THE MAKING OF AMERICANS (Family Saga). Gertrude Stein
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simple line, though then it had not come to be, as now alas it is, that natural sense for gilding and all kinds of paint and complicated decoration in design all must be suppressed and thrust away, and so take from us the last small hope that something real might spring from crudity and luxury in ornament. In those days there was still some freedom left to love elaboration in good workmanship and ornate rococoness and complication in design. And all the houses of one's friends and new school rooms and settlements in slums and dining halls and city clubs, had not yet taken on this modern sad resemblance to a college woman's college room.
Julia Dehning's new house was in arrangement a small edition of her mother's. In ways to wash, to help out all the special doctors in their work, in sponges, brushes, running water everywhere, in hygienic ways to air things and keep ones self and everything all clean, this house that Julia was to make fit for her new life which was to come, in this it was very like the old one she had lived in, but always here there were more plunges, douches, showers, ways to get cold water, luxury in freezing, in hardening, than her mother's house had ever afforded to them. In her mother's house there were many ways to get clean but they mostly suggested warm water and a certain comfort, here in the new house was a sterner feeling, it must be a cold world, that one could keep one's soul high and clean in.
All through this new house there were no solid warm substantial riches. There were no silks in curtains, no blue brocade here, no glass chandeliers to make prisms and give tinklings. Here the parlor was covered with modern sombre tapestry, the ceiling all in tone the chairs as near to good colonial as modern imitation can effect, and all about dark aesthetic ornaments from China and Japan. Paintings there were none, only carbon photographs framed close, in dull and wooden frames.
The dining room was without brilliancy, for there can be no brilliance in a real aesthetic aspiration. The chairs were made after some old french fashion, not very certain what, and covered with dull tapestry, copied without life from old designs, the room was all a discreet green with simple oaken wood-work underneath. The living rooms were a prevailing red, that certain shade of red like that certain shade of green, dull, without hope, the shade that so completely bodies forth the ethically aesthetic aspiration of the spare American emotion. Everywhere were carbon photographs upon the walls sadly framed in painted wooden frames. Free couches, open book-cases, and fire places with really burning logs, finished out each room.
These were triumphant days for Julia. Every day she led her family a new flight and they followed after agape with wonderdisapproval and with pride. The mother almost lost all sense of her creation of this original and brilliant daughter, she was almost ready to admit the obedience and defeat she now had in her. Sometimes she still had a little resistance to her but mostly she was swelling inside and to all around her with her admiration and her pride in this new wonderful kind of a daughter.
The father had always been convinced and proud even when he had disapproved the opinions of his daughter. He now took a solid satisfaction in the completeness of accomplishment she now had in her. To her father, to know well what one wanted, and to win it, by patient steady fighting for it, was the best act a man or woman could accomplish, and well had his daughter done it. She had won it, she knew very well what she wanted and she had it. He still shook his head at her new fangled notions, her literary effects, the artistic kind of new improvement, as he called it, that she put into her new house to make it perfect. He did not understand it and he always said it, but he was very proud to see her do it, and he bragged to everybody and made them listen to it, of his daughter and the wonderful new kind of a house she had, and the bright way she knew how to do it.
The little Hortense had always worshipped this wonderful big sister, and the boy George admired too, and followed after.
Altogether these last weeks were brilliant days for Julia.
But always, a little, through all this pride in domination and in the admiration of her family, there was there, somewhere, in the background, to her sense, a vague uncertain kind of feeling as to her understanding and her right. Mostly she had a firm strong feeling in her, but always, a little, there was there, a kind of a doubting somewhere in her. She never in these days did any very real thinking about Hersland as a man to be to her as a husband to control her. But, somehow, a little, he was there in her as an unknown power that might attack her, though she knew very well she had in her a wisdom and experience of life that she could feel strong now always inside her.
A few weeks before the day they were to be married and to begin their new free life together, this vague distrust in Julia became a little sharper. Alfy was talking to her one night about the good life they were to have soon together, about their prospects and his hopes for the future. "I've some good schemes Julia in my head," he said to her, "and I mean to do big things, and with a safe man like your father to back me through now I think I can." Julia somehow was startled though this kind of saying in him was not new to her. "Why what do you mean Alfy?" "Why," he went on, "I want to do some things that have big money and big risks in them and a man as well known as your father for wealth and reliability for a father-in-law will do all that I need. Of course you know Julia," he added very simply enough for her, "you must not talk to him about such things now. You are my wife, my own darling, and you and I will live our lives together always loving and believing in the same good thing."
He said it simply enough to her and he was safe. Julia would not speak of such things now to her father. No torment of doubt, no certainty of misery could bring her to ask questions of her father, now, about the new life she had before her. Hersland was safe, though very simply now, he often made for her that sharp uncertain feeling more dreadful and more clear before her. He was not different in his ways or in his talk to her from the way he always had been with her, but somehow now it had come to her, to see, as dying men are said to see, clearly and freely things as they are and not as she had wished them to be for her.
And then she would remember suddenly what she had really thought he was, and she felt, she knew that all that former thought was truer better judgment than this sudden sight, and so she dulled her momentary clearing mind and hugged her old illusions to her breast.
"Alfy didn't mean it like that," she said over to herself, "he couldn't mean it like that. He only meant that papa would help him along in his career and of course papa will. Oh I know he didn't really mean it like that, he couldn't mean it like that. Anyhow I will ask him what he really meant."
And she asked him and he freely made her understand just what it was he meant. It sounded better then, a little better as he told it to her more at length, but it left her a foreboding sense that perhaps the world had meanings in it that could be hard for her to understand and judge.
But now she had to think that it was all, as it had a little sounded, good and best. She had to think it so else how could she marry him, and how could she not marry him. She had to marry him, and so she had to think it so, and she would think it so, and did.
In a few days more the actual marrying was done and their lives together always doing things and learning things was at last begun.
2.
Bear it in your mind my reader, but truly I never feel it that there ever can be for me any such a creature, no it is this scribbled and dirty and lined paper that is really to be to me always my receiver—but anyhow reader, bear it in your mind—will there be for me ever any such a creature—what I have said always before to you, that this that I write down a little each day here on my scraps of paper for you is not just an ordinary kind of novel with a plot and conversations to amuse you, but a record of a decent family progress respectably lived by us and our fathers and our mothers, and our grandfathers, and grandmothers, and this is by me carefully a little each day to be written down here; and so my reader arm yourself in every kind of a way to be patient, and to be eager, for you must always have it now before you to hear much more of these many kinds of decent ordinary people, of old, grown, grand-fathers and grand-mothers, of growing old fathers and growing old mothers, of ourselves who are always to be young grown men and women for us, and then there are still to be others and we must wait and see the younger fathers and young