Part 1 (2/2)
”Dot to tell us fairy-'tory, too,” said the girl.
”All right, one fairy-'tory--”
She went to the nursery, and the cherubs swarmed up to her lap demanding ”somefin bluggy.”
Invention failed her completely. She hunted through her memory among the Grimms' fairy-tales. She could recall nothing that seemed sweet and guileless enough for these two lambs.
All that she could think of seemed to be made up of ghoulish plots; of children being mistreated by harsh stepmothers; of their being turned over to peasants to slay; of their being changed into animals or birds; of their being seized by wolves, or by giants that drank blood and crunched children's bones as if they were reed birds; of hags that cut them up into bits or thrust them into ovens and cooked them for gingerbread. It occurred to her that all the German fairy-stories were murderously cruel. She felt a revulsion against each of the legends. But her mind could not find subst.i.tutes.
After a period of that fearful ordeal when children tyrannize for romances that will not come, her mind grew mutinous and balked. She confessed her poverty of ideas.
The girl, Bettina, sulked; the boy screamed:
”Aw, botheration! We might as well say our prayers and go to bed.”
In the least pious of moods they dropped from her knees to their own and put their clasped hands across her lap. They became in a way hallowed by their att.i.tude, and the world seemed good to her again as she looked down at the two children, beautiful as only children can be, innocent of wile, of hards.h.i.+p and of crime, safe at home and praying to their heavenly Father from whose presence they had so recently come.
But as she brooded over them motherly and took strength from them as mothers do, she thought of other children in other countries orphaned in swarms, starving in mult.i.tudes, waiting for food like flocks of lambs in the blizzard of the war. She thought still more vividly of children flung into the ocean. She had seen these children at her knees fighting against bitter medicines, choking on them and blurting them out at mouth and nose and almost, it seemed, at eyes. So it was very vivid to her how children thrown into the sea must have gagged with terror at the bitter medicine of death, strangled and smothered as they drowned.
She heard the prayers mumbled through, but at the hasty ”Amen” she protested.
”You didn't thank G.o.d for anything. Haven't you anything to thank G.o.d for?”
If they had expressed any doubt, she would have told them of dozens of special mercies, but almost instantly they answered, ”Oh yes!” They looked at each other, understood, nodded, clapped their hands, and chuckled with pride. Then they bent their heads, gabled their finger-tips, and the boy said:
”We t'ank Dee, O Dod, for making sink dat old _Lusitania_.” And the girl said, ”A-men!”
Marie Louise gave a start as if she had been stabbed. It was the loss of the _Lusitania_ that had first terrified her. She had just seen it announced on the placards of newsboys in London streets, and had fled home to escape from the vision, only to hear the children thank Heaven for it! She rose so suddenly that she flung the children back from their knees to their haunches. They stared up at her in wondering fear. She stepped outside the baleful circle and went striding up and down the room, fighting herself back to self-control, telling herself that the children were not to blame, yet finding them the more repulsive for their very innocence. The purer the lips, the viler the blasphemy.
She was not able to restrain herself from denouncing them with all her ferocity. She towered over them and cried out upon them: ”You wicked, wicked little beasts, how dare you put such loathsome words into a prayer! G.o.d must have gasped with horror in heaven at the shame of it.
Wherever did you get so hateful an idea?”
”Wicked your own self!” the boy snapped back. ”Fraulein read it in the paper about the old boat, and she walked up and down the room like what you do, and she said, '_Ach, unser_ Dott--how dood you are to us, to make sink dat _Lusitania_!'”
He was going on to describe her ecstasy, but Marie Louise broke in: ”It's Fraulein's work, is it? I might have known that! Oh, the fiend, the harpy!”
The boy did not know what a harpy was, but he knew that his beloved Fraulein was being called something, and he struck at Marie Louise fiercely, kicked at her s.h.i.+ns and tried to bite her hands, screaming: ”You shall not call our own precious Fraulein names. Harpy, your own self!”
And the little girl struck and scratched and made a curdled face and echoed, ”Harpy, your own self!”
It hurt Marie Louise so extravagantly to be hated by these irascible cherubs that her anger vanished in regret. She pleaded: ”But, my darlings, you don't know what you are saying. The _Lusitania_ was a beautiful s.h.i.+p--”
The boy, Victor, was loyal always to his own: ”She wasn't as beautiful as my yacht what I sail in the Round Pond.”
Marie Louise condescended to argue: ”Oh yes, she was! She was a great s.h.i.+p, n.o.ble like Saint Paul's Cathedral, and she was loaded with pa.s.sengers, men and women and children: and then suddenly she was ripped open and sunk, and little children like you were thrown into the water, into the deep, deep, deep ocean. And the big waves tore them from their mothers' arms and ran off with them, choking and strangling them and dragging them down and down--forever down.”
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