III Open the Door to Joy — Always
But Betsy had caught John surreptitiously saving—to buy the roof, he explained!
“We—we’re gitting old, you know,” he excused.
“Old!—”
Betsy caught up her dainty skirts—very high—and pirouetted before him.
“Ein’, tswei, drei’, un’ fier. Dass macht sivve’—”
She stopped a moment.
“John! Don’t you remember Eisenkrantz’s husking—where I first saw you? Oh, John, what a gawk you were! And yit—and yit—John, do you remember how you danced that night? Come!”
She pulled him about with her in a very clumsy attempt at waltzing. Then she pushed him off.
“Oh, you are gitting old. But me—”
A few more mad whirls and she flung herself into his arms.
“Say, John, that’s better than any roof.”
“Er—what?” asked John, whose wits were often left behind by his wife’s.
She came close and shouted in his ear:
“Joy!”
“Oh!” said John, patting her pretty hair.
She slipped her arm about him. And then her voice was very soft and loving.
“And our five boys! Such boys! Where is there another such five! If we should get old—if we should need a roof—why, John—there are our five handsome boys!”
She cried a little, and John asked her for the thousandth time why she did it.
“Why does a woman cry? For joy and sorrow—life and death—good and evil!”
“Oh!” said John, once more.
“John!” His wife woke up and gripped his throat again. “Ben needs a new horse,”—Ben was a huckster,—“Tom wants a drill,”—Tom was a farmer,—“and Fred must have a new Sunday suit. How much money have you saved, you rascal?”
John told her. And Ben got his horse, Tom got his drill, and Fred got his Sunday suit—and John saved no more.
But it was so—they were brave and loving fellows—all. And every Sunday—when they were gone—it was a game of hide-and-seek for Betsy and John—to find the money and presents they had left. Of course, they were all at places where she might easily discover them. But she always went shy of the most likely places at first—thus prolonging the search—sometimes until she was quite tired. In the pocket of her second-best dress (she always wore her best on Sunday)—in the frame of her warped toilet mirror—in the drawers of her scratched dressing bureau—in the loaves of her new bread!
Finally, when the boys all became prosperous, they made her stop weaving baskets, and him stop laboring in the streets; all of them dressed well, and they became quite a company of ladies and gentlemen. Neither John nor Betsy was precisely happy afterward. Sunday was longer in coming. But they sighed for their idleness, laughed for their happiness—and did as the boys told them to do: sat still and looked pretty.
But there is such a thing as getting used even to idleness, and joy comes whether we work or not—if we are wise enough to let it come. And no one in that little cheap house ever shut the door on joy. So Betsy, after a while, learned to wear her Sunday clothes all the week, and John to shave every morning. And the door was kept open always to joy.