“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 the eyes. Back of eyes, sprawling out nicely on soft, gray stuff, is you! 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.