II
CHRONICLES OF A CRAFTSMAN
Mrs. Budlong's campaign was undertaken with the same farsightedness as a magazine editor's. On or about the Fourth of July she began to worry and plan. By the second week in August she had her tatting well under way. By the middle of September she was getting in her embroidered doilies. The earliest frost rarely surprised her with her quilts untufted. And when the first snow flew, her sachet bags were all stuffed and smelly.
She was very feminine in her sense of the value of her own time. At missionary meetings she would shed tears over the pathetic pictures of Oriental women who spent a year weaving a rug which would sell for a paltry hundred dollars and last a mere century or two. Then she would cheerfully devote fifteen days of incessant stitching at something she carried round in a sort of drumhead. At the end of that time she would have completed a more or less intolerable piece of colored fabric which she called a "drape" or a "throw." It could not be duplicated at a shop for less than $1.75, and it would wash perhaps three times.
Mr. Budlong once figured that if sweat-shop proprietors paid wages at the scale Mrs. Budlong established for herself, all the seamstresses and seamsters would curl up round their machines and die of starvation the first week. But he never told Mrs. Budlong this. Fancy stitching did not earn much, but it did not cost much; and it kept her mysteriously contented. She was stitching herself to her own home all the time.
The Christmas presents Mrs. Budlong made herself were not all a matter of needle and thread. Not at all! One year she turned her sewing room into a smithy. She gave Mr. and Mrs. Doctor Tisnower the loveliest hand-hammered brass coal scuttle that ever was seen—and with a purple ribbon tied to its tail. They kept flowers in it several summers, till one cruel winter a new servant put coal in it and completely scuttled it.
The same year she gave Mrs. ex-Mayor Cinnamon a hammered brass version of a C. D. Gibson drawing. The lady and gentleman looked as if they had broken out with a combination of yellow fever and smallpox, or suffered from enlarged pores or something. And the plum-colored plush frame didn't sit very well on the vermilion wall paper. But Mrs. Cinnamon hung it over the sofa in the expectation of changing the paper some day. It stayed there until the fateful evening when Mr. Nelson Chur called on Miss Editha Cinnamon and was just warming up a proposal that had held over almost as long as the wall paper, when bang! down came the overhanging brass drawing and bent itself hopelessly on Mr. Chur's skull. Mr. Chur said something that may have been Damocles. But he did not propose, and Mrs. Budlong was weeks wondering why Mrs. Cinnamon was so snippy to her.
The hammered brass era gave way to the opposite extreme of painted velvet. They say it is a difficult art; and it may well be. Mrs. Budlong's first landscape might as well have been painted on the side of her Scotch collie.
Her most finished roses had something of the look of shaggy tarantulas that had fallen into a paint pot and emerged in a towering rage. It was in that velvetolene stratum that she painted for the church a tasseled pulpit cloth that hung down a yard below the Bible. Dr. Torpadie was a very soothing preacher, but no one slept o'sermons during the reign of that pulpit cloth.
Mrs. Budlong was so elated over the success of it, however, that she announced her intention of going in for stained glass. She planned a series of the sweetest windows to replace those already in the church. But she never got nearer to that than painted china.
The painted china era was a dire era. The cups would break and the colors would run, and they never came out what she expected after they were fired. Of course she knew that the pigments must suffer alteration in the furnace, but there was always a surprise beyond surprise.
She soon became accustomed to getting green roses with crimson leaves, and deep blue apple blossoms against a pure white sky, but when she finished one complete set of table china in fifty pieces, each cup and saucer with a flower on it, the result looked so startlingly like something from a medical museum, that she never dared give the set away. She lent it to the cook to eat her meals on. The set went fast.
During this epoch Master Ulysses Budlong Jr. was studying at school a physiology ornamented with a few pictures in color representing the stomachs of alcohol specialists. They were intended, perhaps, to frighten little school children from frequenting saloons during recess, or to warn them not to put whisky on their porridge.
It was at this time that Mrs. Budlong spent two weeks' hard labor painting Easter lilies on an umbrella jug. When it came home from the furnace, her husband stared at it and mumbled:
"It's artistic, but what is it?"
Little Ulysses shrieked: "Oh, I know!" and darting away, returned with his physiology opened at one of those gastric sunsets, and—well, it was this that impelled Mrs. Budlong to a solemn pledge never to paint china again—a pledge she has nobly kept.
From smeared china she went to that art in which a woman buys something at a store, pulls out half of it, and calls the remnant drawn work. A season of this was succeeded by a mania for sofa cushions. It fairly snowed sofa cushions all over Carthage that Christmas; and Yale, Harvard and Princeton pillows could be found in homes that had never known even a night school alumnus.
There ensued a sober period of burnt wood and a period of burnt leather, during which excited neighbors with a keen sense of smell called the fire department three times and the board of health once. And now Indian heads broke out all over town and the walls looked as if a shoemaker's apron had been chosen for the national pennant.
There were various other spasms of manufacture, each of them fashionable at its time and foolish at anytime. As Mr. Detwiller said:
"Somebody ought to write a history of Mrs. Budlong's Christmas presents. It would tell the complete story of all the darned fool fads that American women have been up to for twenty years."
But foolish soever, Mrs. Budlong was fair. A keen sense of sportsmanship led her to give full notice to such people as she planned to honor with her gifts. She knew how embarrassing it is to receive presents from one to whom no present has been sent, and she made it a point of honor somehow to forewarn her prospective beneficiaries betimes. Her favorite method was the classic device of pretending to let slip a secret. For instance:
"Yesterday morning, my dear, I had the Strangest exPerience. It was just ten o'clock. I remember the hour so exactly because for the last few days I have made it a rule to begin work on your Christmas present just at ten—Oh, but I didn't mean to tell you. It was to be a surprise. No, don't ask me, I won't give you an inkling, but I really think it will please you. It's something you've been needing for Such a long time."
And she left the victim to writhe from then on to Christmas, trying alternately to imagine what gift was impending and what would be an appropriate counter-gift.