THE MAKING OF AMERICANS (Family Saga). Gertrude Stein

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СКАЧАТЬ loved and admired and respected each other very much this daughter and her father. They understood very well both of them how to please while they were combating with each other. And so each to-morrow they met, and Julia was sturdy and had strong faith in her, and always, her father, a long time each day listened to her.

      Hersland could do nothing all this time but wait for Julia to persuade her father. They were both agreed, Hersland and Julia, that any effort on his part to change Mr. Dehning's opinion would only make the fight for Julia so much harder. It was always there that Mr. Dehning did not like young Hersland, and the noblest words and the best acts, never, in any kind of a distrusted person, give any evidence against his condemnation. It is never facts that tell, they are the same when they mean very different things. It is never facts that can make a man feel any thing to be made different to him when he has any kind of a judgment in him. Facts can never tell him anything truly about another man in his opinion. It was always there, Mr. Dehning somehow did not trust this man. And so it was only Julia, who by always repeating, perhaps could find a way to change him.

      So Julia struggled every day, to have him, arguing discoursing explaining and appealing. She was always winning but it was slow progress like that in very steep and slippery climbing. For every forward movement of three feet she always slipped back two, sometimes all three and often four and five and six and seven. It was long eager steady fighting but the father was slowly understanding that his daughter wanted this thing enough to stand hard by it and with such a feeling and no real fact against the man, such a father was bound to let her some time get married to him.

      "I tell you what Julia what I been thinking. When we all get back to town you can tell better whether you do really want him. I say we better leave off all this talking and just wait till we get home now again. I don't say no Julia and I don't say yes to you. When everybody gets back to town and you are busy and running around with your girls and talking and meeting all the other people and the other kinds of young men, you can tell much better then whether all this business is not all just talking with you. I say now Julia we will wait and just see how you feel about it later. I say we will talk it all over when we get home and you are altogether with all your friends there. I say Julia I don't say no to you and I don't say yes yet to you. I say when we get home we will talk it over again all together and then if nothing turns up new against him, and you still want him, I say if then you still want him enough to trust to him and to trust to your own judgment about him, we will see what we can do about him."

      "Alright papa," Julia said to him, "alright I won't even see Alfy any more till we get back to town then, and papa I won't say another word to you about it. I'll just go and ride around the country and think hard the way you like to have me do it about what we both have said about it."

      It was a well meant intention this in Julia of riding by herself around the country and thinking hard about what they had both said about it, but not the certain way to end in a passionate young woman her first intense emotion. The wide and glowing meadows of low oaks, the clean clear tingling autumn air, the blaze of color in the bits of woods, the freedom and the rush of rapid motion on the open road, the joy of living in a vital world, the ecstasy of loving and of love, the intensity of feeling in the ardent young, it surely was not so that Julia Dehning could win the sober reason that should judge of men.

      And always every day it came and always every day when it was ending it would be the same. "Yes I certainly do care for him and I do know him. And he and I will live our lives together always learning things and doing things, good things they will be for us whatever other people may think or say."

      And so at last, filled full with faith and hope and fine new joy she went back to her busy city life, strong in the passion of her eager young imagining.

      The home the rich and self made merchant makes to hold his family and himself is always like the city where his fortune has been made. In London it is like that rich and endless dark and gloomy place, in Paris it is filled with pleasant toys, cheery and light and made of gilded decoration and white paint, and in Bridgepoint it was neither gloomy nor yet joyous but like a large and splendid canvas completely painted over but painted full of empty space.

      The Dehning city house was of this sort. A nervous restlessness of luxury was through it all. Often the father would complain of the unreasoning extravagance to which his family was addicted but these upbraidings had not much result for the rebuke came from conviction and not from any habit of his own.

      It was good solid riches in the Dehning house, a parlor full of ornate marbles placed on yellow onyx stands, chairs gold and white of various size and shape, a delicate blue silk brocaded covering on the walls and a ceiling painted pink with angels and cupids all about, a dining room all dark and gold, a living room all rich and gold and red with built-in-couches, glass-covered book-cases and paintings of well washed peasants of the German school, and large and dressed up bedrooms all light and blue and white. (All this was twenty years ago in the dark age, you know, before the passion for the simple line and the toned burlap on the wall and wooden panelling all classic and severe.) Marbles and bronzes and crystal chandeliers and gas logs finished out each room. And always everywhere there were complicated ways to wash, and dressing tables filled full of brushes, sponges, instruments, and ways to make one clean, and to help out all the special doctors in their work.

      It was good riches in this house and here it was that Julia Dehning dreamed of other worlds and here each day she grew more firm in her resolve for that free wide and cultured life to which for her young Hersland had the key.

      At last it was agreed that these two young people should become engaged, but not be married for a year to come, and if nothing new had then turned up, the father said he would then no longer interfere. And so the marriage now was made for with these kind of people an engagement always meant a marriage excepting only for the gravest cause. And Alfred Hersland and Julia had this time to learn each other's natures and prepare themselves for the event.

      When the twelve months had passed away no grave cause had come to make a reason why this marriage should not be. Julia was twelve months older now, and wiser, and through this wisdom had in general a little more distrusting in her, but never in any kind of a way was she changing about the new world she needed now to content her and she was firm always in her intention to marry Alfred Hersland. She loved him then with all the strength of her eager young imagining, though dimly, somewhere, in her head and heart now there was sometimes a vague dread that comes of ignorance and a beginning wisdom, a distrust she could not then yet seize and look on so that she could really know it, but a distrust that often was there, somewhere in the background, somehow sometimes mixed there to her sense, in with her energy, her new faith, and her feeling.

      For a girl like Julia Dehning, all men, excepting those of an outside unknown world, these one read about in books and never really could believe in, for it is a strange feeling one has in one's later living, when one finds the story-books really have truth in them, for one loved the story-books earlier, one loved to read them but one never really believed there was truth in them, and later when one by living has gained a new illusion and a kind of wisdom, and one reads again in them, there it is, the things we have learned since to believe in, there it is and we know then that the man or the woman who wrote them had just the same kind of wisdom in them we have been spending our lives winning, and this shows to any one wise in learning that no young people can learn wisdom from the talking of the older ones around them. If they cannot believe the things they read in the story-books where it is all made lifelike, real and interesting for them, how should they ever learn things from older people's talking. Its foolish to expect such things of them. No let them read the story-books we write for them, they don't learn much, to be sure, but more than they can from their fathers', mothers', aunts' and uncles' talking. Yes from their fathers' and their mothers' living they can get some wisdom, yes supply them with a tradition by your lives, you grown men and women, and for the rest let them come to us for their teaching.

      But now to come back to Julia Dehning. As I was saying, to a girl like СКАЧАТЬ