Part 21 (2/2)
”Oh, a _greatly_ overrated man!” repeated Miss Caroline, terribly, ”far too wordy--too fond of wretched puns--so much of his humor coa.r.s.e and tiresome. By the way, have you ladies taken up Byron?”
The moment was charged, almost to explosion. A crisis impended, out of the very speechlessness of the gathering. Mrs. Potts was aghast in behalf of William Shakspere, and Marcella Eubanks was crimsoning at the blunt query about Byron, well knowing that he could be taken up by a lady only with the wariest caution, and that he would much better be let alone. The others were torn demoralizingly between these two extremes of distress.
But the situation was saved by the ready wit of Mrs. Judge Robinson.
”I think the hour has come for refreshments, Madam President!” she said urbanely, and the meeting was nervously adjourned. Under the animation thus induced an approximate equilibrium was restored. The ladies gulped down chicken salad, many of them using forks with black thread tied about them to show they were borrowed from Mrs. Eubanks. They drank lemonade from a fine gla.s.s pitcher that had come as a gratuitous mark of esteem from the tea merchant patronized by the hostess; and they congealed themselves pleasantly with vanilla ice-cream eaten from dishes of excellent pressed gla.s.s that had come one by one as the Robinson family consumed its baking powder.
But Miss Caroline would have been dense indeed had she not divined, even amid that informal babbling, that she was being viewed by the ladies of the Club with a shocked stupefaction.
Precisely what emotion this knowledge left with her I have never known.
But I do know that before the meeting broke up, it had been agreed to hold the next one at the house of Miss Caroline herself. It may be that she suggested and urged this in pure desperation, wis.h.i.+ng to regain a favor which she had felt unaccountably withdrawn; and it may be that the ladies accepted in a similar desperation, knowing not how to inform her that she was grossly ineligible for members.h.i.+p in a Home Study Club.
The intervening two weeks were filled with tales and talks of Miss Caroline's heresy. Excitement and adverse criticism were almost universally aroused. It was a scandal of proportions almost equal to that of her love for strong drink. About most writers one could be permitted to have an opinion. But it was not thought that one could properly have an opinion about Shakspere, and, so far as we knew, no one had ever before subjected him to this indignity. One might as well have an opinion about Virtue or the law of gravitation. An opinion of any sort was impossible. One favorable would be puny, futile, immodestly patronizing. An unfavorable opinion had heretofore not been within realms of the idlest speculation.
There were but two of us, I believe, who did not promptly condemn Miss Caroline's violence of speech--two men of varying parts. Westley Keyts frankly said he had never been able to ”get into” Shakspere, and considered it, as a book for reading purposes, inferior to ”Cudjo's Cave,” which he had read three times. The minister, whose church Miss Caroline now patronized,--that term being chosen after some deliberation,--held up both his hands at the news and mildly exclaimed, ”Well!” Then, after a pause, ”Well, well!” And still again, after another pause, ”Well, well, well!”
This was thought to be s.h.i.+fty and evasive--certainly not so outspoken as the town had a right to expect.
Solon Denney, though in his heart true to Shakspere, affected to be gleeful. A paragraph, mysterious to many, including Miss Caroline, appeared in the ensuing _Argus_:--
”An encounter long supposed by scientists to be a mere metaphysical abstraction of almost playful import has at last occurred in sober physics. The irresistible force has met up with the immovable body. We look for results next week.”
I knew that Solon considered Miss Caroline to be an irresistible force.
I was uncertain whether Shakspere or Mrs. Potts was meant by the immovable body. I knew that he held them in equal awe, and I knew that Mrs. Potts felt, in a way, responsible for Shakspere this far west of Boston, regarding any attack upon him as a personal affront to herself.
On the day of the next meeting the ladies of the Club gathered in the dingy and inelegant drawing-room of Miss Caroline. No vividly flowered carpet decked the floor; only a time-toned rug that left the outer edge of the floor untidily exposing its dull stain; no gilt and onyx table bore its sculptured fantasy by the busy Rogers. The mantel and shelves were bare of those fixed ornaments that should decorate the waste places of all true homes; there were no flint arrow-heads, no ”specimens,” no varnished pine cones, no ”Rock of Ages,” no waxen lilies, not even a china cup goldenly emblazoned with ”Love the Giver,” in German script.
And there were no beautiful chairs with delicate gilded spindles--not an elegant and impracticable chair in the whole big room--not one chair which could not be occupied as comfortably as any common kitchen rocker.
It was indeed a poor place; obviously the woman's best room, yet showing careless traces of almost daily use. To ladies who never opened their best rooms save to dust and air them on days when company was expected, and who would as soon have lounged in them informally as they would have desecrated a church, this laxity was heinous.
And ordinarily, in the best rooms of one another, the ladies became spontaneously, rigidly formal as they a.s.sembled, speaking in tones suitably stiff of the day's paper, or viewing with hushed esteem those art treasures that surrounded them.
But so difficult was it to attain this formality amid the homely surroundings of Miss Caroline that to-day they not only lounged with negligent ease in the big chairs and on the poor, broad sofas, but they talked familiarly of their household concerns quite as if they had been in one of their own second-best rooms on any common day.
On a table in one cool corner was a huge bowl of thin silver, whence issued a baffling fragrance. Discreet observation, as the throng gathered, revealed this to contain a large block of ice and a colored liquid in which floated cherries with slices of lemon and orange. A ladle of generous lines reposed in the bowl, and circling it on the table were many small cups.
There was a feeling of relief when these details had been ascertained.
Fear had been felt that Miss Caroline might forget herself and offer them a gla.s.s of wine, or something worse, from a large black bottle; for Little Arcady believed, in its innocent remoteness, that the devil's stuff came in no other way than large black bottles. Miss Eubanks had made sure that the ladies wore their white ribbons. Marcella's own satin bow was larger than common, so that no one might mistake the principles of the heart beating beneath it.
But the cool big bowl with its harmless fruit restored confidence at once, and when Miss Caroline urged them to try Clem's punch they refrained not. The walk to the north end of town on a sultry afternoon had qualified them to receive its consolations, and they gathered gratefully about.
Marcella Eubanks quaffed the first beaker, a trifle timorously, it is true, for the word ”punch” had stirred within her a vague memory of sinister a.s.sociations. Sometime she had read a tale in which one Howard Melville had gone to the great city and wrecked a career of much promise by accepting a gla.s.s of something from the hands of a beautiful but thoughtless girl, pampered child of the banker with whom he had secured a position. For a dread moment Marcella seemed to recall that the fatal draught was named ”punch.” But after a tentative sip of the compound at hand, she decided that it must have been something else--doubtless ”a gla.s.s of sparkling wine.” For this punch before her was palpably of a babe's innocence. Indeed it tasted rather like an inferior lemonade. But it was cold, and Marcella tossed off a second cup of it. She could make better lemonade herself, and she murmured slightingly of the stuff to Aunt Delia McCormick.
”It wants more lemons and more sugar,” said Marcella, firmly. Aunt Delia pressed back the white satin bow on her bosom in order to manage her second gla.s.s with entire safety.
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