The Boss of Little Arcady Part 8

"First the worst, second the same, Last the best of all the game!"

That superb machinery of travel was silent, and the mechanics and officials, robbed of their pa.s.senger, eyed us with disfavor.

"They are terrapin-buzzards!" exclaimed my woman child, with deep conviction.

I shuddered fittingly at the violence of her speech.

Before we had gone far the train-boy deserted his post and came running after us.

"John B. Gough!" he exclaimed bitterly--profanely.

"He's swearing," warned his sister. "Look out, Uncle Maje, or he'll say 'Gamboge' next."

"I don't care," retorted the indignant follower; "you can't have a train without any pa.s.senger--it's silly. I don't care if I do say Gamboge.

There! Gamboge it!"

I turned upon him. I had endured "terrapin-buzzards," hurled at the group by my woman child, perceiving need of relief for her pent-up pa.s.sion. I had, moreover, for the same reason, permitted my namesake to roll under his tongue the formidable and satisfying expletive, "John B.

Gough!" But I felt that the line must be drawn at Gamboge.

Terrapin-buzzards was bad enough, though it was true that this might be used innocently, as in a moment of mild dismay, or as an exclamation of mere astonishment without sinister import. But Gamboge!--and ripped out brazenly as it had been?--No! A thousand times No!

"Calvin," I said sternly, "aren't you ashamed to use such language--before me--and before your little sister?"

But here the little sister sank beneath her true woman's level by saying:--

"I know worse than that--Dut!"

With a look of deadly coldness I sought to chill the pride that shone in her eyes as she achieved this new enormity.

"What is 'Dut'?" I asked severely.

"Dut is--is _a_ Dut," she answered, somewhat abashed by my want of enthusiasm.

"A Dut is a baddix--a regular baddix," volunteered her brother.

Following a device familiar to philologists, he submitted concrete examples.

"Two of those Sullivans are Duts, and so's Mrs. Sullivan sometimes when she makes me split kindling and let the cat alone and--"

"That will do," I said; "that's enough of such talk. Come right into the house."

"It ain't a baddix to say 'O Crackers!'" he observed tentatively, as he followed us.

"It may not be for some people," I answered. "Nice people might say that once in a great while, on week-days, if they never said any other baddixes; but it's just as bad as any of them if you say all the others--especially that horrible one--"

"Gamboge," he reminded me, brightly.

"Never mind saying it again!"

Then came a new uproar from the wagon-box. We perceived that the train had moved off again, manned now entirely by Sullivans. They sought, I detected, to produce in our minds an impression that the thing was going better than ever. The toots of the Sullivan-throated whistle were louder and more frequent, and the voice of the largest could be plainly heard.

He had combined the two offices of train-boy and conductor. We heard him alternately demanding "Tickets!" and urging "Peanuts, cakes, and candies!" If the intention had been to lure us back to witness a Sullivan triumph, it failed. We shut our lips tightly and moved around to the front porch.

The foiled Sullivans presently followed us here. They made a group at the base of a maple on the lawn and, affecting not to notice us, talked in a large, loud way so that we must overhear and be made envious,--even awe-struck; for they had all secured jobs on the real railroad, it appeared. They would have to begin to-morrow, probably. They didn't know for sure, but they thought it would be to-morrow. It would be fine, riding off on the big train. Probably they would never come back to this town, but sleep on their big engine every night; and every day, from the toothsome dainties of the train-boy Sullivan's basket, they would "eat all they could hold." The elder Sullivan, aged eight, he of the artistic temperament, here soared dizzily into the farthest ether of romance. He had his uniform at home, at that very moment, and a cap with "gold reading" on it--it read "Conductor" on one side, and "Candy" on the other. Only--this veritably smacked of genius--the blue coat with the gold b.u.t.tons had been made too small for him, and he'd have to wait until they sent him a larger size--"a No. 12," he said, with a careless, unseeing glance at our group. This was a stroke that had nearly done for one of us--but a moment's resistance and another of sober reflection saved him. He flashed to me a look of scorn for the clumsy fabrication.

There was still a brakeman needed, it appeared,--a _good_ brakeman. The Sullivans consulted importantly, wondering if "a good man" could by any chance be found "around here." They named and rejected several possible candidates--other boys that we knew. And they wondered again.

No--probably every one around here was afraid to leave home, or wouldn't be strong enough.

I held my breath, perceiving at once, the villany on foot. They were trying to lure one of us into a trap. They wished one of us to leap forward with a glad, eager, artless shout--"_I'll_ be the other brakeman!" At once they would jeer coa.r.s.ely, slapping one another's backs and affecting the utmost merriment that this one of us should have been equal to so monstrous a pretension. This would last a long time.

They would take up other matters only for the sake of coming back to it with sudden explosions of contemptuous mirth.

Happily, the one of us most liable to this ignominy remained unbelieving to the bitter end; even did he pretend to a yawning sort of interest in a book carelessly picked up. The Sullivans had been foiled at every turn, and now we were relieved from the covert but not less pointed insult of their presence.

Mrs. Delia, her morning's work done, came out dressed for church, bidding me a briskly sad little "Good marnin', _Major!_" I responded pleasantly, for in a way I liked Mrs. Sullivan, who came each day from her bare little house under the hill to make a home for Solon and our children. At least she was kind to them and kept them plump. That she remained dismal under circ.u.mstances that seemed to me not to warrant it was a detail of minor consequence. Terry Sullivan had been no good husband to her. Beating her and the lesser Sullivans had been his serious aim when in liquor and his diversion when out. But he fell from a gracious scaffolding with a. bucket of azure paint one day and fractured his stout neck, a thing which in the general opinion of Little Arcady Heaven had meant to be consummated under more formal auspices.

But when they took Terry home and laid him on her bed, she had wailed absurdly for the lost lover in him. Through the night her cry had been, "Ah, Terry, Terry,--ye gev me manny a haird blow, darlin', but ye kep'

th' hairdest til th' last!"

It was not possible to avoid being irritated a little by such a woman, but I always tried to conceal this from her. I suppose she had a right to her own play-world. She was dressed now in a limp black of many rusty ruffles that sagged close to her and glistened in spots through its rust. Both the dress and the spiritless silk bonnet that circled her keen little face seemed to have been cried over a long time--to be always damp with her tears.

With parting injunctions to my namesake to let the cat alone, not to "track up" the kitchen, and not to play with matches, the little woman lovingly cuffed the conspiring lesser Sullivans into a decorous line behind her and marched them off to church. There, I knew, she would give from her poor wage that the soul of dead Terry should be the sooner prayed out of a place, which, it would seem, might have been created with an eye single to his just needs.

Thinking of woman's love,--that, like the peace of G.o.d it pa.s.seth all understanding,--I officiated absently as one of two guests at a "tea-party." My fellow-guest was a large doll braced stiffly in its chair; a doll whose waxen face had been gouged by vandal nails. That was an old tragedy, though a sickening one at the time. The doll had been my Christmas offering to the woman child, and in the dusk of that joyous day my namesake had craved of its proud mother the boon of holding it a little while. Relinquished trustingly to him, he had sat with it by a cheerful fire--without evil intent, I do truly believe. Surely it was by chance that he found its waxen face softening under the stove's glow--and has Heaven affixed nails to any boy of seven that, in a dusky room at a quiet moment, would have behaved with more restraint? I trow not. One surprised dig and all was lost. Of that fair surface of rounded cheek, fattened chin, and n.o.ble brow not a square inch was left ungouged. It was indeed a face of evil suggestion that the unsuspecting mother took back.

That was the evening when the Crowders, living next door, had rushed over in the belief that my woman child was being murdered. The criminal had never been able to advance the shadow of a reason or excuse for his mad act. He seemed to be as honestly puzzled by it as the rest of us, though I rejoice to say that he was not left without reason to deplore it.

But the mother--the true mother--had thereafter loved the disfigured thing but the more. She promptly divested it of all its splendid garments, as a precaution against further vandalism, and the naked thing with its scarred face was ever an honored guest at our functions.

"You really must get some clothes for Irene," I said. "That's not quite the right thing, you know, having her sit there without any."

In much annoyance she rebuked me, whispering, for this thoughtless lapse from my role as guest. At our parties Irene was no longer Irene, but "Mrs. Judge Robinson," and justly sensitive about her faulty complexion and lack of clothes.

"Besides," came the whisper again, "I am going to make her some clothes--a lovely veil to go over her face."

Resuming her company voice, and with the aplomb of a perfect hostess who has rectified the gaucherie of an awkward guest, she pressed upon me another cup of the custard coffee, and tactfully inquired of the supposedly embarra.s.sed Mrs. Judge Robinson if she did not think this was _very_ warm weather for this time of year.

The proprieties being thus mended, our hostess raised her voice and bade Mrs. Sullivan, within doors, to hurry with the next course, which, I was charmed to learn, would be lemon soup and frosted cake. Mrs. Sullivan's response, though audible only to her mistress, who was compelled to c.o.c.k an intent ear toward the kitchen, seemed to be in some manner shuffling or evasive.

"What's _that_?" she exclaimed sharply, listening again. Then, with dignity, "Well, if you _don't_ hurry, I'll have to come right in there and see to you this minute!"

The threat happily availed, and the feast went forward, a phantom and duly apologetic Mrs. Sullivan serving us with every delicacy which our imaginations afforded. When we had eaten to repletion, of and from the checkers which were our plates and food as well, Mrs. Judge Robinson suddenly became Irene, who had eaten too much and had to be scolded and put to bed. The lights were out, the revelry done.

"Going walking now?" asked my namesake. He did not know how to behave at tea-parties, and, sitting at a little distance from us, he had been aiming an imaginary gun at every fat robin that mined the lawn for sustenance.

"Ask your father if you may go," I said. I had heard Solon pacing his room--forever cogitating the imminent Potts. I did not enter the house oftener than I could help, for always in those rooms I felt a troubled presence, a homesick thing that pushed two frail white hands against an intangible but sufficing curtain that held it from those it sickened for. I could not long be easy there.

It was a day poised and serene, with white brush-dabs of cloud on a wonderful canvas of blue,--a day when I longed for the honeyed fragrance of the woods warming from the last night's rain.

But this was not to be my walk. Not for me the shaded arches of the wood where glad birds piped, nor the velvet hillsides tufted with green and yellow and brown, nor eke the quiet lane running between walls of foliage, where simple rabbits scampered, amazed, but not yet taught their fullest fear.

The b.u.t.terflies we must chase hovered rather along urban ways. That of the woman child was social. Ahead of us she flounced. Strangely, she was herself Mrs. Judge Robinson now. I understood that she was decked in a gown of royal purple, whose sweeping velvet train gave her no little trouble. But she paid her calls. At each gate she stopped, and it seemed that persons met her there, for she began:--