The Spread Eagle and Other Stories Part 21

He hurried away with the two hundred dollars. It was his intention to sample Miss Hampton's punch again; but he turned from this on a sudden impulse and sought out the young man who had been run away with. With this attractive person he talked very earnestly for half an hour, and asked him an infinite number of questions; just the kind of questions that he had asked the young men who had aspired to the hands of his own daughters. And these must have been satisfactorily answered, because at the end of the interview Mr. Holiday patted the young man on the back and said that he would see him later.

Next he came face to face with Mr. Jolyff, and the two old gentlemen stared at each other coldly, but without any sign of recognition.

Once--ever so many years ago--they had been intimate friends. Mr.

Holiday had never had any other friend of whom he had been so fond. He tried now to recall what their first difference had been, and because he could not he thought he must be growing infirm. And he began to think of his approaching party with less pleasure. He had let himself in for a good deal of bother, he thought.

But this time Miss Hampton made him take a whole teaspoonful of punch, and told him what a dear he was, and what a good time everybody was going to have, and that she would do anything in the world for him; she would even recite "The Night Before Christmas" for his company, if he asked her. And then they did a great deal of whispering, and finally Mr.

Holiday said:

"But suppose they balk?"

"Nonsense," said Miss Hampton; "would you and I balk if we were in their places?"

The pretty actress and the old gentleman laughed and bowed to each other, and exchanged the most arch looks imaginable. And then Miss Hampton exclaimed:

"Good Lord--it's twelve-thirty."

Then there came to them a sudden dreadful smell of burning feathers.

They dashed into the observation end of the car and found the ex-convict smothering an incipient conflagration of the Christmas tree, which was made of dusters, with his hands.

The girl who had run away was despatching the porter with the last batch of invitations. The ex-convict showed them his burned hands.

"You go and feel the champagne," said Mr. Holiday, "that'll cool'em."

Mr. Holiday himself went to fetch the children. In his pockets were the envelopes containing money for the train hands, the envelope containing a check for the two hundred dollars that he had borrowed from the clergyman, and enough over to complete the rebuilding fund which the clergyman had tried so hard to collect. And there was an envelope for the ex-convict--not with money in it, but with an I.O.U.

"_I.O.U. A Good Job_," Mr. Holiday had written on a card and signed his name. And he had taken out of his satchel and transferred to his waistcoat pocket a pair of wonderful black pearls that he sometimes wore at important dinners. And he was going to give one of these to Miss Hampton and one to the girl who had run away. And then there were all the wonderful toys and things for Alice, and Freddie, and Euphemia, and he was going to present them with the black trunk, too, so that they could take their gifts off the train when it eventually got to Painsville. And Mr. Holiday had thought of everybody, and had prepared a little speech to speak to his guests; and for two of his guests he had arranged one of the greatest surprises that can be sprung on two guests; and he ought to have been perfectly happy. But he wasn't.

When he pa.s.sed the door of Mr. Jolyff's drawing-room he noted that it was tightly closed. And it ought to have pleased him to see how his enemy had taken his exclusion from the party to heart, and had shut himself away from any sign or sound of it. But, although he smiled cynically, he wasn't altogether pleased. And presently he made a wry mouth, as if he were taking something unpleasant; and he began to hustle Freddie and Euphemia so as to get away from that closed door as quickly as possible.

The girl who had run away was talking with Mr. Holiday when suddenly she began to grow conscious and uncomfortable. She gave one swift look about her, and saw that all the pa.s.sengers, and all the train hands, and porters, and the express-man were looking at her and smiling, and she saw that they had ranged themselves against the sides of the car and were making themselves as small as possible. Then she saw the young man looking at her with a wonderful, nervous, radiant look. And then she saw that the clergyman was standing all by himself, in a s.p.a.ce that the crowd had just managed to leave open for him, and that he had on his surplice, and that he was marking a place in his prayer-book with one finger. Then she understood.

Instinctively she caught Mr. Holiday's arm and clung to it, and Mr.

Holiday, smiling, patted her hand and began to draw her gently toward the young man and the clergyman. It looked for a moment as if she were going to hang back, and protest, and make a scene. But just when everybody was beginning to fear the worst, and to look frightfully nervous and uncomfortable, a wonderful and beautiful expression came into her face, and her eyes lighted, and seemed to grow larger and darker all at the same time. And if there were any present who had regarded the impromptu wedding as something of a joke, these now had their minds changed for them in the quickest kind of a jiffy. And if there were any present who doubted of the beauty and dignity of love, these had their minds changed for them, too. And they knew that they were witnesses, not to a silly elopement, but to the great occasion in the lives of two very young people who were absolutely sure of their love for each other, and who would cherish each other in sickness and peril, in good times and bad, in merry times and in heart-breaking times, until death did them part.

And then suddenly, just when the clergyman was about to begin, just when Miss Hampton had succeeded in righting herself from smothering a sob, Mr. Holiday, whose face, had you but noticed it, had been growing longer and longer, and drearier and drearier, gave a half-strangled cry:

"Wait!"

Wholly oblivious to everything and everybody but what was in his mind at the moment, he dropped the bride's hand as if it had been a red-hot horseshoe and started to bolt from the car. But, strangely enough, the old face that had grown so long and dreary was now wreathed in smiles, and he was heard to mutter as he went:

"Just a minute, while I get Jolyff!"

Mr. Jolyff and Mr. Holiday lifted their gla.s.ses. And Mr. Holiday said, so that all could hear:

"I drink to my old friends and to my new friends. And I drink to the lesson of Christmas. For Christmas," said he, and he smiled in a wonderful way, "teaches us that in all the world there is absolutely nothing that we cannot forgive...."

The two very old gentlemen clinked their gla.s.ses together, and, looking each other affectionately in the eyes, might have been heard to mutter, somewhat brokenly, each the other's Christian name.

WHITE MUSCATS OF ALEXANDRIA

My wife, said the Pole, was a long time recovering from the birth of our second child. She was a normal and healthy woman, but Nature has a way in these matters of introducing the unnatural; science, too, mistook the ABCs of the case for the XYZs; and our rooms were for many, many weary weeks like a cage in which the bird has ceased to sing. I did what I could. She was not without books, magazines, and delicacies; but I had to attend to my business; so that time hung about her much like a millstone, and she would say: "All's well with me, Michael, but I am bored--bored--bored."

Our baby was put out to nurse and our older boy, Casimir, who was seven, began, for lack of his mother's care, to come and go as he pleased. The a.s.surance and cheek of street boys began to develop in him. He startled me by his knowledge and his navete. But at the same time he was a natural innocent--a little dreamer. In the matters of street life that arise among children he had, as a rule, the worst of it. He was a born believer of all that might be told him. Such children develop into artists or ne'er-do-wells. It was too soon to worry about him. But I was easiest in mind when I saw that he was fas.h.i.+oning anatomies with mud or drawing with chalk upon the sidewalk. "Wait a little," I would say to my wife, "and he will be old enough to go to school."

The happiest times were when it was dark and I had closed the store and could sit by my wife's bed with Casimir on my knee. Then we would talk over pleasant experiences, or I would tell them, who were both American-born, stories of Poland, of fairies, and sieges; or hum for them the tunes to which I had danced in my early youth. But oftenest my wife and I talked, for the child's benefit, of the wonderful city in whose slums we lived--upper central New York with its sables and its palaces. During our courts.h.i.+p and honeymoon we had made many excursions into those quarters of the city and the memory of them was dear. But if I remembered well and with happiness, my wife remembered photographically and with a kind of hectic eagerness in which, I fear, may have been bedded the roots of dissatisfaction. Details of wealth and luxury, and manners that had escaped me, even at the time, were as facile to her as terms of endearment to a lover. "And, oh--do you remember," she would say, "the ruby that the Fifth Avenue bride had at her throat, and how for many, many blocks we thought we could still hear the organ going? That was fun, Michael, wasn't it, when we stood in front of Sherry's and counted how many real sables went in and how many fakes, and noticed that the fake sables were as proudly carried as the real?"

One night she would not eat her supper. "Oh, Michael," she said, "I'm so bored with the same old soup--soup--soup, and the same old porridge--porridge--porridge, and I hate oranges, and apples, and please don't spend any more money on silly, silly, silly me."

"But you must eat," I said. "What would you like? Think of something.

Think of something that tempts your appet.i.te. You seem better to-night--almost well. Your cheeks are like cherries and you keep stirring restlessly as if you wanted to get up instead of lying still--still like a woman that has been drowned, all but her great, dear eyes.... Now, make some decision, and were it ambrosia I will get it for you if it is to be had in the city.... Else what are savings-banks for, and thrift, and a knowledge of furs?"

She answered me indirectly.

"Do you remember, Michael," she said, "the butcher shops uptown, the groceries, and the fruit stores, where the commonest articles, the chops, the preserved strawberries, the apples were perfect and beautiful, like works of art? In one window there was a great olive branch in a gla.s.s jar--do you remember? And in that fruit store near the Grand Central--do you remember?--we stood in the damp snow and looked in at great clean s.p.a.ces flooded with white light--and there were baskets of strawberries--right there in January--and wonderful golden and red fruits that we did not know the names of, and many of the fruits peeped out from the bright-green leaves among which they had actually grown--"

"I remember the two prize bunches of grapes," I said.

And my wife said:

"I was coming to those ... they must have been eighteen inches long, every grape great and perfect. I remember you said that such grapes looked immortal. It was impossible to believe they could ever rot--there was a kind of joyous frostiness--we went in and asked a little man what kind of grapes they were, and he answered like a phonograph, without looking or showing politeness: 'Black Hamburgs and White Muscats of Alexandria'--your old Sienkiewicz never said anything as beautiful as that, 'White Muscats of Alexandria--'"

"Dear little heart," I said. "Childkin, is it the memory of those white grapes that tempts your appet.i.te?"

"Oh, Michael," she exclaimed, clasping her hands over those disappointed b.r.e.a.s.t.s into which the milk had not come in sufficiency.

"Oh, Michael--they were two dollars and a half a pound--"

"Heart of my heart," I said, "Stag Eyes, it is now late, and there are no such grapes to be had in our part of the city--only the tasteless white grapes that are packed with sawdust into barrels--but in the morning I will go uptown and you shall have your White Muscats of Alexandria."

She put her arms about my neck with a sudden spasm of fervor, and drew my head, that was already gray, down to hers. I remember that in that moment I thought not of pa.s.sion but of old age, parting, and the grave.

But she would not eat the grapes in my presence. There was to be an orgy, she said, a baccha.n.a.lian affair--she was going to place the grapes where she could look at them, and look at them until she could stand the sight no more, when she would fall on them like a wolf on the fold and devour them. She talked morbidly of the grapes--almost neurotically.

But, though her fancies did not please my sense of fitness, I only laughed at her, or smiled--for she had been ill a long time.

"But, at least, eat one now," I said, "so that I may see you enjoy it."

"Not even one," she said. "The bunch must be perfect for me to look at until--until I can resist no more. Hang them there, on the foot of the bed by the crook of the stem--is it strong enough to hold them? and then--aren't you going to be very late to your business? And, Michael, I feel better--I do. I shouldn't wonder if you found me up and dressed when you come back."

In your telling American phrase, "there was nothing doing" in my business that morning. It was one of those peaceful, sunny days in January, not cold and no wind stirring. The cheap furs displayed in the window of my shop attracted no attention from the young women of the neighborhood. The young are shallow-minded, especially the women. If a warm day falls in winter they do not stop to think that the next may be cold. Only hats interest them all the year round, and men.

So I got out one of my Cicero books and, placing my chair in a pool of suns.h.i.+ne in the front of the shop, I began to read, for the hundredth time, his comfortable generalities upon old age. But it seemed to me, for the first time, that he was all wrong--that old age is only dreadful, only a shade better than death itself. And this, I suppose, was because I, myself, during those long months of my wife's illness, had turned the corner. The sudden pa.s.sions of youth had retreated like dragons into their dens. It took more, now, than the worse end of a bargain or the touch of my wife's lips to bring them flaming forth. On our wedding day we had been of an age. Now, after nine years, my heart had changed from a lover's into a father's, while she remained, as it were, a bride. There remained to me, perhaps, many useful years of business, of managing and of saving--enjoyable years. But life--life as I count life--I had lived out. One moment must pa.s.s as the next. There could be no more halting--no more moments of bliss so exquisite as to resemble pain. I had reached that point in life when it is the sun alone that matters, and no more the moon.