_ CHAPTER III
Shortly before we moved to the seaside this summer, it was evident to me that Josephine had something on her mind which she hesitated to broach to me. I suspect that the dear girl realized that we had had rather a trying winter in our new establishment, and was accordingly a little nervous as to how I would receive a new suggestion, which was aimed directly at my personal comfort. I had indeed found the winter somewhat trying on account of the number of small repairs which had proved to be necessary. Most of the doors would not open except by the application of brute force, and many of the windows rattled, so that carpenters were in possession of the premises a total of one hundred and twenty-eight hours in the course of nine calendar months, and I was compelled to listen in hang-dog silence to Josephine's sibilant commentary, that this was the natural result of buying a ready-made house. Still, I must admit that on the whole she behaved extraordinarily well under these trying circumstances, and said nothing more tart than that, if she ever were so foolish as to move again, she should insist on building a house to suit herself; which struck me as rather a boomerang of a speech, seeing that it implied a lurking doubt on her part as to whether she had been wise in moving at all. I even came near admitting to her in consequence that I was thankful we had moved, and that, surface indications to the contrary notwithstanding, I was extremely happy in my new surroundings, and egregiously proud of her taste and cleverness in the selection of wall-papers and upholstery. I could have truthfully added also that, though a slippery hump had replaced the cosey hollow in my renovated easy-chair, I had found one of the new chairs exactly suited to my sensibilities, and should be secretly pleased if the old one were to softly and suddenly vanish away during our absence at the sea-side, after the manner of the Boojum of ditty. I have really no adequate reason to give why I delayed to make this amiable confession. It was the consciousness, however, that I had it to make which had prompted me to help my darling out of her quandary when I perceived that she seemed afraid to beard the lion in his den.
"It has been very evident to me, Josephine, for the last two days, that you are keeping back something. If your mind is really set on altering the tinting of the drawing-room ceiling, I will consent to have it done while we are out of town."
"It isn't that at all, Fred. I agree with you that we can't afford it this year."
"Is it the extra tub in the laundry, then?"
"Of course it would be very nice if we could have an extra tub. But it isn't that."
"Then there is something?"
"Yes," she murmured. "Oh, Fred, I do hope, now that the doctor has ordered you to take more exercise, you will get one of those pretty, striped, tennis suits."
"Yes, do, father dear," exclaimed my eldest daughter, who happened to enter the room at the moment and overheard her mother's speech. "You would look perfectly lovely in one."
"It would be a satisfaction for once to see you wear something a little joyous," continued my wife, emboldened by the enthusiasm of her offspring.
"You seem to forget, dear, that I am a plain man," I answered, though to tell the truth I was asking myself whether I was not a trifle weary of posing in that sublime capacity. Now that I thought of it, what was the especial virtue of being a plain citizen?
When I came to reflect on the matter further, I realized that my programme for the past fifteen years has been to put on a plain pepper-and-salt suit of modest demeanor in the morning, eat two plain-boiled eggs for breakfast, walk down town in a plain black overcoat to my office in a plain-looking building, where I pursue my calling until it is time to go home and doff my pepper-and-salt of modest demeanor for a plain suit of sables, the funereal dress-clothes of commerce and convention. Even this coal-black tribute to ceremony has discredited me with some, who argue that I am not a plain man because I do not prefer to dine in the same old pepper-and-salt. Verily the only bits of warm color in my wardrobe have been a robin's-egg-blue neck-tie, which I have never dared to wear except once at a wedding, and a pair of pajamas reserved for very occasional jaunts on yachts and sleeping cars. And now that I had the doctor's orders to take more exercise, I had been on the point of selecting an ordinary, plain, pepper-and-salt flannel shirt, and condemning one of my oldest and plainest pairs of pepper-and-salt trousers for the purpose.
And yet it was not always so. I remember that when I was a young fellow and a bachelor I used to be, if not a dandy exactly, very particular regarding my personal appearance, and that I was willing to approach the border line of gaudiness as closely as any of my contemporaries. It took courage, too, then: the youth who wore down town even a garden flower in his button-hole was liable to be suspected of a lack of purpose. One got very little encouragement at the best in any effort to fly in the face of the perpetual black tie and black broadcloth frock-coat of the plain American citizen, and he who chose not to wear the garb of the Republic not merely cut himself off from the possibility of ever becoming President, but ran the risk of being refused employment of any kind. Naturally, therefore, I began after I was married to do pretty much as the rest of my fellow-citizens did, save in the matter of a dress-coat at dinner, which I continued to don daily out of respect to Josephine's feelings. (This has been one of the few points in my behavior upon which she has ever laid particular stress, and I thank her here publicly for her pertinacity. It has saved me from the slough of utter carelessness.) Barring the single blue necktie and the pajamas, I drifted into and have stuck to blacks and browns and the least ostentatious cuts until my own wife and children have felt called upon to proclaim me fusty.
To tell the truth, I had been more or less conscious for some time of my degeneration in this respect, but it is no easy matter to escape from a rut when one is middle-aged. Josephine's stricture concerning the lack of joyousness in my apparel, however, brought me up standing, as the phrase is, and served not merely to spur me to action, but to crystallize a tissue of reflections which had been churning in my brain during a considerable period. One evening a fortnight later I sauntered into the drawing-room, where my wife and four children were congregated round the family lamps, and drew attention to my appearance by a timorous cough.
Josephine was the first to look up. My foot-fall will usually draw from her a welcoming smile, but she happened to be absorbed at the moment in the end of a novel, the beginning of which she was going to read later, so that it was not until I coughed that she raised her eyes from her book. For a moment she stared at me as though she were doubtful whether I was not one of the characters in whose vicissitudes she had been engrossed, then, letting the volume fall to the ground, she exclaimed in a voice of rapture, "Children, look at your father!"
Roused from their respective volumes by the ardor of this exhortation, my two sons and two daughters bent their critical eyes upon the male author of their being. It was a moment of sweet triumph for the old man for which he had made the most careful preparations. It was in vain that their gimlet-like faculties sought to discover flaws in the eminently fashionable costume of white striped serge, the brand-new yellow shoes, the jaunty summer necktie, and the appropriate hat, whereby I was transformed from a plain man to a respectable-looking member of society. The father who can run the gauntlet of his children's censorship may look the cold world in the face without a quaver. Philosophy has taught me this, and it was under the spur of the philosophic spirit that I had sought out the most expensive and most fashionable tailor in town, and told him to build me a summer outfit such as no one could carp at. Expense? He was to spare none. Cut? The latest and most joyous.
The children clapped their hands and there was a lively chorus of approval, and I had the satisfaction of hearing Josie, whose hair is ornamently auburn, and whose face reminds me of her mother at the same age, declare that I looked "perfectly scrumptious," a sentiment which, in spite of its flavor of school-girl slang, seemed to express the critical estimate of the family circle.
"I look like a perfect idiot," I remarked, with becoming modesty, as I surveyed myself in the glass. I did not think so, all the same. Indeed, I was saying to myself that I had had no idea I could look so well. Yet, after all, it is other people who decide whether one looks like an idiot or not.
"On the contrary," said Josephine, having surveyed me once more from head to foot to make sure that I was in nowise peculiar, but just like everybody else (only nicer, as she would say), "you look neat, and cool as a cucumber, and five years younger. Doesn't he, dears?"
"I should think so," said little Fred, who is aiming to be a dandy himself. "Father has cut us all out completely."
"It is a comfort to think that I shall no longer be a disgrace to my family," I remarked with humble mien. "I may add that this is not all. I possess not merely this costume, but I have replenished my wardrobe utterly. When you see my new trousers, my new summer overcoat, my assortment of neckties, my brilliant shoes--both patent leather and strawberry roan--you will no longer be able to state, Josephine, that my clothes lack joyousness."
Later in the evening, after the children had gone to bed, Josephine, who had been up stairs to inspect my purchases, sat down beside me on the sofa, and nestled her head against my shoulder.
"Fred, you are very good," she said. "It must have bothered you terribly to get all those things--you, who are so busy. Everything is lovely, and the latest and prettiest of its kind. You have shown exquisite taste, dear; but I feel as though I had badgered you into it, following as it does on top of the house and everything else."
"No, dearest," I answered, stroking her hair. "I am proud of you--I am grateful to you. A man falls behind the times before he is aware of it. The world changes and paterfamilias ought to change with it out of consideration for his children. You were perfectly right, Josephine, just as you were right about the moving. Our house was too small and I was getting to look fusty and frowsy."
"Not so bad as that, Fred. I never said that you didn't look perfectly clean and respectable. All I meant was that there are such pretty things now, it seems a pity not to wear them. It wasn't the fashion to wear them when you were young. I mean younger than you are now," she added, patting my cheek. "I am glad, Fred, that you are reconciled to the house. I know that I have been a thorn in your flesh for the last eighteen months on account of it. I didn't mean to be irritating about the moving, but I was, and my soul has been wearing sackcloth and ashes ever since because I was so nasty. You see, Fred, in the first place, though I pretended to be pleased at your selecting the house, I was really dreadfully disappointed, for half the fun of a new house is choosing it. Of course a new house chosen by some one else is better than none at all, but a woman hates surprises of that sort, and somehow my teeth were set on edge by the few things about the house that didn't suit me. And then, dear," she continued, caressingly, "I don't think it was very nice of me to meddle with your great-grandfather Plunkett's portrait. It was too much in the line of the people who have their ancestors painted to order. I think of it quite often at night and blush, which shows that I have a guilty conscience on the subject, though I can't help feeling that it has been very much improved whenever I look at it."
"It was a very trifling amelioration," I answered. "And, if I remember rightly, it was I who put you up to it."
"Yes, but you were only in jest, and I was base enough to adopt the idea and act upon it. No, Fred, though I agree that everything has worked out a great deal more satisfactorily than I deserve, and that we are infinitely better off than we have ever been before in point of comfort and general happiness, I look back on the last year and a half as a sort of nightmare. You were content to live along steadily in the dear old house and to toil unselfishly for us all, and I was perpetually prodding you. It has made me feel myself to be a perfect ogre of a woman. And yet it seemed to me to be necessary, Fred."
"It was not merely necessary, Josephine. It was essential. Thank goodness we have got through it so lightly! It is not every man who survives the operation. But, as I have said to you already, I am the one who should be grateful, and I too was the one at fault. Had you waited for me to make the suggestion, we should have been still in that dirty little box of a house, and I should have been wearing the same black wisp of a necktie such as I have worn for the last fifteen years. Kiss me, darling."
She did so, and as she leaned her head lovingly against my breast she looked up and said, tremulously: "It was all on account of the children, Fred. I wish them to have every chance there is." There spoke the fond mother-bird. The children! Are these young giants and giantesses our children? Seemingly but yesterday they were little tots pottering in the sand with spade and shovel, alternately angelic and demoniac, supplying annual testimony to the inability of green apples to oppress a hardy digestion, and free from every inkling of responsibility save a faint, intermittent respect for parental mandate. Now they tower before me in the glory of budding manhood and maidenhood; lovable, yet haughty; with star-like eyes and brows perplexed by all the problems of the universe; God-like in their devotion to principle, though distressingly eager for pocket-money.
"Fred," whispers the dear woman at my side, breaking in upon my cogitation, "what were you like as a boy--er--a young man, I mean?"
Her words are the answering echo to my own secret thought. Like myself she is groping for light and counsel. May not the cleverest man and woman fitly quail before the soul-hunger of eager adolescent youth? And I do not profess to be clever.
"What were you like as a young woman?"
"I was afraid you would make that answer," she murmurs, reproachfully. "Oh, I have forgotten!"
"And if we could remember, Josephine, it would not help us very much. Each generation finds the world a virgin field. Somehow, though, I had fancied that when we had seen them through the scarlet fever and landed them in college, it would be plain sailing. We have to begin all over again, though, and the second half promises to be the most difficult."
"I know it. And think how we worried, or rather tried not to worry, over them when they were little things, and how we fancied there were no problems to compare in difficulty with supplying them with proper food and proper masters. In the last fifteen years they have had everything--chicken-pox, measles, whooping-cough, mumps, and scarlet fever. And they've collected everything--postage-stamps, minerals, butterflies, coins, and cigarette pictures. And they've kept everything--rabbits, goats, bull-terriers, white mice, a pony, and guinea-pigs."
"And owned, and subsequently discarded, to my certain knowledge, a music-box, doll's-house, puppet-show, printing-press, steam-engine, aquarium, and camera."
"Yes, and over and above their school learning they've been taught to swim, ride, dance, use tools, play on the piano, and speak fair to middling French. Yet, as you say, Fred, the most difficult part is to come, just as we fancied that we were through. And the terrible reflection is that we're not so sure now what we ought to do for them as we were when they were younger."
"Precisely, dear."
"And it seems sometimes very strange to me, Fred, that though they've eaten out of the same dish, as it were, all their days, and had the same opportunities, they should be so totally unlike one another physically, mentally, and morally. It's impossible to lay down any hard-and-fast rule for them now, as one could do when they were little."
It is indeed. I see them on the threshold of manhood and maidenhood looking up to my wife and me for guidance and counsel, though they pretend to be sufficient to themselves in matters of judgment. A word of encouragement or of disapproval from us may be the turning-point in their destinies, may set the seal on what they are to become. Even as the flowers are drawn by the sun and the willows follow the prevailing wind, their young lives may be turned to good or saved from ill by our loving sympathy or remonstrance in the nick of time. We clinch our fingers in the stress of uncertainty. Good counsel? Yes, a thousand times yes; but who will counsel the counsellors?
How the world has changed since Josephine and I were their age! More particularly that choicest section of it which we were taught to think and speak of as the land of the free and the home of the brave. As I look back now in philosophic mood, simplicity seems to me to have been the keynote of our day. Not merely had the gladsome flannel costume and the Indian pajamas not yet begun to force an issue with the oratorical black broadcloth coat and the up-and-down white nightgown. There were no shingle stains to speak of but those of time and eternity, and he who owned a vehicle of any kind must needs be careful that it was of sombre hue and homely pattern. Among the fixed truths which we imbibed with the maternal milk, and from the prejudice of which I never expect to be wholly free, were these: That though the blatant blast of the Western politician offend the sensitive ear of culture by exaggeration, it is still true that we are the greatest nation under the sun by virtue of our total disregard of everything which other nations have held fast to; that the American woman is a newly created species; that George Washington never told a lie; that though France was on our side in our struggle for Independence, for which we should ever be profoundly grateful, the custom of handing over young people to be married at parental dictate, coupled with certain hoarse suspicions of an unmentionable character, must be an everlasting barrier between us and the Gaul; that, nevertheless, if a man will have his fling, he may do so in Paris once without being held to strict account for it, provided that he comes home and lives a respectable life ever after on this side the water; that Russia's ill-treatment of the serf and general barbaric conditions are to be overlooked on account of the friendliness she displayed toward us in our hour of need, barbarism being on the whole a less crucial blemish than the above-mentioned peculiarities of our other ally; and that everyone should hitch his wagon to a star.
In this last injunction lay, perhaps, the gist of the whole matter. To hitch one's wagon to a star was to be, primarily, a plain person, to go in for truth, patriotism, fineness of soul, long hours of labor, little exercise and no vacations, pies and doughnuts, ugliness of physical surroundings, and squeaky feminine voices. Public opinion justified making all the money one could, provided it was not spent in rendering life ornate or beautiful. So lived our fathers and mothers, our up-right, vigorous, single-minded, ascetic predecessors; and in our day their precepts were still held in reverence. Yet even then there were indications of a change. The newly created species took it into her head to look around her, especially in summer, first by itineraries along the rock-bound coast of her native land, and later by amazon-like pilgrimages abroad. She invented Bar Harbor, and while electrified Europe held its breath perambulated Paris alone and climbed Mont Blanc with a single man. She also made the pertinent discovery that her popper's purse was pudgy with the proceeds of wheat, corn, dry goods, and railway shares. Though she still urged the successive youths who strolled and sat under her Japanese sunshade to hitch their wagons to heavenly bodies, she gave it sweetly, and little by little to be understood that chastity among women and high resolve among men need not preclude more picturesque paraphernalia and a broader field of investigation. She bought French clothes; her brothers took the hint from her, and hied them to Paris and Vienna to pursue their studies; penetrated to Pekin and Constantinople, and hunted the tiger in the jungles of India, while popper's pudgy purse grew more and more plethoric despite the drafts upon it. Purification by pie waned, and the first Queen Anne cottage reared its head.
I wooed and won Josephine in those early, transitory days when the influence of the past was still upon us, though we foresaw and caught glimpses of the new. We were simple souls. I believe that Josephine's wagon was hitched to a star; else I could not have loved her. And she believed the same of mine. She wandered in the panoply of her maiden independence to far-off rookeries attended by me only (or some other swain only). Though we were fain to discuss De Musset and Herbert Spencer, Darwin and Dobson, George Eliot and Philip Gilbert Hamerton--strange names to the elder generation--our scheme of life was still essentially grave and plain for all Josephine's Japanese sunshade and tendency to make the most of her willowy figure. Little did we dream of the later development which, like a huge wave, was to sweep over the land of the free and the home of the brave, overwhelming its native simplicity with the virtues, tastes, and vices of the other nations against which our forefathers barred the door. Palaces in all but the name stand where the buffalo was wont to disport himself, and where the American eagle in human form once flapped his wings and screamed most viciously in contempt of the effete civilization of the older world. Sons and daughters of the pioneers who bolted their dinners on the stroke of twelve find seven too early for elegant convenience. Among the reddest and palest of hot-house roses, which deck their tables, glisten glass of Venetian pattern and china from the bankrupt stock of kings. According to their intellectualities their talk is of labor and capital, of working-girls' clubs and model tenement-houses, of Buddha and Zola, of foreign titles, and transplanted fox-hunting. To-day a hundred thousand dollars is barely a competency, and a building less than a dozen stories high dwarfs the highway of trade. The vestibule limited, the ocean grey-hound, the Atlantic cable, and the voice-bearing telephone have made all nations kin, and bid fair to amalgamate society. Even the newly created species condescends to swap her birthright for a coronet.
All this has come to pass while Josephine and I have been plodding along the route of all flesh, trying not to forget our early aspirations. We have changed our dinner-hour with the rest of the world; we have learned to talk more or less unintelligently about the sweating system and Buddhism; we have bowed our necks to the yoke of the electric wire. Now that Josephine has spurred me on to it, I have even bought a modern house, and replenished my wardrobe so as to keep pace with thought and custom. But, nevertheless, sitting here in my renovated easy-chair, with my feet stretched toward the brass andirons which were the pride of one of my great-grandmothers, listening to the ticking of the old-fashioned clock which belonged to another of them, and conscious that the eyes of my most distinguished ancestor are looking down at me from the wall, I feel bewildered, as it were, by this latter-day metamorphosis, bristling with new and formidable problems. Whither is civilization tending? What is one to think of it all? And by the shades of my forefathers, purified by pie, how shall we best help our sons and daughters to hitch their wagons to stars? That is what is worrying Josephine and me. _