IX
Christmas Week came.
Cities by thousands made preparation. Great shops took on vast cargoes of silk and precious things and seemed ready to sail about, distributing gifts to the town, and thought better of it, and let folk come in numbers to them to pay toll for what they took. Banks opened their doors and poured out, now a little trickling stream of pay envelopes, now a torrent of green and gold. Flower stalls drew tribute from a million pots of earth where miracles had been done. Pastry counters, those mock commissariats, delicately masking as servants to necessity, made ready their pretty pretences to nutrition. The woods came moving in—acres of living green, taken in their sleep, theirroots left faithful to a tryst with the sap, their tops summoned to bear an hybrid fruitage. From cathedrals rose the voices of children now singing little carols and hymns in praise of the Christ-child, now speaking little verses in praise of the saint, Nicholas, now clamouring for little new possessions. And afar from the fields that lay empty about the clustered roofs of towns came a chorus of voices of the live things, beast and fowl, being offered up in the gorgeous pagan rites of the day.
Hither and yonder in every city the grown townsfolk ran. The most had lists of names,—Grace, Margaret, Laura, Alice, Miriam, John, Philip, Father, Mother,—beautiful names and of rich portent, so that, remembering the time, one would have said that these were entered there with some import of special comradeship, of being face to face, of having realized in little what will some day be truein large. But on looking closer, the lists were found to have quite other connotations: as, Grace, bracelet; Margaret, spangled scarf; Laura, chafing-dish; Philip, smoking set; Father (Memo: Ask mother what she thinks he'd like). And every name, it seemed, stood for some bestowal of new property, mostly of luxuries, and chiefly of luxuries of decoration. And the minds of the buying adults were like lakes played upon by clouds and storm birds and lightning, and, to be sure, many stars—but all in unutterable confusion.
Also from the cargo-laden shops there came other voices in thousands, but these were mostly answers. And when one, understanding Christmas, listened to hear what part in it these behind the counter played, he heard from them no voice of sharing in the theory of peace, or even of truce, but instead:—
"Two a yard and double width. Jewelryis in the Annex. Did you want three pairs of each? Veils and neckwear three aisles over. Leather, glassware, baskets, ribbons, down the store beyond the notions. Toys and dolls are in the basement—toys and dolls are in the basement. Jewelry is in the Annex...."
So that a great part of the town seemed some strong chorus of invocation to new possessions.
But there were other voices. Whole areas of every town lay, perforce, within the days of Christmas Week—it must have been so, for there is only one calendar to embrace humanity, as there is only one way of birth and breath and death, one source of tears, one functioning for laughter. But to these reaches of the town the calendar was like another thing, for though it was upon them in name, its very presence was withdrawn. In those ill-smelling stairways and lofts there was little to divulge the imminence of anything other than themselves. Andwherever some echo of Christmas Week had crept, the wistfulness or the lust was for possession also; but here one could understand its insistence. So here the voices said only, "I wish—I wish," and "I choose this—and this," at windows; or, "If I had back my nickel...." "Don't you go expecting nothink!" And over these went the whirr of machinery, beat of treadles, throb of engines, or the silence of forced idleness, or of the disease of dereliction. It was a time of many pagan observances, as when some were decked in precious stuffs and some were thrown to lions.
To all these in the towns Christmas Week came. And of them all not many stood silent and looked Christmas Week in the face. Yet it is a human experience that none is meant to die without sharing. For the season is the symbol of what happens to folk if they claim it.
Christmas is the time of withdrawal of mostmaterial life. It is the time when nature subtracts the externals, hides from man the phenomena of even her evident processes. Left alone, his thought turns inward and outward—which is to say, it lays hold upon the flowing force so slightly externalized in himself. If he finds in his own being a thousand obstructions, a thousand persons,—dogs, sorcerers, whoremongers,—he will try to escape from them all, back to the externals. But if he finds there a channel which the substance of being is using, he will be no stranger, but a familiar, with himself. Only when the channel has been long cleared, when there has left it all consciousness of striving, of self in any form, only when he finds himself empty, ready, immaculate, will he have the divine adventure. For it is then that in him the spirit of God will have its birth, then that he will first understand his own nature ... the nature of being.
Then the turn of the year comes in, the year begins to mount. Birth is in it, growth is in it, Spring is in it. Sometime, away back in beginnings, they knew this. They knew that the time of the Winter solstice is in some strange fashion the high moment of the year, as the beginning of new activity in nature and in the gods. They solemnized the return of the fiery sun wheel; they traced in those solstice days the operations on earth of Odin and Berchta. They knew in themselves a thing they could not name. And when the supreme experience took place in Christ, they made the one experience typify the other, and became conscious of the divine nature of this nativity. So, by the illuminati, the prophets, the adepts, the time that followed was yearly set aside—forty days of dwelling within the temple of self, forty days of reverence for being, of consciousness of new birth. Then the emergence, then the apotheosisof expression typifying and typified by Spring—the time when bursting, pressing life almost breaks bounds, when birth and the impulse to birth are in every form of life, without and within. These festivals are not arbitrary in date. They grow out of the universal experience.
Is it not then cause for stupefaction that this time of "divine bestowal" should have become so physical a thing? From the ancient perception, to have slipped into a sense of annual social comradeship and good will and peace was natural and fine—to live in the little what will some day be true in the large. But from this to have plunged down into a time of frantic physical bestowals, of "present trading," of lists of Grace and Margaret and Philip, of teeming shops with hunting and hunted creatures within, of sacrificial trees and beasts, of a sovereign sense of good for me and mine and ashameless show of Lord and Lady Bountiful ... how can that have come about, how can the great festival have been so dishonoured?
Not all dishonoured, for within it is its own vitality which nothing can dishonour. Through all the curious variations which it receives at our hands, something shines and sings: self-giving, joy giving, a vast, dim upflickering on humanity of what this thing really is that it seeks to observe, this thing that grips men so that no matter what they are about, they will drop it at the touch of the gong and turn to some expression, however crooked and thwarted, of the real spirit of the time. If in war, then bayonets are stacked and holly-wreathed, and candles stuck on each point! If at sea, some sailor climbs out on the bowsprit with a wreath of green. If on the western plains, a turkey wishbone for target will make the sport, at fifty paces; if at home, somegreat extravagance or some humble gift or some poignant wish will point the day; if at church, then mass and carol; in certain hearts, reverence,—everywhere the time takes hold of folk and receives whatever of greatness or grotesqueness they choose to give it.... So, too, the actual and vital experience which it brings to humanity is universal, is offered with cosmic regularity, cannot be escaped. Through all the tumult of the time, Christmas Week and the time that lies near to it is always waiting to claim its own, to take to itself those who will not be deceived, who see in the stupendous yearly pageant only the usual spectacle of humanity trying to say divine things in terms of things physical, because the time for the universal expression is not yet come.
When that time comes ... when the time of the worship ofthingsshall be past; when the tribal sense of holiday shall have given placeto the family sense, and that family shall be mankind; when shall never be seen the anomaly of celebrating in a glorification of little family tables—whose crumbs fall to those without—the birth of him who preached brotherhood; and the mockery of observing with wanton spending the birth of him who had not where to lay his head; when the rudiments of divine perception, of self-perception, of social perception, shall have grown to their next estate; when the area of consciousness shall be extended yet farther toward the outermost; when that new knowledge with which the air is charged shall let man begin to know what he is ... when that time comes, they will look back with utmost wonder at our uncouth gropings to note and honour something whose import we so obscurely discern; but perhaps, too, with wonder that so much of human love and divining should shine for us through the mists we make.
X
Two days before Christmas Ellen Bourne went through the new-fallen snow of their wood lot. Her feet left scuffled tracks clouded about by the brushing of her gown's wet hem and by a dragging corner of shawl. She came to a little evergreen tree, not four feet tall, with low-growing boughs, and she stood looking at it until her husband, who was also following the snow-filled path, overtook her.
"Matthew," she said then, "will you cut me that?"
Matthew Bourne stood with his ax on his shoulder and looked a question in slow preparation to ask one.
"THE CHILDREN BEGAN TO SING 'GO BURY SAINT NICKLIS'""THE CHILDREN BEGAN TO SING 'GO BURY SAINT NICKLIS'"
"I just want it," she said; "I've—took a notion."
He said that she had a good many notions, it seemed to him. But he cut the little tree, with casual ease and no compunctions, and they dragged it to their home, the soft branches patterning the snow and obscuring their footprints.
"It's like real Christmas weather," Ellen said. "They can't stop that coming, anyhow."
In the kitchen Ellen's father sat before the open oven door of the cooking stove, letting the snow melt from his heavy boots.
"Hey," he said, "I was beginning to think you'd forgot about supper. What was in the trap?"
At once Ellen began talking rapidly. "Oh," she said, "we'll have some muffins to-night, father. The kind you like, with—"
"Well, what was in the trap?" the old mandemanded peevishly. "Why don't you answer back? What was, Mat?"
Matthew, drying his ax blade, looked at it with one eye closed.
"Rabbit," he said.
"Where is it?" her father demanded.
"It was a young one—not as big as your fist," Ellen said. "I let it out before he got there. Where's mother?"
"Just because a thing's young, it ain't holy water," the old man complained. "Last time it was a squirrel you let go because it was young—it's like being spendthrift with manna...." he went on.
Ellen's mother appeared, gave over to Ellen the supper preparations, contented herself with auxiliary offices of china and butter getting, and talked the while, pleased that she had something to disclose.
"Ben Helders stopped in," she told. "He'sgoing to the City to-morrow. What do you s'pose after? A boy. He's going to take him to bring up and work on the farm."
"Where's he going to get the boy?" Ellen asked.
Her mother did not know, but Mrs. Helders was going to have a new diagonal and she wanted the number of Ellen's pattern. Ben would stop for it that night.
Evenings their kitchen was a sitting room, and when the supper had been cleared away and the red cotton spread covered the table, Ellen asked her husband to bring in the little tree. She found a cracker box, handily cut a hole with a cooking knife, and set up the little tree by the kitchen window.
"What under the canopy—" said her mother, her voice cracking.
"Oh, something to do in the evening," Ellen answered. "Father's going to pop me somecorn to trim it with; aren't you, father? Mother, why don't you get you a good big darning needle and string what he pops?"
"It'll make a lot of litter," said her mother, but she brought the needle, for something to do.
"Hey, king and country," said her father; "I'd ought to have somebody here to shell it for me."
"Who you trimming up a tree for?" her mother demanded; "I thought they wasn't to be any in town this year."
"It ain't Christmas yet," Ellen said only. "I guess it won't do any hurt two days before."
While the two worked, Ellen went to the cupboard drawer, and from behind her pile of kitchen towels she drew out certain things: walnuts, wrapped in shining yeast tinsel and dangling from red yarn; wishbones tied with strips of bright cloth; a tiny box, made like ahouse, with rudely cut doors and windows; eggshells penciled as faces; a handful of peanut owls; a glass-stoppered bottle; a long necklace of buttonhole twist spools. A certain blue paper soldier doll that she had made was upstairs, but the other things she brought and fastened to the tree.
Her husband smoked and uneasily watched her. He saw somewhat within her plan, but he was not at home there. "If the boyhadlived andhadbeen up-chamber asleep now," he thought once, "it'd be something like, to go trimming up a tree. Butthisway—"
"What you leaving the whole front of the tree bare for?" her mother asked.
"The blue paper soldier goes there. I want it should see the blue paper soldier first thing...." Ellen said, and stopped abruptly.
"You talk like you was trimming the tree for somebody," her mother observed, aggrieved.
"Maybe something might look in the window—going by," Ellen said.
"Get in there! Get your heads in there, ye beggars!" said the old man to the popcorn. "I'd ought to have somebody here to pick up them shooting kernels," he complained.
In a little while, with flat-footed stamping, Ben Helders came in. When he had the pattern number, by laborious copying against the wall under the bracket lamp, Matthew said to him:—
"Going to get a boy to work out, are you?"
Helders laughed and shifted.
"He's going to work by and by," he said. "We allow to have him to ourselves a spell first."
"Keep him around the house till Spring?"
"More," said Helders. "You see," he added, "it's like this with us ... family all gone, all married, and got their own. We figured to gethold of a little shaver and have some comfort with him before he goes to work, for life."
"Adopt him?" said Matthew, curiously.
"That's pretty near it," Helders admitted. "We've got one spoke for at the City Orphand Asylum."
Ellen Bourne turned. "How old?" she asked.
"Around five—six, we figure." Helders said it almost sheepishly.
Ellen stood facing the men, with the white festoons of popcorn in her hands.
"Matthew," she said, "let him bring us one."
Matthew stared. "You mean bring us a boy?" he asked.
"I don't care which—girl or boy. Anything young," Ellen said.
"Good Lord, Ellen," Matthew said, with high eyebrows, "ain't you got your hands full enough now?"
Ellen Bourne lifted her hands slightly and let them fall. "No," she answered.
The older woman looked at her daughter, and now first she was solicitous, as a mother.
"Ellen," she said, "you have, too, got your hands full. You're wore out all the time."
"That's it," Ellen said, "and I'm not wore out with the things I want to do."
"Hey, king and country!" the old man cried, upsetting the popper. "Don't get a child around here underfoot. I'm too old. I deserve grown folks. My head hurts me—"
"Matthew," said Ellen to her husband, "let Helders bring us one. To-morrow—for Christmas, Mat!"
Matthew looked slowly from side to side. It seemed incredible that so large a decision should lie with a man so ineffectual.
"'Seems like we'd ought to think about it a while first," he said weakly.
"Think about it!" said Ellen. "When haven't I thought about it? When have I thought about anything else but him we haven't got any more?"
"Ellen!" the mother mourned, "you don't know what you're taking on yourself—"
"Hush, mother," Ellen said gently; "you don't know what it is. You had me."
She faced Helders. "Will you bring two when you come back to-morrow night?" she said; "and one of them for us?"
Helders looked sidewise at Matthew, who was fumbling at his pipe.
"Wouldn't you want to see it first, now?" Helders temporized. "And a girl or a boy, now?"
"No—I wouldn't want to see it first—I couldn't bear to choose. One healthy—from healthy parents—and either girl or boy," Ellen said, and stopped. "The nicest treething I've made is for a boy," she owned. "It's a paper soldier.... I made these things for fun," she added to Helders.
For the first time Helders observed the tree. Then he looked in the woman's face. "I'll fetch out a boy for you if you say so," he said.
"Then do," she bade.
When the four were alone again, Mat sat looking at the floor. "Every headlong thing I've ever done I've gone headlong over," he said gloomily.
Ellen took a coin from the clock shelf. "When Ben goes past to-morrow," she merely said, "you'll likely see him. Have him get some little candles for the tree."
"My head hurts me," the old man gave out; "this ain't the place for a great noisy boy."
Ellen put her hand on his shoulder almost maternally.
"See, dear," she said, "then you'd be grandfather."
"Hey?" he said; "not if it was adopted, I wouldn't."
"Why, of course. That would make it ours—and yours. See," she cried, "you've been stringing popcorn for it already, and you didn't know!"
"Be grandfather, would I?" said the old man. "Would I? Hey, king and country! Grandfather again."
Ellen was moving about the kitchen lightly, with that manner, which eager interest brings, of leaving only half footprints.
"Come on, mother," she said, "we must get the popcorn strung for sure, now!"
The mother looked up at the tree. "Seems as if," she said, wrinkling her forehead, "I used to make pink tarleton stockings for your trees and fill 'em with the corn. I donno but I'vegot a little piece of pink tarleton somewheres in my bottom drawer...."
... Next night they had the bracket lamp and the lamp on the shelf and the table hand lamp all burning. The little tree was gay with the white corn and the coloured trifles. The kitchen seemed to be centering in the tree, as if the room had been concerned long enough with the doings of these grown folk and now were looking ahead to see who should come next. It was the high moment of immemorial expectancy, when those who are alive turn the head to see who shall come after.
"What you been making all day, daddy?" Ellen asked, tense at every sound from without.
Her father, neat in his best clothes, blew away a last plume of shaved wood and held out something.
"I just whittled out a kind of a clothespinman," he explained. "I made one for you, once, and you liked it like everything. Mebbe a boy won't?" he added doubtfully.
"Oh, but a boy will!" Ellen cried, and tied the doll above the blue paper soldier.
"Hadn't they ought to be here pretty soon?" Matthew asked nervously. "Where's mother?"
"She's watching from the front room window," Ellen answered.
Once more Helders came stamping on the kitchen porch, but this time there was a patter of other steps, and Ellen caught open the door before he summoned. Helders stepped into the room, and with him was a little boy.
"This one?" Ellen asked, her eyes alive with her eagerness.
But Helders shook his head.
"Mis' Bourne," he said, "I'm real dead sorry.They wa'n't but the one. Just the one we'd spoke for."
"One!" Ellen said; "you said Orphan Asylum."
"There's only the one," Helders repeated. "The others is little bits of babies, or else spoke for like ours—long ago. It seems they do that way. But I want you should do something: I want you and Matthew should take this one. Mother and I—are older ... we ain't set store so much...."
Ellen shook her head, and made him know, with what words she could find, that it could not be so. Then she knelt and touched at the coat of the child, a small frightened thing, with cap too large for him and one mitten lost. But he looked up brightly, and his eyes stayed on the Christmas tree. Ellen said little things to him, and went to take down for him some trifle from the tree.
"I'm just as much obliged," she said quietly to Helders. "I never thought of there not being enough. We'll wait."
Helders was fumbling for something.
"Here's your candles, I thought you might want them for somethin' else," he said, and turned to Matthew: "And here's your quarter. I didn't get the toy you mentioned. I thought you wouldn't want it, without the little kid."
Matthew looked swiftly at Ellen. He had not told her that he had sent by Helders for a toy. And at that Ellen crossed abruptly to her husband, and she was standing there as they let Helders out, with the little boy.
Ellen's father pounded his knee.
"But how long'll we have to wait? How long'll we have to wait?" he demanded shrilly. "King and country, why didn't somebody ask him that?"
Matthew tore open the door.
"Helders!" he shouted, "how long did they say we'd have to wait?"
"Mebbe only a week or two—mebbe longer," Helders' voice came out of the dark. "They couldn't tell me."
Ellen's mother stood fastening up a fallen tinsel walnut.
"Let's us leave the tree right where it is," she said. "Even with it here, we won't have enough Christmas to hurt anything."
XI
On that morning of the day before Christmas, Mary Chavah woke early, while it was yet dark. With closed eyes she lay, in the grip of a dream that was undissipated by her waking. In the dream she had seen a little town lying in a hollow, lighted and peopled, but without foundation.
"It isn't born yet," they told her, who looked with her, "and the people are not yet born."
"Who is the mother?" she had asked, as if everything must be born of woman.
"You," they had answered.
On which the town had swelled and rounded and swung in a hollow of cloud, globed and shining, like the world.
"You," they had kept on saying.
The sense that she must bear and mother the thing had grasped her with all the sickening force of dream fear. And when the dream slipped into the remembrance of what the day would bring her, the grotesque terror hardly lessened, and she woke to a sense of oppression and coming calamity such as not even her night of decision to take the child had brought to her, a weight as of physical faintness and sickness.
"I feel as if something was going to happen," she said, over and over.
She was wholly ignorant that in that week just passed the word had been liberated and had run round Old Trail Town in the happiest open secrecy:—
"... coming way from Idaho, with a tag on, Christmas Eve. We thought if everybody could call that night—just run into Mary's, you know, like it was any other night, and take in a little something to eat—no presents, youknow ... oh, of course, no presents! Just supper, in a basket. We'd all have to eatsome-where. It won't be any Christmas celebration, of course—oh, no, not with the paper signed and all. But just for us to kind of meet and be there, when he gets off the train from Idaho."
"Just ... like it was any other night." That was the part that abated suspicion. Indeed, that had been the very theory on which the nonobservance of Christmas had been based: the day was to be treated like any other day. And, obviously, on any other day such a simple plan as this for the welcoming of a little stranger from Idaho would have gone forward as a matter of course. Why deny him this, merely because the night of his arrival chanced to be Christmas Eve? When Christmas was to be treatedexactlyas any other day?
If, in the heart of Mis' Abby Winslow, where the plan had originated, it had originated side by side with the thought that the point of the plan was the incidence of Christmas Eve, she kept her belief secret. The open argument was unassailable, and she contented herself with that. Even Simeon Buck, confronted with it, was silent.
"Goin' back on the paper, are you?" he had at first said, "and hev a celebration?"
"Celebration of what?" Mis' Winslow demanded; "celebration of that little boy getting here all alone, 'way from Idaho. And we'd celebrate that any other night, wouldn't we? Of course we would. Our paper signing don't call for us to give everybody the cold shoulder as I know of, just because it's Christmas or Christmas Eve, either."
"No," Simeon owned, "of course it don't. Of course it don't."
As for Abel Ames, he accepted the proposal with an alacrity which he was put to it to conceal.
"So do," he said heartily, "so do. I guess we can go ahead just like it was a plain day o' the week, can't we?"
"Hetty," he said to his wife, whom that noon he went through the house to the kitchen expressly to tell, "can you bake up a basket of stuff to take over to Mary Chavah's next Tuesday night?"
She looked up from the loaf she was cutting, the habitual wonder of her childish curved lashes accented by her sudden curving of eyebrows.
"Next Tuesday?" she said, "Why, that's Christmas eve!"
Abel explained, saying, "What of that?" and trying to speak indifferently but, in spite of himself, shining through.
"Well, that's kind of nice to do, ain't it?" she answered.
"My, yes," Abel said, emphatically, "It's a thing to do—that's the thing to do."
It was Mis' Mortimer Bates, the nonconformist by nature, in whom doubts came nearest to expression.
"Idon'tknow," she said, "it kind ofdoesseem like hedging."
"They ain't anybody for it to seem to," Mis' Winslow contended reasonably, "but us. And we understand."
"We was going to do entirely without a Christmas this year. Entirely without," Mis' Bates rehearsed.
"Was we going to do entirely without everyday, week-day, year-in-and-year-out milk of human kindness?" Mis' Winslow demanded. "Well, then, let's us use a little of it, same as we would on a Monday wash day."
No voice was raised in real protest. None who had signed the paper and none who had not done so could take exception to this simple way of hospitality to the little stranger with a tag on. And it was the glory of the little town being a little town that they somehow let it be known that every one was expected to look in at Mary's that night. No one was uninvited. And this was like a part of the midwinter mystery expressing itself unbidden.
Mary alone was not told. She had consistently objected to the Christmas observances for so long that they feared the tyranny of her custom. "She might not let us do it," they said, "but if we all get there, she can't help liking it. She would on any other day...."
... So she alone in Old Trail Town woke that morning before Christmas with no knowledge of this that was afoot. And yet the daywas not like any other day, because she lay there dreading it more.
She had cleared out her little sleeping room, as she had cleared the lower floor. The chamber, with its white-plastered walls, and boards nearly bare, and narrow white bed, had the look of a cell, in the first light struggling through the single snow-framed window. Here, since her childhood she had lain nightly; here she had brought her thought of Adam Blood, and had seen the thought die and had watched with it; here she had lain on the nights after her parents had died; here she had rested, body-sick with fatigue, in the years that she had toiled to keep her home. In all that time there had gone on within her many kinds of death. She had arrived somehow at a dumb feeling that these dyings were gradually uncovering her self from somewhere within; rather, uncovering some self whose existenceshe only dimly guessed. "They's two of me," she had thought more often of late "and we don't meet—we don't meet." She lived among her neighbors without hate, without malice; for years she had "meant nothing but love"—and this not negatively. The rebellion against Christmas was against only the falsity of its meaningless observance. The rebellion against taking the child, though somewhat grounded in her distrust of her own fitness, was really the last vestige of a self that had clung to her, in bitterness not toward Adam, but toward Lily. Ever since she had known that the child was coming she had felt a kind of spiritual exhaustion, sharpened by the strange sense of oppression that hung upon her like an illness.
"I feel as if something was going to happen," she kept saying.
In a little while she leaned toward the window at her bed's head, and looked down thehill toward Jenny's. Her heart throbbed when she saw a light there. Of late, when she had waked in the night, she had always looked, but always until now the little house had been wrapped in the darkness. Because of that light, she could not sleep again, and so presently she rose, and in the sharp chill of the room, bathed and dressed, though what had once been her savage satisfaction in braving the cold had long since become mere undramatic ability to endure it without thinking. With Mary, life and all its constructive rites had won what the sacrificial has never been able to achieve—the soul of the casual, of, so to say, second nature, which is last nature, and nature triumphant.
While she was at breakfast Mis' Abby Winslow came in.
"Mercy," Mis' Winslow said, "is it breakfast—early? I've been up hours, frosting the cakes."
"What cakes?" Mary asked idly.
Mis' Winslow flushed dully. "I ain't baked anything much in weeks before," she answered ambiguously, and hurried from the subject.
"The little fellow's coming in on the Local, is he?" she said. "You ain't heard anything different?"
"Nothing different," Mary replied. "Yes, of course he's coming. They left there Saturday, or I'd have heard. The man he's with is going to get home to-night for Christmas with his folks in the City."
"Going down to meet him of course, ain't you," Mis' Winslow pursued easily.
"Why, yes," said Mary.
"Well," Mis' Winslow mounted her preparation, "I was thinking it would be kind of dark for you to bring him in here all alone. Don't you want I should come over and keep up the lights and be here when you get here?"
She watched Mary in open anxiety. If she were to refuse, it would go rather awkwardly. To her delight Mary welcomed with real relief the suggestion.
"I'd be ever so much obliged," she said; "I thought of asking somebody. I'll have a little supper set out for him before I leave."
"Yes, of course," Mis' Winslow said, eyes down. "I'll be over about seven," she added. "If the train's on time, you'll be back here around half past. The children want to go down with you—they can be at Mis' Moran's when you go by. You'll walk up from the depot, won't you? You do," she said persuasively; "the little fellow'll be glad to stretch his legs. And it'll give the children a chance to get acquainted."
"I might as well," Mary assented listlessly. "There's no need to hurry home, as I know of, except keeping you waiting."
"Oh, I don't mind," Mis' Winslow told her. "Better come around through town, too. It's some farther, but he'll like the lights. What's the little chap's name?" she asked; "I donno's I've heard you say."
Mary flushed faintly. "Do you know," she said, "I don't know his name. I can't remember that Lily ever told me. They always called him justYes, because he learned to say that first."
"'Yes!'" repeated Mis' Winslow, blankly. "Why, it don't sound to me real human."
Later in the day, Mis' Mortimer Bates and Mis' Moran came in to see Mary. Both were hurried and tired, and occasionally one of them lapsed into some mental calculation. "We must remember something for the middle of the table," Mis' Bates observed to Mis' Moran, under cover of Mary's putting wood in the stove. And when Mary related thebreaking of the bracket lamp, the two other women telegraphed to each other a glance of memorandum.
"Don't it seem funny toyouto have Christmas coming on to-morrow and no flurry about it?" Mary asked.
"No flurry!" Mis' Bates burst out. "Oh, well," she amended, "of course this Christmas does feel a little funny to all of us. Don't you think so, Mis' Moran?"
"I donno," said Mary, thoughtfully, "but what, when folks stop chasing after Christmas and driving it before them, Christmas may turn around and come to find them."
"Mebbe so," Mis' Moran said with bright eyes, "mebbe so. Oh, Mary," she added, "ain't it nice he's coming?"
Mary looked at them, frowning a little. "It seemed like the thing had to happen," she said; "it'll fit itself in."
Before dark she took a last look about the child's room. The owl paper, the puppy washbasin, the huge calendar with its picture of a stag, the shelves for whatever things of his own he had, all pleased her newly. She had laid on his table her grandfather's Bible with pictures of Asiatic places. Below his mirror hung his father's photograph, that young face, with the unspeakable wistfulness of youth, looking somewhere outside the picture. It made her think of the passionate expectation in the face of the picture that Jenny had brought.
"Young folks in pictures always look like they was setting store by something that ain't true yet," Mary thought. "It makes you kind of feel you have to pitch in and make whatever it is come true, a little...."
It was when Mis' Winslow came back toward seven o'clock that there was news of Jenny. Mary had been twice to her door in thecourse of the day, and had come away feeling, in her inquiry, strangely outside the moment and alien to its incidence, as if she were somehow less alive than those in Jenny's house.
"Jenny's got a little girl," Mis' Winslow said.
Mary stood staring at her. It seemed impossible. It was like seeing the hands of time move, like becoming momentarily conscious of the swing and rush of the earth, like perceiving the sweep of the stream of stars in which our system moves.... She was startled and abashed that the news so seized upon her. Little that had ever happened to herself seemed so poignant, so warmed its place in sensation. While Mis' Winslow's mind marked time on details of time and pounds, as is the way with us immortals when another joins our ranks, Mary was receiving more consciousness. There are times when this gift is laid on swiftly, as with hands, instead ofcoming when none knows. Rather than with the child whom she was to meet, her thought was with Jenny as she left Mis' Winslow in the doorway and went down the street.
"Expect you back in about half an hour if the train's on time," Mis' Winslow called.
Mary nodded, and turned into the great cathedral aisle that was Old Trail Street, now arched and whitened, spectral in the dark, silver with starlight....
... Capella was in the east, high and bright, and as imperative as speech. Mary's way lay north, so that that great sun went beside her, and there was no one else abroad but these two. A coat of ice had polished the walks, so she went by the road, between the long white mounds that lined it. The road, whose curves were absorbed in the dimness, had thus lost its look of activity and lay inert as any frozen waterway. Only a little wind, the star'ssparkle, and Mary's step and breath seemed living things—but from the rows of chimneys up and down the Old Trail Road, faint smoke went up, a plume, a wreath, a veil, where the village folk, invisible within quiet roof and wall, lifted common signals; and from here a window and there a window, a light shone out, a point, a ray, a glow, so that one without would almost say, "There's home."
The night before Christmas; and in not one home was there any preparation for to-morrow, Mary thought, unless one or two lawless ones had broken bounds and contrived something, from a little remembrance for somebody to a suet pudding. It was strange, she owned: no trees being trimmed, no churches lighted for practice, and the shops closed as on any other night. Only the post office had light—she went in to look in her box. Affer was there at the telegraph window, and he accosted her.
"Little boy's comin' to-night, is he?" he said, as one of the sponsors for that arrival.
"I'm on my way to the train now," Mary answered, and noted the Christmas notice with its soiled and dog-eared list still hanging on the wall. "It was a good move," she insisted to herself, as she went out into the empty street again.
"You got a merry Christmas without no odds of the paper or me either," Affer called after her; but she did not answer save with her "Thank you, Mr. Affer."
"Why do they all pretend to think it's so fine for me?" she wondered. "To cheer me up, I guess," she thought grimly.
To-night they were all sharing the aloofness from the time, an aloofness which she herself had known for years. All save Jenny. To Jenny's house, in defiance of that dog-eared paper in the post office, Christmas had come.Not a Christmas of "present trading," not a Christmas of things at all; butChristmas. Unto them a child was born.
"Jenny's the only one in this town that's got a real Christmas," thought Mary, on her way to meet her own little guest.
The Simeon Buck North American Dry Goods Exchange was dark, too, and from its cave of window the gray Saint Nicholas looked out, bearing his flag—and he to-night an idle, mummy thing of no significance. The Abel Ames General Merchandise Emporium was closed, but involuntarily Mary stopped before it. In its great plate-glass window a single candle burned. She stood for a moment looking.
"Why, that's what they do, some places, to let the Christ-child in," Mary thought. "I wonder if Abel knows. How funny—for a store!"
Some one whom she did not know passed her and looked too.
"Kind o' nice," said the other.
"Real nice," Mary returned, and went on with a little glow.
Abel's candle, and the arc light shining like cold blue crystal before the dark Town Hall, and the post-office light where the dog-eared list hung and the telegraph key clicked out its pretence at hand touching with all the world, these were the only lights the street showed—save Capella, that went beside her and, as she looked, seemed almost to stand above the town.
At Mis' Moran's house on the other side of the square, the children were waiting for her—Bennet and Gussie and Tab and Pep and little Emily. They ran before Mary in the road, all save little Emily, who walked clasping Mary's hand.
"Aren't you staying up late, Emily?" Mary asked her.
"Yes," assented the child, contentedly.
"Won't you be sleepy?" Mary pursued.
"I was going to stay awake anyhow," she said; "I ain't goin' sleep all night. We said so. We're goin' stay 'wake and see Santa Claus go by."
"Go by?" Mary repeated.
"Yes," the child explained; "you don't think that'll hurt, do you?" she asked anxiously. "And then," she pursued, "if we don't see him, we'll know he's dead everywheres else, too. An' then we're goin' bury him to-morrow morning, up to Gussie's house."
At the station, no one was yet about. The telegraph instrument was clicking there, too, signaling the world; a light showed in the office behind a row of sickly geraniums; the wind came down through the cut and across thetracks and swept the little platform. But the children begging to stay outside, Mary stood in a corner by the telegraph operator's bay window and looked across to the open meadows beyond the tracks and up at the great star. The meadows, sloping to an horizon hill, were even and white, as if an end of sky had been pulled down and spread upon them. Utter peace was there, not the primeval peace that is negation, but a silence that listened.
"'While shepherds watched their flocks by night, all seated on the ground,...'" Mary thought and looked along the horizon hill. The time needed an invocation from some one who watched, as many voices, through many centuries, had made invocation on Christmas Eve. For a moment, looking over the lonely white places where no one watched, as no one—save only Jenny—watched in the town, Mary forgot the children....
The shoving and grating of baggage truck wheels recalled her. Just beyond the bay window she saw little Emily lifted to the truck and the four others follow, and the ten heels dangle in air.
"Now!" said Pep. And a chant arose:
"'Twas the night before Christmas when allthrough the houseNot a creature was stirring, not even a mouse.The stockings were hung by the chimney withcareIn the hope that Saint Nicholas soon wouldbe there...."
Upborne by one, now by another, now by all three voices, the verses went on unto the end. And it was as if not only Tab and Pep and Bennet and Gussie and little Emily were chanting, but all children who had ever counted the days to Christmas and had found Christmas the onepiece of magic that is looked on with kindness by a grown-up world. The magic of swimming holes, for example, is largely a forbidden magic; the magic of loud noises, of fast motion, of living things in pockets, of far journeys, of going off alone, of digging caves, of building fires, of high places, of many closed doors, words, mechanisms, foods, ownerships, manners, costumes, companions, and holidays are denied them. But in Christmas their affinity for mystery is recognized, encouraged, gratified, annually provided for. The little group on the baggage truck chanted their watch over a dead body of Christmas, but its magic was there, inviolate. The singsong verses had almost the dignity of lyric expression, of the essence of familiarity with that which is unknown. As if, because humanity had always recognized that the will to Christmas was greater than it knew, these words had somehowbeen made to catch and reproduce, for generations, some faint spirit of the midwinter mystery.
The 'bus rattled up to the platform and Buff Miles leaped down and blanketed his horses, talking to them as was his wont.
"So, holly and mistletoe,So, holly and mistletoe,So, holly, and mistletoe,Over and over and over, oh...."
he was singing as he came round the corner of the station.
"It ain't Christmas yet," he observed defensively to Mary. "It ain't forbid except for Christmas Day, is it?"
He went and bent over the children on the truck.
"Look alive as soon as you can do it," Mary heard him say to them, and wondered.
She stood looking up the track. Across thestill fields, lying empty and ready for some presence, came flashing the point of flame that streamed from the headlight of the train. The light shone out like a signal flashed back to the star standing above the town.