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 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 school-house 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 them 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; but I guess I ain’t dat kind of a boy.

“It was after twelve o’clock, an’ terrible cold, an’ I start out to walk about London all night. I walk along de river awhile, but dey was lots of drunks all along; men, and women too. I chust move along to keep away from de police. I git onto de Strand, an’ den over to New Oxford Street, where dere was a big German restaurant on de ground floor, wid big windows all fixed up fine, an’ I could see de people havin’ parties inside. While I was lookin’ in, two men and two ladies come out, laughin’ and talkin’ and feelin’ happy about all dey been eatin’ an’ drinkin’, and dey was speakin’ Czech,—not like de Austrians, but like de home folks talk it.

“I guess I went crazy, an’ I done what I ain’t never done before nor since. I went right up to dem gay people an’ begun to beg dem: ‘Fellow-countrymen, for God’s sake give me money enough to buy a goose!’

“Dey laugh, of course, but de ladies speak awful kind to me, an’ dey take me back into de restaurant and give me hot coffee and cakes, an’ make me tell all about how I happened to come to London, an’ what I was doin’ dere. Dey take my name and where I work down on paper, an’ both of dem ladies give me ten shillings.

“De big market at Covent Garden ain’t very far away, an’ by dat time it was open. I go dere an’ buy a big goose an’ some pork pies, an’ potatoes and onions, an’ cakes an’ oranges fur de children,—all I could carry! When I git home, everybody is still asleep. I pile all I bought on de kitchen table, an’ go in an’ lay down on my bed, an’ I ain’t waken up till I hear dat woman scream when she come out into her kitchen. My goodness, but she was surprise! She laugh an’ cry at de same time, an’ hug me and waken all de children. She ain’t stop fur no breakfast; she git de Christmas dinner ready dat morning, and we all sit down an’ eat all we can hold. I ain’t never seen dat violin boy have all he can hold before.

“Two three days after dat, de two men come to hunt me up, an’ dey ask my boss, and he give me a good report an’ tell dem I was a steady boy all right. One of dem Bohemians was very smart an’ run a Bohemian newspaper in New York, an’ de odder was a rich man, in de importing business, an’ dey been travelling togedder. Dey told me how t’ings was easier in New York, an’ offered to pay my passage when dey was goin’ home soon on a boat. My boss say to me: ‘You go. You ain’t got no chance here, an’ I like to see you git ahead, fur you always been a good boy to my woman, and fur dat fine Christmas dinner you give us all.’ An’ da’s how I got to New York.”

That night when Rudolph and Polly, arm in arm, were running home across the fields with the bitter wind at their backs, his heart leaped for joy when she said she thought they might have his family come over for supper on New Year’s Eve. “Let’s get up a nice supper, and not let your mother help at all; make her be company for once.”

“That would be lovely of you, Polly,” he said humbly. He was a very simple, modest boy, and he, too, felt vaguely that Polly and her sisters were more experienced and worldly than his people.