And now just when everybody in the school had got used to Emily’s glasses and she couldn’t be proud of them any more she had got the mumps. All the girls at recess had felt her neck and Emily had kept going up to the school window where it was dark like a mirror to see how much bigger her neck was getting all the time. Her throat hadn’t been sore at all at first. Just bigger and bigger. It was funny trying to turn her neck like this and like that. One minute it would turn so far and the next it wouldn’t turn nearly so far. She must be getting a fat neck like Mrs. Pierce. Probably that was where women first began putting on weight. She had kept her neck quiet in school so Miss Lunt wouldn’t notice and then she had made the mistake of telling her father when she got home.
She was to stay out of school three weeks. The first ten days she was to stay in bed. After that she could sit up and then a few days later she could go out. That is she could go out if she promised not to go near her brothers or any other children. But what was the fun of having the mumps if you couldn’t tell people you had them while you were having them? After the mumps were all over nobody would get excited about them. Then there was nasty little Josephine Parkerson. She was bound to say I don’t believe you ever had the mumps. You’re just making believe again. Of course Emily did make believe a lot but it was interesting and a lot of girls liked to have her make believe. Oh, Emily, let’s make believe something! They would all sit down together while Emily made believe they were little girls a giant with big eyes and hairy arms and hands had captured and he was about to eat them all up and then she would jump up and say oh here! he’s coming, run! run! And they would all run screaming. She couldn’t make believe the giant eating little girls any more though because Ruth’s mother had been scared when she heard them all running screaming from the giant. So Emily had to play more quiet make-believe like Queen Titania’s court when she sat on a throne and the other little girls all sat around with their hair unbraided and made believe they were good fairies who could do all kinds of things with a touch of the long wands they carried which were sticks from bushes with just a little tuft of leaves left on the ends. They pretended they were turning everything they touched to candy until one of them accidentally touched Dorothy’s baby brother. And Dorothy who really was too little to be playing make-believe anyway had cried and cried and said she didn’t want her baby brother to be eaten up for candy and everybody had got terribly excited and tried to make Dorothy stop crying and told her not to be such a baby that it was all only make-believe and that nobody was going to eat her brother. Then Emily had remembered something about a man-witch named Merlin and she said, Wait! Wait! We’ll get Merlin! Everybody asked who Merlin was and she told them and Dorothy stopped crying about her brother being candy. Emily went away and in a little time she came back and she was wearing a long black cloth over her head so you could hardly see her face and in a low deep voice she said I am Merlin who wants me here and Dorothy started to cry again so Emily said as quickly as she could this baby won’t be candy any more I’ll make him a real baby again and she said Hoochy-Poochy pronto changeo! He was still asleep so to prove he was changed she pinched him and he cried and the baby was real again. And Dorothy instead of saying thank you had got mad and wheeled her brother off in his baby carriage and said I’m never going to bring my brother here again to be made into candy and get pinched so he cries! Something like that was always happening when Emily played make-believe and she couldn’t make the other children understand how something you made believe was so really wasn’t so. Anyhow she was getting to be eleven years old and that was pretty big for make-believe except to one’s self. In fact making believe to one’s self was much more fun. It was like having a secret.
She could do a lot of make-believing while she was staying in bed for ten days having the mumps. Sometimes she would pretend the bed was a boat. It was out in the middle of the ocean and she was floating along in it. She would pass beautiful islands with palm trees and birds in them singing. There would be caves on the islands and beautiful women with long golden hair singing in the cave openings. She would float and float and that was a good make-believe for going to sleep. Then she would make believe that her bed was in a hospital and that she had been a soldier wounded doing his duty on the battlefront. Nurses were hovering around her and people were telling her how brave she was. She could hear cannons bombarding in the distance and the enemy shouting. People would run in and out of the hospital room saying, Oh, what a brave man you are! You have saved your country! Hear the enemy shouting. You fought so bravely you made them run. They don’t like it. Hear the way they are shouting. The cannon would roar and the enemy shout. A band leading her conquering army to victory would be playing Hail Columbia the Gem of the Ocean. She sat up in bed and said I have given all for my country. And fell back dead.
Let’s see, what else could she be? She could hitch the spread up to the top of the bed and pretend she was in a tent. That she was a pioneer camping out on the cold, cold ground. Listen to the winds howl! And the snow was coming down fast, covering up the earth and the bushes and the trees and the tent. It was a terrible blizzard, the worst in many years. Oh, it was good to lie here in bed—in the tent snug and warm.
Emily put the sheet back. She could also, by holding the sides of the spread tight under her arms, pretend she was a prisoner of the Indians lying on the ground. But she was tired of making believe. And she had read all the big green Dickens volumes lying on the chair beside her bed. The Uncommercial Traveler and Bleak House and even The Mystery of Edwin Drood. She felt a little cross about Edwin Drood. After all Dickens had no right to begin a novel and then leave it right in midair even if it wasn’t his fault that he did die. But somehow those tall thin volumes that always seemed so reliable to her had failed her. She would never be able to look into them again sure they would satisfy her interest. Edwin Drood bothered her. She tried to figure it out but none of her endings for the book, Drood murdered, Drood posing as the other man, Drood back from the colonies with lots of money, seemed to be right. So she gave it up and went back to The Uncommercial Traveler, the least liked of the Dickens stories which she read only after she had read everything else.
She would polish her glasses, Emily decided. She carefully took the little pink cloth the optician had given her out of her black leather case and wiped her glasses. The world always seemed brighter when she put them on.
Her glasses sparkling bright she lay back in bed, facing the window which opened on a neighbor’s garden. She looked at the green of a budding tree and other trees beyond.
Suddenly Emily looked up—and she knew what beauty was. It was the corner of the house next door against the sky. The sky was blue. The house corner a simple angle painted yellow. But, oh, it was beautiful! The house corner, the sky. A little yellow and a lot of blue. And it was the first really beautiful thing she had ever seen. Or the first thing she knew for herself was beautiful.
Emily lay back in bed, holding her vision. So that was beauty! What she felt. It was what poets and artists had, it was what people were always talking about when they said the word beautiful and she had thought it was something pretty like her turquoise locket or Alice’s long curls. But beauty such as this was different from all the turquoise lockets in the world. This beauty made you tremble and made you happy and sad and excited. Beauty! She had beauty!
All the rest of the time Emily had the mumps she lay quietly in bed. Her books she didn’t read except one day to turn over the leaves looking for all references to beauty. She stopped playing the games of make-believe and she paid no attention to the cards and the other games her family gave her. Instead she looked constantly out of the window, not always at the corner of the house next door. She tried again and again to come upon it suddenly as she had that first day when the sight had given her such an unknown feeling. But it never gave her quite the same start although she learned it could act as a rousing thing from which to go on to other loveliness.
Emily would look at the cor
ner of the house and then at the leaves on the tree. She saw for the first time how delicate they were and how lightly the sun glistened on them. She watched first the leaves and then the branches take a pattern on the blue of the sky. She watched the clouds in the sky coming up slowly and whitely. At night she looked at the stars and listened to the stirring of the leaves in the winds of the darkness. Beauty! I have beauty!
Are you sure you are feeling better?’ Her family bothered her with questions. Oh, thought Emily, if they would only go away and leave me alone. I want to look at the corner of the house. ‘Why don’t you play with the nice games we brought you?’ Or ’Do you miss all your little playmates? Only a few days, now, dear, and you can get up and go out and play.’
She heard her mother and her aunt discussing her in the next room. ‘I’m a little worried about Emily. She lies in bed so quietly and doesn’t seem to take an interest in anything any more. Andrew says it’s just an ordinary case of mumps such as all children have but it doesn’t seem natural for her to be so quiet. She’s always been so full of spirits.”
And her aunt’s voice. ‘Probably the mumps make her feel tired and lethargic. I wouldn’t worry about it. And doesn’t she look a funny little owl lying there so solemnly with her big spectacles and swollen throat?’
Emily began to hate the thought of getting up until one day it occurred to her that perhaps other things might make her feel beautiful the way the corner of the house did. Perhaps that old bridge over the river where her father liked to walk so often. He always said when she asked him why do you come this way all the time, because it is beautiful along here. She would go and see how beautiful it was as soon as she was well. She wanted to go back into the art museum too and see if the statues and pictures everyone said were so beautiful made her feel the way the corner of the house did. The last time she had been taken to the art museum she tried to stay in the mummy room and when her father took her into the classical statue room she had kept trying to look at the undressed men without having anyone notice what part she was looking at. Funny that men should be made that way, all outside. It ought to seem heavy to them or perhaps it was just the same as having an arm or a leg.
The day she got up for the first time she wanted to run everywhere looking for beauty. She was made to stay in the garden or on the porch lying in the hammock. So all she could do in the way of finding beauty was to study flowers. Nasturtiums and hollyhocks, somehow, never seemed very nice to her anyway. Too ordinary Yet the corner of that house was ordinary and it made her feel beauty. Emily concentrated on a tall, swaying hollyhock hooked with great pink flowers. No, hollyhocks suggested barnyards where most of them were planted and what could be less beautiful than a barnyard? Now the syringa wasn’t so bad. The more you looked the lovelier it became, the flowers were small white stars and to close your eyes and breathe their fragrance was sweet.
For a long time after she got better Emily didn’t play much with the other children. Near the school was an office building with wide steps where the girls liked to play jackstones. The steps looked down the street toward the west. One late afternoon Emily sat on the steps watching the sky turn rose. She was thinking how beautiful it was and how much more beautiful it would be if only she could hear music as she watched the coloring sky.
‘Oh, come on, Emily, why don’t you play? If you’re no good at jackstones we can play jump rope but if you don’t hold the rope first why we can’t play jump rope because that wouldn’t be fair.’
‘I can’t. I’m watching the sunset.’
‘What are you doing that for?’
‘It’s beautiful.’
The other children turned and looked surprised at the sunset.
‘It’s just the same as it always is.’
‘Yes, but it’s always beautiful. And a thing of beauty is a joy forever. Didn’t you ever read poetry? A thing of beauty . . .’
‘Beauty! Oh, you’re crazy!’
Ruth turned away and picked up the jump rope.
‘She’s crazy! Emily’s crazy! Emily’s crazy!’ They skipped in time to the refrain. ‘Emily’s crazy!’
But Emily sat on the steps, her face held tight in her hands, her eyes behind her glasses fixed on the sky. She had a secret. Beauty was her secret. She would never talk about it to Alice or Ruth again.
A Work of Art
ANTON CHEKHOV
HOLDING under his arm an object wrapped in a newspaper, Sasha Smirnov, the only son of his mother, walked nervously into the office of Doctor Koshelkov.
“Well, my dear boy,” exclaimed the doctor warmly, “how do you feel today? What’s the good news?”
Sasha began to blink with his eyes, put his hand over his heart, and stammered nervously :
“My mother sends her regards and begs to thank you. . . . I am my mother’s only son, and you have saved my life . . . and we both hardly know how to thank you.”
“Come, come, my young friend, let us not speak of it,” interrupted the doctor, literally melting with pleasure. “I have only done what anybody else in my place would have done.”
“I am the only son of my mother. . . . We are poor people and consequently we are not in position to pay you for your trouble . . . and it makes it very embarrassing for us, Doctor, although both of us, mother and I, who am the only son of my mother, beg of you to accept from us, a token of our gratitude, this object which . . . is an object of rare worth, a wonderful masterpiece in antique bronze.”
The doctor made a grimace.
“Why, my dear friend,” he said, “it is entirely unnecessary. I don’t need this in the least.”
“Oh, no, no,” stammered Sasha. “I beg you please accept it!”
He began to unwrap the bundle, continuing his entreaties in the meantime:
“If you do not accept this, you will offend both my mother and my-self. . . . This is a very rare work of art . . . an antique bronze. It is a relic left by my dead father. We have been prizing it as a very dear remembrance. . . . My father used to buy up bronze antiques, selling them to lovers of old statuary. . . . And now we continue in the same business, my mother and myself.”
Sasha undid the package and enthusiastically placed it on the table.
It was a low candelabrum of antique bronze, a work of real art representing a group: On a pedestal stood two figures of women clad in the costume of Mother Eve and in poses that I have neither the audacity nor the temperament to describe. These figures were smiling coquettishly and in general gave one the impression that, were it not for the fact that they were obliged to support the candle-stick, they would lean down from their pedestal and exhibit a performance which . . . my dear reader, I am even ashamed to think of it!
When the doctor espied the present, he slowly scratched his head, cleared his throat and blew his nose.
“Yes, indeed, a very pretty piece of work,” he mumbled. . . . “But,—how shall I say it—not quite . . . I mean . . . rather unconventional . . . not a bit literary, is it? . . . You know . . . the devil knows. . ..”
“Why?”
“Beelzebub himself could not have conceived anything more ugly. Should I place such a phantasmagoria upon my table I would pollute my entire home!”
“Why, Doctor, what a strange conception you have of art! ” cried Sasha in offended tones. “This is a real masterpiece. Just look at it! Such is its harmonious beauty that just to contemplate it fills the soul with ecstasy and makes the throat choke down a sob! When you see such loveliness you forget all earthly things. . . . Just look at it! What life, what motion, what expression!”
“I quite understand all this, my dear boy,” interrupted the doctor. “But I am a married man. Little children run in and out of this room and ladies come here continually.”
“Of course,” said Sasha, “if you look at it through the eyes of the rabble, you see this noble masterpiece in an entirely different light. But you certainly are above all that, Doctor, and especially when your refusal to accept this gift will deeply offe
nd both my mother and myself, who am the only son of my mother. . . . You have saved my life . . . and in return we give you our dearest possession and . . . my only regret is that we are unable to give you the mate to this candelabrum.”
“Thanks, friend, many thanks. . . . Remember me to your mother and . . . But for God’s sake! You can see for yourself, can’t you? Little children run in and out of this room, and ladies come here continually. . .. However, leave it here! There’s no arguing with you.”
“Don’t say another word!” exclaimed Sasha joyously. “Put the candelabrum right here, next to the vase. By Jove, but it’s a pity that I haven’t got the mate to give you. But it can’t be helped. Well, good-bye, Doctor!”
After the departure of Sasha the doctor looked for a long time at the candelabrum and scratched his head.
“This is beautiful, all right,” he thought. “It would be a pity to throw it away.. . . And yet I dare not keep it. . . . Hm! . . . Now who in the world is there to whom I can present or donate it?”
After long deliberation he hit upon a good friend of his, the lawyer Ukhov, to whom he was indebted for legal services.
“Fine!” chuckled the doctor. “Being a close friend of his, I cannot very well offer him money, and so I will give him this piece of indecency instead. . . . And he’s just the man for it . . . single, and somewhat of a gay bird, too.”
No sooner thought than done. Dressing himself, the doctor took the candelabrum and went to the home of Ukhov.
“Good morning, old chap!” he said. “I have come here to thank you for your trouble. . .. You will not take money, and I will therefore repay you by presenting you with this exquisite masterpiece. . . . Now say for yourself, isn’t it a dream?”
A Treasury of Doctor Stories Page 14