“Here, stop this; I’ll be giving it away in a minute. I won’t say another word. Wait.”
May, June, July, August, September; five months of guessing. How delightful—and how wicked!
XX
A 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 eye that 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.