THE MAKING OF AMERICANS (Family Saga). Gertrude Stein
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harsh hard man and his good gentle little wife had many children, and one daughter had long ago married Henry Dehning. It was a happy marriage enough for both of them, their faults and the good things they each had in them made of them a man and wife to very well content all who had to do with them.
All the Dehnings were very fond of Bridgepoint. They had their city and their country house like all the people who were well to do in Bridgepoint.
The Dehnings in the country were simple pleasant people. It was surprising how completely they could shed there the straining luxury and uneasy importance of their city life. Their country house was one of those large commodious wooden double affairs with a wide porch all around and standing well back from the road. In front and at the sides were pleasant lawns and trees and beyond were green open marshes leading down to salt water. In back was a cleared space that spread out into great meadows of stunted oaks no higher than a man's waist, great levels glistening green in the summer and brilliantly red in the autumn stretching away under vast skies, and always here and there was a great tree waving in the wind and wading knee deep in the rough radiant leafy tide.
Yes the Dehnings in the country were simple pleasant people. There they were a contented joyous household. All day the young ones played and bathed and rode and then the family altogether would sail and fish. Yes the Dehnings in the country were simple pleasant people. The Dehning country house was very pleasant too for all young men and boys, the uncles and the cousins of the Dehning family, who all delighted in the friendly freedom of this country home, rare in those days among this kind of people, and so the Dehning house was always full of youth and kindly ways and sport and all altogether there they all always lead a pleasant family life.
The Dehning family itself was made up of the parents and three children. They made a group very satisfying to the eye, prosperous and handsome.
Mr. Dehning was a man successful, strong-featured, gentle tempered, joyous and carrying always his fifty years of life with the good-nature of a cheerful boy. He enjoyed the success that he could boast that he had won, he loved the struggle in which he had always been and always conquered, he was proud of his past and of his present worth, he was proud in his three children and proud that they could teach him things he did not know, he was proud of his wife who was proud of such very different things. "Oh Miss Jenny, she is the best girl I know," he always sang as he came to find her, never content long out of sight of his family when not engrossed by business or cards.
I said that Henry Dehning's wife was proud of such very different things, but that was wrong, she was proud in very different fashion but proud of the same things. She loved his success and the worth with which he conquered and she was not anxious to forget the way that he had come. No she was in her way proud that he himself had done it. She liked his power, and when she ever thought about it she liked the honest way she knew that he had done it. And like him too she was very proud in their three educated children but to her thinking there was very little they could teach her. She knew it all always very well and much better than they could ever know it. But she was very proud of these educated children and she was very proud of her husband Henry Dehning though she knew he always did little things so badly and that he would still always play like a poor man with his fingers and he never would learn not to do it. Yes she was very proud of her husband though he always did little things so badly and she had always to be telling him how a man in his position should know how to do it. She came towards him now when he was through with his talking, and she had one rebuke to him for his always calling her his girl Miss Jenny, and another for the way he had of fidgeting always with his fingers. "Don't do that Henry!" she said to him loudly.
Mrs. Dehning was the quintessence of loud-voiced good-looking prosperity. She was a fair heavy woman, well-looking and firmly compacted and hitting the ground as she walked with the same hard jerk with which she rebuked her husband for his sins. Yes Mrs. Dehning was a woman whose rasping insensibility to gentle courtesy deserved the prejudice one cherished against her, but she was a woman, to do her justice, generous and honest, one whom one might like better the more one saw her less.
Yes it was now all very different for them. It was very pleasant always for Henry Dehning then, to stand and to look about him, yes truly it was now all very different with him. He had his family there about him, a family certain to be a satisfaction to him. They were a group to gratify the feeling of pride in him, they were so prosperous vigorous good-looking, honest, and always respectful to him, and surely they would have later, good hope of winning for themselves all that he could ever wish to them.
Yes it certainly was very different now with him. Could one ever have it real to him that in one life time a man could have it all so different for him, that a man all alone in his single lifetime could make it so that he could have it to be truly all so different in him.
Nay for a man to have it in a single life time all so different for him is more strange than being born and being then a baby and then a child and then a young grown man and then old like a man grown old and then dead and so no more of living, it is more strange because it makes so many lives in this one living. Each one of these lives that he forgets or remembers only as a dim beginning is a whole life to us in our thinking, and so Henry Dehning has had many lives in him to our feeling.
Could one believe it that he was a grown man and he was then living like the man who comes into his place now to do a little selling to the servants in the kitchen. And yet that was one whole full life for him; and then there was the old world where there had been for him such a very different kind of living. Yes as he stands there talking to his children of the things that are never real now any more to his feeling, a man comes up the walk and slinks back when he sees them and goes sneaking to the kitchen and there he sells little things to the women who buy them out of Irish fun or just to be kind to him, for his things are really not good enough for them, they are things for people poorer than any that work in a kitchen; and so Mr. Dehning goes on talking to his children and it is all more real to their feeling than it is now to his thinking, for they have it in their fear which young ones always have inside them, and he, he has it only as a dim beginning as being like a baby or an old grown man or woman. Nay how can he ever have it in him to feel it now as really present to him, such things as meekness or poor ways or self attendance or no comforts, it is only a fear that could make such things be now as present to him, and he has no such a fear ever inside him, not for himself ever or even for his children, for he is strong in a sense of always winning. It is they, the children, who, though they too feel a strength inside them and talk about it very often, yet way down deep in them they know they have no way to be really certain; and always they are brave, good-looking, honest, prosperous children and the father feels strong pride as he looks around him.
The Dehning family was made of this father and mother and three children. Mr. Dehning was very proud of his children and proud of all the things he knew that they could teach him. There were two daughters and a son of them.
Julia Dehning was named after her grandmother, but, as her father often told her, she never looked the least bit like her and yet there was a little in her that made the old world not all lost to her, a little that made one always remember that her grandmother and her father had had always a worn old world to remember.
Yes Julia looked much like her mother. That fair good-looking prosperous woman had stamped her image on each one of her children, and with her eldest, Julia, the stamp went deep, far deeper than just for the fair good-looking exterior.
Julia Dehning was now just eighteen and she showed in all its vigor, the self-satisfied crude domineering American girlhood that was strong inside her. Perhaps she was born too near to the old world to ever attain quite altogether that crude virginity that makes the American girl safe in all her liberty. Yes the American girl is a crude virgin and she is safe in her freedom.
And now, so thought her mother, and Julia was quite of the same opinion, the time had come for Julia to have a husband and to begin her real important living.
Under Julia's very American face, body, clothes and manner and her vigor of the domineering and crude virgin, there were now and then flashes of passion that lit up an older well hidden tradition. Yes in Julia Dehning the prosperous, good-looking, domineering woman was a very attractive being. Julia irradiated energy and brilliant enjoying, she was vigorous, and like her