The Toy Shop Part 3

"And now, friend Joseph, good-bye."

After he had gone, Joseph looked at the toy the President had left. He put it to his lips. He held it to his meagre chest. And thus they lay, the man and the toy, until the exultation on Joseph's face softened into perfect peace.

"Toys--toys--" So his thoughts sang themselves. "Toys. Nothing else is real. Toys of tenderness--toys of mirth--toys that sail a man back to childhood--toys that sweep a man into manhood--and beyond." He held the color-bearer pa.s.sionately close. "A hero!" he said. "Thank G.o.d for the man who knows our hearts. The world is his toy-shop and men and women are his toys. He can use everybody--it makes no difference how ugly a toy may be. He loves them even when they are naughty--just like a little girl when she spanks her dolly." Joseph smiled at his own thoughts with tenderness.... "Just like the Christ who suffers us to come to Him."

"I wonder ... is it because he loves people or because he plays with them that he is so far above them?--I believe he is very far off--looking on. He is really neither smiling nor looking sad--just seeing."

The room was quiet. The pain had ceased. Joseph clasped his toy and slept.

Into the damp night air drifted suddenly a wave of sound. It startled Mrs. Schotz, who sat at work by the lamp, watching late into the night.

Even as she lifted her head to listen it swelled into a distant growl of thunder, threatening, sullen. A startled voice came from her husband's bed asking what the noise might be. Before she had time to answer, the door burst open, and their neighbor, the cobbler's wife, ran into the shop.

"Have you heard," she shrieked--"have you heard? They have killed him, the good President!" With the last word she was out of the door.

Joseph fell back and lay still. His hands were clinched and his lips were locked. He tried to lock his heart, too. He did not dare to feel....

"'A hero.'" he thought. "He called me that." The sound of his wife's sobbing filled the room.... No, it would never do to weep. "Ah-h!" A pang greater than he had ever known shattered him. He held that down, too. It was then that a great thought came to him--the pain taught him.

"The same future, then, for him and for me."

He lay very still while the thought grew and filled him. The sound of his wife's sobbing sank lower and lower. She crept close to her husband and laid her hand on his. He took it gently in his weak fingers, and thus they remained. The room seemed empty.

"They killed him, too, thy Napoleon," at last his wife said, timidly.

Joseph started. The name of the old G.o.d made him know how far he had gone. For a moment he felt shame, as though he, too, had betrayed. Then he spoke:

"If the Emperor, too, had had--toys--and if he had played with them; if he had been able to laugh at the world and--yes--a little at himself; if he had been able to laugh at himself--and cry over other people--he would not have stayed at St. Helena. And ... he would have been almost as great as the President."

Mrs. Schotz started forward and put her face close to that of her husband. She spoke with her eyes on his eyes.

"You say--that--my Joseph?"

He nodded his head weakly but with meaning. And both were silent with that silence which follows truth proclaimed.

After a few minutes he took up his thought again.

"I thought, my wife, that the end of life had come for me when I knew that I should have to sit here in the shop the rest of the days of my life and make toys for children. Now I know that it was but the beginning. He taught me. There could be nothing greater. The toys will live in the homes of the children. They will find them, too, the toys he bought for his boy--after he has gone. But not every one will know the work that they have done. Nor will all the toys the President left be so easily discovered.... I, too, am his toy."

He stopped, for he was weak. After a time, when he had lain gazing at the wall with a look that was new to his face, an eager look that made his wife break into hopeless but silent sobbing, he said:

"It is enough to have made him smile."

When the President had been carried to his rest it came to pa.s.s that men whom the dead man had not known were called into the house to make ready for those who were to come. Through the long hours of the day they toiled. The garments that the President had worn and those things which he had used in his labor were placed aside. When it was evening they came upon an upper chamber full of toys. The men closed the door hastily and came away. But at night when they drew near to their own homes they kissed more tenderly the children who ran to meet them from their open doors.

[Ill.u.s.tration]