IV
Frank had always disliked Elmer’s thickness, his glossiness, his smut, and his inability to understand the most elementary abstraction. But Frank was ordinarily no great hater, and when they went off together to guard the flock at Schoenheim, he almost liked Elmer in his vigorous excitement—beautiful earthy excitement of an athlete.
Frank considered Lulu Bains a bisque doll, and he would have cherished her like any ten-year-old in his Sunday School class. He saw Elmer’s whole body stiffen as he looked at Lulu. And there was nothing he could do.
He was afraid that if he spoke to Mr. Bains, or even to Lulu, in the explosion Elmer might have to marry her, and suddenly the Frank who had always accepted “the holy institution of matrimony” felt that for a colt like Lulu any wild kicking up of the heels would be better than being harnessed to Elmer’s muddy plow.
Frank’s minister father and his mother went to California for Christmas time, and he spent the holiday with Dr. Zechlin. They two celebrated Christmas Eve, and a very radiant, well-contented, extremely German Weinachtsabend that was. Zechlin had procured a goose, bullied the osteopath’s wife into cooking it, with sausages for stuffing and cranberry pancake to flank it. He brewed a punch not at all Baptist; it frothed, and smelled divinely, and to Frank it brought visions.
They sat in old chairs on either side of the round stove, gently waving their punch glasses, and sang:
Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht,
Alles schläft, einsam wacht
Nur das traute hochheilige Paar,
Holder Knabe im lokkigen Haar
Schlaf in himm’lischer Ruh,
Schlaf in himm’lischer Ruh.
“Ah, yes,” the old man meditated, “that is the Christ I still dream of—the Child with shining hair, the dear German Christ Child—the beautiful fairy tale—and your Dean Trospers make Jesus into a monster that hates youth and laughter—Wein, Weib und Gesang. Der arme! How unlucky he was, that Christ, not to have the good Trosper with him at the wedding feast to explain that he must not turn the water into wine. Chk! Chk! I wonder if I am too old to start a leetle farm with a big vineyard and seven books?”