WHITE VIOLETS
Bruce McKenzie's letter arriving in due time at the Toy Shop, found
Emily very busy. There were many women to be instructed how to do
things with gauze and muslin and cotton, so she tucked the letter in
her apron pocket. But all day her mind went to it, as a feast to be
deferred until the time came to enjoy it.
In the afternoon Ulrich Stölle arrived, bearing the inevitable tissue
paper parcel.
"Do you know what day it is?" he asked.
"Thursday."
"There are always Thursdays. But this is a special Thursday."
"Is it?"
"And you ask me like that? It is a Thursday for valentines."
"Of course. But how could you expect me to remember? Nobody ever
sends me valentines."
"My father has sent you one." It was a heart-shaped basket of pink
roses; "but mine I couldn't bring. You must come and see it. Will you
dine with us tonight?"
"Oh, I am so busy."
"You are not too busy for that. Let your little Jean take charge."
Jean, all in white with her white veil and red crosses was more than
ever like a little nun. She was remote, too, like a nun, wrapped not
in the contemplation of her religion, but of her love.
She still made toys, and the proceeds of the sale of Lovely Dreams had
been contributed by herself and Emily for Red Cross purposes. There
were rows and rows of the fantastic creatures behind glass doors on the
shelves, and for Valentine's Day Jean had carved and painted pale doves
which carried in their beaks rosy hearts and golden arrows and whose
wings were outspread--.
There were also on the shelves the white plush elephants which Franz
Stölle and his friends had made, and which were, too, being sold to
swell the Red Cross fund.
Thus had the Toy Shop come into its own. "I have enough to live on,"
Emily had said, "at least for a while, and I am taking no more chances
for future living, than the men who give up everything to fight."
So enlisted in this cause of mercy as men had enlisted in the cause of
war, Miss Emily led where others followed, and the old patriarch of all
the white elephants, who had been born in a country of blood and iron,
looked down on women working to heal the wounds which his country had
made.
"Let your little Jean look after things," Ulrich repeated.
"Do you mind, my dear?"
"Mind what, Emily--?"
"If I go with Mr. Stölle--to see his father about the--toys."
"Darling--no;" Jean kissed her. "I don't mind in the least, and the
ride will do you good."
"But you are not going to see my father about toys," Ulrich told her,
twinkling, as he followed her to the back of the shop.
"Do you think I was going to tell her that?"
She put on her coat and hat and off she went with Ulrich, leaving still
unread in the pocket of the big apron the letter which Bruce McKenzie
had written her.
All the way out Ulrich was rather silent. It was not, however, the
silence of moodiness or dullness, it was rather as if he wanted to hear
her speak. It was, indeed, a responsive, stimulating silence, and she
glowed under his glance.
It seemed to her, as she talked, that these adventures with Ulrich
Stölle were in every way the most splendid thing that had happened to
her. They were always unexpected, and they were packed to the brim
with pleasure of a rare quality.
When they reached their destination, Ulrich took her at once to the
hothouses. As they passed down the fragrant aisles, she found that all
the men and gone, their day's work over; only she and Ulrich were under
the great glass roof.
"Anton comes back later," Ulrich explained, "but at this hour the
houses are empty, and dinner will not be ready for as hour. We have it
all to ourselves, Emily."
Her name, spoken with so much ease, without a sign of
self-consciousness, startled her. Her inquiring glance showed her that
he was utterly unaware that he had spoken it. Her breath came quickly.
The birds sang and the stream sang, and suddenly her heart began to
sing.
You see it had been so many years since Emily had known
romance;--indeed, she had never known it--there had always been, in her
mother's time, her sense of the proper thing, and her sense of duty,
and her sense of making the best of things--and now for the first time
in her life there was no make-believe. This was a world of realities,
with Ulrich leading the way, his hands gathering flowers for her.
He stopped at last at the entrance of a sort of grotto where great
ferns towered--at their feet was a bed of white violets.
"You see," he said, "I could not bring it. I came here this morning to
pick the violets--for you--to let them say, 'I love you'--"
Even the birds seemed silent, and the little stream!
"And suddenly they spoke to me, 'Let her see us here, where you have so
often thought of her. Tell her here that you love her--'
"How much I love you," and now she found her hands in his, "I cannot
tell you. It seems to me that the thought of you as my wife is so
exquisite that I cannot believe it will ever come to pass. And I have
so little to offer you. Even my name is hated because it is a German
name, and my old house is German, and my father--
"But my heart's blood is for America. You know that, and so I have
dared to ask it, not that you will love me now, but that you may come
to think of loving me, so that some day you will care a little."
The birds were singing madly, the streams were shouting--Emily was
trembling. Nobody had ever wanted her like this--nobody had ever made
her feel so young and lovely and--wanted--. She had had a proposal or
two, but there had been always the sense that she had been chosen for
certain staid and sensible qualities; there had been nothing in it of
red blood and rapture.
"If you should come to us, to me and my father, you would be a queen on
a throne. If you could love me just a little in return--"
She could not answer, she just stood looking up at him, and suddenly
his arms went around her. "Tell me, beloved."
* * * * * *
An hour later they went in to his father, and after that Emily was
lifted up on the wings of an enthusiasm which left her breathless, but
beatified. "I knew when I first saw you what we desired," said the old
man, "and my son knew. All that I have is yours both now and
afterwards--"
Dinner was a candle-lighted feast, with heart-shaped ices at the end.
"How sure you were," Emily told her lover, smiling.
"I was not sure. But I set the stage for success. It was only thus
that I kept up my courage. There were so many chances that the curtain
might drop on darkness--," his hand went over hers. "If it had been
that way, I should have let the ices melt and the violets die--."
After dinner they went over the house. "Why should we wait," Ulrich
had said, "you and I? There is nothing to wait for. Tell me what you
want changed in this old house, and then come to it, and to my heart."
It was, she found, such a funny old place. It had been furnished by
men, and by German men at that. There was heaviness and stuffiness,
and all the bric-a-brac was fat and puffy, and all the pictures were
highly-colored, with the women in them blonde and buxom, and the men
blond and bold--.
But Ulrich's room was not stuffy or heavy. The windows were wide open,
and the walls were white, and the cover on the canopy bed was white,
and there were two pictures, one of Lincoln and one of Washington, and
that was all.
"And when I have your picture, it will be perfect," he told her.
"Where I can see you when I wake, and pray to you before I go to sleep."
"But why," she probed daringly, "do you want my picture?"
"Because you are so--beautiful--"
It was not to be wondered that such worship went to Miss Emily's head.
She slipped out of the dried sheath of the years which had saddened and
aged her, and emerged lovely as a flower over which the winter has
passed and which blooms again.
"I don't want to change anything," Emily told her lover as they went
downstairs, "at least not very much. I shall keep all of the lovely
old carved things--with the fat cupids."
As she lay awake that night, reviewing it all, she thought suddenly of
Bruce McKenzie's letter in her apron pocket. The apron was in the Toy
Shop, and it was not therefore until the next morning that she read the
letter.
In it Dr. McKenzie asked her to marry him.
"I should like to think that when I come back, you will be waiting for
me, Emily. I am a very lonely man. I want someone who will sympathize
and understand. I want someone who will love Jean, and who will hold
me to the best that is in me, and you can do that, Emily; you have
always done it."
It was a rather touching letter, and she felt its appeal strongly.
Indeed, so stern was her sense of self-sacrifice, that she had an
almost guilty feeling when she thought of Ulrich. If he had not come
into her life at the psychological moment, she might have given herself
to Bruce McKenzie.
But the letter had come too late. Oh, how glad she was that she had
left it in her apron pocket!
She answered it that night.
"I am going to be very frank with you, Bruce, because in being frank
with you I shall be frank with myself. If Ulrich Stölle had not come
into my life, I should probably have thought I cared for you. Even now
when I am saying 'no,' I realize that your charm has always held me,
and that the prospect of a future by your pleasant fireside holds many
attractions. But since you left Washington, something has happened
which I never expected, and all of my preconceived ideas of myself have
been overturned. Bruce, I am no longer the Emily you have known--a
little staid, gray-haired, with pretty hands, but with nothing else
very pretty about her; a lady who would, perhaps, fill gracefully, a
position for which her aristocratic nose fits her. I am no longer the
Emily of the Toy Shop, wearing spectacles on a black ribbon, eating her
lunches wherever she can get them. No, I am an Emily who is young and
beautiful, a sort of fairy-tale Princess, an Emily who, if she wishes,
shall sit on a cushion and sew a fine seam, but who doesn't wish it
because she hates to sew, and would much rather work in her
silver-bell-and-cockle shell garden--oh, such a wonderful garden as it
is!
"And I am all this, Bruce, I am young and beautiful and all the rest,
because I am seeing myself through the eyes of my lover.
"He is Ulrich Stölle, as I have said, and you mustn't think because his
name is German that he is to be cast into outer darkness. He is as
American as you with your Scotch blood, or as I with my English blood.
And he is as loyal as any of us. He is too old to be accepted for
service, but he is giving time and money to the cause.
"And he loves me rapturously, radiantly, romantically. He doesn't want
me as a cushion for his tired head, he doesn't want me because he
thinks it would be an act of altruism to provide a haven for me in my
old age, he wants me because he thinks I am the most remarkable woman
in the whole wide world, and that he is the most fortunate man to have
won me.
"And you don't feel that way about it, Bruce. You know that I am not
beautiful, there is no glamour in your love for me. You know that I am
not wonderful, or a fairy Princess--. And you are right and he is
wrong. But it is his wrongness which makes me love him. Because every
woman wants to be beautiful to her lover, and to feel that she is much
desired.
"You will ask why I am telling you all this. Well, there was one
sentence in your letter which called it forth. You say that you want
me because I will hold you to the best that is in you.
"Oh, Bruce, what would you gain if I held you? Wouldn't there be
moments when in spite of me you would swing back to women like Hilda?
You are big and fine, but you are spoiled by feminine worship--it is a
temptation which assails clergymen and doctors--who have, as it were,
many women at their feet.
"Does that sound harsh? I don't mean it that way. I only want you to
come into your own. And if you ever marry I want you to find some
woman you can love as you loved your wife, someone who will touch your
imagination, set you on fire with dreams, and I could never do it.
"Yet even as I finish this letter, I am tempted to tear it up and tell
you only of my real appreciation of the honor you have conferred upon
me in asking me to be your wife. I know that you are offering me more
in many ways than Ulrich Stölle. I don't like his name, because
something rises up in me against Teuton blood and Teuton nomenclature.
But he loves me, and you do not, and because of his love for me and
mine for him, everything else seems too small to consider.
"Oh, you'd laugh at his house, Bruce, but I love even the fat angels
that are carved on everything from the mahogany chests to the soup
tureens. It is all like some old fairy-tale. I shall make few
changes; it seems such a perfect setting for Ulrich and his busy old
gnome of a father.
"When you get this, pray for my happiness. Oh, I do want to be happy.
I have made the best of things, but there has been much more of gray
than rose-color, and now as I turn my face to the setting sun, I am
seeing---loveliness and light--"
She read it over and sealed it and sent it away. It was several weeks
before it reached Doctor McKenzie. He was very busy, for the spring
drive of the Germans had begun, and shattered men were coming to him
faster than he could handle them. But he found time at last to read
it, and when he laid it down he sat quite still from the shock of it.
And the next time he saw Drusilla he said to her, "Emily Bridges is
going to be married, and she is not going to marry me."
"I am glad of it," Drusilla told him.
"My dear girl, why?"
"Because you don't love her, and you never did."