Evening star. [volume], September 22, 1929, Page 7, Image 103

About Evening star. [volume] (Washington, D.C.) 1854-1972

Image provided by: Library of Congress, Washington, DC

                
-THECRANDALLS AND THESTENDHALS''
f; > 4 • * & V ''4
First-Run
Story by the High
est Paid IVriter in
America—A Com
plete Story. Watch
for Another Fannie
Hurst Yarn in the
Magazine of Next
Sunday's Star.
house of the Crandalls In Wittegar
street was one of those massive brick
ami-stone affairs that looked as if it
had been built and passed on for a
few generations from father to son.
And so it had, except in the case of the Cran
drall branch now in occupancy, been a case of
from father to daughter.
Martha Crandall had married Deeping John
son In her father's home and remained there
after her marriage and after the death of the
elder Crandall.
Martha Crandall Johnson’s daughter Adeline
had been born in tliat same house, in the same
stodgy, high-ceiling, wainscoated bedroom in
which she herself was born.
It was a somber house, heavy woodwork,
wooden pillars between archways, folding doors,
long walls, pier-glasses, hot-air furnace, plush
window hangings, balcony-fronted china closets,
hatracks, what-nots, great bronze figures for
bric-a-brac and a bronze clock with two bronze
warriors for the centerpiece on the parlor
mantel.
And yet withal, there was within this house
the feeling of stability. Its silent old walls had
soaked into their timbers the emotions of sane,
steady-growing folks.
■you felt about the house of the Crandalls
that th? people who inhabited it had not
made their money overnight, so to speak.
Crandalls, ever since Crandalls had lived there,
had been able to afford the substantial things
of life.
Little Adeline Crandall Johnson grew up in
that environment, as blithely as if the somber
old house had been a rose garden. She flitted
through its halls. She danced through its dark
corridors as brillif.nJy as a butterfly caught in
some strange netherworld environment.
Her parents, her staid, cotton-merchant of
a father and her mether, Martha Crandall, who
had been reared to be stolid, marveled at the
electrical kind of brilliancy of this girl, their
child. They marveled, and it was as if they
warmed their icy fingers around the luminous
flame of her personality. She was something
so alien to them and yet so incalculably fasci
nating. She had been born in the chill
Autumns of their lives, when Martha was 42
and her husband 50. Almost any way you
looked at her she was a phenomenon, the last
creature in the world you would have expected
to spring from the union of two such angular
souls as Marti in Crandall and Deeping Johnson.
Unconscious of tire incongruity of her young
presence in the deep brown-plush of the
Crandall-Johnson environment, Adeline rushed
into the flush of her adolescence.
By this time the Crandall-Johnsons were at
the peak of the financial history of all the
Crandalls who had occupied that house on
Wtttegar street. Not only had Martha come
into a vaster than ever accumulation of Cran
dall’s moneys, but Deeping Johnson had prac
tically cornered one of the most important
cotton markets in the history of the industry.
When Addin' Crandall Johnson wax 17 she
was heiress to $7,000,000. More than that,
and with an obsolete kind of solemnity of
which they were totally unconscious, the
parents of Adeline had picked out for her in
marriage the son of another local millionaire.
It was one of those predetermined affairs about
whioh there had not been much family dis
cumion. It is doubtful If Adeline heraelf, in
thoae years when she and the fat young boy
wore so consciously sent to dancing chool to
gether, was even conscious of the import of
what was happening.
£*KRTAINLY sh* never took Donald Dugan
seriously enough to even resent him. The
flaet that at 17 and 1$ they were unofficially
considered engaged, glanced off her bright
young conscience with scarcely an impact.
One night, however, in the great deep brown
plush parlor, the young Dugan, probably on the
crest of his first fierce wave of adolescence,
caught her into hts short round arms and kissed
her patly, roundly and with possessiveness on
the lips.
Four weeks later Adeline Crandall Johnson
eloped with her music teacher.
It was one of those seven-day wonders, local
catastrophes. The town shivered. The town
stood aghast. The newspapers, muted, as if
Stunned into semi-silcnce. carried news of that
THE SUNDAY STAR, WASHINGTON, D. C, SEPTEMBER 22. 1929:
w*lb Si HpfVR IS
Young Dugan, probably on the crest of his first fierce wave of adolescence,
caught Adeline in his short round arms and kissed her.
marriage as if they were printing the story of
a death.
The house of the Crandall-Johnson might be
said to have shivered to its very timbers.
For three months the great, solemn, brown
doors were closed to Adeline and her slender
blonde husband. Then solemnly, inevitably and
rather terribly, with the news that Adeline was
to become a mother, they swung open, taking
in'o the silent maw of that house on Wittegar
street the young figures of Addin? and Jacques
Stendhal.
Promptly It swallowed them. Promptly It
engulfed them. Promptly the solemnity of that
environment flowed around them In rivers
brown as mud. The young Frenchman who
had married Adeline because to him she was
a flower almost too sweet to pluck, pulled In
the beginning against the drag of this en
vironment.
But in the end he, too, began to succumb.
By the time Adeline's baby girl was born the
young pair were part and parcel of the house
on Wittegar street.
It cannot be said for Jaoques Stendhal that
he was of the stuff that parents would select
as the husband of a loved daughter. He was
a frail fellow, probably in character, too. A
constitutional dilettante, unstable by nature,
playful, and In away that was forever to be
adorable to Adeline, dependent upon her for
decision.
Hjen, too. he loved her. There was no doubt
of that. This volatile Frenchman, full of tra
ditions that were alien to the very life and
being of Adeline, had one quality of stability
that was impeccable.
He loved Adeline.
It was curious, but within that household,
slowly, surely, steadily, as relentlessly as the
progress of a Greek drama, unspoken plans for
the destiny of Adeline Stendhal began to shape
themselves In the minds of Martha Crandall
and her husband, Deeping Johnson.
r catastrophe that had come to them was
not to be borne. This frail, blonde, volatile
young outsider, with the stagelike name of
Jacques Stendhal, music teacher, was not to
be endured within the substantial walls of the
Crandall mansion.
And it must be admitted that as time
marched on Jacques himself gave justification
to their enormous resentments against him.
He twaddled away his days. After his mar
riage his slight income from the teaching of
piano fell off entirely. It was nothing for him
to spend hours on end in the narrow atrip
of garden behind the Crandall house, dandling
his baby girl on his knees.
In vain Adeline, as if she sensed the menace
that was forming between them, pleaded with
him to stabilise his life; to either resume his
own profession of piano instruction or adapt
himself to some form of work in her father’s
vast cotton organizations.
It was no use. To all intents and purposes
Adeline had married a ne’er-do-well.
When the baby was 3 years old, a phantom
of delight if ever there was one, affairs in that
household began to shape themselves toward a
climax. For 30 months Jacques Stendhal had
not turned hh hand In an earning capacity, the
threats, the aspersions, the abhorrence of his
parents-in-law notwithstanding.
For 30 months, until her sweet eyes were
rimmed with weeping, Adeline had importuned,
begged, coaxed. And to what end? To the
end that after these impor tunings Jacques, re
morseful for the moment, would promise, and
the scene would end in one of play, the young
father, the young mother, their child between
them, romping in their youth and vitality
through the somber rooms of the somber man
sion.
It was at the end of the fourth year, how
ever. that the older Crandalls did succeed in
creating a schism. It was finally borne in upon
even Adeline herself that life with this play
boy was unendurable; it was not only unfair
to herself and to her parents, but to the young
ster at their knees, to continue as his wife.
Just why it was unfair Adeline never stopped
to ask herself, except that, according to all the
traditions of the Crandalls and the Johnsons,
every man must produce. It never occurred to
Adeline that the fact that the Crandall-
Johtisons had seven millions should be more
v\; - •• 1 i■ ~ % X f
than sufficient to offset the congenital short*
coming: of Jacques.
yLTHRN the little girl was 4 yews to the day
™ Adeline consented to the divorce. Curl
iws, but the reality of the situation never
seemed to ocme home to Jacques. He eauld
not take seriously the fact that this sweet gtrl
of his life and heart was about to walk out
of them. And yet she did.
One year after Adeline’s incredible acqui
escence to a divorce Jacques found himself back
in his humble studio ss piano teacher, pound*
ing out li!s living at the keyboard.
The situation in the Crandall-Johnaon house
had progressed. With an acquiescence which
seemed to denote that the strength for canliet
had flowed out of her heart, Adeline resumed
life according to the dictates of her parents.
Not even the prospect of their designs far an
approaching marriage with Donald Dugan
seemed to penetrate the icy stolidity that had
incased her since her official separation from
Jacques Stendhal.
Life resumed its even flow. She had her
child, a small beauty, who was permitted by
court agreement to visit her father once every
month, and Donald Dugan, as eager as ever to
marry her, was reconciled to taking the little
stepdaughter along with his marriage contract
to Adeline.
Two nights before the wedding Adeline, still
In what seemed to be her icy mantle of reserve,
walked out cf the Crandall-Johnaon household
with her child in her arms. At 10 o’clock that
same night she eloped with Jacques Stendhal
and was rcmsnled to him in the office of a
local msglstrati.
The Stendhals—there are five of them by now
—are a playful, um able. hilarious group. There
are a pair of solemn brown doors that remain
closed against them.
The Stendhals, beth Jacques and Adeline, try
to feel solemn about that. Somehow they
cannot.
(Copyricht. ltlf.)
The Domesday Booh
William the Conqueror came from Normandy,
In Prance, in 1066, landed in England in that
year and defeated the early English and their
King Harold. He then marched with his army
to London and was crowned on Christmas day
of the same year in Westminster, as King Wil
liam I.
He started immediately thereafter to to
come acquainted with the island he had con
quered so that he might rule it efficiently and
make such changes in its laws and institutions
as seemed fit. And so he sent his men to all
regions of England to secure information that
would assist him in his work. These men had
a big job on their hands. They had to get
the number of people in every city and town,
the amount of money they earned, the number
of cattle and sheep, the number and size and
value of ah the farms. In fact, they had to
make a census end survey of all the kingdom.
Naturally, such a work required much «»n*'
for in those days, nearly 900 years ago, there
were no roads such as we have today, there
were no automobiles, no trains, no telephones
and no mail service, and It is no wonder that
several years were required to gather all this
information for King William. But once it was
obtained, it was very valuable, and It was col
lected and written down in two large volumes,
known as the Dcmesday Book.
The smaller of the two contained 760 pages;
the larger volume contained 900 pages. Both
books were heavily bound in brass and leather,
with two locks on the edges, and were kept
securely in a large chest. Large as these books
are, it may seem strange to us at this tfiyw
that they contained the entire census of Eng
land. A census of that country today, con
taining all the information that King William,
wanted In 1066, would probably require several
hundred books of equal size.
The Domesday Book of William the Con
queror is still to be seen in the British Museum
of London.
New Vegetabje Aristocrats
'J'HE humble beet, turnip and carrot are nog
so humble these days. In fact, they are
taking a prominent position in the best vege
table circles, and from their former obscure
place as members of the home-garden family
they have advanced to an important
commodity.
Take the carrot, for instance. Outside of
soups and a dainty bit of dessert for hones,
this vegetable was of little consequence for
commercial purposes. During 1924 there were
6.030,000 bushels shipped, representing more
than 100 per cent gain over the 1923 figure.
Beets and parsnips, too, have shown the same
marvelous growth, and Department of Agrfcul
ture officials are inclined to ascribe the increase
to standardisation of packing and Thfppiag
More Tea Imported
r T'HE United States made considerable art Tan no
toward getting all ‘Tea-ed up’’ during the
fiscal year just ended. Os course, “tea-ed
up" was used hi its literal sense, and referred
to the importation of tea. which exceeded by
2.397.651 pounds the importation for the pre
ceding year.
Altogether, 93,593,264 pounds were brought In
and of this huge total, nearly a pound per per
son, only approximately 1,115,000 pounds were
rejected. Os this rejection, only 9,000 pounds
were because shipments were substandard la
purity.
There was a decided tendency toward Mack
tea. for Americans scein to like their tea Mack,
and .-.way from green teas and oolongs, which
are the varieties preferred by the Chinese popu
lation of the country.
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