Terry | Page 7

be glad, too, as not only is he forever freed from cold and hunger and stark fear, but his is to be a tender office.
Will you lay it at your bedside, that each night it may cushion your last step at slumbertime, and each morning soften the first contact between the vistas of dreamland and the less yielding surfaces of life to which we wake.
So even the things of the wild are made to serve. To serve--is that not the law of man?
My part in it? But little: none other than I will have touched it till it reaches your dear hands. I shaped it, wrought to preserve its beauties that it might give you pleasure.
To give pleasure--is that not the law of love?
A very, very Merry Christmas!
DICK.
He sent his gift, at about nine o'clock. In gay mood, he wandered about the great house: entered the kitchen where Fanny was singeing the Christmas turkey: returned to the living room to throw a fresh log in the wide fireplace. His mood was too expansive for indoors. He donned short coat and thick cap, but as he passed out of the gate a scared little lad, a foreigner, rushed up breathlessly and begged him to come--trouble was brewing on the southside.
His questions elicited meager information. Excited, the lad relapsed so often into his native tongue that Terry could make nothing of his tale.
Hand in hand they hurried through the village, crossed the dark bridge and approached a ramshackle house from which a babble of voices rose in strident argument. The excited chorus abated at Terry's sharp knock and the door was thrown open to disclose the belligerent figure of Tony Ricorro, the leader of the Italian colony. Recognizing the reefered figure that smiled up at him through the falling flakes, Tony's dark scowl faded as he reached out his powerful hands and with a joyous shout fairly lifted Terry into the house.
Terry laughed as the gaudily dressed occupants of the room crowded around him, and greeted most of the score of swarthy men and women by name. Tony masterfully stripped him of his overcoat and cap and placed them in the kitchen from which emanated odors of strange things cooking. The room was stifling with heat and with smells--beer, garlic, tobacco, perfumes, kerosene.
Tony charged in from the kitchen with a bottle of beer but Terry shook his head. Tony was hospitably insistent, "What! No beer?"
"No thanks, Tony."
"What's matt'? Bad stomach?"
"Yes," smiled Terry, "call it that."
He plunged into the business in hand. "Tony, what's the trouble here to-night?"
Tony's first word of explanation was instantly submerged beneath a chorus of voices; the excited crowd surged around Terry, as voluble of gesture as of tongue. Pandemonium descended.
Terry finally silenced the din by standing on his chair and pantomiming his desire to be heard. "Now, listen to me," he began, after quiet was restored, "I'm going to ask you all to keep silent, and to promise me that no one will speak except those I call by name." They all promised--each one not once but in a series of lengthy assurances which he had to raise his hand to cut short.
"Now, Tony, you first. What's the matter?"
Tony's face registered his utter disgust. "What'sa matt'? What'sa matt'? Evra teeng 'sa matt'! Tommor' we christen our bab' and evra' bod' want a name heem!" He glared at the restless circle which ringed them.
The odd wistful twist at the corner of Terry's mouth disappeared for a moment in his slow smile; this was so like these people, who bore big troubles stoically and reacted powerfully to inconsequentials.
He called on several others. All were relatives of Tony or of his wife; sisters, brothers, several "in-laws," Tony's father, two uncles. Each had his or her name for the child, and sound reasons for the choice.
"Tony, where is Felice?" he asked, noting that Tony's wife was not in the crowded dining room.
Tony took him into a dimly lighted room, where his wife lay in bed; the guiltless cause of all this dissension, obviously inured to clamor, was asleep in her arm. She smiled up at Terry as he sat down on the edge of the bed and took her hand.
Tony stood looking down at Felice and their first-born, his heart in his eyes.
"Tony, what does Felice wish to name your son?" Terry asked suddenly.
Receiving no answer, he looked up at Tony and read in the agonized contrition of Tony's dark face that she had not yet been consulted. Tears glistened in the forgiving eyes Felice turned on Tony, and as he flung himself down at the side of the bed and buried his face in her pillow, Terry tiptoed out of the room and softly closed the door.
In a few minutes Tony flung the door open and strode into the room, unashamed