'Something not worth the search, we may be sure,' remarked Onkel Heinrich.
'_Ach Gott_,' said Tante Else, not heeding him, 'where do they--' She clasped and unclasped her fingers; she gazed round the room and up at the ceiling. We all sat silent, feeling that here there was no help, and watched while she chased the elusive word round and round her brain.
Only Onkel Heinrich continued to eat herring salad with insulting emphasis.
'I have it,' she cried at last triumphantly.
We at once revived into a brisk attention.
'A door is a characteristic--'
'A most excellent word,' said Papa encouragingly. 'Continue, my dear.'
'It is a characteristic of buildings that are massive and that have windows and chimneys like other buildings.'
'Excellent, excellent,' said Papa. 'Definitions are never easy.'
'And--and tents don't have them,' finished Tante Else, looking round at us with a sort of mild surprise at having succeeded in talking so much about something that was neither neighbors nor housekeeping.
'_Quatsch_,' said Onkel Heinrich.
'My dear,' protested Tante Else, forced at last to notice these comments.
'I say it is _quatsch_,' said Onkel Heinrich with a volcanic vehemence startling in one so trim.
'Really, my dear,' said Tante Else.
'I repeat it,' said Onkel Heinrich.
'Do not think, my dear--'
'I do not think, I know. Am I to sit silent, to have no opinion, in my own house? At my own table?'
'My dear--'
'If you do not like to hear the truth, refrain from talking nonsense.'
'My dear Heinrich--will you not try--in the presence of--of relations, and of--of our children--' Her voice shook a little, and she stopped, and began with great haste and exactness to fold up her table-napkin.
'_Ach--quatsch_' said Onkel Heinrich again, irritably pushing back his chair.
He waddled to a cupboard--of course he doesn't get much exercise in his cage, so he can only waddle--and took out a box of cigars. 'Come, Ferdinand,' he said, 'let us go and smoke together in my room and leave the dear women to the undisturbed enjoyment of their wits.'
'I do not smoke,' said Papa briefly.
'Come then while I smoke,' said Onkel Heinrich.
'Nay, I fear thee, Heinrich,' said Papa. 'I fear thy tongue applied to my weak places. I fear thine eye, measuring their deficiencies. I fear thy intelligence, known to be great--'
'Worth exactly,' said Onkel Heinrich suddenly facing us, the cigarbox under his arm, his cross owl's eyes rounder than ever, 'worth exactly, on the Berlin brain market, eight thousand marks a year.'
'I know, I know,' cried Papa, 'and I admire--I admire. But there is awe mingled with my admiration, Heinrich,--awe, respect, terror. Go, thou man of brains and marketableness, thou man of worth and recognition, go and leave me here with these lesser intellects. I fear thee, and I will not watch thee smoke.'
And he got up and raised Tante Else's hand to his lips with great gallantry and wished her, after our pleasant fashion at the end of meals, a good digestion.
But Tante Else, though she tried to smile and return his wishes, could not get back again into her _role_ of serene and conversational _Hausfrau._ My uncle waddled away, shooting a sniff of scorn over his shoulder as he went, and my aunt endeavored to conceal the fact that she was wiping her eyes. Lieschen and Elschen began to talk to me both at once. My step-mother cleared her throat, and remarked that successful public men often had to pay for their successes by being the victims at home of nerves, and that their wives, whose duty it is always to be loving, might be compared to the warm and soothing iron passed over a shirt newly washed, and deftly, by its smooth insistence, flattening away each crease.
Papa gazed at my step-mother with admiring astonishment while she elaborated this image. He had hold of Tante Else's hand and was stroking it. His bright eyes were fixed on his wife, and I could see by their expression that he was trying to recall the occasions on which his own creases had been ironed out.
With the correctness with which one guesses most of a person's thoughts after you have lived with him ten years, my step-mother guessed what he was thinking. 'I said public men,' she remarked, 'and I said successes.'
'I heard, I heard, _meine Liebste_,' Papa assured her, 'and I also completely understand.'
He made her a little bow across the table. 'Do not heed him, Else, my dear,' he added, turning to my aunt. 'Do not heed thy Heinrich--he is but a barbarian.'
'Ferdinand!' exclaimed my step-mother.
'Oh no,' sighed Tante Else, 'it is I who am impatient and foolish.'
'I tell thee he is a barbarian. He always was. In the nursery he was, when, yet unable to walk, he crawled to that spot on the carpet where stood my unsuspecting legs the while my eyes and hands were busy with the playthings on the table, and fastening his youthful teeth into them made holes in my flesh and also in my stockings, for which, when she saw them, my mother whipped me. At school he was, when, carefully stalking the flea gambolling upon his garments, he secured it between a moistened finger and thumb, and, waiting with the patience of the savage sure of his prey, dexterously transferred it, at the moment his master bent over his desk to assure himself of his diligence, to the pedagogue's sleeve or trouser, and then looked on with that glassy look of his while the victim, returned to his place on the platform, showed an ever increasing uneasiness culminating at last in a hasty departure and a prolonged absence. As a soldier he was, for I have been told so by those comrades who served with and suffered from him, but whose tales I will not here repeat. And as a husband--yes, my dear Else, as a husband he has not lost it--he is, undoubtedly, a barbarian.'
'Oh, no, no,' sighed Tante Else, yet listening with manifest fearful interest.
'Ferdinand,' said my step-mother angrily, 'your tongue is doing what it invariably does, it is running away with you.'
'Why are married people always angry with each other?' asked Lieschen, the unmarried daughter, in a whisper.
'How can I tell, since I am not married?' I answered in another whisper.
'They are not,' whispered Elschen with all the authority of the lately married. 'It is only the old ones. My husband and I do not quarrel. We kiss.'
'That is true,' said Lieschen with a small giggle which was not without a touch of envy. 'I have repeatedly seen you doing it.'
'Yes,' said Elschen placidly.
'Is there no alternative?' I inquired.
'No what?'
'Alternative.'
'I do not know what you mean by alternative, Rose-Marie,' said Elschen, trying to twist her wedding-ring round on her finger, but it couldn't twist because it was too deeply embedded. 'Where do you get your long words from?'
'Must one either quarrel or kiss?' I asked. 'Is there no serene valley between the thunderous heights on the one hand and the swampy enervations on the other?'
To this Elschen merely replied, while she stared at me, '_Grosser Gott_.'
'You are a queer cousin,' said Lieschen, giggling again, the giggle this time containing a touch of contempt, her giggles never being wholly unadulterated. 'I suppose it is because Onkel Ferdinand is so poor.'
'I expect it is,' said I.