Those who could not minister to the esthetic needs should take their turn at the fetching, lifting and carrying, the portering of life. That is their happiness, their beauty.
“Look at my wife,” he illustrated, nudging toward the tent. “She has not the skill, the art. Good! But she work, and carry a pack, and do everything right for the babies; and she is happy, working, working, working all the day. When she work and I work, we sing songs of Hungary where she live. That is fine. Woman must not be waxworks! Sapristi! The good Lord has give them a job, my friend. Nom d’une pipe!” he sighed softly. “A big job! It needs zat zey get ready for it.”
In the spaces between Bardek’s speeches Blynn tried to hint of the trouble that would come to Gorgas if it were known at home how she had spent her time off in the Cresheim woods.
Bardek was not concerned; when a man is right he does not worry his head about what others will think. If he had bothered himself over the opinions of small minds he would have stayed in Hungary and sold tobacco and postage stamps. No! Liberty is worth paying much for; and when there is fear of criticism, liberty is dead.
Bah! The fat mother would not know a golden child from a salade de tomate. Doubtless she would scold a little. His wife, she scolds. It is nothing; it passes off and away like steam in the air. What one has, one has; all the scoldings of all the little people in the world cannot alter it; on earth there is no judge but oneself.
“Already,” he said, “the little Gorgas has more than all those copy-kittens who went to school and sat at wooden desks in the dark little rooms and listened as nice old ladies tell how to be jus’ waxworks. In her arm, in the ends of all her fingers, in her eye and on her tongue and in her brain, too, she has beauty, and the power to make beauty.
“You, you, my friend, have studied in the university. Try it out with the little Gorgas. What do you know that she does not know better? Do you know better how high is heaven and how wide are the angels’ wings? You have studied languages, and you know German—a sort of German, ho!—and French and Italian, perhaps; and you will always be foreigner there and a fool: but she, the little Gorgas that I teach, she is German and she is French and she is Italian.”
He stopped his work for a moment to show her how to smooth off the inlay without disturbing the fine surface of the beaten copper.
“Let us sing for them, my pretty one,” he coaxed in French. “You are some of the beauty that I have made. I want to show you off, exhibit you, prove my skill. What shall it be?” He ran through several simple songs of childhood. Reluctantly she agreed, only to please him as he knew, and together they sang a lively air. It was about life on the winding roads, and there was a chorus of jolly tappings which they did lightly with their hammers.
“That is liberty,” Bardek commented. “In France they have not liberty except painted on every sign-post. ‘Liberté, fraternité, equalité!’ Là, là, là, là, là! It is the great national joke! America? Non! ‘The land of the brave,’” he sang nasally in burlesque, “‘and the ho-o-me of the fre-e-e!’ Ho! that is vairy, vairy comic.” He wiped the tears of laughter from his eyes. “Very comic! I come to the land of liberty, ‘the ho-o-me of the free’ and I cannot sell my work without I get a permit for which I must pay; and in each spot I must have new one. I cannot live as I please. The people say, ‘Phieu! go away, ugly man. You have no soul, for you have no stiff white collar. Tie up the neck with white peekadilly and we give you liberty to live by us!’ I have not liberty to drink my beer or smoke when I please.