Part 3 (1/2)
The children clapped their hands and there was a lively chorus of approval, and I had the satisfaction of hearing Josie, whose hair is ornamently auburn, and whose face reminds me of her mother at the same age, declare that I looked ”perfectly scrumptious,” a sentiment which, in spite of its flavor of school-girl slang, seemed to express the critical estimate of the family circle.
”I look like a perfect idiot,” I remarked, with becoming modesty, as I surveyed myself in the gla.s.s. I did not think so, all the same.
Indeed, I was saying to myself that I had had no idea I could look so well. Yet, after all, it is other people who decide whether one looks like an idiot or not.
”On the contrary,” said Josephine, having surveyed me once more from head to foot to make sure that I was in nowise peculiar, but just like everybody else (only nicer, as she would say), ”you look neat, and cool as a cuc.u.mber, and five years younger. Doesn't he, dears?”
”I should think so,” said little Fred, who is aiming to be a dandy himself. ”Father has cut us all out completely.”
”It is a comfort to think that I shall no longer be a disgrace to my family,” I remarked with humble mien. ”I may add that this is not all.
I possess not merely this costume, but I have replenished my wardrobe utterly. When you see my new trousers, my new summer overcoat, my a.s.sortment of neckties, my brilliant shoes--both patent leather and strawberry roan--you will no longer be able to state, Josephine, that my clothes lack joyousness.”
Later in the evening, after the children had gone to bed, Josephine, who had been up stairs to inspect my purchases, sat down beside me on the sofa, and nestled her head against my shoulder.
”Fred, you are very good,” she said. ”It must have bothered you terribly to get all those things--you, who are so busy. Everything is lovely, and the latest and prettiest of its kind. You have shown exquisite taste, dear; but I feel as though I had badgered you into it, following as it does on top of the house and everything else.”
”No, dearest,” I answered, stroking her hair. ”I am proud of you--I am grateful to you. A man falls behind the times before he is aware of it. The world changes and paterfamilias ought to change with it out of consideration for his children. You were perfectly right, Josephine, just as you were right about the moving. Our house was too small and I was getting to look fusty and frowsy.”
”Not so bad as that, Fred. I never said that you didn't look perfectly clean and respectable. All I meant was that there are such pretty things now, it seems a pity not to wear them. It wasn't the fas.h.i.+on to wear them when you were young. I mean younger than you are now,” she added, patting my cheek. ”I am glad, Fred, that you are reconciled to the house. I know that I have been a thorn in your flesh for the last eighteen months on account of it. I didn't mean to be irritating about the moving, but I was, and my soul has been wearing sackcloth and ashes ever since because I was so nasty. You see, Fred, in the first place, though I pretended to be pleased at your selecting the house, I was really dreadfully disappointed, for half the fun of a new house is choosing it. Of course a new house chosen by some one else is better than none at all, but a woman hates surprises of that sort, and somehow my teeth were set on edge by the few things about the house that didn't suit me. And then, dear,” she continued, caressingly, ”I don't think it was very nice of me to meddle with your great-grandfather Plunkett's portrait. It was too much in the line of the people who have their ancestors painted to order. I think of it quite often at night and blush, which shows that I have a guilty conscience on the subject, though I can't help feeling that it has been very much improved whenever I look at it.”
”It was a very trifling amelioration,” I answered. ”And, if I remember rightly, it was I who put you up to it.”
”Yes, but you were only in jest, and I was base enough to adopt the idea and act upon it. No, Fred, though I agree that everything has worked out a great deal more satisfactorily than I deserve, and that we are infinitely better off than we have ever been before in point of comfort and general happiness, I look back on the last year and a half as a sort of nightmare. You were content to live along steadily in the dear old house and to toil unselfishly for us all, and I was perpetually prodding you. It has made me feel myself to be a perfect ogre of a woman. And yet it seemed to me to be necessary, Fred.”
”It was not merely necessary, Josephine. It was essential. Thank goodness we have got through it so lightly! It is not every man who survives the operation. But, as I have said to you already, I am the one who should be grateful, and I too was the one at fault. Had you waited for me to make the suggestion, we should have been still in that dirty little box of a house, and I should have been wearing the same black wisp of a necktie such as I have worn for the last fifteen years.
Kiss me, darling.”
She did so, and as she leaned her head lovingly against my breast she looked up and said, tremulously: ”It was all on account of the children, Fred. I wish them to have every chance there is.” There spoke the fond mother-bird. The children! Are these young giants and giantesses our children? Seemingly but yesterday they were little tots pottering in the sand with spade and shovel, alternately angelic and demoniac, supplying annual testimony to the inability of green apples to oppress a hardy digestion, and free from every inkling of responsibility save a faint, intermittent respect for parental mandate.
Now they tower before me in the glory of budding manhood and maidenhood; lovable, yet haughty; with star-like eyes and brows perplexed by all the problems of the universe; G.o.d-like in their devotion to principle, though distressingly eager for pocket-money.
”Fred,” whispers the dear woman at my side, breaking in upon my cogitation, ”what were you like as a boy--er--a young man, I mean?”
Her words are the answering echo to my own secret thought. Like myself she is groping for light and counsel. May not the cleverest man and woman fitly quail before the soul-hunger of eager adolescent youth?
And I do not profess to be clever.
”What were you like as a young woman?”
”I was afraid you would make that answer,” she murmurs, reproachfully.
”Oh, I have forgotten!”
”And if we could remember, Josephine, it would not help us very much.
Each generation finds the world a virgin field. Somehow, though, I had fancied that when we had seen them through the scarlet fever and landed them in college, it would be plain sailing. We have to begin all over again, though, and the second half promises to be the most difficult.”
”I know it. And think how we worried, or rather tried not to worry, over them when they were little things, and how we fancied there were no problems to compare in difficulty with supplying them with proper food and proper masters. In the last fifteen years they have had everything--chicken-pox, measles, whooping-cough, mumps, and scarlet fever. And they've collected everything--postage-stamps, minerals, b.u.t.terflies, coins, and cigarette pictures. And they've kept everything--rabbits, goats, bull-terriers, white mice, a pony, and guinea-pigs.”
”And owned, and subsequently discarded, to my certain knowledge, a music-box, doll's-house, puppet-show, printing-press, steam-engine, aquarium, and camera.”
”Yes, and over and above their school learning they've been taught to swim, ride, dance, use tools, play on the piano, and speak fair to middling French. Yet, as you say, Fred, the most difficult part is to come, just as we fancied that we were through. And the terrible reflection is that we're not so sure now what we ought to do for them as we were when they were younger.”