Chapter IV: Part 4

Upstairs the bedrooms, all in freshest dimity, and smelling of lavender and rosemary, begged you to come in and lie down and rest a while. And you didn’t need to look at the Unrevised Version on a stand by the bed to know that they were rooms you could _pray_ in. On the wall in the front room hung, in a blackened frame, a sampler, a nice moral sampler, with an edging of painfully prim flowers, “Work’d by Anne Alice Hardy, Aged 12 Yrs.” Anne Alice was the senator’s wife’s mother; and the sampler had lain for years at the bottom of a trunk, because, among the notable pictures on the walls of the great new house, there wasn’t room for anything so crude.

When with loving exactitude the Little Brown House of dreams had been wrought into reality the senator’s wife drew a long breath of relief. She said with a smile and a sigh:

“Now I need flowers, and a cat, and a canary, and a friend.”

Getting flowers, and a cat, and a canary do not present difficulties; getting a friend does. The senator’s wife knew exactly what she wanted; she knew that the Little Brown House must spell happiness, and home, and hope to any who were to dwell therein.

Face after face flitted through her mind, to be dismissed. The social secretary? _She_ despised little brown houses! The senator’s wife began to wonder if, perhaps, people do not build great houses more to please social secretaries, and visitors, and butlers, and footmen, and maids, than to live and be happy in themselves!

Apply to the pastor of her church? But he too was one for whom the bigger houses are built. Her friends? Fashionable friends are--acquaintances. They would smile to one another, with lifted eyebrows, over their bridge-tables, if they knew.

Her husband? Never, never, never he: he was with all his heart and soul a man of his times; never was he to know that the high place he had coveted and won for her wasn’t her ideal realized.

The Little Brown House remained closed, and dark at night when a friendly light should have streamed through its windows. Every time she walked through its homy rooms--rooms which seemed to be complaining of not being allowed to be home--the Little Brown House asked reproachfully:

“You who have so much, haven’t you one, just one real friend you can share my simple secret with? Why, those you regard as utter failures can call in friend and neighbor to share their joys and sorrows! Do you know why? Because Just-Enough, and more often Not-Enough, draw folks together brotherlily; but Too-Much cuts you off from your kind.

“Why do you come, senator’s wife, to me, who am only a little brown house, and keep me empty? You must share me--or leave me!”

Among her charities were several Homes for women--women that haven’t any homes of their own, and that nobody on earth wants in theirs. Her name figured on their lists of patronesses and on their many boards. And while the social secretary attended to all the mere business details, and she had but to sign the necessary checks, she made it a rule to appear at each annual function, exquisitely gowned, smiling, affable, a being from another sphere almost.

The price that one insensibly pays for Too-Much is that one insensibly forgets one is just folks; the whole great toiling wonderful terrible race becomes to one--the common people. Just as if all that has been created in our common universe hadn’t been made by our common God for His common people!

The senator’s wife, naturally enough, had drifted into this common error. It wasn’t that she didn’t feel kindly; why, she wished to help--with checks. But she simply couldn’t imagine that people who had nothing at all could be just like herself. So she had never looked at any one face among all these faces to know it from its fellows: these were just the faces of old women in Homes.

It was only because the Little Brown House was so insistent in its demands, making her thoughtful, that she found herself watching at one of these sad receptions the strong, serene face of Anne O’Driscoll. Moved by a sudden impulse, she approached the middle-aged woman, who was looking about her with the merry courage of Irish eyes.

“I hope,” she began, “that you’re happy here?”

Anne O’Driscoll’s voice hadn’t the usual complacent sureness of the grateful reply.

“My two eyes,” said she, after a pause, “went back on me last winter, an’ I could sew no more. I’m too old to find payin’ work, though I’m too young, I’m thinkin’, for _this_. But I’m grateful for the shelter, ma’am, for I’d been alone and sick.”

“Alone and sick!” The sheltered and beloved woman shuddered slightly. “I’m sorry, Mrs.--Mrs.--”

“Thank you kindly, ma’am, but I’m used to it--the being alone--for a good many years. An’ I’m no Mrs., but just Anne O’Driscoll.”

“You aren’t unhappy here, at least?”

“I’d be less so, ma’am, if I’d the hopes of gettin’ work, an’ my cat Blinkie back. I minded losin’ Blinkie most of all, I think. Ah, he was a fine cat, an’ more knowin’ than most folks, Blinkie was!”

“And you couldn’t bring him here? Why, the very idea, wanting and not being able to keep--just a _cat_!”

“Why, ma’am,” said Anne gently, “you couldn’t expect the Home to take you an’ your cat too. Just think now, if we’d all be allowed to bring what we liked with us--this one a cat, and t’other one a dog, and another one a parrot, might be! Oh, no ma’am, it wasn’t to be expected; so I let Blinkie go to the grocer on the corner’s wife, that’d always wanted him. If you’re to keep things yourself you must have a home that’s yours to keep them in.” There wasn’t the faintest trace of bitterness in her voice.

An old woman, plain, unlettered; an old cat that she couldn’t keep: could anything be more _banal_? But Anne looked something like her own old aunt, her father’s sister, dead these many years.

“May I,” said the senator’s wife, “call you Anne?”

“Why, of course, ma’am, if you like.” Anne was neither flustered nor flattered by the great lady’s notice, just simply and pleasantly responsive.

“Anne,” said the lady after a pause, “Anne, don’t you think you’d like a really, truly home, where you’d grow old gently and in peace and surety, with enough work to make things worth while, and not enough money to spoil things, and a cushion in the sun for Blinkie, and flowers in the windows--and--somebody else to help, Anne?” Her voice was a bit breathless.

“There’s women,” said Anne softly, “that’s born to ache for a home all their days, an’ never do they find nor keep it. I’m one of ’em.”

The senator’s wife wondered a little at herself. She had known Anne but a few minutes; Anne was a plain woman, a woman in a Home, and she knew that she was going to tell Anne all about the Little Brown House; and Anne would understand!

“Will you come with me to-morrow, Anne, to see a little brown house that needs somebody--and I think that somebody’s you--to take care of it?”

Over Anne’s face fell an autumn fairness of emotion. She lifted humid eyes.

“To-morrow, then!” said the senator’s wife, delicate finger on lip. “And remember, it’s a secret, Anne.”

She came for Anne in her big new car, and together they went over the Little Brown House. Anne fingered the table-cloths and towels and bed-linen lingeringly, and laid her hand on the shining tables with a loving touch.

“You like it, then?” asked the senator’s wife. Anne began to cry for answer. And after the senator’s wife, seated beside her on the chintz-hung sofa, had explained things, Anne took the white hand in her brown one.

“Dear heart! To think you were like that all along, underneath, an’ me thinkin’ you weren’t anything but just a fine lady!” she wondered. “I’m thinkin’ it’s a grand thing, now, to be a fine lady, because women’s women; that’s all they be--thank God!” She lifted her head, and the other woman saw, not admiration nor flattery nor envy, but love, real love, look at her out of the eyes of a friend.

As they shut the door of the Little Brown House after them, they heard through the open windows of the house next door the painfully measured splashing of “Silvery Waves” spilled over a piano by childish fingers.

“Why, we’ve got neighbors!” said the senator’s wife gaily. “I’d forgotten _that_. And we’re neighbors too, aren’t we? Anne, after a while you must send things over on a tray, and we hope they’ll be neighborly and just drop in when they can. Isn’t it nice, Anne? And after they’ve called on you, you must tell me all about them. I hope they’ve got _little children_. We’ll give their little girl a doll, and their boy a train of cars, won’t we? My little grandson dotes so on trains of cars!”

When she could come, between whiles, she found herself in the midst of a pleasant neighborhood life; and all about her were the soft noises and sights and smells of home. Anne’s pride in the place was almost piteous. How clean and sweet it was; how everything was polished, and how it shone and twinkled; but nothing was fussy and not-to-be-used! The neighbors whom she began to meet knew and accepted her as the Lady Who Came to See Anne. They didn’t wonder she liked to come to see Anne: they liked to come too.

Next door was a mother of six. They had all come over to see Anne, and Blinkie had purred over the baby. Anne had given all of them little cakes that bound them to her forever. She was going to have the whole noisy, hungry, beautiful brood of them once a week to tea. Anne reveled in their company.

“You know,” she told the senator’s wife, “I’d never much of a home at best, Miss Barbara, me bein’ out all day, workin’. So I’d no chance of knowin’ little children, except I’d see them on the street, an’ have to take out my love o’ them in passin’. Why, I’ve known me to be happy for a whole long day because a little thing in its carriage waved its hand an’ gave me a smile, passin’ by. Now, thanks be to God an’ you, I’ve got a real home, an’ a chance to have them about me a bit, though they’re none o’ my own. I look forward all week to the time they’ll come, an’ the noise they’ll make, an’ the joy o’ them, an’ the way they’ll look, an’ talk, an’ laugh. Miss Barbara, I’m thinkin’ this is the kind of a house that _likes_ to have children under its roof; and there’ll be more an’ more o’ them comin’ by an’ by. An’--you wouldn’t be mindin’ if I called in, one or two at a time, the old women that’s got to stay on in the Home, Miss Barbara? They’re tired, sometimes, of just havin’ to keep alive, an’ a day here’d hearten them, maybe. I’d like to share.”

The senator’s wife looked about her. It _was_ the sort of house that likes to shelter the young and call in the old and the poor for warmth and kindliness.

“Have them all, Anne. And tell me all about it afterward. You dear, dear woman, you!”

“I’d most forgotten to tell you about the Westerner, hadn’t I? The lady next door brought him first, Miss Barbara, him bein’ a great friend o’ the children’s. An’ he’s the clearest-eyed, softest-spoken, brownest-faced man ever I clapped my two eyes on. Right around the corner from us he is, him keepin’ house by himself, except for the passel o’ men that’s always comin’ to set with him. I ain’t one for praisin’ up men-folks’ housekeepin’, Miss Barbara; so one day I upped an’ sent him a tray--a big heavy one at that, jest to show him! He brought it back himself, him havin’ no servant, an’ he was that kind an’ sociable I took to him like the children do. I like Westerners--they’re so just _themselves_, ain’t they? He’s real glad we’re neighbors, he says, an’ him an’ his friends’ll be glad to be of any service to us. I told him us bein’ women-folks an’ the best cooks, they’d better come over an’ neighbor with us holidays. The nicest man ever I knew, Miss Barbara--it’s him fixed our kitchen-window shelves.”

The senator’s wife smiled appreciatively, then went up-stairs for her usual half-hour of quiet thought and rest by that shaded window. Outside the day was rather dark, and the tree was bare now to the autumn winds. She sat with her hands in her lap, thoughtfully. The senator hadn’t been so well of late. He looked, she thought, more gray and old.

“Why, it’s getting so we just see each other going up and down stairs!” she thought indignantly and sorrowfully. “We’re getting old too, Hugh and I are. Oh, it isn’t fair, it isn’t fair. We aren’t even sharing any more--I _can’t_ share his work, and he _won’t_ share my house!”

That was perhaps the most strenuous winter either of them had known. They crossed each other’s orbits frenziedly. At her affairs he showed his fine worn face for a few dutiful minutes, then disappeared. And when at times they did go out together, the usual tactful hostess, following immemorial custom, separated them.

In the midst of this mad swirl Christmas drew near. To the senator’s wife Christmas had come to mean merely a long list of gifts, dutifully checked over with her secretary: you gave just as you received; you had to. You knew that from the housekeeper down every one in the house must be remembered; the secretary saw to it that they were. There was no planning; no hiding of things half done when somebody came into the room; no mysterious hints nor smiles; no air of subdued eagerness; no tender sacrifices that make gifts doubly precious.

But at the Little Brown House things were different. Anne had made with her own skilful hands something for everybody: for the little Maid Who Helped; for the Mother of Six and her brood; for the old women from the Home; for the Man around the Corner, who was so glad to be neighborly; and for the senator’s wife. Anne even had a tree; and they were all to come for a while on Christmas eve, except, perhaps, Miss Barbara.

“I wish,” said Anne, looking up from the cake she was whisking together, “that you’d put on your plainest frock. Miss Barbara, and come. It’d make Christmas more like Christmas as it ought to be for me.” Her eyes implored the senator’s wife with so much of love and longing that the heart in her warmed anew to Anne.

“The senator and I have simply got to attend our daughter’s Christmas Eve reception, but I think, by close management, I _might_ get here--from half-past six until nearly nine, say. And I could drive home and dress, and nobody be the wiser for my pleasantest Christmas secret!” She thought for a moment, and laughed like a girl: “Anne, I’m coming!”

The senator was to accompany her to their daughter’s. She knew that until then she wouldn’t see him; she knew, too, that some beautiful and costly gift, chosen with exquisite care, would be lying by her plate on Christmas morning. No, he wasn’t forgetful, nor neglectful, any more than she herself; he was only--too busy.

It was quite half-past seven when she reached the Little Brown House on Christmas Eve. When she opened the door she knew that Christmas itself had arrived before her; for the house was alive with young children, as all self-respecting houses would be if they had the chance. You heard the children’s shouts, and their mothers’ worried admonitions, and Anne’s cheerful, “There, there, let ’em be! It’s Christmas Eve, an’ Christmas Eve’s children’s eve. Ay, my dearies, laugh, do! An’ when Miss Barbara comes we’ll open that settin’-room door; an’ then you’ll see what you’ll see--bless you!”

“Miss Barbara” came in to be swallowed in a warm sea of joyous welcomings. She wore what she considered a plain dress; but the Mother of Six, and the women with her, looked upon its lustrous folds almost with awe; only the baby disregarded it, and sat upon it, and kicked his feet against it unconcernedly.

The sitting-room door had been opened; they were in the midst of gift-giving, and receiving, and exclamations when the doorbell rang.

“That,” said Anne, pausing, with the Baby’s jumping-jack in her hand, “will be that Westerner from ’round the corner. I’ll let him in, Miss Barbara; he’ll want to stay with the children here for a while, I know.”

The senator’s wife heard the front door open and close, and men’s feet in the hall, and the Westerner saying in his pleasant out-of-doors voice full of the burr of R’s:

“Here’s a bunch of real holly, and some real mistletoe to hang up; and here’s my oldest friend along with me--he’s an old friend of those kids, too. We’ve brought you a few things to add to the tree for ’em. Say, now, it sure makes us two old chaps feel right good and Christmassy to get in here with you women and kids to-night!”

Anne and the Westerner came in together. The other man followed more slowly, looking about him with merry eyes. He was a very, very big man, and he seemed to fill the whole doorway in which he stood. Then the children saw him, and shouted rapturous welcomings; and he returned these with somewhat of a tender wistfulness in his smile.

From her sofa the senator’s wife looked up; their eyes met, incredulously. She rose to her feet, putting down the baby.

But Anne had advanced to him, holding out a friendly hand.

“I know you’re the Big Man That Plays with the Children!” she said cordially. “I’m sure glad to meet you at last, Neighbor; welcome, an’ a Merry, Merry Christmas to you!”

He returned her greeting cordially; then the senator’s wife came forward. Her eyes were large.

“You!” said she faintly. “You--neighbor--playing with children. You here!”

“You!” said the senator. “Here to-night--why, Barbara, my dear!”

“I come--when I can find time--Anne keeps house--” she began.

He nodded. “I go around to Jack’s--when I can find time. One’s got to have a few friends one can visit, don’t you think?”

The baby set up a great wail, because he was a baby, and he had had enough of presents, and play, and grown-ups; and he wanted to go home and be put to bed. The Mother of Six picked him up, and her friends gathered the rest of the brood and their belongings together and carried them off, with many Christmas wishes tossed back and forth.

Anne beckoned the Westerner into the dining-room and pointed to the table.

“No real gentlemen,” said she, “will refuse to fall to an’ help eat up a lady’s pie that she’s made with her own hands for Christmas.”

“I am,” said the Westerner, “a long-fanged wolf on pie. An’ if you’ll cut yours in just halves, I’ll be everlasting grateful to you, ma’am.” And he sat down, turning his back upon the sitting-room door.

The senator and his wife came to each other slowly, he looking down upon her whimsically, she looking up at him with eyes of pure wonder.

“Why, Barbie, is there ever any reading a woman? I’d never guess that you’d come visiting a little house like this--”

“This little house,” said she, “is mine: I bought it. I’ve wanted just this little house all my life, and I wasn’t honest or brave enough to tell you so.”

“I thought,” said the senator, “that it was the other sort of house you 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.

“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.

“My children, I have a thing to say to you,” she said seriously. “I am going to leave your house. No! Do not protest. Do not do me or yourselves the injury to wish me to remain. My mind is made up, irrevocably. You know the tenants of my flat above the shop are leaving the city. I shall at once move back into my own house, which I should never have left. It was a grievous thing for me to come to you, my dears, for no one should be a useless fifth wheel upon another’s domestic coach. You should have your chance to be happy--alone. Forgive me, forgive me, for having made you unhappy! You see, Leontine is my only child, and her father--” She turned her head aside for a moment. But Willy leaned over and took her hand, consolingly.

“You are quite right, little Mother,” he said, truthfully. “It would be as great a wrong to you as to us to wish you to remain, when you are not happy with us. But do you realize why you are unhappy here, Mamanchen? It is because you are too young and too pretty to play second fiddle in anybody else’s house, even Leontine’s.”

Maman laughed through her tears. “Willy!” she cried, “you might have been a Frenchman!”

When Father was told, he nodded his head. “I, too, go,” he said bluntly. “She is right for once, that odious woman. For there is no room in the new nest for the old birds; they crowd the youngsters, and for themselves they make starvation. Sing and fly by yourselves, my children. That will make me happy. Only--do not fly too far away from thy old father, Willy!”

So Maman went back to the rooms over the shop and was too busy to allow herself to be unhappy, even if she were inclined to be; and Father took two pleasant rooms near us, and went right on with his music lessons. Maman was to come on Tuesdays and Fridays, and Father on Mondays and Thursdays, with an alternate Sunday for each; thus they would escape the unpleasantness of meeting each other in our house.

It was pleasant to have such a darling little place as Maman’s flat to visit. Now that she was alone she gave full rein to her own individual taste, and never did any little place look daintier, more homelike and simple and charming than Maman’s rooms. And Maman herself! Under our astonished and delighted eyes Maman grew younger. She arranged her thick white hair ravishingly, with fleecy curls about the ears; she manufactured for herself enchanting little hats with hints of lilac in them, and she evolved frocks of a chic to make one gasp. She was witty as only a Frenchwoman can be; she was pretty as only an American is. Then she began to skip her evenings with us; she began to visit us, not as a pleasure only to herself, but as a pleasure and a privilege to us.

As for Father, the change in him was of a longer growth, but it was none the less certain and sure. He began to do without us. He looked brushed and groomed and well-fed and prosperous and jovial. He developed a taste in ties that made us marvel. His ragged beard had been Vandyked into a trimness which clipped ten years off his age, and his clothes were modern and dignified.

It was our turn now to suffer a little wholesome neglect, for our parents _were_ neglecting us. They were seeking--and, what is more, finding--other objects of absorbing interest outside of our dear selves that loved them so much; they were living their own lives in their own fashion, without so much as a by-your-leave from either of us.

When our dear adored baby was born they behaved as distractedly as any well-brought-up grandparents could, however. They were extravagantly delighted. Never was there so exquisite a baby! Maman said that I had been an adorable baby myself, but that I simply wasn’t to be compared with _this_ angel. Father remembered that Willy had been a very nice baby, too, but not to compare to our baby, who, judging from the magnificent formation of his head, would undoubtedly grow up to be a statesman. Poor, dear, red, wrinkled little statesman, with no language at his command save a squeal, and never a hair to his precious head!

The baby had come to us at Thanksgiving--that good, beautiful American holiday of ours that I so greatly love--so it was almost Christmas before I was able to take him out, myself. Willy and I had decided that his first visit should be to his grandmother; we would take him to see her on Christmas Eve, all snugly wrapped up. And we would then go to Father on Christmas morning. It was to be a beautiful surprise.

To tell the truth, for the last week or ten days we had seen very little of Maman or of Father, either. They were so busy with their own affairs.

We knew that Maman had intended to dismiss her assistants early, close the shop, and spend Christmas Eve at home; she could afford to be so independent, for those charming hats of hers were beginning to sell for good prices. At dusk, then, we wrapped our little baby up snugly and tucked him among his carriage cushions, took our presents, and started out. We were both in a glow of pride and happiness when we reached Maman’s. Her windows were lighted, so we knew she was at home.

She met us at the door with a cry of pleasure; then she ushered us into her living-room, calling in a gay, glad voice:

“See who’s here! See who’s here!”

A big man in a brand-new smoking-jacket got up out of the new Morris chair in which he had been making himself comfortable.

“Ha! Our children!” said Willy’s father gaily, and fell upon us.

We could only gasp, and stare. The room was lovely with Christmas greens, and Maman herself was a vision in a red gown, with red satin slippers on her little feet and a vivid Poinsettia in her beautiful white hair. On a new mahogany stand was a powerful bust of--who but the Chancellor himself, a gay holly wreath adorning his beetling brows!

“Father!” gurgled Willy. “Maman!” I echoed weakly, and almost fell into a chair.

Willy’s father shifted his small grandson very tenderly to his shoulder, and beckoned to Maman, who came and stood beside him, slipped her small hands about his big arm, and laughed at our bewilderment.

“My surprise for you, my children!” said she.

“It is like this,” said Father, gravely. “I came one night to Madame, forced by loneliness and repentance, to beg her pardon for driving her out of her child’s home. I found her sad and lonely, even as I was; but how good the little home she had made for herself looked to me, who had none! And we consoled each other. She loved my son and I adored her daughter, and thus we fell into kind talk and discovered that each was better than the other had thought. And how heavenly a meal she set before me, seasoned with such wit! It is true that there are no cooks and no wits on earth like the French!

“Afterward I came again--and yet again. And we discovered that we were not so very old--not too old to be young--and that there was much, very much, in life, for both of us. We decided to share, to help each other. I taught her much of German, she explained to me much of French, and the great immortal ones of our countries healed us with their divine art.”