XXA CONNOISSEUR OF JOY
BARDEK and his family had done astonishingly well with the “boards and plaster” of their white-washed cottage. It had been something more than a novel experience; genuine domestic roots had sprouted and held him. Assisted in emergencies by Mrs. Mac, the young wife fell into the ways of other women with remarkable instinctiveness, and the two babies flourished into rugged boyhood, went to bed like other lads, swam, quarreled and played miniature baseball with the neighbors’ children.
Perhaps the workshop held Bardek more than anything else; but he never ceased to marvel at his own surrender.
“I let myself, I, Bardek,” he would exclaim with comic seriousness, “be tied up like dog with chain.”
But he broke loose many times. Without notice he would be off; the little white cottage would give forth no sounds of singing or scrubbing; the children’s shrill voices would cease. One need not then bother further about Bardek for many days. Perhaps the doors would be closed, but the windows rarely; and often the wash was left flapping on the line. It was Mrs. Mac’s eyethat saw that everything was put shipshape after one of these abrupt exoduses.
“It is good to be away,” on his return Bardek would say as he dropped his pack before the door and sniffed at the well-scrubbed pine floors and took in the general clean-up which Mrs. Mac could not refuse to an untidy dwelling. “The kennel gets in the nose; then one must gnaw the rope and be off and get new scents, and so to come back glad to the old. Ah! Nature is a great sweetener and cleaner. Ach! It is good to sit on hard chair! And how strong and fine smell the boards!”
And Mrs. Mac would lean in the doorway and listen to his sighs of satisfaction; and her eyes and her red cheeks would glow with pride.
Bardek would come back with something more than a nostalgia for boards and plaster; splendid orders he would bring for his own special work, and enough for Gorgas to keep her busy and prosperous. After one of these journeys there would be much excitement in the “smitty.” The lamp would burn at night. A clean spot would be cleared, the drawing boards would come down, and design would flourish.
And now once more had Bardek quietly decamped, silently stole away like the Arabs.
His pilgrimage was prolonged far beyond the usual hegira. April became May and May gave place to June, but no intimation came of the Bohemians. Mrs. Mac had time to give the cottage a complete house-cleaning,and Mac put new whitewash everywhere, on the broad boards that made the frame and on all the posts, and on the chicken-houses, and on the long, low fence which encircled the garden. Backed by a perfect mass of green shrubs and trees, and with a mighty Norway maple sheltering all, the little cottage cried out with welcome, but remained vacant.
Gorgas found herself almost helpless without the daily consultations with the master. At first she put things aside unfinished, hoping against an early return, but as the days lengthened into summer and the white cottage remained tenantless, she was forced to work out her problems alone. It was a dreary task, lacking the companionship of that bubbling cosmopolitan. How much he meant to her! Hardly had she realized that before. Just before he left, he had seemed moody and disappointed. She resolved to be kinder to him; to cease having jokes at his expense. Their baseball slang seemed to annoy him; or was he joking, too? One never could tell.
He was rarely angry, but once she had seen the inner ferocity of the man. A group of Italian railway laborers, sauntering by the “smitty” where they had no right to be, had stopped to peer in at the odd spectacle of a girl blowing a forge.
They talked in their own tongue. It was an unfamiliar patois to Gorgas; although she could comprehend their general meaning. Their guttural interrogation changed to amusement; references to the young woman became pointed and finally personal. They saw,far off in the corner, the thick-set man tapping gently at his bench, but they rested secure in what they were accustomed to find an incomprehensible speech. One quiet utterance from a beady-eyed youth, who led the others in the doorway, set the company in gusts of laughter, which was followed by a clatter of attempts to imitate their bold companion.
From the depths of the “smitty” the roaring voice of Bardek was suddenly heard calling upon them in their own tongue to run for their lives. A flying mallet crashed against the door-post and rebounded off to the leader’s shoulder. Almost before they could comprehend the curses hurled at them, the flaming form of Bardek appeared in the doorway, breathing carefully chosen Italian. Blows he rained upon them and kicks, delivered with precision. In terrified rout they scattered, straight through Mac’s perfect garden and over the fence, carrying part of it with them. Had anyone faltered he would probably have been killed.
It was a half-hour before Bardek subsided; and all the while he had bubbled Italian. Finally, little chuckles of deep laughter came in flurries to the surface. The voluble cries and prayers of the retreating Italians he repeated, first with irony, then with full comprehension of their comic possibilities.
“I must have care,” he warned himself. “Inside I am the big, sacred, mad bull of the old Greek, Dionusos. It is foolishness. To roar and kill, and for hot words, little harmless words, puffs of silly wind. For just that a man may give up a great fine life which the goodLord has made.... When I was jus’ a man I bellow like that, in Wien it was, and the man was big, a great Austrian.... We fight, and all for words. He speak against the France, and I have jus’ come from the France, and inside am I all French.” Bardek considered for a moment. “It was a bad day for that big Austrian when he speak against the France....Eh bien, for that I am here!... Well,le bon Dieu,” he shrugged, “he it is, not Bardek, who manages.”
But Bardek was not back, even to tease with American slang, Bardek who hovered over her with eloquent eye, who hungered to touch her, to smooth her forehead and grip her to him, but who ever remained aloof, a picture of magnificent restraint. Somehow, she hardly dared touch him herself, she who was so free with the others that came about the “smitty.” The mad bull of the old Greek, Dionusos, seemed sometimes as if it needed only a resting of the hand on the arm to give signal for a wild devouring.
“I am just like his child,” she mused, “and—I must be honest—he is more my father than my father. It is wretched that we can’t show our affection in some human way....Nom d’une pipe!Why does he not come back!... He must stop this gallivanting; I just can’t stand it.”
One splendid June morning, as she plodded listlessly over her bench, an answer came to her call. It was the familiar voice of two noisy children disputing in French over the possession of the drinking dipper. In the house they heard only German; outside, the speechwas French; on the long pilgrimages and on daily prowlings with the father through Cresheim, the language was Italian. The back-yard being undisputed French territory the little Bohemians were “tutoyéing” most belligerently.
“Bardek!” shouted Gorgas. “Bardek!” she cried, and was out of the door and over the white fence.
“Là! là!là!là! mon enfant!” he shouted in reply. “I come; like thela grande vitesse, quick I come!”
Into each other’s arms they rushed. He swung her around and kissed her hair and cried over her like a veteran of the war returning safe to his children. Before she could recover, the boys had grabbed her knees, and the ordinarily stolid Lady Bardek had swooped upon her with much bubbling of Hungarian and weepings and wet kissings.
Bardek pulsated language. One would never, never go away again! Oh, it was so good to be home! Never, never, would one go away again; not until the next time—eh, what?—until the soul grew sick with sameness and ran away for the pleasure of coming back. How could one get such joy without the suffering of absence? How do you know what you love until you try for one little while to give it up? The white-faced bald heads who keep, keep, keep; ah! what do they have—nothing. Life is rhythm, not stillness; back and forth, give up and take back, so swing the tides of earth and the bountiful blessings of heaven.
“I,” cried Bardek, striking a pose, “I am the connoisseur of joy. It is not given to the rich to behappy, nor to the poor; both can be very miserable. I have studied and know the secret of living. Here is one of my secrets: When you love most, make it a grand sacrifice; go away; desert; fly for your life from that which gives life, and some day when you are far away, you hear the cry for you, oh! such a pitiful tenderness, it make you weep—inside. Have you loved? Oh, you thought yes. But now you know; never have you believed to love so much. Inside you have been cleaned out, burned dry, made ready to receive the blessing.... Then you come back. Rush fast? Right away? Oh,non! non! non!You wait. You suffer some little more. It is necessary. Soon you cannot rest where you are. But yet you do not rush; you hold fast and slip slow, slow, toward ‘home.’ Exquisite! The passion of going nearer, nearer! Each day the miles on the sign-post say littler and littler. Now it is sixty mile; now it is only forty-t’ree; now it is ten’s and five’s and two’s. You see all the home things, the skies and the grass and the cows and the—ach!Gott im Himmel, I cannot say it....Ein tousand ein hundred ein und zwanzig!I am full of the joy. It is too much!”
Everybody wept gloriously. It was the feast of tears, a celebration of the joy that cometh in the morning. And they laughed and they talked and they ran through the little house and admired and patted and loved and kissed even the clean white crockery.
“You have miss me, eh?” Bardek eyed her with confidence.
Gorgas nodded.
“Ah, my child,” he patted her cheek, “now you know, too.... It was pain, was it not? Ah, yes. It must be.Qui sait aimer sait mourir.But ah! what would you give for your suffering? Eh? Nothings! The pain is part of the joy!”
Bardek came back with something more than accumulative joy; he brought cash for work done and orders for more. New York city had evidently been on the route of his travels, for a famous firm of jewelers was on his list. One knew better than to question Bardek either about his journeys or about his past. “Only the old and the foolish chew over again the past,” he would say. “I have been; it is part of me; you see it all in my face, in my talk, in my ‘me’ which is thus transformed: or I have it not. When I grow too feeble to live in the present, then, perhaps, will I live in the past; but more likely will I take then the quick jump into the great future.”
He was eager to go at his planning. The designs were talked over; sketches made, discarded and approved; the material tested and sorted, and the benches cleaned for action.
For several days the “smitty” was too busy for talk, except such business-like conversation as was needed to push the work forward; all copper does not anneal with the same result, nor does all charcoal burn with the same intensity; but after the plate, candlestick, candelabrum or vase had begun to reach a half-recognizable shape, there would be a lull.
“How is that Neddie fellow?” Bardek inquired. “I don’t see him hanging about and making the smile of idleness. More ‘home-run,’ eh?”
She explained that he was busy with his medical courses and, further, that Bea Wilcox had laid claims upon all his surplus time.
“Now, that is so much better,” honest Bardek nodded approval. “He is nice boy; nice, clean boy. I like—when the day’s work is done—to take him on my knee and sing sweet, sleepy songs,‘Schlaf’, Kindschen, schlaf’,’ und so weiter.... But he smoke too many cigarette: so he will not grow.”
“He is twenty-two, Bardek,” Gorgas rejoined, but not disclosing in her tone any defense of Morris. “That is five years older than I.”
“You!” Bardek gazed at her. “Ha! You! Little Neddie will never be so old as Miss Gorgas. You take by years? Ah, that such wrong way to make measure. Today the whole world is one day older than yesterday, but is every man of the world just one day older?Ach, gar nichts!There are some who have lived—ah! how they have lived while the slow hours of last night moved away!—and there are some who have made one jump from child to man, and there are some baby-women who have in that little day turned to be mothers of babies, and there are some who have stood just where they are, and others who have gone back from jus’ fool to imbecile. The day, the month, the year, it is nothing. When I would know the age I do not look in the calendar—ach, nein!—I look in theeyes. Back of eyes, sprawling out nicely on soft, gray stuff, isyou! Jus’ there!” he tapped his forehead. “In little children, I have seen, back there, wise old folks—you were jus’ such a little wise one when you first came to me. Your Neddie is jus’ boy—nice, clean, fresh boy. Oh, he will make nice man some day—if he grow up.”
It was difficult to know when Bardek spoke out of his serious opinions or through a desire to stir up his listeners. In English, especially, was he hard to fathom. Sometimes his auditors had laughed at the wrong spot, had taken his most earnest talk as if intended for droll humor. It was not prudent so to do; for then Bardek called on his heavy artillery of irony and satire, and woe betide the weakling who stood before him: the personal blemish of his opponent, moral or physical, which society had agreed to ignore, was trotted out for inspection, caparisoned with many unique beauties of language. To Gorgas, Ned Morris had seemed quite a man; but she deferred questioning Bardek too closely on that point.
Instead, she seemed to shift the subject.
“I envy you your freedom, Bardek,” she sighed. “When you want a thing, you just go and take it. If you want to cut loose you can say, ‘Let her go, Gallagher’ and boomp! you’re at the bottom. It takes courage, I tell you. One has to just stop caring for everybody and what everybody thinks. I can’t. I can’t be free. I’d like to break away and, if I wanted to, eat my breakfast in the middle of Main street—inmy bare feet, too; but I couldn’t do it. Not that I care an awful lot about what folks say. It isn’t exactly that; but I’d be scared stiff. I might get as far as Main street with my oatmeal and roll, but my teeth would be chattering so much from fright that I couldn’t get the breakfast down.”
Bardek thought the matter over carefully. Then he eyed her seriously and asked:
“Something in your mind, it troubles you, eh?”
“Oh, no.”
He was not convinced.
“When you have great troubles, tell somebody. Confession is good. That what makes ol’ Mac such a fine man. He is always clean, is ol’ Mac. Every Saturday night he stand in line and think of the bad in him—it is not much, but no matter—then he soon be on his knees to tell the father and when he come out he is all w’ite-wash inside. Ol’ Mac, his mind is not always full of dead matters and ferments and things that go bad. His mind is like my house after Mrs. Mac have come to slop hot soap-water over everyt’ing. I know. Sometimes I, too, go to father and tell him everything.... No troubles, eh?”
“Oh, nothing’s the matter with me, Bardek; that is, nothing worth telling.”
“Very well,” he nodded. “When you make confession you must want to do it. Your inside will tell you it is time when.”
“That’s just what I want to know, Bardek,” she brought him back. “You listen to what the ‘inside’bids you do, and you never question what the ‘outside’ would say. That’s freedom. I wish I had it.”
He worked for some time at his designing, as if he did not care to discuss the matter further. Occasionally, he looked over his shoulder at her, staring into her eyes as if to see what was within.
“So you would be free?” he asked quietly. “Well, it is easy. But first, you must know what freedom is—and that is hard. I have had many thoughts about freedom and have changed my mind many, many times; and just now I am not so sure as I was three, five, ten year ago. Once I t’ink freedom is ‘do as you please.’ In America you say that so much, ‘I do as I please.’ It is vairy nice. But ‘as I please’ is sometime not nice. For one, two, three minutes, yes. When you jump into nice, cold water and swim when it is yet April, ‘Oh!’ you say, ‘it is fine!’ but the next day you sneeze and for two weeks you have bad cold. That not vairy nice, eh? Now, I think you have not freedom then. You put great chains on you which keep you in house for two weeks when you would please go out. Sometimes it is freedom to be wise and not do ‘as I please.’
“You t’ink to sit in Main street and eat breakfast is freedom. You are right, quite right, if that is what you do want. But also, you want peoples to like you and not to laugh and touch the head and say, ‘What a crazy, silly child!’ You must choose. Well, you find you didn’t want to sit in Main street; not at all. It give you just what you don’t want.
“Life is full of jus’ that. ‘To do as you please,’ yes, that is to be free. But it is so hard to know what will please. You want swim in April spring water? You do not want cold in head? You cannot have both, my child. Freedom is to know what one to take. And who is to tell? It is hard, vairy hard.
“Then there are the other peoples—the great crowd, of them I do not think much—but of vairy few, my wife and those big boys, and you, Miss Gorgas, and of ol’ Mac—well, of them I do care. To keep them happy I must not have somet’ings. Ipleasenot to have them. I want them vairy much—oh, vairy much I want them—but so do I want to see the good friends with smiling face. I have freedom—yes—but I lose much. And it is good to lose.”
Gorgas was thinking how similar were the philosophies of Bardek and Allen Blynn, although each expressed his point of view in different ways. Here was an essential agreement on the mystic puzzle of human conduct, and by men who looked upon life from nearly opposite angles. It was as if Puritan and Cavalier, Stoic and Epicurean, Spartan and Athenian had for once settled their eternal quarrel.
“How did you learn all this?” Gorgas asked.
“By much troubles and much pains,” he shook his head. “You get one little cold in head. Ah! That is nothing. You learn so cheap! But I? I have walked in blood....Nom d’une pipe!how I pay to know so little!”
Whatever were the experiences that Bardek conjuredup, it prevented further speech. So they hammered away for the remainder of that morning without further discussion. Occasionally in the pauses she would hear Bardek muttering hisnom d’une pipe!—a sign of great perturbation.
And she was glad. Clearness had come into her thinking. In her mind now she was certain of the track for a little way ahead. She had asked about freedom because she meant to liberate herself from a great thralldom, but she had feared the consequences; now that she had been taught to face all the choices, all the possible results, she had chosen and was content.