Page:Weeds (1923).pdf/121

 laid a square of glossy new oilcloth. She made up the bed with the new sheets and the bright patchwork quilts. The old rocking chair in which Uncle Nat had died was gay with a bright chintz cushion. Thus the old man's possessions, already hoary with experience, took on a new outside gloss and began a new life, like an elderly widower who marries a young wife and for a little while shakes off the accumulations of the years and almost fancies himself young again. Drinking coffee from chipped and cracked blue cups a century old, Judith and Jerry laughed and chattered with no thought that those who had first drunk from these cups, perhaps as young and gay as themselves, were long since turned to dust in some neglected graveyard.

It was astonishing how much they could laugh. They laughed when the sizzling hog meat spat hot grease into their faces. They laughed when Jerry leaned too heavily on the table leaf and almost overturned it. They laughed when they saw flies buzzing in the sunny window pane, a sure sign of warm weather. They laughed when the new butcher knife fell on the floor and stuck daggerwise into the soft pine board. And when there was nothing whatever to laugh at, they laughed at nothing whatever, because laugh they must.

The first sleep in Uncle Nat Carberry's walnut bed was disturbed by no ghost dreams of the tragedies, comedies, and tragi-comedies that had been witnessed by that ancient piece of furniture. If old beds and chairs, like old houses, are haunted, it is to the lonely and the disillusioned that they reveal themselves. Before young lovers they stand abashed and hug their secrets to their bosoms. The old bed received them in its arms as though they were its first pair of lovers. And when at last they fell asleep under the gay patchwork quilts, they slept as soundly as two children until the early March dawn brought them their first waking together—supreme of moments!

But life could not be all play for Jerry and Judith, nor did they in the least expect it to be so. Work had never as yet showed its ugly side to them, hence they had no dread of it.