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Title: The Toy Shop
A Romantic Story of Lincoln the Man
Author: Margarita Spalding Gerry
Release Date: May 28, 2012 [EBook #39829]
Language: English
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[Illustration]
THE TOY SHOP
MARGARITA SPALDING GERRY
[Illustration: THE _MAN_ WAS LEAVING HIS OWN FRONT DOOR]
_The_ TOY SHOP
A ROMANTIC STORY OF LINCOLN THE MAN
BY
MARGARITA SPALDING GERRY
[Illustration]
HARPER & BROTHERS
NEW YORK AND LONDON
MCMVIII
Copyright, 1908, by HARPER & BROTHERS.
_All rights reserved._
Published September, 1908.
_The child is eternal, and so are toys and tears and laughter. When
the house is put in order by strange men, when the clothes that were
worn and the tools that were used are put away, there will be found
an upper room full of toys. These remain._
[Illustration]
_THE TOY-SHOP_
The Man was leaving his own front door. On the steps he paused and
looked sombrely back. The white pillars of the facade rose before him in
stately fashion. They reminded him of the care he was evading for the
moment, and he sighed. Though he shut his eyes determinedly, he knew
that another grim building just beyond, the usual end of his journeying,
demanded him, and he sighed again. This time there was something more
than weariness in the sound.
From around the corner of the house, which almost hid from view the
white tents of the Home Guard, ran a child. He was bright-faced, and
magnificent in a miniature officer's uniform.
"Oh, papa-day!" he cried. "Never mind the curtains for my stage. You are
always too busy now to see my plays, anyway--!" He interrupted himself
to fling this in petulantly: "But get lots of soldiers--and one company
of cavalry. I can't get him surrounded without two more companies--and
six cannon!"
The child lisped so in his eagerness that no one but his father could
have understood him, and his father was so lost in his gloomy thought
that he did not know the child had spoken. When the expected reply did
not come, the boy looked his wonder.
"Papa-day--papa-day!" he cried, giving the man a little push. "I want
some soldiers!"
Startled out of his sadness, the father looked at the child.
"Soldiers? All right, son; I'm off for a walk now. I saw a shop the
other day."
He walked off. It was not a beautiful street down which he turned. Even
the fine width of it suggested an inflated sense of its own importance.
There were some good lines in the structure at the first corner, but the
building was unfinished, and drooped sadly, like an eagle without its
wings. Beyond that corner the paving of the street ended. Looking at the
mud, the Man wished vaguely that he had worn his boots.
He swung down the row of dingy business houses, his eye on the ragged
sky-line. His ungainly strides covered the ground rapidly, even though
in abstraction he stumbled over the uneven brick sidewalk. The Man's
face fell again into lines of melancholy thought.
"There is no hope for it," he told himself. "I will have to sign the
warrant. I can't find the shadow of an excuse. It is a clear case of
desertion." His thoughts drifted to the armies facing each other in the
cheerless, raw December weather--his army sodden with fogs, sullen with
inaction. "The poor young fellow must be punished." The Man's heart
ached with comprehension. He understood so well the wave of
homesickness, for which he had the more tender sympathy because of the
absence of it in his own cheerless boyhood. "After all, he is a soldier,
and he must be punished for the good of the others. And that boy--like
so many other boys--would have been a hero, not a deserter, at another
turn of the wheel. It is idleness that makes traitors of them. Where can
I find a man who will end all this?"
He passed the comfortable portico of a church which carried with it a
breath of thrifty village life. He had been there the Sunday before, and
the minister had prayed for peace. "Peace!" The word smote him, for he
had ordained war. "Peace! How can I compass it? Somewhere in the Eternal
Consciousness must rest the knowledge. But how can I discover it? 'Such
knowledge is too high; I cannot attain to it,'" groaned the Man.
With the thought he raised his eyes. He was opposite a young ladies'
boarding-school. It was a decorous place, sedately retired on a terrace.
A group of young women in billowing crinolines were returning from the
daily walk. There was a lively ripple of subdued comment as he looked
up.
"Did you ever see such awkwardness?" asked of her companion a girl from
Virginia. "And the creases in his coat!" There was much mirth, in the
midst of which a young lady from Maryland laughed out:
"Did you ever see him try to bow to a lady?"
Quite ignorant of these girlish strictures, the Man caught the eye of
the youngest boarder, who, kept in the house with a sore throat, was
flattening her nose hopelessly against the window-pane. Something in the
face of the sad-looking man made her throw him a shy little appeal for
sympathy from two red and swollen eyes. He answered it. Then:
"That child, too, I may have made fatherless even now," he thought, and
shuddered.
"How to end it?" His mind kept him remorselessly at work. "I have
failed. Another man might know--so many claim to know. If a better man
were in my place, perhaps he could stop the killing and the sorrow."
He was approaching a poorer part of the city, where modest homes and
small industries bound about the lives of simple folk, quite apart from
the square, dignified old houses where the aristocrats lived. The houses
seemed to press in upon him like the sorrows of the world. He thought of
those who had gone out from them.
"My hand sent them out--the bright youth, North and South--to kill and
to be killed. And my hand cannot bring them back. Had I the right to do
it? How could I have thought that any good could come from such as I? I
thought I saw clearly--I, sprung out of such darkness--having seen such
sin. What right had I to think that I could lead? It was a crime!"
He came to a group of tiny two-story shops--cobblers' rooms, dingy
groceries.
"Would it not be less a sin to end it all--to make way for some man who
was not cursed before he was born? Surely it would not be a sin to lay
it all down--no matter the way--to end it all--to make way--"
A little child, turning to go into one of the shops, brushed lightly
against him, and he started. When he looked up his face was tragic.
Through the daze came a recollection. Surely it was here, the fifth door
from the corner, that he was going. It was a toy-shop he was looking
for. Yes, that was the name--Schotz. For the son had said he wanted
toys. The father entered the shop, though he saw but dimly. His mind was
turned in on its own sorrows, and he went in, muttering to his own ears:
"To end it all--to make way."
He had to wait for a moment while the mite who had ushered him in made
a purchase. It was a girl child. She was too awe-struck by the glories
laid before her to talk; but she managed to point with a fat forefinger
to the penny doll she desired. The gesture with which she seized it
brought--strangely enough--a smile to the deep-set eyes of the stranger
who stood watching her. His face was quite different when he smiled.
Lines which had seemed nothing but deep-graven channels for sorrow
became paths for tenderness. Outside he heard her break into excited,
high-voiced triumph, which was mingled with the chatter of her mates.
The little shop was a modest place. On one side was a counter where,
safe under glass, were home-made candies and cakes, with a rosy-cheeked
apple or two. But, lining the walls, tumbling over shelves, crowded into
old-fashioned presses, were the toys. There were dolls, of course,
patrician wax dolls with delicate eyebrows of real hair, hearty,
wooden-jointed dolls that were a real comfort to little mothers. There
were wheels of fortune where one could see a steeple-chase if he spun
hard enough to make the horses vault the hurdles. There was a
fascinating confusion of supplejacks, house furniture, houses of
Oriental magnificence, little imported German toys--horses, trees, dogs.
As the Man's melancholy eyes comprehended all that the place contained
to minister to childish delight, something of the bitterness left them.
In its place was a curious inertness. One would have said that the man's
being was paralyzed with doubt.
The next instant he had seen something that brought grief back
again--something that reminded him of his burden. For, marching
valiantly over the shelves, storming wooden boxes flanked with cannon,
were toy soldiers. There were, too, all the necessary trappings of
combat--swords, guns, soldier suits, arrayed in which youthful generals
could marshal their forces and sweep the enemy's army before them--while
their fathers elsewhere learned the tragedy of war.
Behind the counter was a pretty, young-faced woman, who looked her fifty
years only from the softness sometimes brought by the records of many
days. She smiled at him in friendly fashion and, unhurried, waited his
request. While she reached for the toys the son had asked for, the Man,
bent over the counter, fingered the dolls left lying there from the last
small purchaser with clumsy, gentle fingers.
"Who makes that 'dolly' furniture?" he asked, idly. "I wish I could get
any one to work for me one-half so well. Carved, too. I didn't know
there were tools fine enough to make those tiny wreaths."
Mrs. Schotz shook her head at him good-humoredly.
"My man, he speak English. I--not--can." Following her gesture, the
stranger saw, in the back part of the shop, a patient figure at work.
Joseph Schotz was sitting in an invalid-chair, a table littered with
tools and bits of wood by his side. One leg, bandaged and swathed,
rested on a cushion. His strong peasant face was seamed and drawn with
pain.
The Man was beside him in an instant.
"Yes, I make the dolls' houses and carve the furniture--great work,
that, for a man, sir? I used to be a cabinet-maker at Annapolis--before
my leg got so bad. No, sir, I did not learn my trade there. I was
apprenticed to Cadieux, who was cabinet-maker to Napoleon. Yes, the
Emperor. Who else could it have been? But that was after those pigs of
Russians shot me in the leg. It was their ball that brought me here,"
with a contemptuous glance at his bandaged leg. "I was color-bearer--you
see, I was too young to go in any other way. I was sixteen when I was
wounded."
The Man found himself a chair.
"Why, no, sir, it isn't much of a story. It is only that I could never
stay still. I don't believe men were ever meant to. That's why it's--"
He checked himself with a glance at his wife. "I was born in the Tyrol,
but the name of Buonaparte pulled me to France. Why, sir, I don't know
what it was, but he is the only great man I have ever known. He made you
drop everything and go with him, that is all. We never stopped to ask
what it was, but--he knew his soldiers, he didn't know what it was to be
afraid--and where he wanted to go he went."
The Man, who had been listening thus far with sympathy, started--at
these last words--into tenseness.
"Did your Napoleon never--doubt?" he asked, with rather a breathless
voice.
"If he did, no one ever saw him," chuckled the cabinet-maker,
indulgently. "That was why we followed him. It sounds like very little,
but--if he could call me to-day, I'd jump up and hop on one leg after
him."
Had Joseph Schotz not been lost in the one story that never failed to
thrill him--of his shattered dreams and his hero--he would have noticed
that the face of the tall man who sat before him had lapsed into
hopelessness. This time there was even something desperate in the eyes.
But Napoleon's color-bearer went on:
"But you see--instead of that I'm here." He glanced at his leg again
with a repressed passion of bitterness, which made him in some dark way
kin to the man who listened. "It was when I couldn't fight for him that
I learned to carve the wreaths on the chairs at the Tuileries--after
all, that was near the end.... It is never as the Emperor on his throne
that I think of him--I have seen him so--or as the general on horseback;
but as the soldier in his gray overcoat going about among us. He had a
way of standing, sir, as if you couldn't dislodge him--that was
Buonaparte."
Mrs. Schotz had gone back to the counter with the toys the stranger
sought. With an irresolute effort he moved listlessly toward them. There
was a whole regiment of little men in blue, and with them a gorgeous
officer in gold-decked uniform waving his sword above a prancing steed.
The Man laid his hand upon the toy and moved it absently into position
at the head of the men. The brave general toppled spinelessly over when
the great gnarled hand was removed. The woman shook her head.
"He not--can--stand," she said, in her hesitating English. "Too
heavy--of the--head. This"--substituting a plain little captain with
modest sword held at attention--"this stand so you--not--can--dis--lodge
him."
The Man raised his head alertly as the woman echoed so unconsciously
her husband's words. The movement was a quicker one than could have been
expected from the languor of the whole figure. He gave a quick glance
from the man to the woman and then at the toy soldiers. Then he squared
his shoulders. His hand closed again upon the top-heavy little general
and, half-absently, swept him aside. The plain little officer was moved
into position. The officer stood. A light that was half humor and half
inspiration broke upon the rugged face of the Man who bent over them
both.
"No more generals on horseback," he muttered. "My man may ride when it
is necessary, but he must know how to walk, too. I want one--I wonder if
I know him--who 'stands so you can't dislodge him' and who 'knows his
men.' Perhaps they have given me the answer to it all. Perhaps, after
all, I can find him. Perhaps. And 'where he wants to go'--was that the
word?" He pored over the toys. The woman went back to her knitting. The
click of needles or the noise of a tool raised or laid down was the only
sound heard in the shop.
"Are you buying the soldiers for your boys? It's wonderful how they take
to them these days." The voice of the cabinet-maker broke the stillness.
He repeated the question before the Man heard. And even then the answer
was slow in coming.
"I have but one boy to buy toys for--now," said the man, at length.
"The other one--that is left--is too old. And, in spite of all, the
child must be made happy."
He turned again to the soldiers as if they contained the answer to some
question. His eyes fell again upon the captain. He nodded as though he
recognized some one. "I believe I--know," he thought, half-fearfully.
"He 'stands so you can't dislodge him'--he 'doesn't know what it is to
be afraid'--he 'walks about among his men'--he 'knows them.'" The man
seized the officer almost fiercely and held it in his big hand.
"I will put him there. He will stand. And"--his face lit up with sudden
fire--"and 'where he wants to go' he shall go, please God!"
He swept the soldiers into a heap and pushed them from him, waiting
impatiently while Mrs. Schotz deftly made them up into a parcel. But
when that was done he still lingered. Suddenly he turned to Joseph
Schotz with a sort of desperation.
"Did he never--waver--your Napoleon--even when he watched thousands of
you--even men with children--die, and die because he placed you
there--bound in the shambles?"
The cabinet-maker raised his head from his work in surprise. The
inexplicable agony in the face of the other man brought an unusual
thoughtfulness into the peasant's face.
"I do not know"--he hesitated--"I am not sure. He must have felt--but
no one ever saw him. He could not stop. There was not a moment when, if
he had halted--even to pity--all the great Thing he was building would
not have fallen about his ears--and carried all France down with it. No,
he could not stop. If he had been of those who falter"--here Schotz
shrugged his shoulders with the gesture of the Frenchmen he had fought
among--"Buonaparte should not have played the game of war."
The tall man winced. He looked for a moment as if the cabinet-maker had
taunted him--knowing. Then he straightened his shoulders. His face
hardened into lines of steadfastness and determination. Taking up his
parcel--
"Thank you," he said, with a deeper intonation than one would have
expected in return for so slight a deed--"thank you," he said to Joseph
Schotz, and wrung his hand with a grasp that hurt. Then he hurried out.
When they had watched the great figure out of sight--
"Who is he--that tall man? Do you know, my wife?" asked Joseph Schotz,
in their own tongue.
"Some American," replied his wife, with democratic unconcern. Then when
her husband continued to gaze earnestly at the door from which their
guest had departed, "A sad-looking man, I think."
"Yes, he is one that carries with him the sorrows of the world. When he
came into the world he had already known what it was to sorrow. Men like
that must learn to laugh or they cannot live."
"What does it matter?" she said, rallying him. "He is not thy Napoleon."
"No, he is not Napoleon," replied the man, quickly, looking down at his
hand, still red from the pressure of the bony fingers. "No--Napoleon
never played--with toys."
* * * * *
Joseph Schotz was weaker in the summer heat when the Man next came to
the toy-shop. The wife was at market, so there was nobody in the place
save Joseph and the little neighbor girl who was being taught to take in
pennies like a woman grown. She was not an altogether profitable clerk,
however, for she outdid Mrs. Schotz in giving too good measure for the
pennies. But there was need for her help, and soon there would be--more.
The Man entered the shop eagerly. From his remembering glance that
comprehended the place to its farthest shelf one would have said that he
had just left it. He was stooping and careworn, but his eyes sought the
toys with expectation. And as he dwelt upon this spot which ministered
to pure delight--a territory consecrated to those flowerings of grown-up
fancy which the children call toys--his bent shoulders straightened and
his deep eyes began to smile. For a few moments he said nothing. He was
like a man who was drinking great draughts of water, a parched man, new
from desert sands. At last he crossed to where Joseph waited.
"I found my man," he began, with outstretched hand. Then he checked
himself, realizing that Joseph could not know. In that moment he saw the
ravages that suffering had wrought upon the sick man's face, and a new
look came into his eyes.
"How is it with you, my friend?" he asked. His voice would have been
tender had he not taken care to make it merely frank--as from one man to
another who was bearing pain without words. Then Joseph saw that he was
changed from the man who had sought the shop the December gone by. There
was sorrow in the eyes, but there was no more despair.
"Some toy soldiers, please," the stranger said to the little girl who
waited behind the counter. His tone had both firmness and purpose in it,
but it had changed into mere kindness when he turned again to Joseph.
"What do you think of our new general, friend Schotz?" he asked.
"He knows how to win victories," replied Joseph, "but--"
"It is long, is it not, too long? Would your Napoleon have ended it
sooner?" The glance of the deep-set eyes was keen. At last he answered
the uncertainty on the peasant's face with a great sigh.
"Yes, it is long--oh, more than that," he interrupted himself to say to
the little clerk--"more soldiers than that." He crossed the room to give
her a gentle pat on the cheek, a caress which somehow made her feel his
impatience to be at play. "We need all you can get, all you have. We
must reach the end quickly, no matter how many lives it may cost. That
is the only way to be merciful." He was talking now to himself. The
child made round eyes, but she brought the legions out. Before they were
all there the Man was back at the counter.
"Cannon, too--lots of them." His voice was absent, for he was arranging
the soldiers into opposing camps. "There must be some plan which will
end it. This box will do for a fort. This for another. This chap is
making faces, but we'll use him, too. Into your shell, sir. It's the
rampart we need." The jack-in-the-box was cut short in the midst of a
horrible grimace.
"Was the boy pleased with his toys?" asked Joseph Schotz from his end of
the room. His voice was wistful; he had never needed to use his skill
for the delight of children of his own.
"Yes, my friend."
"Yes, there is indeed a change in the Man since his first visit,"
thought Joseph. The smile with which the guest looked up from his toys
warmed the sick man's heart, about which a chill had been gathering.
"But he wants more. He always does." There was the purest delight in the
father's face as he spoke. "Just the other day I came across an upper
chamber in our house which was full of toys. They were all forgotten;
but each one had made him happy for a day. That's the thing. He doesn't
even have to learn his lessons from them as I do." He smiled
whimsically. "I am trying to give him all the toys I--didn't have.
And"--his voice died away, and he forced the words with difficulty--"he
must have all that I meant to give the boy who--went away."
"You mustn't spoil him," said Schotz, after a moment, with the
perfunctory morality of the childless man.
The smile broke out again. "Bless you, you can't spoil children with
love. Why, my boy plays with his soldiers, but he doesn't know that war
is anything but a game. I wish his father could win battles with toy
soldiers and tin swords." His eyes were drawn back to the counter. The
next moment he was lost to every sight and sound.
Marvellous operations were soon in progress on the counter. One set of
men was intrenched behind all the boxes within sight. Advance and
retreat--shifting to right and to left--both sides alert, one would have
said--they seemed so under the great hands that hovered over them--the
besieged army handled with the same cool intelligence--both sides
manoeuvred for position.
The cuckoo-clock in the corner struck eleven. The little clerk stared
with mouth open at the big man who played with toys. Schotz watched him
with questioning eyes as the stranger knitted shaggy brows over some
problem that baffled him.
Creeping over nearer, closing in around by patient degrees, came the
army marshalled by the plain little officer, with sword at attention,
marching on foot at the head of his men.
"I have it!" cried the Man, in heart-felt triumph. He looked up. There
was a dawning realization of his audience.
"A queer thing for an old man like me to be playing with toy soldiers,"
he laughed, sweeping the late combatants into an undignified heap.
"So have I seen the officers at home in the _école de guerre_. Such play
would aid you were you a soldier."
The tall man shot a quick glance at Joseph, in which there was much
humor and some suspicion.
"Tell me--" he began. But he did not finish his sentence. He was
feverishly anxious to be gone. There was so much to be done; the child's
fingers were clumsy as she wrapped up the soldiers. But he found time
for a smile at the little maid and a sympathetic pressure of Joseph's
hand before he crossed the threshold and was gone.
At the same moment there was a bustle at the door. Mrs. Schotz hurried
in, market-basket in hand. She had not laid it down before she was at
her husband's side, her anxious eyes searching his face to find how he
had fared.
"Clara, the tall man has been here again."
"Yes," she said, "I met him. Do you know yet who he is?"
"I have thought that I have somewhere seen a face like that," replied
Joseph, slowly. "Something made me feel--his playing with the soldiers,
which yet seemed more than play--he might be in the army--he might even
be an officer--and yet he had not the air. Still, they are not all
drilled in schools, these officers in this war."
"But listen," said his wife, as she seated herself by him, with joy that
there was something to tell that he would be glad to hear. "I have
something to tell you. This morning, on my way to market, everywhere
there were soldiers--dirty, lean as from hunger, faces black with powder
stains. At first I was afraid--"
"But, my wife," said Joseph, indulgently, "what was there to be feared?"
"I will tell you. A crowd of soldiers came swaggering into Schmidt's.
They ordered him to wait on them, and when he asked for money for the
food, they shook their fists at him with ugly words, and called for all
to come and take what they would. Two officers hurried up and ordered
them to return to their ranks, but they laughed at the officers."
"Mutiny!" whispered Napoleon's soldier, his face pale with excitement.
"They swore oaths and said that they would fight no more battles for men
who were old women and stayed at home while they sweated and bled and
were starving."
"Without doubt their officers ordered them into arrest?" demanded
Joseph, fiercely.
"Who was there to arrest them? The officers looked white, and I was
trembling. More soldiers came into the square, until everywhere there
were angry faces and bodies swaying this way and that, while the men
were thinking what evil they should do. At that moment a carriage drove
up at full speed. There was one man in it. He stood up; he was a tall
man. A hesitating sort of shout went up from the soldiers. Then there
was a great muttering, and every one rushed toward him, and some were
shaking their fists.
"The man stood still. He said no word. But little by little the
muttering stopped and there was silence. Then the crowd began backing
away from him. There was a break in the mass, and through it I saw his
face. He was smiling with--well, the way fathers look at their children
that have hurt themselves because they were naughty and are yet not very
bad. Still there was silence."
"He held them so?" broke in Joseph. "But then he was a great man. But
who?"
"Wait. He began talking to them. I couldn't hear what he said, for all
the men began crowding up around him. But one moment they laughed, and
the next they were wiping their eyes with the back of their hands."
Joseph was listening with shining eyes.
"When he had driven off again the soldiers went back to their camp. Some
of them looked downcast and ashamed, but most of them were just boyish
and good-natured, as if they had forgotten how they felt before. One boy
laughed as he passed me:
"'Say, that was a good one about the tin soldier. I felt like a toy
soldier myself when he turned those eyes of his on me!'"
"Who was it?" asked Joseph Schotz, eagerly. "Have they such a man? Was
it the new general? I have thought he might be such a man--to win such
victories. And yet"--his face fell--"that one is a short man, and this,
you said, was very tall."
"The general? No!" said Mrs. Schotz, contemptuously. "It was not the
general. As he drove off, some boys shouted, 'Hurrah for the
President!'"
"The President!" Joseph echoed.
"The President. And, Joseph, when I saw his face I knew him." She paused
to make sure of the effect upon her petted invalid of what she had to
say. "It was he who came to us to buy toy soldiers!"
She fell back triumphantly when she had fired this bolt of wonder. But
Joseph was looking at her with eyes in which there was no wonder--only
comprehension.
"So," he said, slowly--"so--that was the President. So Napoleon would
have done."
* * * * *
The doctor had told Joseph that he must go to his bed. The old soldier
winced. A man may be brave before bullets and yet quail before the
doctor. The bed was brought down into the little kitchen back of the
shop. Joseph insisted on it.
"It is that I may be able to help you tend the shop," he said. But the
real reason was that he might not be banished from the children's
domain. He could still see Minna and Rosa and Bennie come for their
toys.
Thus it happened that one morning Joseph sat propped up in his narrow
wooden bed. Mrs. Schotz bustled, with much demonstration of activity,
about her work. Joseph almost wished that she would go up-stairs. He was
forced to keep up an appearance of much cheerfulness--if he screwed up
his face when the pain came, she wept.
"I wonder if the President will come to-day," he thought. "He said he
would as soon as he got back. I want to see how he looks since the
surrender. Strange that it should have been on Palm Sunday." His eyes
strayed to the mantel-piece, where a spray of palm waved from a gilt
vase. The wife had had it in her hand when she came in from the street
with the news the day before.
"If he would come, it would be easier," thought Joseph. "He would take
my hand and look deep into my eyes--it would be as if he took some of
the pain away from me--into his own heart." And then, because some
childishness is permitted to the sick, he moved peevishly in his bed and
thumped his pillow.
Suddenly the door opened. It was the President. Still, a different
President--almost a new one. His shoulders were straight and held well
back. He walked with a sort of joyous impatience, as though he brushed
aside palms of victory. His eyes glowed. He spoke as he entered, and his
voice broke into a boyish laugh. When he looked into the room and saw
Joseph, the full meaning of the change struck him and his face fell. For
a moment he looked almost abashed. Then, shaking his head with decision,
he strode through the shop to where the sick man lay. He took Joseph's
hand with resolute happiness and held it, looking full into the other
man's eyes. There was no need of words between them. A heartening and a
tonic influence went from one man to the other.
"It is over, friend Schotz," he said, buoyantly. "The nightmare is over;
we are awake." He paused and added, under his breath, with humble,
halting reverence, "Thank God!"
"They have surrendered." Joseph Schotz raised himself on his elbows.
"It was the meeting of two great men," said the President. "Mine and
the other. He's a general after our own hearts--eh, Schotz--the modest
man you helped me to choose!"
The sick man's face was every minute taking on the lines of hope and
manly force. The other man watched him with tender eyes, in which the
pity was carefully veiled.
"Yes, we chose him well, my President," said Joseph, with almost a
swagger.
"You will never know how great is my gratitude, Schotz," suggested the
President, "because you can never know from what you saved me--you and
the toy-shop. The day when first I came here I had fallen into a pit
digged by my own nature. You showed me the way out." His eyes were on
the sick man, and he chose the words that would hearten most. "It was a
great service you did me--and, through me, this great land of ours."
There was a light in Joseph's eyes that had been absent for many days.
"And now it is over." The President drew a breath so great that his
gaunt frame expanded. He settled into a chair near the bed with a sigh
of restfulness. "The boys will come home. Their mothers will meet them.
Their fathers will grip their hands. No, I will not think of those who
will be missing--the time for that has passed. The children will hang
about their father's neck. And they will be together." The light grew in
the President's eyes, until it seemed they blazed with a love which was
that of child and father in one and contained the passion and tenderness
of the universal lover.
Then the President rose, shaking himself like a great spaniel and
laughing from delight in living.
"There are things to be done--oh, the fight is not over. Perhaps it is
only begun. But to-day is my perfect moment--the first perfect moment of
my life, God knows." He paused and raised himself to his full
stature--challenging his fate. "It is enough to have lived for. I am
content!"
He turned to Schotz again, and his face was radiant with steadfast
brightness.
"There will be a future, my friend. We are ready for it, are we not? I
know the path will be clear. I have begun--the first thing to be done is
to heal. Beyond that"--he paused, and his forehead contracted slightly
as if from doubt--"all is in the shadow." A veil made vague the
joyousness of his eyes. It seemed to Joseph that his great friend was
looking upon something that he himself could not see. The face
brightened--the eyes opened wide--became luminous.... The President took
up his words in an altered tone. "Beyond that--I cannot see," he ended,
happily.
Joseph watched him for a moment. Then, uneasy, he put out his hand and
touched him timidly on the sleeve. The President smiled at him again.
There seemed to be no transition, and yet--they were back again in the
world where things were to be done and--borne.
"And now, friend Joseph" (the President took up again the task he had
set himself in the shadowed toy-shop), "when we were in the conquered
city I found a toy--" He interrupted himself to laugh. "It was the only
loot I permitted myself."
Joseph stared at him with puzzled expectation.
"For, after all, toys are the only things that are worth the
consideration of wise folks like you and me." He was busily extricating
a package from his pocket. It was done up in many wrappings. He watched
while the sick man pulled off the papers, one after another. Joseph
became angry with them--they seemed endless. Then the President chuckled
gleefully, for he saw the color coming into Joseph's face. At last the
toy stood in Joseph's hand revealed--a little tin soldier. Joseph looked
at it in wonder.
"But what--?" he began. Then, "Why, it is the old uniform--he carries
the tricolor. Where did you find Napoleon's soldier, my President?"
The President watched him tenderly.
"That is my secret, friend Joseph. Does he look to you like the little
color-bearer, my friend, that marched gayly out, in the sparkling
sunshine? But see--he is no child--his hair is gray." He bent forward.
He saw a spasm of pain contract the worn face. He saw the involuntary
movement of muscles when tortured nerves cry out. He saw the stark will
of the man who sternly commanded his anguish to be decent and to make no
moan.
"He is a soldier, my Joseph, one of my soldiers, and in the evening he
is doing the greatest deed of all." The President's voice had sunk into
a cadence which was melodious with all the pain the world has known--and
all the joy. He held with his own the sufferer's eyes so that he could
not fail to understand.
"He is a hero--!"
The President sat with the sick man in a pregnant silence, while the
color came back into the face of the man on the bed. At last there came
a smile. When he was satisfied that his work was done, the President
rose. For a moment his hand touched Joseph's brow as the sculptor does
his clay, with that touch which is a caress.
"And now, friend Joseph, good-bye."
After he had gone, Joseph looked at the toy the President had left. He
put it to his lips. He held it to his meagre chest. And thus they lay,
the man and the toy, until the exultation on Joseph's face softened into
perfect peace.
"Toys--toys--" So his thoughts sang themselves. "Toys. Nothing else is
real. Toys of tenderness--toys of mirth--toys that sail a man back to
childhood--toys that sweep a man into manhood--and beyond." He held the
color-bearer passionately close. "A hero!" he said. "Thank God for the
man who knows our hearts. The world is his toy-shop and men and women
are his toys. He can use everybody--it makes no difference how ugly a
toy may be. He loves them even when they are naughty--just like a little
girl when she spanks her dolly." Joseph smiled at his own thoughts with
tenderness.... "Just like the Christ who suffers us to come to Him."
"I wonder ... is it because he loves people or because he plays with
them that he is so far above them?--I believe he is very far
off--looking on. He is really neither smiling nor looking sad--just
seeing."
The room was quiet. The pain had ceased. Joseph clasped his toy and
slept.
* * * * *
Into the damp night air drifted suddenly a wave of sound. It startled
Mrs. Schotz, who sat at work by the lamp, watching late into the night.
Even as she lifted her head to listen it swelled into a distant growl of
thunder, threatening, sullen. A startled voice came from her husband's
bed asking what the noise might be. Before she had time to answer, the
door burst open, and their neighbor, the cobbler's wife, ran into the
shop.
"Have you heard," she shrieked--"have you heard? They have killed him,
the good President!" With the last word she was out of the door.
Joseph fell back and lay still. His hands were clinched and his lips
were locked. He tried to lock his heart, too. He did not dare to
feel....
"'A hero.'" he thought. "He called me that." The sound of his wife's
sobbing filled the room.... No, it would never do to weep. "Ah-h!" A
pang greater than he had ever known shattered him. He held that down,
too. It was then that a great thought came to him--the pain taught him.
"The same future, then, for him and for me."
He lay very still while the thought grew and filled him. The sound of
his wife's sobbing sank lower and lower. She crept close to her husband
and laid her hand on his. He took it gently in his weak fingers, and
thus they remained. The room seemed empty.
"They killed him, too, thy Napoleon," at last his wife said, timidly.
Joseph started. The name of the old god made him know how far he had
gone. For a moment he felt shame, as though he, too, had betrayed. Then
he spoke:
"If the Emperor, too, had had--toys--and if he had played with them; if
he had been able to laugh at the world and--yes--a little at himself; if
he had been able to laugh at himself--and cry over other people--he
would not have stayed at St. Helena. And ... he would have been almost
as great as the President."
Mrs. Schotz started forward and put her face close to that of her
husband. She spoke with her eyes on his eyes.
"You say--that--my Joseph?"
He nodded his head weakly but with meaning. And both were silent with
that silence which follows truth proclaimed.
After a few minutes he took up his thought again.
"I thought, my wife, that the end of life had come for me when I knew
that I should have to sit here in the shop the rest of the days of my
life and make toys for children. Now I know that it was but the
beginning. He taught me. There could be nothing greater. The toys will
live in the homes of the children. They will find them, too, the toys he
bought for his boy--after he has gone. But not every one will know the
work that they have done. Nor will all the toys the President left be so
easily discovered.... I, too, am his toy."
He stopped, for he was weak. After a time, when he had lain gazing at
the wall with a look that was new to his face, an eager look that made
his wife break into hopeless but silent sobbing, he said:
"It is enough to have made him smile."
When the President had been carried to his rest it came to pass
that men whom the dead man had not known were called into the
house to make ready for those who were to come. Through the long
hours of the day they toiled. The garments that the President had
worn and those things which he had used in his labor were placed
aside. When it was evening they came upon an upper chamber full of
toys. The men closed the door hastily and came away. But at night
when they drew near to their own homes they kissed more tenderly
the children who ran to meet them from their open doors.
[Illustration]
* * * * *
Transcriber's note:
In general every effort has been made to replicate the original text
as faithfully as possible, which may include some instances of no
longer standard spelling. The hyphenation is occasionally variable,
notably in the usage of "Toy Shop" in the cover pages and toy-shop
elsewhere; this has not been altered. Italic text is denoted by
_underscores_.
End of Project Gutenberg's The Toy Shop, by Margarita Spalding Gerry
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