THE PASTOR’S BLUE APRON.
Pastor Schaefer was in serious trouble. It was the 22d of December, and
his Christmas sermon was still unprepared: worse still, it stood every
possible chance of remaining so; for how on earth was a man to consider
texts, headings, arguments, or perorations, who had a house and six
small children to care for, and a housekeeper whose brother had just
been inconsiderate enough to die? In truth, however, it was rather the
housekeeper who should be blamed for want of consideration, since the
brother would very likely have remained alive if he had been consulted
about the matter; whereas Mary, the housekeeper, could certainly have
restrained her grief sufficiently to take the sausages off the fire!
It was early that same morning that it had all happened, though the
brother had been in a dying condition for several weeks, ever since he
had fallen from a ladder during the operation of hod-carrying, and
fractured his skull. Therefore Mary’s mind had certainly had time to
prepare itself for the shock; indeed the pastor’s children had become so
accustomed to hearing her shriek wildly every time there came a knock at
the door, under the supposition that the knocker brought news of her
brother’s death, that, when this event really happened, little Bruno,
the third from youngest, said solemnly, “Poor Mary’s brother is dead
again;” but nobody supposed it was actually so.
“You had better hold still, and have your hair brushed,” said Christina
a little sharply. Poor Tina was only nine years old, yet felt herself,
as the eldest, responsible for the family; and the responsibility was
apt to re-act on her temper. So they all hurried to finish dressing (for
the odors of breakfast were unusually strong), and descended in
procession to the kitchen, Tina first, leading Heinz, who was two and a
half, and apt, when left to himself, to make only one step, and that
head first, from bedroom to kitchen. He had fallen downstairs and landed
on his head so often, that Tina said she did not believe he minded it at
all. Next to him came Bruno, with Gretchen, who was six, and a person to
whom nothing, good or bad, ever happened; then Franz, who was eight, and
very useful in splitting wood, clearing away snow, and running errands;
and then the father, carrying Lena, the six-months-old baby, at whose
birth their mother had died.
“Poor Mary!” said Heinz.
The procession abruptly halted.
The children’s tongues had been running so fast about the nearness of
Christmas, and what gifts the Christ-child might be expected to deposit
in their shoes, that no one heard a sound from the kitchen until they
had almost reached the lowest step.
“Tina, but why do you stop there?” cried the pastor, who at the turn,
with the baby in his arms, could see nothing of what was happening
below. “Go ahead!” he added in English, being very anxious that his
children should acquire the language of their adopted country.
They were good children, and did their best to obey. Heinz made a flying
leap down two steps, and, being withheld by Tina’s grasp upon his
petticoats from landing on his head, brought some other portion of his
anatomy, less toughened by hard knocks, in contact with the steps,
whereupon he howled like the last of the Wampanoags. Tina, from the
violence of the exertion, fell back upon Bruno and Gretchen, and Franz
made two long steps over everybody’s head, and landed first of all in
the kitchen.
“_Donnerwetter!_” said the pastor under his breath, but from the bottom
of his heart.
There sat Mary on the floor, her apron over her head, howling like a
legion of wolves; Heinz was singing the tenor of the same song, the baby
added a soprano, Tina rubbed her back, and Bruno, with doubled fists,
attacked Franz, who, he averred, had kicked him on the head in passing.
Gretchen alone retained sufficient equanimity to realize the full
situation.
“Oh, Tina!” she cried, “the coffee is all boiled over, and the sausages
burnt to nothing at all.”
“When your mother died,” said the pastor solemnly, after they had eaten
such breakfast as was possible under the circumstances, “when your dear
mother died, children, _I_ had no time to sit and weep. And I was able
to do all that I had to do; but Mary, it seems, was not able even to
move back the sausages. Come, let us wash the dishes.”
Matters did not improve as the day went on. There never were better
children than Heinz and Bruno; but when one had upset the dishwater, and
the other fallen against the stove, in their eagerness to be of use, and
they had consequently been turned adrift on the wide world, pray, could
they be expected to be as quiet as mice? It was quite natural they
should find their way to the pastor’s study, where there was an
excellent fire; natural, too, that the thought of tidying the room, as
an atonement for their presence there and previous misadventures, should
occur to them; and most natural of all that they should upset the lamp
over a valuable book, which had been a college prize of their father’s.
Then it was certainly not the baby’s fault if she had a tooth nearly
through, and was cross about it; nor Tina’s if she was too small to
handle the tea-kettle dexterously, and so poured the boiling water over
her foot, instead of into the basin; but when the kitchen door was
opened by Frau Kellar, the wife of the obese little man, and her niece,
this was the situation. Heinz and Bruno were seated in different corners
of the room, with orders not to move hand or foot until permitted;
Christina, in a third, was contemplating her injured member, bandaged,
and supported on a pillow; Gretchen, to whom nothing ever happened,
rocked the baby in the middle of the floor; and the pastor, with his
coat off, and a blue check apron tied around his waist, was bending over
the stove, frying cabbage.
“You poor fellow!” said Frau Kellar, “though begging your pardon for the
word, Herr Pastor. _Gott!_ but you must have the patience of Job!”
“Oh, no,” said the pastor. “They are good children, all. It is not their
fault if they are young and little; but of course it is hard for a man,”
he added wearily.
“I should say so!” cried Frau Kellar; “but now here is my niece Lottie,
who will stay to-day, and to-morrow for that matter, and help you.”
“She is very good,” said the pastor, looking up admiringly at Lottie, a
tall, florid, good-natured-looking girl, who had already caught up the
baby, and hushed its wailing on her substantial shoulder.
“Let Gretchen and the boys go and play with my children,” said Frau
Kellar. “Lottie can look after these two, and see to your dinner, and
you come into your study with me. There is something I must say to you.”
The pastor meekly obeyed. He was tired out, poor man, mind and body, and
disinclined to assert himself; yet he was scarcely prepared for the
decided tone of Frau Kellar’s first remark.
“You need a wife, Herr Pastor; you must marry. This state of affairs
cannot go on.”
“But I wish to marry,” said the pastor seriously.
Frau Kellar hesitated a moment; there are limits to every woman’s
frankness, thank Heaven! especially when she is talking to her pastor.
Then she said,—
“Of course you know that Karl Metzerott and Dora Weglein are betrothed?”
The pastor, still in his blue apron, sat somewhat uneasily upon a chair
much too high for his short legs. A sufficiently grotesque figure, one
would have said, even if his hair had not been so very rumpled, and the
hands upon his thin, aproned knees so very grimy; yet, as he
straightened his meagre figure and looked Frau Kellar full in the face,
there was an unselfish distress upon his ugly little face that dignified
his whole personality.
“That man!” he said, “that infidel, that free-thinker!”
“Well, one knew it was sure to happen,” replied Frau Kellar, with a
shrug of her ample shoulders; “he has been her shadow ever since the
Kaffee-Visite.”
“I tried to hinder it,” said the pastor boldly. “Fräulein Dora is good
and pious, and she has no right to marry an atheist. But she only grew
angry with me,” he added sadly.
“Of course,” answered Frau Kellar with a laugh, “folks who meddle with
mating birds must expect a peck or two. Well, I have no fault to find
with Karl, for my part. He is as steady as a rock, and if he chooses to
think for himself, it’s no more than every one does nowadays. After all,
too little religion is better than too much beer,” she added sagely.
The pastor shook his head. “That may follow,” he said.
“Hardly,” she replied; then, with an access of boldness, “but if she had
listened to my advice, Herr Pastor, she would have taken you.”
The pastor did not resent her freedom of speech. “She is very
beautiful,” he said sadly, “and who would marry a man with six children,
if she could do better?”
Frau Kellar regarded the figure before her with some inward amusement,
as she mentally contrasted Dora’s two suitors. “I wonder,” she thought,
“if he really considers the six children his only drawback.” Then she
said aloud, “If you really wish to know, Herr Pastor, I will tell you.
My niece Lottie in there would marry you to-morrow if you asked her.”
“Your niece Lottie?” he said slowly.
“Yes, indeed. And Lottie is a good girl, a very good girl, Herr Pastor;
not so young as she has been, perhaps, but you were not born yesterday
yourself.”
“No,” he said, “certainly I was not born yesterday.”
“And she would be all the better wife and mother for her thirty years,”
continued the match-maker, recklessly subtracting several units from
Lottie’s actual attainments. “She is a good worker, too, an excellent
cook, and the temper of an angel. And, best of all, Herr Pastor, she has
a nice little sum in bank, saved out of her wages. No one knows it, or
she’d have offers enough; but Lottie is sharp; she won’t waste her money
on any idle good-for-naught. No; but she is tired of living out, and
wants a home of her own, and she’d like well enough to be a pastor’s
lady. That, you know, gives one a good position.”
“So it does,” said the pastor absently.
“Well, think it over,” said Frau Kellar, rising, “and if it suits you,
mention it to Lottie. She’ll stay with you to-day, and you can see what
she is for yourself.”
The pastor sat still for a long while after Frau Kellar had left him
with his hands upon his knees, gazing into the fire. Presently a tear
trickled down his cheek, then another and another. The pastor was
weeping the death of his first and only love: for his first marriage had
been as business-like a contract as the present proposed arrangement;
and his feeling for Dora had been his one romance. But, after all, one
cannot live on romance; especially one plus six children, and minus
either a wife or a housekeeper. Romance will not mend the broken head or
heal the scalded foot: it will not light the kitchen fire or keep the
sausages from burning. The pastor might shed a tear or so over his lost
golden-haired darling; but business is business, and when the door at
last was gently opened, he knew quite well that the buxom figure and
smiling face in the doorway were the face and form of his future wife.
“Dinner is ready, Herr Pastor.”
The pastor rose and untied his blue apron.
“Fräulein Lottie,” he said, “this apron belonged to my former wife. I
shall not need it, if you are good enough to stay with me: could you,
perhaps, make use of it?”
It was the freedom of the city, the investiture with the best robe, the
sending of the pallium, the throwing of the handkerchief; and, as she
promptly and proudly tied it on, Lottie took seizin of the pastor, his
house and children, and all that he had.