wanted, Barbie. That’s why I built it--for you.”
“I did want it and I do want it--for you,” said his wife. “That’s why
I let you build it. But I want this for _me_--to get rested in, to be
folksy in.”
A slow twinkle grew in the senator’s eyes.
“Barbara,” he said, “you ought to see Jack’s house, around the corner!
A mighty nice little house. I’ve been going there for a long time.
Didn’t you ever guess I might like to be just folksy too, Barbie?
There’s no tiresome bunch of servants tagging at your heels at Jack’s.
You can sit down in your shirt-sleeves and smoke a cuddy, if you want
to; you can wait on yourself without shame and reproach--think of
that! Do you know what Jack had for supper to-night? Fish-chowder, and
pan-bread, and coffee that’d make your hair curl! Gee, it was good!
“You see,” he went on thoughtfully, nodding his head, “I like to go to
Jack’s because I get rested there--he’s a man. I can quarrel with him,
even! Now you know I’ve loved you, and you alone, all my life, Barbie;
it’s for you I wanted--the top-notch. But I--get tired at times. I
want to loaf a little, and be folksy too. And you, Barbie--you?”
“I also,” said the senator’s wife with a girl’s laugh. She put her
arms about his neck and clung to him. “Oh, Hugh, my dear, don’t you
see, we’ve come together again! Hugh, we’ve come together, close! It
wasn’t the big house, nor the too-muchness: it was that we didn’t know,
Hugh, and we couldn’t take time to find out! All these years--and I
didn’t know the real You until to-night; all these years, and you had
to stumble by chance into the Little Brown House, on Christmas Eve, and
find the real me.”
He kissed her with a young delight that shook his years from him, and
straightened his shoulders, and kindled his face; so, for a while, they
held each other.
“I wonder,” he said presently--“Barbie, I wonder if you or any other
woman can keep a secret?”
She waved her hand about the room by way of reply.
“Why, of course you can, all of you!” said the senator. “There’s no
end to the wonder of women! Well, now, Barbie, here’s the secret: I’m
to take a two weeks’ rest after New Year’s, and dodge everybody. I’d
thought of running out West--but, say, let’s just cone right here to
this little house of yours, and get acquainted all over again, Barbie.
I feel as if I didn’t half know you, anyhow. Will you come, dearest
dear?”
“I’ll come,” she said with shining eyes. “Hugh, Hugh, I’m beginning
to fall in love with you all over again--and I fifty-seven and a
grandmother!”
The senator took out his watch. “There’s the girl’s reception,
Barbie--we’ve got to fly,” he said regretfully. “Is the car to come for
you?”
“Oh, let’s tell Anne to send it back, and we’ll walk home,--as we used
to--remember?--when a callow fledgling of a country lawyer courted and
married a penniless district school-teacher?”
He nodded, wrapping her carefully in her sables. Anne and the Westerner
asked no questions, expressed no surprise, made no comments: they were
just such friends as that! They shook hands with a warm and loving
pressure, and wished a million Merry Christmases with all their heart.
And the Little Brown House breathed after them a message of peace and
of understanding; and overhead the sky was thick with stars--one,
larger and brighter than the others, dominating a great clear space.
They walked along together, hand in hand. The great holiday crowd
jostled them, and they, being afoot, knew themselves a part of it and
caught its spirit, and were glad. After a while the senator glanced up
and called her attention to the biggest star.
“The same old star!” said he softly.
“And we together under it!” she answered happily.
“Why come to think of it, so is everybody else!” said the senator with
a hint of reverence.
“So is everybody else!” she repeated. “And that,” she added, “is just
what makes Christmas _Christmas_!”
“THAT MAKES THE WORLD GO ’ROUND”
“THAT MAKES THE WORLD GO ’ROUND”
If I hadn’t loved Willy more than any girl had ever loved any man
before, I should never, never, never have had the wild courage to
marry him, on account of my mother; and if Willy hadn’t adored me to
distraction, he would never, never, never have had the temerity to
marry me, on account of his father. Not that there was anything in
the least objectionable about Willy’s father, or about my mother, who
are about as dear, delightful angels as one shall find this side of
Elysium. But--divided, they stood; united, they simply fell upon each
other, tooth and claw!
When Willy passed the little millinery shop in West 127th Street, with
the big “Valleau et Cie.” above the door, and glancing in saw the
“Cie.”--who was only little me--sitting with head bent over the bunch
of red roses which was to adorn a stunning hat, he stopped dead short
and stared with all his blue, honest, German eyes,--the very nicest
eyes that ever were. And I looked up and stared back with my French
black ones. From that moment neither of us had the faintest doubt but
that the good God had meant us for each other. It was just like that!
One minute before, and I had had no thought but of making a fine hat,
and Willy had had no thought but of hurrying on to his luncheon; and
the next moment the eternal, beautiful miracle had happened, snatching
us out of every-day ordinary 127th Street and plumping us into
Paradise, an Adam and Eve who didn’t know each other’s name.
After that my days were divided into the hours of waiting for a tall,
fair young man to pass and fix me with his fine eyes, and the hours in
which I reflected upon that glance. And then one day he marched in,
very straightforward and serious, and told Maman and me who he was and
all about himself, in a direct and manly way that won her respect at
once. When we knew more of him Maman agreed that he was a very charming
young man,--irreproachable, a desirable _parti_ for a dowerless
demoiselle like me. Only, in our dear, splendid America one does not
have to have a _dot_ to make a fine marriage.
When we were betrothed Willy had at once brought his father to see us.
Willy looks up to his father as one does to Providence. He considers
this old man with the big bald head and the white beard and the
twinkling blue eyes quite perfect. When he says “My father” it is with
an air of pride and affection that makes one’s heart glow. One cannot
but smile tenderly to see these two looking upon each other with such
naïve delight, and to hear with what happiness this father says “My
son.”
The old Herr Roeder is organist and choirmaster in the Lutheran
Church, where Willy himself plays the violin and sings in a pleasing
counter-tenor. Willy is a bank clerk, and as good an American as one
shall find in a week’s march. But his father is what Maman at once
said was “effusively, emphatically, offensively Teutonic.” Maman said
that if Willy’s father had been present upon the day when le bon Dieu
finished making the heavens and the earth, he would have stamped upon
both “_Made in Germany_”--as a guarantee of worth.
You see, Maman’s father and grandfather had been Lorraine soldiers in
1870. Indeed, her grandfather had fallen fighting. And when Lorraine
had been taken away from France, her father’s French heart couldn’t
beat happily under German rule. So presently he picked up himself
and his motherless young daughter--who was Maman--and came over to
New York. He was a mender and maker of clocks and watches,--a mild,
amiable, fiery man with stooped shoulders upon which his white hair
fell. I used to sit in his shop and hear his endless stories of bloody
and bitter fighting in the streets and houses of Alsatian mountain
towns, and of sorties and surprises and reprisals in the pleasant
country of Lorraine. The big clocks upon the wall would go “tick, tick,
tick,” solemnly; and Maman would hold her sewing in her lap and murmur,
“_Une crime! Une crime!_” remembering what her childish eyes had seen.
My dear gay artist father died when I was very little, and, like most
artists, he left us nothing but his cherished memory. So Maman and I
lived with my grandfather, and were very happy until he, too, died.
Then Maman opened the millinery parlor in the shop where the clocks
and watches used to tick. Although she is astonishingly clever and our
shop had “Imported French Hats” on its sign, we didn’t make much more
than our living. But we were grateful and happy, putting our love of
beauty and our joy in life and work into folds of ribbon and chiffon
and clusters of flowers which were to make other women look pretty.
Maman is really more like a sister than a mother, she is so gay and
charming. Her hair framing her rosy face is of that cottony, shining
whiteness which is so rare and lovely, and her eyes are the brown,
sparkling, animated eyes of a girl. She stands about five feet high in
her shoes; and I am sure she would be enchanting and ensnaring if she
lived to be a thousand, she has so much sheer power of personality.
But--she is very temperamental. And she remembered cruel things she had
seen and heard, even as Willy’s father remembered. Although Willy’s
lovableness had disarmed her, and she loved him, Maman simply detested
Germans in general. And although Herr Roeder had at once taken me
into his big, warm, kind heart, he loathed French people as a rule.
Maman shrugged her shoulders, and Willy’s father wrinkled his nose.
One wouldn’t dream what immense and baleful powers of insult lie in
shoulder and nose, until they had witnessed a performance by Maman and
Willy’s father. They disliked and distrusted each other with a fire
and fury which threatened to consume our happiness. I think Maman was
jealous that I should care so much for Willy’s father, too; and Willy’s
father disliked the thought that his son should so greatly admire my
charming Maman.
I shall never forget the night Willy made in their rooms a little feast
in honor of our betrothal. Maman was silent and depressed. She would
have been perfectly horrified at the bare thought of my remaining
unmarried, but she was averse to having me go out of her life just yet
and into Willy’s--and his father’s.
Her eyes, roving critically about the stiff, bare, clean dining-room,
met of a sudden the insulting stare of Prince Bismarck, looking
forbiddingly out of a big oak frame,--grim, military, formidable.
She gave an involuntary shudder of distaste and aversion. But Willy’s
father, with a proud and sweeping gesture, and in a voice one might use
to name Deity, said reverently:
“Bismarck!!”
“Brute!” said Maman. “Despoiler of France! Ah, mon Dieu! How I abhor
that ill-favored visage of adamant!”
Herr Roeder stroked his beard tolerantly. “Ach, well!” he admitted
soothingly, “one cannot blame you so greatly: he was one to trounce you
thoroughly, the great Chancellor!”
I could almost see Maman’s hair rise, and I trembled. Echoes of old
songs, of old tales, firelighted memories, floated through my mind.
“I forgive him,” said Maman, gently, “for the evils he helped to
inflict upon my stricken country. Besides,” she added piously, “one
should even be sorry for him, now that he is undoubtedly in hell,
thank God!”
It was turn for Willy’s father’s hair to rise, and I am sure that if he
had had any it would have stood on end. Only, he is bald. His face grew
purple, as if he were threatened with apoplexy.
“He is in the bosom of God!” he said with violence. “In hell! A man
like that!”
“A man like that!” repeated Maman. “_Hein!_” and she and Herr Roeder
locked eyes like horns.
“Madame!” stammered Willy, imploringly. “Dear Madame! Will you
not--Madame, I beg of you to take a slice of seed-cake! Father, let me
beg of you to offer our honored guest a slice of seed-cake. Do! It is
such fine seed-cake!”
“Do, dear Maman!” I besought. She shrugged her shoulders, but a smile
dimpled her lips and her eyes danced.
“Very well, my dears: I will have a slice of this fine seed-cake,” she
agreed. It was really very good indeed, and she said so, graciously.
“It is good German cake,” said Willy’s father, complacently. “For other
peoples the messy cooking, yes; but for the good, plain, sensible,
satisfying, body-building cooking, always it is the German which is the
best. Ach! The gosling-stew of Germany! With dumplings!” He looked up
at the ceiling ecstatically, as one who sees a beatific vision.
“Do not, I beseech you, forget the soup!” said Maman, gravely. “The
fine water, with a thimble-ful of vegetable-parings floating upon the
surface. Ah! The soup of Germany! Without seasoning!” She, too, looked
up at the ceiling, with a droll naughtiness to make one giggle.
Willy had never been separated from his father, any more than I from
Maman, and to break that tender intimacy, which a lifetime’s love and
service had built up, seemed to us intolerable. We could not bear the
thought of leaving them alone. We had, in truth, so much love that
it spread out and embraced everything and everybody, and we thought
that our parents’ great affection for us would in time make them more
tolerant of each other.
And so Willy and I were married, in St. Agatha’s parsonage, with Maman
and Herr Roeder looking on. Maman had made my frock herself, not
allowing any one else to put a hand to it, and it was a dress to dream
over and put away and cherish. When Father Bazin had read the service
which united us, Willy’s father put his arms around us both: he kissed
Willy. “For your mother, my son, my dear, dear son!” said he, tenderly.
“Ach! If she were only here to welcome our sweet new daughter! Always
she longed for a daughter! But I will love you for myself and for her,
too, my pretty Leontine!” He kissed me then, so fatherly that a great
wave of affection flowed over my heart for him. But Maman only wept.
We all settled down together in a new bright apartment, up in the
120’s. Maman had sublet the rooms over our shop, which she still
retained; and as our new home was only a few blocks away from our old
one, she wasn’t much inconvenienced going to and fro. It is true that
the new rooms were small, and that Father’s piano and music racks and
arm-chair took up most of the sitting-room, just as Bismarck and Von
Moltke took up most of the wall space in the dining-room, which they
seemed to dominate. I was so glad to make Willy’s father happy that I’d
have welcomed those pictures if both had been twins. It was delightful
to me to see him at his piano, singing _lieder_ sentimentally, or
roaring out a drinking chorus at the top of his voice. He had, too, a
pipe some two or three feet long, with a little ridiculous china bowl
on the end of it, to which he was particularly devoted. Because I kept
his jar full of his pet tobacco, and never meddled with his music, he
praised me as an angel, pulling my ears, rumpling my hair, and kissing
me smackingly on both my cheeks, while Willy looked on, pleased and
happy.
But the pipe gave Maman a headache; she couldn’t, she said, abide the
German fare I was learning to make, from Willy’s mother’s cherished
recipe book, given me as a treasure upon a state occasion. She hated
_lieder_. She said they were jellyfishy squishysquashy things, all
sentiment and bereft of sense. She accepted the big pictures in the
dining-room with a bad grace. She said their ungracious visages spoiled
her appetite and gave her indigestion. And then she bought a fine
new record of the “_Marseillaise_” for her victrola, as an offset to
“_Die Wacht am Rhein_,” which Father liked occasionally to sing in the
evening, in a lusty voice that carried a full block.
“_Lieb’ Vaterland, magst ruhig sein,
Fest steht und treu die Wacht, die Wacht am Rhein!_”
shouted Father.
“_Aux armes, citoyens! formez vos bataillons!
Marchons, marchons!
Qu’un sang impur abreuve nos sillons!_”
shrieked the victrola belligerently, upon the heels of it.
That was the real beginning of overt and covert hostilities. Father
felt himself affronted upon his most vulnerable points--his music and
his affections. The most jovial and kindly of men, he couldn’t forgive
that; he brought heavy artillery to bear upon his nimble antagonist,
who skirmished lightly about and around him, attacking him upon all
sides at once, until he was forced to retreat in raging disorder. Willy
and I had to stand by, distressed and helpless.
“If only my mother would even try to appreciate your father!” I wept
upon Willy’s shoulder.
“If only my father would be his true agreeable self to your mother!”
Willy lamented to me. We were both exquisitely unhappy, because there
lowered above the little home a heavy storm-cloud, liable at any moment
to burst forth into thunders and lightnings of wrathful remarks and
exploding retorts discourteous. If Willy had been less angelic, he
would have been horribly cross; but he was strong and good enough to be
patient as Job and meek as Moses.
“We will bear with them both,” I told Willy. “It may be that some day
you or I may be alone, like them, in a child’s house, and we shall need
love and patience then, too, my dearest. So let us now give both to
these two people who are so dear to us.”
I am sure we tried to. But Maman complained bitterly and with tears
that I loved “that ruffianly old German” better than I loved her; and
Father said Willy had forgotten his own sainted mother and loved in her
stead a saucy French jade knee-high to a duck and with the temper to
shame the devil’s mother-in-law.
Willy and I were caught between the upper and the nether millstones.
It wasn’t that they didn’t love us; they did, passionately. I am sure
Father would have died for me, a thousand times; I am sure Maman loved
Willy as her own son. She said his mother had evidently been an angel,
as, despite his horrible old father, she had been able to endow him
with her perfect disposition. And when I at first ventured to speak up
timidly in behalf of the hot-tempered, kind-hearted old man, Maman made
a thin red line of her pretty mouth, shrugged her shoulders up to her
ears, flashed at me a glance of flaming disdain, and marched off to her
own room, locking me out.
“I have but one favor, one last favor, to ask of you, my child,” she
said, before shutting the door upon me. “Let me be dead before you give
to me grandchildren that resemble little dressed Christmas pigs--and
named Karl Johann. I could not support that indignity.”
I went back to the kitchen to look after the pot-roast with herbs which
simmered upon the back of the range, and I reflected sorrowfully that
we should have all been so much happier for only a little reasonable
kindness! I suppose I cried a little over the stove about the Christmas
pigs named Karl Johann. Oh, Maman, how could you! I said not a word to
Willy, however; and when Maman wouldn’t come to table, complaining that
she simply couldn’t endure the fumes of Father’s pipe to-night, Willy
himself carried her in a tray, with a rose laid upon it which he had
brought home. She thanked him somewhat shamefacedly.
“Willy,” said she, “I’m very, very glad my child had the good sense
to love you and the good fortune to marry you. And I’m still gladder,
Willy, that it is I, and not the good little Leontine who has the bad,
bad, bad temper.” She kissed him and gently pushed him out of the room.
“Ah!” said Willy to me, regretfully, “such a kind heart, with so
much love! If only we could make her happy!” I am sure my own heart
crowded up into my eyes then to look out at Willy; and I dropped the
basting-spoon and flung my arms around him in a passion of gratitude.
Willy held me for a long minute.
“So!” said Father, entering on tiptoes, and putting his arms about us
both. “So! Son! Daughter. I--” His voice broke. He kissed us quickly
and ran out.
I think they honestly tried to avoid quarrels; but they possessed to an
unusual degree the power of arousing each other’s antagonism and anger;
and so they did little else than quarrel. Maman’s merry chatter, her
lighthearted insouciance, left her. She wore a dissatisfied face, and
she took to staying longer at the shop, coming home I hate to think
how unwillingly. Father’s loud laughter was a thing of the past; he
looked bewildered, as one who expects and dreads rebuffs. He no longer
roared out drinking-songs, and the piano was too often closed.
I had taken a severe cold and had to remain in bed, and so Maman left
the shop in charge of her assistant and remained at home with me. I
required very little attention; and she took this opportunity to give
our apartment a particularly thorough cleaning, which, indeed, it
didn’t need. But Maman had the French passion for dustlessness.
She really doesn’t make the nerve-racking uproar most superclean people
raise when they clean and polish and shine what is already clean and
polished and shining. Not she! In cap and dust-apron she whisks from
one thing to another, giving everything an extra touch; and the light
sound of her little feet is pleasant to hear, as a child’s footsteps
about one’s house. So I lay back in satisfied half-consciousness,
until she came to the dining-room. When she was polishing Bismarck’s
picture she broke into irrepressible speech:
“_Ja! Ach! Ich! So! Gewiss!_” she mocked, in an irresistibly funny
imitation. “_Kolossal!_” Then: “Iron-faced animal!” said she,
viciously. “Cruel, cold, arrogant Prussian! It is your overbearing
spirit which animates this unhappy house and blights my one child’s
affection for me!” The cake of scouring-soap came down with a
resounding crack, followed by a still more ominous crack. Maman had
brought more force to bear than she intended, and the cake went right
through the glass and came down on the Chancellor’s broad nose. Maman
gave a little scream, and just at that inopportune moment Father
stalked in.
“Infamous!” he roared. “Miserable Frenchwoman! You should be locked up
in jail for such an outrage!” He stamped with his feet so violently
that the broken glass fell out of the frame with a loud shivering
crash. Maman jumped aside.
“Assassin!” said she, passionately. “Do you deliberately try to murder
me? Ah! You would like to, brute of a German!”
“Little anarchist! To wreck my picture--my fine, noble picture!”
stormed Father. “It is dastardly!”
“I did not deliberately break it; it was an accident--”
“To drive her revengeful fist upon his honored countenance!” gritted
Father. “Demoniac!”
“Beast!” hissed Maman, quivering with rage. “Is it not enough for you
to steal from me my only child’s affection but you must also insult me
with brutal doubts upon my truthfulness, and then try to murder me with
broken glass?”
“Horrible woman! You estrange from me my son, my only son, prevent your
daughter from loving me, wreck my home and my peace of mind, and then
smash my beautiful picture!”
“Oh! This German is insufferable!” exclaimed Maman, in a suffocating
voice. “Frightful old man! It is you, you, who blight this house!”
“Madame! I love my children. You, Madame, love nothing but your own
way. You have the devil’s own temper, Madame. It is you, you, who make
us all wretched.”
I got out of bed then, and in my dressing-gown, trembling, sick at
heart, came and stood between them.
“Father! Maman! Allow me to love you both without making you and Willy
and myself frightfully unhappy. Ah! You are killing me!” I sank into a
chair and wept uncontrollably. They watched me in stricken silence.
[Illustration: “Such scenes shall not be repeated”]
“Monsieur,” said Maman in a subdued voice, after a long and painful
pause, “it is not you, not I alone, but both of us, who make our
beloved children weep. We must remedy this.” She patted me on the
shoulder and then assisted me to rise. “Calm yourself before Willy
comes home and is troubled, my child,” said she quietly, though she was
very pale. “There! Go back to bed. Such scenes as this shall not be
repeated, I promise you.”
I went over to Father, who had sunk dejectedly into a chair, with his
arms hanging down lifelessly, and kissed him timidly upon the cheek.
He looked at me unhappily, but said not a word. _Ah, le bon Dieu!_ Why
do we make one another thus miserable, when at the best and longest we
have such a little, little while to stay!
That night, when Father had gone out, Maman came into my room, where
Willy was sitting beside my bed.