Rosicky said nothing. He found a bib apron on a nail behind the
kitchen door. He slipped it over his head and then took Polly by
her two elbows and pushed her gently toward the door of her own
room. "I washed up de kitchen many times for my wife, when de
babies was sick or somethin'. You go an' make yourself look nice.
I like you to look prettier'n any of dem town girls when you go in.
De young folks must have some fun, an' I'm goin' to look out fur
you, Polly."
That kind, reassuring grip on her elbows, the old man's funny
bright eyes, made Polly want to drop her head on his shoulder for a
second. She restrained herself, but she lingered in his grasp at
the door of her room, murmuring tearfully: "You always lived in
the city when you were young, didn't you? Don't you ever get
lonesome out here?"
As she turned round to him, her hand fell naturally into his, and
he stood holding it and smiling into her face with his peculiar,
knowing, indulgent smile without a shadow of reproach in it. "Dem
big cities is all right fur de rich, but dey is terrible hard fur
de poor."
"I don't know. Sometimes I think I'd like to take a chance. You
lived in New York, didn't you?"
"An' London. Da's bigger still. I learned my trade dere. Here's
Rudolph comin', you better hurry."
"Will you tell me about London some time?"
"Maybe. Only I ain't no talker, Polly. Run an' dress yourself
up."
The bedroom door closed behind her, and Rudolph came in from the
outside, looking anxious. He had seen the car and was sorry any of
his family should come just then. Supper hadn't been a very
pleasant occasion. Halting in the doorway, he saw his father in a
kitchen apron, carrying dishes to the sink. He flushed crimson and
something flashed in his eye. Rosicky held up a warning finger.
"I brought de car over fur you an' Polly to go to de picture show,
an' I made her let me finish here so you won't be late. You go put
on a clean shirt, quick!"
"But don't the boys want the car, Father?"
"Not tonight dey don't." Rosicky fumbled under his apron and found
his pants pocket. He took out a silver dollar and said in a
hurried whisper: "You go an' buy dat girl some ice cream an' candy
tonight, like you was courtin'. She's awful good friends wid me."
Rudolph was very short of cash, but he took the money as if it hurt
him. There had been a crop failure all over the county. He had
more than once been sorry he'd married this year.
In a few minutes the young people came out, looking clean and a
little stiff. Rosicky hurried them off, and then he took his own
time with the dishes. He scoured the pots and pans and put away
the milk and swept the kitchen. He put some coal in the stove and
shut off the draughts, so the place would be warm for them when
they got home late at night. Then he sat down and had a pipe and
listened to the clock tick.
Generally speaking, marrying an American girl was certainly a risk.
A Czech should marry a Czech. It was lucky that Polly was the
daughter of a poor widow woman; Rudolph was proud, and if she had a
prosperous family to throw up at him, they could never make it go.
Polly was one of four sisters, and they all worked; one was book-
keeper in the bank, one taught music, and Polly and her younger
sister had been clerks, like Miss Pearl. All four of them were
musical, had pretty voices, and sang in the Methodist choir, which
the eldest sister directed.
Polly missed the sociability of a store position. She missed the
choir, and the company of her sisters. She didn't dislike
housework, but she disliked so much of it. Rosicky was a little
anxious about this pair. He was afraid Polly would grow so
discontented that Rudy would quit the farm and take a factory job
in Omaha. He had worked for a winter up there, two years ago, to
get money to marry on. He had done very well, and they would
always take him back at the stockyards. But to Rosicky that meant
the end of everything for his son. To be a landless man was to be
a wage-earner, a slave, all your life; to have nothing, to be
nothing.
Rosicky thought he would come over and do a little carpentering for
Polly after the New Year. He guessed she needed jollying. Rudolph
was a serious sort of chap, serious in love and serious about his
work.
Rosicky shook out his pipe and walked home across the fields.
Ahead of him the lamplight shone from his kitchen windows. Suppose
he were still in a tailor shop on Vesey Street, with a bunch of
pale, narrow-chested sons working on machines, all coming home
tired and sullen to eat supper in a kitchen that was a parlour
also; with another crowded, angry family quarrelling just across
the dumb-waiter shaft, and squeaking pulleys at the windows where
dirty washings hung on dirty lines above a court full of old brooms
and mops and ash-cans. . . .
He stopped by the windmill to look up at the frosty winter stars
and draw a long breath before he went inside. That kitchen with
the shining windows was dear to him; but the sleeping fields and
bright stars and the noble darkness were dearer still.
V
On the day before Christmas the weather set in very cold; no snow,
but a bitter, biting wind that whistled and sang over the flat land
and lashed one's face like fine wires. There was baking going on
in the Rosicky kitchen all day, and Rosicky sat inside, making over
a coat that Albert had outgrown into an overcoat for John. Mary
had a big red geranium in bloom for Christmas, and a row of
Jerusalem cherry trees, full of berries. It was the first year she
had ever grown these; Doctor Ed brought her the seeds from Omaha
when he went to some medical convention. They reminded Rosicky of
plants he had seen in England; and all afternoon, as he stitched,
he sat thinking about those two years in London, which his mind
usually shrank from even after all this while.
He was a lad of eighteen when he dropped down into London, with no
money and no connexions except the address of a cousin who was
supposed to be working at a confectioner's. When he went to the
pastry shop, however, he found that the cousin had gone to America.
Anton tramped the streets for several days, sleeping in doorways
and on the Embankment, until he was in utter despair. He knew no
English, and the sound of the strange language all about him
confused him. By chance he met a poor German tailor who had
learned his trade in Vienna, and could speak a little Czech. This
tailor, Lifschnitz, kept a repair shop in a Cheapside basement,
underneath a cobbler. He didn't much need an apprentice, but he
was sorry for the boy and took him in for no wages but his keep and
what he could pick up. The pickings were supposed to be coppers
given you when you took work home to a customer. But most of the
customers called for their clothes themselves, and the coppers that
r /> came Anton's way were very few. He had, however, a place to sleep.
The tailor's family lived upstairs in three rooms; a kitchen, a
bedroom, where Lifschnitz and his wife and five children slept, and
a living-room. Two corners of this living-room were curtained off
for lodgers; in one Rosicky slept on an old horsehair sofa, with a
feather quilt to wrap himself in. The other corner was rented to a
wretched, dirty boy, who was studying the violin. He actually
practised there. Rosicky was dirty, too. There was no way to be
anything else. Mrs. Lifschnitz got the water she cooked and washed
with from a pump in a brick court, four flights down. There were
bugs in the place, and multitudes of fleas, though the poor woman
did the best she could. Rosicky knew she often went empty to give
another potato or a spoonful of dripping to the two hungry, sad-
eyed boys who lodged with her. He used to think he would never get
out of there, never get a clean shirt to his back again. What
would he do, he wondered, when his clothes actually dropped to
pieces and the worn cloth wouldn't hold patches any longer?
It was still early when the old farmer put aside his sewing and his
recollections. The sky had been a dark grey all day, with not a
gleam of sun, and the light failed at four o'clock. He went to
shave and change his shirt while the turkey was roasting. Rudolph
and Polly were coming over for supper.
After supper they sat round in the kitchen, and the younger boys
were saying how sorry they were it hadn't snowed. Everybody was
sorry. They wanted a deep snow that would lie long and keep the
wheat warm, and leave the ground soaked when it melted.
"Yes, sir!" Rudolph broke out fiercely; "if we have another dry
year like last year, there's going to be hard times in this
country."
Rosicky filled his pipe. "You boys don't know what hard times is.
You don't owe nobody, you got plenty to eat an' keep warm, an'
plenty water to keep clean. When you got them, you can't have it
very hard."
Rudolph frowned, opened and shut his big right hand, and dropped it
clenched upon his knee. "I've got to have a good deal more than
that, Father, or I'll quit this farming gamble. I can always make
good wages railroading, or at the packing house, and be sure of my
money."
"Maybe so," his father answered dryly.
Mary, who had just come in from the pantry and was wiping her hands
on the roller towel, thought Rudy and his father were getting too
serious. She brought her darning-basket and sat down in the middle
of the group.
"I ain't much afraid of hard times, Rudy," she said heartily.
"We've had a plenty, but we've always come through. Your father
wouldn't never take nothing very hard, not even hard times. I got
a mind to tell you a story on him. Maybe you boys can't hardly
remember the year we had that terrible hot wind, that burned
everything up on the Fourth of July? All the corn an' the gardens.
An' that was in the days when we didn't have alfalfa yet,--I guess
it wasn't invented.
"Well, that very day your father was out cultivatin' corn, and I
was here in the kitchen makin' plum preserves. We had bushels of
plums that year. I noticed it was terrible hot, but it's always
hot in the kitchen when you're preservin', an' I was too busy with
my plums to mind. Anton come in from the field about three
o'clock, an' I asked him what was the matter.
"'Nothin',' he says, 'but it's pretty hot, an' I think I won't work
no more today.' He stood round for a few minutes, an' then he
says: 'Ain't you near through? I want you should git up a nice
supper for us tonight. It's Fourth of July.'
"I told him to git along, that I was right in the middle of
preservin', but the plums would taste good on hot biscuit. 'I'm
goin' to have fried chicken, too,' he says, and he went off an'
killed a couple. You three oldest boys was little fellers, playin'
round outside, real hot an' sweaty, an' your father took you to the
horse tank down by the windmill an' took off your clothes an' put
you in. Them two box-elder trees was little then, but they made
shade over the tank. Then he took off all his own clothes, an' got
in with you. While he was playin' in the water with you, the
Methodist preacher drove into our place to say how all the
neighbours was goin' to meet at the schoolhouse that night, to pray
for rain. He drove right to the windmill, of course, and there was
your father and you three with no clothes on. I was in the kitchen
door, an' I had to laugh, for the preacher acted like he ain't
never seen a naked man before. He surely was embarrassed, an' your
father couldn't git to his clothes; they was all hangin' up on the
windmill to let the sweat dry out of 'em. So he laid in the tank
where he was, an' put one of you boys on top of him to cover him up
a little, an' talked to the preacher.
"When you got through playin' in the water, he put clean clothes on
you and a clean shirt on himself, an' by that time I'd begun to get
supper. He says: 'It's too hot in here to eat comfortable. Let's
have a picnic in the orchard. We'll eat our supper behind the
mulberry hedge, under them linden trees.'
"So he carried our supper down, an' a bottle of my wild-grape wine,
an' everything tasted good, I can tell you. The wind got cooler as
the sun was goin' down, and it turned out pleasant, only I noticed
how the leaves was curled up on the linden trees. That made me
think, an' I asked your father if that hot wind all day hadn't been
terrible hard on the gardens an' the corn.
"'Corn,' he says, 'there ain't no corn.'
"'What you talkin' about?' I said. 'Ain't we got forty acres?'
"'We ain't got an ear,' he says, 'nor nobody else ain't got none.
All the corn in this country was cooked by three o'clock today,
like you'd roasted it in an oven.'
"'You mean you won't get no crop at all?' I asked him. I couldn't
believe it, after he'd worked so hard.
"'No crop this year,' he says. 'That's why we're havin' a picnic.
We might as well enjoy what we got.'
"An' that's how your father behaved, when all the neighbours was so
discouraged they couldn't look you in the face. An' we enjoyed
ourselves that year, poor as we was, an' our neighbours wasn't a
bit better off for bein' miserable. Some of 'em grieved till they
got poor digestions and couldn't relish what they did have."
The younger boys said they thought their father had the best of it.
But Rudolf was thinking that, all the same, the neighbours had
managed to get ahead more, in the fifteen years since that time.
There must be something wrong about his father's way of doing
things. He wished he knew what was going on in the back of Polly's
mind. He knew she liked his father, but he knew, too, that she was
afraid of something. When his mother sent over coffee-cake or
prune tarts or a loaf of fresh bread, Polly seemed to regard the
m
with a certain suspicion. When she observed to him that his
brothers had nice manners, her tone implied that it was remarkable
they should have. With his mother she was stiff and on her guard.
Mary's hearty frankness and gusts of good humour irritated her.
Polly was afraid of being unusual or conspicuous in any way, of
being "ordinary," as she said!
When Mary had finished her story, Rosicky laid aside his pipe.
"You boys like me to tell you about some of dem hard times I been
through in London? Warmly encouraged, he sat rubbing his forehead
along the deep creases. It was bothersome to tell a long story in
English (he nearly always talked to the boys in Czech), but he
wanted Polly to hear this one.
"Well, you know about dat tailor shop I worked in in London? I had
one Christmas dere I ain't never forgot. Times was awful bad
before Christmas; de boss ain't got much work, an' have it awful
hard to pay his rent. It ain't so much fun, bein' poor in a big
city like London, I'll say! All de windows is full of good t'ings
to eat, an' all de pushcarts in de streets is full, an' you smell
'em all de time, an' you ain't got no money,--not a damn bit. I
didn't mind de cold so much, though I didn't have no overcoat,
chust a short jacket I'd outgrowed so it wouldn't meet on me, an'
my hands was chapped raw. But I always had a good appetite, like
you all know, an' de sight of dem pork pies in de windows was awful
fur me!
"Day before Christmas was terrible foggy dat year, an' dat fog gits
into your bones and makes you all damp like. Mrs. Lifschnitz
didn't give us nothin' but a little bread an' drippin' for supper,
because she was savin' to try for to give us a good dinner on
Christmas Day. After supper de boss say I can go an' enjoy myself,
so I went into de streets to listen to de Christmas singers. Dey
sing old songs an' make very nice music, an' I run round after dem
a good ways, till I got awful hungry. I t'ink maybe if I go home,
I can sleep till morning an' forgit my belly.
"I went into my corner real quiet, and roll up in my fedder quilt.
But I ain't got my head down, till I smell somet'ing good. Seem
like it git stronger an' stronger, an' I can't git to sleep noway.
I can't understand dat smell. Dere was a gas light in a hall
across de court, dat always shine in at my window a little. I got
up an' look round. I got a little wooden box in my corner fur a
stool, 'cause I ain't got no chair. I picks up dat box, and under
it dere is a roast goose on a platter! I can't believe my eyes. I
carry it to de window where de light comes in, an' touch it and
smell it to find out, an' den I taste it to be sure. I say, I will
eat chust one little bite of dat goose, so I can go to sleep, and
tomorrow I won't eat none at all. But I tell you, boys, when I
stop, one half of dat goose was gone!"
The narrator bowed his head, and the boys shouted. But little
Josephine slipped behind his chair and kissed him on the neck
beneath his ear.
"Poor little Papa, I don't want him to be hungry!"
"Da's long ago, child. I ain't never been hungry since I had your
mudder to cook fur me."
"Go on and tell us the rest, please," said Polly.
"Well, when I come to realize what I done, of course, I felt
terrible. I felt better in de stomach, but very bad in de heart.
I set on my bed wid dat platter on my knees, an' it all come to me;
how hard dat poor woman save to buy dat goose, and how she get some
neighbour to cook it dat got more fire, an' how she put it in my
corner to keep it away from dem hungry children. Dey was a old
carpet hung up to shut my corner off, an' de children wasn't
allowed to go in dere. An' I know she put it in my corner because
she trust me more'n she did de violin boy. I can't stand it to
face her after I spoil de Christmas. So I put on my shoes and go
out into de city. I tell myself I better throw myself in de river;