang interestingly, "I gathered Sh.e.l.ls upon the Sh.o.r.e," and for an encore, in response to eager demands, "Comin' thro' the Rye." Not coyly did she give this, with inciting, blushing implications, but rather with an unbending, disapproving sternness, as if with intent to divert the minds of her listeners from the song's frank ribaldry to its purely musical values.

Eustace followed with a solo:--

"Nigh to a grave that was newly made, Leaned a s.e.xton old on his earth-worn spade."

In the very low parts, where the s.e.xton old is required to say, "I gather them in," he was most effective, and many of his more susceptible hearers shuddered. For an encore he sang, "I am the old Turnkey," which goes lower and lower with deliberate steps until it descends to incredible depths of ba.s.sness.

It was a rare comfort to the Eubanks ladies that Eustace was a ba.s.s instead of a tenor. They had observed that most tenor songs are of a suggestive and meretricious character. Arthur Upd.y.k.e, for example, who clerked in the city drug store, was a tenor, and nearly all of his songs were distressingly sentimental; indeed, fairly indelicate at times in their lack of reserve about kisses and embraces and sighs and ecstasies.

Glad indeed were the guardians of Eustace that his voice had lowered to a salutary depth, and that ba.s.s songs in general were pure and innocent,--songs of death, of dungeons, of honest war, or of diving beneath the deep blue sea--down, down, down, as far as the singer's chest tones permitted. With "Euty" a tenor, warbling those pernicious boudoir _chansons_ of moonlight and longing of sighing love and anguished pa.s.sion, they suspected that he would have been harder to manage. Even as it was, he had once brought home a most dreadful thing called "A Bedouin Love Song," for a ba.s.s voice, truly enough, but so fearfully outspoken about matters far better left unmentioned among nice people that the three girls had fled horrified from the room after that first verse:--

"From the desert I come to thee, On a stallion shod with fire, And the wind is left behind In the speed of my desire."

The mother sped to her daughters' appeal for help and required her son to sing "The Lost Chord" as a febrifuge. The other song was confiscated after the mother had read the words so unblushingly penned by an author whom she ever afterward deemed an abandoned profligate. She considered that Bedouins must be unspeakable creatures--but how much lower the mind that could portray their depravity, and send it out into the world for innocent young men to carol in the homes of our best people!

Thereafter Eustace sang only songs that had been censored by his family, and his repertoire was now stainless, containing no song in which a romantic attachment was even hinted at; but only those reciting wholesome adventures, military and marine, pastoral scenes and occupations, or the religious experience of the singer.

In the words of the _Argus_, "his powerful singing was highly enjoyed by all present."

There followed the feature of the evening,--a paper read by Mrs. Potts; subject, "The Message of Emerson." With an agreeable public manner the lady erected herself at one corner of a square piano, placed her ma.n.u.scripts under the shaded lamp, and began. The subject, aforetime made known among us, had been talked about and perhaps a little wondered at. It is certain, at least, that Westley Keyts had yielded to the urging of his good wife to be present in the belief that a man named Emerson had sent Mrs. Potts a telegram to be read to us. This was what "the message of Emerson" meant to Westley, and the novelty of it had seemed to justify what he called "togging up," after a hard day's work at the slaughter-house.

If, then, he listened to Mrs. Potts at first with wonder-widening eyes, amazed at Mr. Emerson's recklessness in the matter of telegrams, and if at last he fell into gentle slumber, perhaps it was only that he had been less hardened than others present to the rigors of social nicety.

No one else fell asleep, but it was noticed that the guests, when the paper was done, praised it to one another in swift generalities and with averted face, as if they sought to evade specific or pointed inquiry as to its import. But the impression made by the reader was all that she could have wished, and the gathering was presently engrossed with refreshments. The _Argus_ stated that "a dainty collation was served to all present, the menu comprising the choicest delicacies of the season,"

which I took to mean that Solon was trying to profit by instruction; and that never again would he permit a table in the _Argus_ to groan with its weight of good things.

Westley Keyts, being skilfully awakened without scandal by his wife, drank a cup of strong coffee to clear his brain, and cordially consumed as many segments of cake as he was able to glean from pa.s.sing trays, speculating comfortably, meanwhile, about the message of Emerson,--chiefly as to why Emerson had not sent it by mail, thus saving--he estimated--at least a hundred and twenty dollars in telegraph tolls.

Mrs. Potts, thus auspiciously launched upon the social sea of Little Arcady, was henceforth to occupy herself prominently with the regulation of its ebb and flow. Already she had organized a "Ladies' Literary and Home Study Club," and had promised to read a paper on "The Lesson of Greek Art" at its first meeting a week hence. As the _Argus_ observed, "it was certainly a gala occasion, and one and all felt that it was indeed good to be there."

In addition to elevating the tone of our intellectual life, however, Mrs. Potts found it necessary to support herself and her son. That she could devise a way to merge these important duties will perhaps be surmised. Comfortably installed in a cottage at the south end of town with her household belongings, including a chair once sat in by the Adams-husband of her heaven-favored second cousin, she lost no time in prosecuting her double mission. The t.i.tle of the work with which she began her task of uplifting our ma.s.ses was "Gaskell's Compendium of Forms," a meritorious production of amazing and quite infinite scope, elegantly ill.u.s.trated. The book weighed five pounds and cost three dollars, which was sixty cents a pound, as Westley Keyts took the trouble to ascertain. But it was indeed a work admirably calculated for a community of diversified interests. While Solon Denney might occupy himself with the "Aid to English Composition," including "common errors corrected, good taste, figures of speech, and sentence building," the Eubanks ladies could further inform themselves upon grave affairs of "The Home and Family,--Life, Health, Happiness, Human Love," etc., or upon more frivolous concerns, such as "Introductions and Salutations, Carriage and Horseback Riding, Croquet, Archery, and Matinee parties, and the Art of Conversation." While Asa Bundy interested himself in "History of Banking, Forms of Notes, Checks and Drafts, Interest and Usury Tables, etc.," Truman Baird, who meant some day to go to Congress, might perfect himself in Parliamentary law and oratory, an exposition of the latter art being illumined by wood-cuts of a bearded and handsome gentleman in evening dress who a.s.sumed the various positions of emotion or pa.s.sion, as, in "Figure 8.--This gesture is used in concession, submission, humility," or, in Figure 9, which diagrams reproach, scorn, and contempt. While Truman sought to copy these att.i.tudes, to place the feet aright for Earnest Appeal or Bold a.s.sertion, or to clasp the hands as directed for Supplication and Earnest Entreaty, the ladies of the Literary and Home Study Club conned the chapter on American literature, "containing choice proverbs and literary selections and quotations from the poets of the old and new worlds." Our merchants found information as to "Jobbing, Importing and Other Business," and our young ladies could observe the correct forms for "Letters of Love and Courtship," "Apology for a Broken Engagement," "French Terms used in Dancing," "Rights of Married Women," "The Necessity and Sweetness of Home," and "Marriage--Happiness or Woe may come of It."

Again, Westley Keyts could read how to cut up meats. He knew already, but this chapter, ill.u.s.trated with neat carca.s.ses marked off into numbered squares, convinced him that the book was not so light as some of its other chapters indicated, and determined him to its purchase.

And there were letters for every conceivable emergency. "To a Young Man who has quarrelled with his Master," "Dismissing a Teacher," "Inquiry for Lost Baggage," "With a Basket of Fruit to an Invalid," and "To a Gentleman elected to Congress." Rare indeed, in our earth life, would be the crisis unmet by this treasury of knowledge. Not only was there an elevation of tone in our correspondence that winter, resulting from the persuasive activities of Mrs. Potts, but our writing became decorative with flourishes in "the muscular" and "whole-arm" movements. We learned to draw flying birds and bounding deer and floating swans with scrolls in their beaks, all without lifting pen from paper. Some of us learned to do it almost as well as the accomplished Mr. Gaskell himself, and almost all of us showed marked improvement in penmanship. Doubtless Truman Baird did not, he being engrossed with oratory, striving to reproduce, "Hate--the right foot advanced, the face turned to the sky, the gaze directed upward with a fierce expression, the eyes full of a baleful light," or other phases of pa.s.sion duly set down. Not for Truman was the ornate full-arm flourish; he had observed that all Congressmen write very badly.

But my namesake may be said to have laid the foundations that winter for an excellent running chirography, under the combined stimuli of Mr.

Gaskell's curves and a hopeless pa.s.sion for his school-teacher.

As my own teacher had been my own first love, I knew all that he suffered in voiceless longing for his fair one, throned afar in his languishing gaze. I knew that he plucked flowers meant to be given to her, only to lay them carelessly on the floor beside his seat when school "took in," lacking the courage to bestow them brazenly upon his idol as others did. I knew, too, his thrill when she came straight down the aisle, took up the flowers with a glance of sweet reproof for him, and nested them in the largest vase on her desk. But my poor affair had been in an earlier day, and my namesake wove novelty into the woof of his. For in that wonder-book of the fertile-minded Gaskell was a form of letter which Calvin Blake Denney began to copy early in December, and which by the following spring he could write in a style that already put my own poor penning to the blush. Did he write it a hundred times or five hundred, moved anew each time by its sweet potencies, its rarest of suggestions? I know not, but it must have been very many times, for I would find the copies in his school books, growing in beauty of flourish day by day. As well as if he had confessed it I knew that this letter was intended for the father of his love--for old Sam Murdock, to be literal, who uncouthly performed for us the offices of drayman; but who, in my namesake's eyes, shone pure and splendid for his relationship. Doubtless the letter was never sent, but I am sure it was written each time with an iron resolve to send it. Its t.i.tle in the excellent book was "From a Lover to a Father on his Attachment to the Daughter," and it ran:--

=DEAR SIR: As I scorn to act in any manner that may bring reproach upon myself and family, and hold clandestine proceedings unbecoming in any man of character, I take the liberty of distinctly avowing my love for your daughter and humbly request your permission to pay her my addresses, as I flatter myself my family and expectancies will be found not unworthy of your notice. I have some reason to imagine that I am not altogether disagreeable to your daughter, but I a.s.sure you that I have not as yet endeavored to win her affections, for fear it might be repugnant to a father's will. I am, etc.=

Under this was provided "A Favorable Answer," in which Sam Murdock might have said that he had long perceived this thing and applauded it, and would the young man "dine with us to-morrow at six if you are not engaged, and you will then have an opportunity to plead your own cause."

But chillingly after this graceful a.s.sent followed an "Unfavorable Answer," which Sam Murdock would also see when he opened the book at page 251; and still more portentously on the same page was a letter which Miss Selina Murdock herself might choose to write him, a sickening and dreadful thing ent.i.tled, "Unfavorable Reply on the Ground of Poverty."

"To say that I do not feel pleased and flattered at your proposal would be to tell a useless untruth," the thing began speciously. "But how are we situated, what hope of happiness with our unsettled prospects and worse than small means? Industry has doubtless never been and never will be wanting on your part, but--" and so to its dreadful end. It was almost base in its coldness and mercenary calculation. That phrase about the "useless untruth" implied even a dubious and considering morality; and the conclusion, "we must not entail misery upon others as well as ourselves by a too hasty step," argued a nature cautious in the extreme.

Yet Mr. Gaskell was too evidently a man of the world, knowing in his ripe experience that there existed a sufficient number of such cold natures to warrant the obtrusion of this heart-rending formula; and I doubt not that these negative specimens of the possible alone restrained my namesake from going beyond mere copies of that first letter.