In which something must be done
Clem's prolonged convalescence was a trial to his militant spirit. The month or more of curious weakness in his body, always before so stout, left him with a fear that he had been "pah'lyzed in th' frame." Moreover, there were troubles less intimately personal to him, but not less harassing to the household.
There was Little Miss, who was making a fight like Clem's own in a Baltimore hospital. Each day I bore to Miss Caroline a telegram detailing the progress of her daughter, though it had cost me time and trouble to convince my correspondent that he was not to skimp such encouragement as might be his to offer, merely to comprise it within ten words. There were three days, it is true, when ten words were more than enough in which to be non-committal. And there was a day that came upon the heels of these when the profits of the telegraph company must have been unusual, for only two words came instead of ten—"Recovery doubtful." This might as well have been left unsent, for I tore it up and assured the waiting pair that no news was good news. They tried eagerly to believe this aphorism, which has the authority of age, but which I suspect was coined originally from despair.
The next day's bulletin read "Temperature still up, but making a strong fight." Stupid it was, when these were but eight words, not to have added two more, such as, "Very hopeful." I induced our telegraph operator to rectify this oversight, and felt repaid for my trouble when I showed the message. That last touch seemed to have been needed. Of course Little Miss would make a strong fight. Miss Caroline and Clem both knew that. But they had known other strong fights to be none the less hopeless, and they were grateful for those last two words of qualification.
There were four other days when the report seemed to need judicious editing, and in this I did not prove remiss. As the telegraph company remained indifferent, I could see that no harm was done. For at last came a bulletin of seventeen words which left us assured that Little Miss had conquered. Henceforth we could receive the things without that stifling dread, that eager fearfulness of the eyes to read all the words in one glance. Leisurely could we learn that Little Miss was getting back her strength, and Miss Caroline and I could laugh at Clem's fear that she also would find herself "pah'lyzed in th' frame."
After that Miss Caroline and I were free to consider another matter, weighty enough with pneumonia out of the running. This was a matter of ways and means—of sheer, downright money.
When Clem, in the first days of his sickness, had warned Miss Caroline that she would not be let to waste "all that gold money," his lofty reference, as a matter of cold figures, was to a sum less than nine dollars. I forget the precise amount, but that is near enough—nine dollars, in round numbers. And the winter had been an expensive one.
At the lowest time of doubt, when Miss Caroline had affairs of extreme gravity to face, I had spoken to her incidentally of money that I owed to Clem for services performed, and I had, in fact, paid several instalments of the debt as money seemed to be needed.
When Clem's recovery was assured and I urged Miss Caroline to go to Little Miss, she asked me bluntly what sum I had owed Clem. I felt obliged to confess that it was not more than two hundred dollars.
This must have surprised Miss Caroline as much as it rejoiced her, for she took up the matter with Clem, and in so clumsy a fashion that he, perhaps owing to his enfeebled condition, witlessly made a confession at variance with mine, and with an effect of candor that moved his questioner to take his word rather than that of an officer and a gentleman. Of course this was not at all like Clem. In referring to sums of money due him he had ever been wont to chant them with a bard-like inflation that recognized only sums of a vague but immense rotundity. I had never known him to be thus prosaic, and I suspected that Miss Caroline had, in a sudden impulse of doubt, terrified him into being so brutally explicit.
Whence fell a coldness between Miss Caroline and me, for the discrepancy between Clem's confession and mine was not slight. Even my mutterings about interest having accumulated were put down as the desperate resource of embarrassment. Miss Caroline did not even dignify them with her notice, and the coldness increased.
Yet, while it was a true coldness, it was distinguished by a certain alien quality of warmth, for Miss Caroline, though now on guard against any mere vulgar benevolence of mine, talked to me frankly, as she had never done before, about her situation.
First, it was impossible to think of going to her daughter. There were debts in the town; Clem would be unable to work for many weeks; and not only had Little Miss's contribution from her small wage now failed, but she herself had incurred debts and would be without money to pay them.
My neighbor depicted the gravity of this situation with a spirit that taxed my powers of admiration,—powers not slight, I may explain; for had they not already been developed beyond the ordinary by this same woman? Not even was she downcast in my presence. In fine, she was superbly Miss Caroline to me. If I saw that to herself she was an ill-fated old woman, perversely surviving a wreck with which she should have gone down, alone in a land that seemed unkind because it did not understand, and in desperate straits for the commonest stuff in the world,—why, that was no matter to be opened between us. We affected with mild philosophy to study a situation that not only did not require study but scarcely permitted it by candid souls. But we affected to agree that something must be done, which sounded very well indeed.
As a sign that she bore me no malice it was promised that I might hire a man to plant Clem's garden that spring, with the understanding that I should thus acquire an equity in its product. This seemed to be in the line of that something that must be done, and Miss Caroline and I made much of it, to avoid the situation's more embarrassing aspects.
"If I could only sell something," said my neighbor, with a vacant look about the room—a look of humorous disparagement. "The silver is good, but there's hardly enough of it to pay one of those debts—and I've nothing else but Clem. But if I tried to sell him," she added brightly, "it would only bring on trouble again with your Northern President. I know just how it would be."
We parted on this jest. Miss Caroline, I believe, went to be scolded by Clem for her trifling ways, while I sought out Solon Denney.
When something must be done, I seem never to know what it shall be. I believe Solon is often quite as uncertain, but he will never confess this, so that talk with him under such circumstances stimulates if it does not sustain.
I put Miss Caroline's difficulties before him. As any common catalogue of troubles will not provoke Solon from a happy unconcern which is temperamental, I spared no details in my recital, and I observed at length that my listener was truly aroused to the bad way in which Miss Caroline found herself. He sat forward in his chair, rested one elbow upon his untidy desk, and for several moments of silence jabbed an inky pen rhythmically into the largest rutabaga ever grown in Slocum County. At last he sat back and gazed upon me distantly from inspired eyes. Then, with his characteristic enthusiasm, he exclaimed:
"Something will have to be done!"
"Wonderful!" I murmured. "Here I've worried over the thing for two months, studied it in court, studied it in my office, studied it in bed—and couldn't make a thing out of it. All at once I am guided to a welling fount of wisdom, and the thing is solved in a flash. Solon, you dazzle me! Denney forever!"
"Now, don't be funny, Calvin—I mean, don't try to be—" but I arose to go.
"You've solved it, Solon. Something must be done. There's the difference between intuition and mere clumsy ratiocination. In another month I might have found this out for myself, but you divine it instantly. You're a clairvoyant. Now I'm going to find Billy Durgin. You've done the heavy work—you've discovered that something must be done. What we need now, I suppose, is a bright young detective to tell us what it is."
But Solon interrupted soothingly. "There, there, something must be done, and, of course, I'll do it."
"What will you do?"
Even then I think he did not know.
"We must use common sense in these matters," he said, to gain time, and narrowed his gaze for an interval of study. At last he drove the pen viciously to its hilt in the rutabaga, and almost shouted:—
"I'll go to see Mrs. Potts!"
Before I could again express my enthusiasm, reawakened by the felicitous adequacy of this device, he had seized his hat and was clattering noisily down the stairway.
Two hours later Solon bustled into my own office, whither I had fled to forget his manifest incompetence. His hat was well back, and he seemed to be inflated with secrecy. I remembered it was thus he had impressed me just previous to the coup that had relieved us of Potts. I knew at once that he was going to be mysterious with me.
"I am not to say a word to any one," I began, merely to show him that I was not dense.
He paused, apparently on the point of telling me as much. I saw that I had read him aright.
"I am merely to be quiet and trust everything to you," I continued.
"Oh, well,—if you—"
"One moment—let me take a few more words out of your mouth. You are not certain, I am to remember, that anything will come of it, but you think something will. You think you may say that much. But I am again to remember not to talk about it. There! That's it, isn't it?"
He was entirely serious.
"Well, that's practically it. But I don't mind hinting a little, in strict confidence." He dropped into a chair, sitting earnestly forward.
"You see, Cal, I remembered a little remark Mrs. Potts once made. I believe it was the day after Mrs. Lansdale entertained the ladies' club last summer—I remember she was complaining of a headache—"
"I never knew Mrs. Potts to make a little remark," I said. I was not to be trifled with. Solon grinned.
"Well, perhaps this one wasn't so very little, only I never thought of it again until this morning. It was about Mrs. Lansdale's furniture."
"Indeed," I said in cold disinterest, having designed to be told more.
"Well, Mrs. Potts thinks there may be something in it."
His effort was to seem significant, but those things are apt to fail with me.
"Oh, I see. Well, that's a good idea, Solon, but you and Mrs. Potts are slow. Billy Durgin had the same idea last summer while the furniture was being unloaded. He took a good look at some of those old pieces, and he confided to me in strict secrecy that there were probably missing wills and rolls of banknotes hidden away in them. It seems that they're the kind that have secret drawers. Billy knows a case where a man touched a spring and found thirty thousand dollars in a secret drawer, 'and from there,' as Billy says, 'he fled to Australia.' So you can see it's been thought of. Of course I've never spoken of it, because I promised Billy not to,—but there's nothing in it."
"Bosh!" said Solon.
"Of course it's bosh. I could have told Billy that, but some way I always feel tender about his illusions. You may be sure I've learned enough of the Lansdale family to know that no member of it ever hid any real money—money that would spend—and there hasn't been a will missing for at least six generations."
"Bosh again!" said Solon. "It isn't secret drawers!"
"No? What then?"
"Well,—it's worse—and more of it."
"Is that all you have to say?" I asked as he stood up.
"Well, that's all I can say now. We must use common sense in these matters. But—Mrs. Potts has written!" With this cryptic utterance he stalked out.
There had been little need to caution me to secrecy. I was not tempted to speak. Had I known any debtor of Miss Caroline's who would have taken "Mrs. Potts has written" in payment of his account, it might have been otherwise.