One of the chief engines for keeping up the display was the display itself. Everybody who knew Mrs. Budlong—and not to know Mrs. Budlong was to argue oneself unknown—knew that he or she would be invited to this Christmas triumph. And being invited rather implied being represented in the tribute.
Hence ensued a curious rivalry in Carthage. People vied with each other in giving Mrs. Budlong presents; not that they loved Mrs. Budlong more, but that they loved comparisons less.
The rivalry had grown to ridiculous proportions. But of course Mrs. Budlong did not care how ridiculous it grew; for it could hardly have escaped her shrewd eyes how largely it advantaged her that people should give her presents in order to show other people that some people needn’t think they could show off before other people without having other people show that they could show off, too, as well as other people could. The pyschology must be correct, for it is incoherent.
Mrs. Budlong herself was never known to break any of the commandments, but in her back parlor her neighbors made flitters of the one against coveting thy neighbor’s and-so-forth and so-on.
It was when Mr. and Mrs. County Road Supervisor Detwiller were walking home from one of these occasions, that Mr. Detwiller was saying: “Well, ain’t Mizzes Budlong the niftiest little gift-getter that ever held up a train? How on earth did We happen to get stung?”
“I don’t know, Roscoe. It’s one of those things you can’t get out of without getting out of town too. Here we’ve been and gone and skimped our own children to buy something that would show up good in Mrs. Budlong’s back parlor, and when I laid eyes on it in all that clutter—why, if it didn’t look like something the cat brought in, I’ll eat it!”
Mr. Detwiller had only one consolation—and he grinned over it:
“Well, there’s no use cryin’ over spilt gifts. But did you see how she stuck old Widower Clute for that Japanese porcelain vace—I notice she called it vahs?”
“Porcelain?” sniffed Mrs. Detwiller. “Paper musshay!”
“Well, getting even a paper—what you said—from old Clute is equal to extracting solid gold from anybody else. He’s the stingiest man in sev’n states. He don’t care any more for a two dollar bill than he does for his right eye. I bet she gave him ether before he let go.”
“Oh, she works all the old bachelors and widowers that way,” said Mrs. Detwiller, with a mixture of contempt and awe. “Invites ’em to a dinner party or two around Christmas marketing time, and begins to talk about how pretty the shops are and how tempting everything she wants is; says she saw a nimitation bronze clock at Strouther and Streckfuss’s that it almost broke her heart to leave there. But o’ course she couldn’t afford to buy those kind of things for herself now when she’s got to remember all her dear friends, and she runs on and on and the old batch growls, ‘Stung again!’ and goes to Strouther and Streckfuss’s and tells Mr. Streckfuss to send Mrs. Budlong that blamed bronze clock she was admiring. And that’s how she gets things. I could do it myself if I’d a mind to.”
Mr. Detwiller felt that there was more envy than truth in this last remark, and he was rash enough to speak up for justice: “You could if you’d a mind to? Yep. If you’d a mind to! That’s what somebody said about Shakespeare’s plays. ‘I could a wrote ’em myself if I’d a mind to,’ says he, and somebody else said, ‘Yes, if you’d a mind to,’ he says. And that’s about it. Any body could do what Mizzes Budlong does if they had the mind to; but the thing is, she’s got the mind to. She goes after the gifts—and gits ’em. She don’t almost git ’em, and she ain’t goin’ to git ’em. She gits ’em. And what gits me is how she gits ’em.”
“Roscoe Detwiller, if you’re goin’ to praise that woman in the presence of your own lawful wife, I’ll never speak to you the longest day I live.”
“Who’s praisin’ her? I was just sayin’—”
“Why, Roscoe Detwiller, you did, too! And I should think you’d be ashamed of yourself.”
“Say, what ails you? Why, I was roastin’ her to beat the band.”
“And to think that on Christmas day of all days I should live to hear my own husband that I’ve loved and cherished and worked my fingers to the bone and never got any thanks and other women keepin’ two and three hired girls, and after him denyin’ his own children things to get expensive presents for a shameless creature like that Budlong woman—”
All over Carthage on Christmas afternoons couples were similarly at loggerheads over Mrs. Budlong’s annual triumph.
Now of course Mrs. Budlong did not get all those presents without giving presents. Not in Carthage! It might have been possible to bamboozle these people one Christmas, but never another. Mrs. Budlong gave heaps of presents. Christmas was an industry with her, an ambition; Christmas was her career. It had long ago lost its religious significance for her, as for nearly everybody else in Carthage. Even Mr. Frankenstein (the Pantatorium magnate) is one of the most ardent advertisers of Christmas bargains, while Isidore Strouther and Esau Streckfuss are “almost persuaded” every December. They might be entirely persuaded if it were not for the scenes they witness in their aisles during the last weeks of Yuletide and the aftermath of trying to collect from the Gentile husbands during Billtide.
Mrs. Budlong’s Christmas presents were of two sorts: those she made herself and those she made her husband pay for. He was the typical husband who never fails to settle his wife’s bills, so long as he may raise a row about them till his wife cries and looks like an expensive luxury which only a really successful man could afford. Then he subsides until the first of the next month.
II. CHRONICLES OF A CRAFTSMAN
Mrs. Budlong’s campaign was undertaken with the same farsightedness as a magazine editor’s. On or about the Fourth of July she began to worry and plan. By the second week in August she had her tatting well under way. By the middle of September she was getting in her embroidered doilies. The earliest frost rarely surprised her with her quilts untufted. And when the first snow flew, her sachet bags were all stuffed and smelly.
She was very feminine in her sense of the value of her own time. At missionary meetings she would shed tears over the pathetic pictures of Oriental women who spent a year weaving a rug which would sell for a paltry hundred dollars and last a mere century or two. Then she would cheerfully devote fifteen days of incessant stitching at something she carried round in a sort of drumhead. At the end of that time she would have completed a more or less intolerable piece of colored fabric which she called a “drape” or a “throw.” It could not be duplicated at a shop for less than $1.75, and it would wash perhaps three times.
Mr. Budlong once figured that if sweat-shop proprietors paid wages at the scale Mrs. Budlong established for herself, all the seamstresses and seamsters would curl up round their machines and die of starvation the first week. But he never told Mrs. Budlong this. Fancy stitching did not earn much, but it did not cost much; and it kept her mysteriously contented. She was stitching herself to her own home all the time.
The Christmas presents Mrs. Budlong made herself were not all a matter of needle and thread. Not at all! One year she turned her sewing room into a smithy. She gave Mr. and Mrs. Doctor Tisnower the loveliest hand-hammered brass coal scuttle that ever was seen—and with a purple ribbon tied to its tail. They kept flowers in it several summers, till one cruel winter a new servant put coal in it and completely scuttled it.
The same year she gave Mrs. ex-Mayor Cinnamon a hammered brass version of a C. D. Gibson drawing. The lady and gentleman looked as if they had broken out with a combination of yellow fever and smallpox, or suffered from enlarged pores or something. And the plum-colored plush frame didn’t sit very well on the vermilion wall paper. But Mrs. Cinnamon hung it over the sofa in the expectation of changing the paper some day. It stayed there until the fateful evening when Mr. Nelson Chur called on Miss Editha Cinnamon and was just warming up a proposal that had held over almost as long as the wall paper, when bang! down came the overhanging brass drawing
and bent itself hopelessly on Mr. Chur’s skull. Mr. Chur said something that may have been Damocles. But he did not propose, and Mrs. Budlong was weeks wondering why Mrs. Cinnamon was so snippy to her.
The hammered brass era gave way to the opposite extreme of painted velvet. They say it is a difficult art; and it may well be. Mrs. Budlong’s first landscape might as well have been painted on the side of her Scotch collie.
Her most finished roses had something of the look of shaggy tarantulas that had fallen into a paint pot and emerged in a towering rage. It was in that velvetolene stratum that she painted for the church a tasseled pulpit cloth that hung down a yard below the Bible. Dr. Torpadie was a very soothing preacher, but no one slept o’sermons during the reign of that pulpit cloth.
Mrs. Budlong was so elated over the success of it, however, that she announced her intention of going in for stained glass. She planned a series of the sweetest windows to replace those already in the church. But she never got nearer to that than painted china.
The painted china era was a dire era. The cups would break and the colors would run, and they never came out what she expected after they were fired. Of course she knew that the pigments must suffer alteration in the furnace, but there was always a surprise beyond surprise.
She soon became accustomed to getting green roses with crimson leaves, and deep blue apple blossoms against a pure white sky, but when she finished one complete set of table china in fifty pieces, each cup and saucer with a flower on it, the result looked so startlingly like something from a medical museum, that she never dared give the set away. She lent it to the cook to eat her meals on. The set went fast.
During this epoch Master Ulysses Budlong Jr. was studying at school a physiology ornamented with a few pictures in color representing the stomachs of alcohol specialists. They were intended, perhaps, to frighten little school children from frequenting saloons during recess, or to warn them not to put whisky on their porridge.
It was at this time that Mrs. Budlong spent two weeks’ hard labor painting Easter lilies on an umbrella jug. When it came home from the furnace, her husband stared at it and mumbled:
“It’s artistic, but what is it?”
Little Ulysses shrieked: “Oh, I know!” and darting away, returned with his physiology opened at one of those gastric sunsets, and—well, it was this that impelled Mrs. Budlong to a solemn pledge never to paint china again—a pledge she has nobly kept.
From smeared china she went to that art in which a woman buys something at a store, pulls out half of it, and calls the remnant drawn work. A season of this was succeeded by a mania for sofa cushions. It fairly snowed sofa cushions all over Carthage that Christmas; and Yale, Harvard and Princeton pillows could be found in homes that had never known even a night school alumnus.
There ensued a sober period of burnt wood and a period of burnt leather, during which excited neighbors with a keen sense of smell called the fire department three times and the board of health once. And now Indian heads broke out all over town and the walls looked as if a shoemaker’s apron had been chosen for the national pennant.
There were various other spasms of manufacture, each of them fashionable at its time and foolish at anytime. As Mr. Detwiller said:
“Somebody ought to write a history of Mrs. Budlong’s Christmas presents. It would tell the complete story of all the darned fool fads that American women have been up to for twenty years.”
But foolish soever, Mrs. Budlong was fair. A keen sense of sportsmanship led her to give full notice to such people as she planned to honor with her gifts. She knew how embarrassing it is to receive presents from one to whom no present has been sent, and she made it a point of honor somehow to forewarn her prospective beneficiaries betimes. Her favorite method was the classic device of pretending to let slip a secret. For instance:
“Yesterday morning, my dear, I had the Strangest exPerience. It was just ten o’clock. I remember the hour so exactly because for the last few days I have made it a rule to begin work on your Christmas present just at ten—Oh, but I didn’t mean to tell you. It was to be a surprise. No, don’t ask me, I won’t give you an inkling, but I really think it will please you. It’s something you’ve been needing for Such a long time.”
And she left the victim to writhe from then on to Christmas, trying alternately to imagine what gift was impending and what would be an appropriate counter-gift.
III. MISTRESS OF THE REVELS
In more ways than one Mrs. Budlong kept Carthage on the writhe. Christmas was merely the climax of a ceaseless activity. All the year round she was at work like a yeast alert in a soggy dough.
She was forever getting up things. She was one of those terrible women who return calls on time or a little ahead. That made it necessary for you to return hers earlier. If you didn’t, she called you up on the telephone and asked you why you hadn’t. You had to promise to come over at once or she’d talk to you till your ear was welded to the telephone. Then if you broke your promise she called you up about that. She got in from fifty-two to a hundred and four calls a year, where one or two would have amply sufficed for all she had to say.
It was due to her that Carthage had such a lively social existence—for its size. Once, when she fell ill, the people felt suddenly as passengers feel when a street car is suddenly braked back on its haunches. All Carthage found itself wavering and poised on tiptoe and clinging to straps; and then it sogged back on its heels and waited till the car should resume progress. Mrs. Budlong was the town’s motorman—or “motorneer,” as they say in Carthage.
Before she was out of bed, she had invitations abroad for a convalescent tea, and everybody said, “Here we go again!”
If strangers visited Carthage, Mrs. Budlong counted them her clients the moment they arrived. Of course, the merely commercial visitors she left to the hackmen at the station, but friends or relatives of prominent people could not escape Mrs. Budlong’s well-meant attentions. It was sometimes embarrassing when relatives appeared—for everybody has Concealed Relatives that he is perfectly willing to leave in concealment.
Mrs. Alex. (pronounced Ellick) Stubblebine never forgave Mrs. Budlong for dragging into the limelight some obscure cousins of her husband’s who had drifted into Carthage to borrow money on their farm. Mrs. Stubblebine was always bragging about her people, her own people that is. Her husband’s people, of course, were after all only Stubblebines, while her maiden name was Dilatush; and the Dilatushes, as everybody knew, were related by marriage to the Tatums.
But these were Stubblebines that came to town. Mrs. Stubblebine could hardly slam the door in their faces, but she would fain have locked the doors after them. She would not even invite them out on the front porch. She told them the back porch was cosier and less conspicuous. And then Mrs. Budlong had to call up on the telephone and sing out in her telephoniest tone:
“Oh, my dear, I’ve just this minute heard you have guests—some of your dear husband’s relatives. Now they must come to me to dinner tomorrow. Oh, it isn’t the slightest trouble, I asSure you. I’m giving a little party anyway. I won’t take no for an answer.”
And she wouldn’t. Mrs. Stubblebine fairly perspired excuses, but Mrs. Budlong finally grew so suspicious that she had to accept; or leave the impression that the relatives were burglars or counterfeiters in hiding. And they were not—they were pitifully honest.
The result was even worse than she feared. Mr. Stubblebine’s cousin was so shy that he never said a word except when it was pulled out of him, and then he said, “Yes, ma’am”!
In Carthage when you are at a dinner party and you don’t quite catch the last remark, you don’t snap “What?” or “How?” or “Wha’ jew say?” Whatever your home habits may be, at a dinner party or before comp’ny, you raise your eyebrows gracefully and murmur, “I beg your pardon.”
But Mr. Stubblebine’s rural cousin grunted “Huh?”—like an Indian chief trying to scare a white general. And he was perfectly frank about the intimate
processes of mastication.
And when he dropped a batch of scalloped oysters into his watch pocket he solemnly fished them-out with a souvenir after-dinner coffee spoon having the Statue of Liberty for a handle and Brooklyn Bridge in the bowl.
And the wretch’s wife was so nervous that she talked all the time about people the others had never seen or heard of. And she said she “never used tomattus.” And she wasn’t ashamed of what she was chewing either.
Mrs. Stubblebine would have felt much obliged to fate if she had been presented with an apoplectic stroke. But she had to sit the dinner out. From what she said to her poor husband afterward, however, one might have gathered that he picked out those relatives just to spite her, when as a matter of fact he had always loathed them and regretted them and the next day he borrowed enough money to lend them and send them back to the soil.
Mrs. Budlong had constituted herself Entertainment Committee for all sorts of visitors. If a young girl came home from boarding school with a classmate, the real hostess had hardly time to show her to the spare room, and say, “This is the bathroom, round here; watch out for the step. And if the water don’t run just wait”—when the telephone would go Brrrrr. And there would be Mrs. Budlong brandishing an invitation to a dinner party.
When the supply of guests ran low she would visit the sick. If a worn-out housewife slept late some morning to catch up, Mrs. Budlong would hear of it and rush over with a broth or something. It is said that old Miss Malkin got out of bed with an unfinished attack of pneumonia, just to keep from eating any more of Mrs. Budlong’s wine jellies.
In Carthage one pays for the telephone by the year. The company lost money on Mrs. Budlong’s wire. As a telephoner she was simply interminable. She would spend a weekend at the instrument while the prisoner at the other extreme of the wire shifted from ear to ear, sagged along the wall, postponed household duties, made signals of distress to other members of the family, and generally cursed Mr. Alexander Graham Bell for his ingenuity.
The Second Christmas Megapack Page 39
