VII
Ebenezer Rule had meant to go to the City before cold weather came. He had there a small and decent steam-warmed flat where he boiled his own eggs and made his own coffee, read his newspapers and kept his counsel, descending nightly to the ground-floor café to dine on ambiguous dishes at tables of other bank swallows who nested in the same cliff. But as the days went by, he found himself staying on in Old Trail Town, with this excuse and that, offered by himself to himself. As, for example, that in the factory there were old account books that he must go through. And having put off this task from day to day and finding at last nothing more to dally with, he set out one morning for the ancient building down in thatpart of the village which was older than the rest and was where his business was conducted when it was conducted.
It had snowed in the night, and Buff Miles, who drove the village snowplow, was also driver of "the 'bus." So on the morning after a snowfall, the streets always lay buried thick until after the 8.10 Express came in; and since on the morning following a snowfall the 8.10 Express was always late, Old Trail Town lay locked in a kind of circular argument, and everybody stayed indoors or stepped high through drifts. The direct way to the factory was virtually untrodden, and Ebenezer made a detour through the business street in search of some semblance of a "track."
The light of a Winter morning is not kind, only just. It is just to the sky and discovers it to be dominant; to trees, and their lines are seen to be alive, like leaves; to folk, and nodisguise avails. Summer gives complements and accessories to the good things in a human face. Winter affords nothing save disclosure. In the uncompromising cleanness of that wash of Winter light, Ebenezer Rule was himself, for anybody to see. Looking like countless other men, lean, alert, preoccupied, his tall figure stooped, his smooth, pale face like a photograph too much retouched, this commonplace man took his place in the day almost as one of its externals. With that glorious pioneer trio, mineral, vegetable and animal; and with intellect, that worthy tool, he did his day's work. His face was one that had never asked itself, say, of a Winter morning:What else?And the Winter light searched him pitilessly to find that question somewhere in him.
Before the Simeon Buck North American Dry Goods Exchange, Simeon Buck himself had just finished shoveling his walk, and stoodwiping his snow shovel with an end of his muffler. When he saw Ebenezer, he shook the muffler at him, and then, over his left shoulder, jabbed the air with his thumb.
"Look at here," he said, his head reënforcing his gesture toward his show window, "look what I done this morning. Nice little touch—eh?"
In the show window of the Exchange—Dry Goods Exchange was just the name of it for the store carried everything—a hodgepodge of canned goods, lace curtains, kitchen utensils, wax figures, and bird cages had been ranged round a center table of golden oak. On the table stood a figure that was as familiar to Old Trail Town as was its fire engine and its sprinkling cart. Like these, appearing intermittently, the figure had seized on the imagination of the children and grown in association until it belonged to everybody, by sheer use and wont. It was apapier-mâchéSanta Claus, three feethigh, white-bearded, gray-gowned, with tall pointed cap—rather the more sober Saint Nicholas of earlier days than the rollicking, red-garbed Saint Nick of now. Only, whereas for years he had graced the window of the Exchange, bearing over his shoulder a little bough of green for a Christmas tree, this season he stood treeless, and instead bore on his shoulder a United States flag. On a placard below him Simeon had laboriously lettered:—
High Cost of Livingand too much fussMakes Folks want aSane ChristmasMe Too.        S. C.
"Ain't that neat?" said Simeon.
Ebenezer looked. "What's the flag for?" he inquired dryly.
"Well," said Simeon, "he had to carry something.I thought of a toy gun—but that didn't seem real appropriate. A Japanese umbrella wasn't exactly in season, seems though. A flag was about the only thing I could think of to have him hold. A flag is always kind of tasty, don't you think?"
"Oh, it's harmless," Ebenezer said, "harmless."
"No hustling business," Simeon pursued, "can be contented with justnotdoing something. It ain't enough not to have no Christmas. You've got to find something that'll express nothing, and express it forcible. In business, a minus sign," said Simeon, "is as good as a plus, if you can keep it whirling round and round."
This Ebenezer mulled and chuckled over as he went on down the street. He wondered what the Emporium would do to keep up with the Exchange. But in the Emporium windowthere was nothing save the usual mill-end display for the winter white goods sale.
Ebenezer opened the store door and put his head in.
"Hey," he shouted at Abel, back at the desk, "can't you keep up with Simeon's window?"
Abel came down the aisle between the lengths of white stuff plaited into folds at either side. The fire had just been kindled in the stove, and the air in the store was still frosty. Abel, in his overcoat, was blowing on his fingers.
"I ain't much of any heart to," said he, "but the night before Christmas I guess'll do about right for mine."
"What'll you put up?" Ebenezer asked, closing the door behind him.
"Well, sir," said Abel, "I ain't made up my mind full yet. But I'll be billblowed if I'm going to let Christmas go by without saying something about it in the window."
"Night before Christmas'll be too late to advertise anything," said Ebenezer. "If I was in trade," he said, half closing his eyes, "I'd fill my window up with useful articles—caps and mittens and stockings and warm underwear and dishes and toothbrushes. And I'd say: 'Might as well afford these on what you saved out of Christmas.' You'd ought to get all the advertising you can out of any situation."
Abel shook his head.
"I ain't much on such," he said lightly—and then looked intently at Ebenezer. "Jenny's been buying quite a lot here for her Christmas," he said.
Ebenezer was blank. "Jenny?" he said. "Jenny Wing? I heard she was here. I ain't seen her. Is she bound to keep Christmas anyhow?"
"Just white goods, it was," said Abel, briefly.
Ebenezer frowned his lack of understanding.
"I shouldn't think her and Bruce had much of anything to buy anything with," he said. "I s'pose you know," he added, "that Bruce, the young beggar, quit working for me in the City after the—the failure? Threw up his job with me, and took God knows what to do."
Abel nodded gravely. All Old Trail Town knew that, and honoured Bruce for it.
"Headstrong couple," Ebenezer added. "So Jenny's bent on having Christmas, no matter what the town decides, is she?" he added, "it's like her, the minx."
"I don't think it was planned that way," Abel said simply; "she's only buying white goods," he repeated. And, Ebenezer still staring, "Surely you know what Jenny's come home for?" Abel said.
A moment or two later Ebenezer was out on the street again, his face turned toward the factory. He was aware that Abel caught openthe door behind him and called after him, "Whenever you get ready to sell me that there star glass, you know...." Ebenezer answered something, but his responses were so often guttural and indistinguishable that his will to reply was regarded as nominal, anyway. He also knew that now, just before him, Buff Miles was proceeding with the snowplow, cutting a firm, white way, smooth and sparkling for soft treading, momentarily bordered by a feathery flux, that tumbled and heaped and then lay quiet in a glitter of crystals. But his thought went on without these things and without his will.
Bruce's baby! It would be a Rule, too.... the third generation, the third generation. And accustomed as he was to relate every experience to himself, measure it, value it by its own value to him, the effect of his reflection was at first single: The third generation of Rules.Was he as old as that?
It seemed only yesterday that Bruce had been a boy, in a blue necktie to match his eyes, and shoes which for some reason he always put on wrong, so that the buttons were on the inside. Bruce's baby. Good heavens! It had been a shock when Bruce graduated from the high school, a shock when he had married, but his baby ... it was incredible that he himself should be so old as that.
... This meant, then, that if Malcolm had lived, Malcolm might have had a child now....
Ebenezer had not meant to think that. It was as if the Thought came and spoke to him. He never allowed himself to think of that other life of his, when his wife, Letty, and his son Malcolm had been living. Nobody in Old Trail Town ever heard him speak of them or had ever been answered when Ebenezer had been spoken to concerning them. A high whiteshaft in the cemetery marked the two graves. All about them doors had been closed. But with the thought of this third generation, the doors all opened. He looked along ways that he had forgotten.
As he went he was unconscious, as he was always unconscious, of the little street. He saw the market square, not as the heart of the town, but as a place for buying and selling, and the little shops were to him not ways of providing the town with life, but ways of providing their keepers with a livelihood. Beyond these was a familiar setting, arranged that day with white background and heaped roofs and laden boughs, the houses standing side by side, like human beings. There they were, like the chorus to the thing he was thinking about. They were all thinking about it, too. Every one of them knew what he knew. Yet he never saw the bond, but he thought they were only the placeswhere men lived who had been his factory hands and would be so yet if he had not cut them away: Ben Torrey, shoveling off his front walk with his boy sweeping behind him; August Muir, giving his little girl a ride on the snow shovel; Nettie Hatch, clearing the ice out of her mail box, while her sister—the lame one—watched from her chair by the window, interested as in a real event. Ebenezer spoke to them from some outpost of consciousness which his thought did not pass. The little street was not there, as it was never there for him, as an entity. It was merely a street. And the little town was not an entity. It was merely where he lived. He went behind Buff Miles and the snowplow—as he always went—as if space had been created for folk to live in one at a time, and as if this were his own turn.
When he reached the bend from the Old Trail to the road where the factory was, heunderstood at last that he had been hearing a song sung over a great many times.
"...One for the way it all begun,Two for the way it all has run,What three'll be for I do forget,But what's to be has not been yet....So holly and mistletoe,So holly and mistletoe,So holly and mistletoe,Over and over and over, oh."
Buff, who was singing it, looked over his shoulder, and nodded.
"They said you can't have no Christmas on Christmas Day," he observed, grinning, "but I ain't heard nothing to prevent singing Christmas carols right up to the day that is the day."
Ebenezer halted.
"How old are you?" he abruptly demanded of Buff—whom he had known from Buff's boyhood.
"Thirty-three," said Buff, "dum it."
"You and Bruce about the same age, ain't you?" said Ebenezer.
Buff nodded.
"Well," said Ebenezer, "well...." and stood looking at him. Malcolm would have been his age, too.
"Going down to the factory, are you?" Buff said. "Wait a bit. I'll hike on down ahead of you."
He turned the snowplow down the factory road, as if he were making a triumphal progress, fashioning his snow borders with all the freedom of some sculpturing wind on summer clouds.
"One for the way it all begun,Two for the way it all has run...."
he sang to the soft push and thud and clank of his going. He swept a circle in front of the littlehouse that was the factory office, as if he had prepared the setting for a great event; and Ebenezer, following in the long, bright path, stepped into the hall of the house.
For thirty years he had been accustomed to enter the little house with his mind ready to receive its interior of desks and shelves and safes and files. To-day, quite unexpectedly, as he opened the door, the thing that was in his mind was a hall stair with a red carpet, and a parlour adjoining with figured stuff at the windows and a coal fire in the stove.... And thirty-five years ago it had been that way, when he and his wife and child had lived in the little house where his business was then just starting at a machine set up in the woodshed. As his project had grown and his factory had arisen in the neighbouring lots, the family had moved farther up in the town. Remembrance had been divorced from this place for decades.To-day, without warning, it waited for him on the threshold.
He had asked his bookkeeper to meet him there, but the man had not yet arrived. So Ebenezer himself kindled a fire in the rusty office stove, in the room where the figured curtains had been. The old account books that he wanted were not here on the shelves, nor in the cupboards of the cold adjoining rooms. They dated so far back that they had been filed away upstairs. He had not been upstairs in years, and his first impulse was to send his bookkeeper, when he should appear. But this, after all, was not Ebenezer's way; and he went up the stairs himself.
Each upper room was like some one unconscious in stupor or death, and still as distinct in personality as if in some ancient activity. There was the shelf he had put up in their room, the burned place on the floor where he hadtipped over a lamp, tattered shreds of the paper she had hung to surprise him, the little storeroom which they had cleared out for Malcolm when he was old enough, and whose door had had to be kept closed because innumerable uncaged birds lived there....
When he had gone through the piles of account books in a closet and those he sought were not found among them, he remembered the trunkful up in the tiny loft. He let down from the passage ceiling the ladder he had once hung there, and climbed up to the little roof recess.
Light entered through four broken panes of skylight. It fell in a faint rug on the dusty floor. The roof sloped sharply, and the trunks and boxes had been pressed back to the rim of the place. Ebenezer put his hands out, groping. They touched an edge of something that swayed. He laid hold of it anddrew it out and set down on the faint rug of light a small wooden hobbyhorse.
He stood staring at it, remembering it as clearly as if some one had set before him the old white gate which he bestrode in his own boyhood. It was Malcolm's hobbyhorse, dappled gray, the tail and the mane missing and the paint worn off—and tenderly licked off—his nose. When they had moved to the other house, he had bought the boy a pony, and this horse had been left behind. Something else stirred in his memory, the name by which Malcolm had used to call his hobbyhorse, some ringing name ... but he had forgotten. He thrust the thing back where it had been and went on with his search for the account books.
By the time he had found them and had got down again in the office, the bookkeeper was there, keeping up the fire and uttering, withsome acumen, comments on the obvious aspects of the weather, of the climate, of the visible universe. The bookkeeper was a young man, very ready to agree with Ebenezer for the sake of future favour, but with the wistfulness of all industrial machines constructed by men from human potentialities. Also, he had a cough and thin hands and a little family and no job.
"Get to work on this book," Ebenezer bade him; "it's the one that began the business."
The man opened the book, put it to his nearsighted eyes, frowned, and glanced up at Ebenezer.
"I don't think it seems...." he began doubtfully.
"Well, don't think," said Ebenezer, sharply; "that's not needful. Read the first entries."
"ACROSS THE STILL FIELDS CAME FLASHING THE POINT OF FLAME""ACROSS THE STILL FIELDS CAME FLASHING THE POINT OF FLAME"
The bookkeeper read:—
The bookkeeper paused again. Ebenezer, frowning, reached for the book. In his wife's fine faded writing were her accounts—after the eleven cents was a funny little face with which she had been wont to illustrate herletters. Ebenezer stared, grunted, turned to the last page of the book. There, in bold figures, the other way of the leaf, was his own accounting. He remembered now—he had kept his first books in the back of the account book that she had used for the house.
Ebenezer glanced sharply at his bookkeeper. To his annoyance, the man was smiling with perfect comprehension and sympathy. Ebenezer averted his eyes, and the bookkeeper felt dimly that he had been guilty of an indelicacy toward his employer, and hastened to cover it.
"Family life does cling to a man, sir," he said.
"Do you find it so?" said Ebenezer, dryly. "Read, please."
At noon Ebenezer walked home alone through the melting snow. And the Thought that hedid not think, but that spoke to him without his knowing, said:—
"Winning a puzzle—Two Dollars and a half. She never told me she tried to earn a little something that way."
VIII
"If we took the day before Christmas an' had it for Christmas," observed Tab Winslow, "would that hurt?"
"Eat your oatmeal," said Mis' Winslow, in the immemorial manner of adults.
"Would it, would it, would it?" persisted Tab, in the immemorial manner of youth.
"And have Theophilus Thistledown for dinner that day instead?" Mis' Winslow suggested with diplomacy.
On which Tab ate his oatmeal in silence.
But, like adults immemorially, Mis' Winslow bore far more the adult manner than its heart. After breakfast she stood staring out the pantry window at the sparrows on the bird box.
"It looks like Mary Chavah was going to be the only one in Trail Town to have any Christmas after all," she thought, "that little boy coming to her, so."
He was coming week after next, Mary had said, and Mis' Winslow had heard no word about it from anybody else. When "the biggest of the work" of the forenoon was finished, Mis' Winslow ran down the road to Ellen Bourne's. In Old Trail Town they always speak of it as running down, or in, or over, in the morning, with an unconscious suiting of terms to informalities.
Ellen was cleaning her silver. She had "six of each"—six knives, six forks, six spoons, all plated and seldom used, pewter with black handles serving for every day. The silver was cleaned often, though it was never on the table, save for company, and there never had been any company since Ellen had losther little boy from fever. Having no articulateness and having no other outlet for emotion, she fed her grief by small abstentions: no guests, no diversions, no snatches of song about her work. Yet she was sane enough, and normal, only in dearth of sane and normal outlets for emotion, for energy, for personality, she had taken these strange directions for yet unharnessed forces.
"Mercy," observed Mis' Winslow, warming her hands at the cooking stove, "you got more energy."
"... than family, I guess you mean," Ellen Bourne finished. Ellen was little and fair, with slightly drooping head, and eyebrows curved to a childlike reflectiveness.
"Well, I got consider'ble more family than I got energy," said Mis' Winslow, "so I guess we even it up. Seven-under-fifteen eats up energy like so much air."
"Hey, king and country," said Ellen's old father, whittling by the fire, "you got family enough, Ellen. You got your hands full of us." He rubbed his hands through his thin upstanding silver hair on his little pink head, and his fine, pink face took on the look of father which rarely intruded, now, on his settled look of old man.
"I donno what she'd do," said Ellen's mother, "with any more around here to pick up after. We're cluttered up enough, as it is." She was an old lady of whose outlines you took notice before your attention lay further upon her—angled waist, chin, lips, forehead, put on her a succession of zigzags. But her eyes were awake, and it was to be seen that she did not mean what she said and that she was looking anxiously at Ellen in the hope of having deceived her daughter. Ellen smiled at her brightly, and was not deceived.
"I keep pretty busy," she said.
Mis' Abby Winslow, who was not deceived either, hastened to the subject of Mary.
"I should think Mary Chavah had enough to do, too," she said, "but she's going to take Lily's little boy. Had you heard?"
"No," Ellen said, and stopped shaving silver polish.
"He's coming in two weeks," Mis' Winslow imparted; "she told me so herself. She's got his room fixed up with owls on the wall paper. She's bought him a washbasin with a rim of puppies, and a red stocking cap. I saw her."
"How old is he?" Ellen asked, and worked again.
"I never thought to ask her," Mis' Winslow confessed; "he must be quite a little fellow. But he's coming alone from some place out West."
"Hey, king and country," Ellen's father said; "I'd hate to have a boy come here, with my head the way it is."
"And keeping the house all upset," Ellen's mother said, and asked Mis' Winslow some question about Mary; and when she turned to Ellen again, "Why, Ellen Bourne," she said, "you've shaved up every bit of that cleaning polish and we're most done cleaning."
Ellen was looking at Mis' Winslow: "If you see her," Ellen said, "you ask her if I can't do anything to help."
Later in the day, happening in at Mis' Mortimer Bates's, Mis' Winslow found Mis' Moran there before her, and asked what they had heard "about Mary Chavah." Something in that word "about" pricks curiosity its sharpest. "Have you heard about Mary Chavah?" "It's too bad about Mary Chavah." "Isn't it queer about Mary Chavah?"—eachof these is like setting flame to an edge of tissue. Omit "about" from the language, and you abate most gossip. At Mis' Winslow's phrase, both women's eyebrows curved to another arc.
Mis' Winslow told them.
"Ain't that nice?" said Mis' Moran, wholeheartedly; "I couldn't bring up another, not with my back. But I'm glad Mary's going to know what it is...."
Mis' Mortimer Bates was glad, too, but being by nature a nonconformist, she took exception.
"It's an awful undertaking for a single-handed woman," she observed.
But this sort of thing she said almost unconsciously, and the other two women regarded it with no more alarm than any other reflex.
"It's no worse starting single-handed than being left single-handed," offered Mis' Winslowsomewhat ambiguously. "Lots does that's thrifty."
"Seems as if we could do a little something to help her get ready, seem's though," Mis' Moran suggested; "I donno what."
"I thought I'd slip over after supper and ask her," Mis' Winslow said; "maybe I'd best go now—and come back and tell you what she says."
Mis' Winslow found Mary Chavah sitting by her pattern bookcase, cutting out a pattern. Mary's face was flushed and her eyes were bright, and she went on with her pattern, thrilled by it as by any other creating.
"I just thought of this," Mary explained, looking vaguely at her visitor. "It come to me like a flash when I was working on Mis' Bates's basque. Will you wait just a minute, and then I'll explain it out to you."
Without invitation, Mis' Winslow laid asideher coat and waited, watching Mary curiously. She was cutting and folding and pinning her tissue paper, oblivious of any presence. Alarm, suspense, doubt, solution, triumph, came and went, and neither woman was conscious that the flame of creation burned and breathed in the room as truly as if the product were to be acknowledged.
"There!" Mary cried at last. "See it—can't you see it?—in gray wool?"
It was the pattern for a boy's topcoat, cunningly cut in new lines of seam and revers, with a pocket, a bit of braid, a line of buttons laid in as delicately as the factors in any other good composition. Mis' Winslow inevitably recognized its utility, exclaimed, and wondered.
"Mary Chavah! How did you know how to do things for children?"
"How did you know how?" Mary inquired coolly.
"Why, I've had 'em," Mis' Winslow offered simply.
"Do you honestly think that makes any difference?" Mary asked.
Mis' Winslow gasped, in the immemorial belief that the physical basis of motherhood is the guarantee of both spiritual and physical equipment.
"Could you have cut out that coat?" Mary asked.
Mis' Winslow shook her head. She was of those whose genius is for cutting over.
"Well," said Mary, "I could. It ain't having 'em that teaches you to do for 'em. You either know how, or you don't know how. That's all."
Mis' Winslow reflected that she could never make Mary understand—though any mother, she thought complacently, would know in a minute. The cutting of the coat did give herpause; but then, she summed it up, coat included, "Mary was queer"—and let it go at that.
"I didn't know," Mis' Winslow said then, "but what I could help you some about the little boy's coming. Seven-under-fifteen does teach you something, you've got to allow. Mebbe I could tell you something, now and then. Or if we could do anything to help you get ready for him...."
"Oh," said Mary, in swift penitence, "thank you, Mis' Winslow. After he comes, maybe. But these things now I don't mind doing. The real nuisance'll come afterwards, I s'pose."
Mis' Winslow smiled in soft triumph.
"Nuisance!" she said. "That's what I meant comes to you by having 'em. You don't think so much of the nuisance part as you did before."
"Then you don't look the thing in theface," said Mary, calmly. "That's all about that."
"Well," Mis' Winslow said pacifically, "when's he coming?"
"A week from Tuesday. A week from to-morrow," Mary told her.
Mis' Winslow looked at her intently, with the light of calculation in her narrowed eyes.
"A week from Tuesday," she said. "A week from Tuesday," she repeated. "A week from Tuesday!" she exclaimed. "Why, Mary Chavah. That's Christmas Eve."
It was some matter of recipes that was absorbing Mis' Bates and Mis' Moran when Mis' Winslow breathlessly returned to them. They were deep in tradition, and in method, its buttonhole relation. During the weary period when nutrition has been one of the two great problems the tremendous impulse that hasnourished the world was alive in the faces of the two women, a kind of creative fire, such as had burned in Mary at the cutting of her pattern. Asparagus escalloped with toast crumbs and butter was for the moment symbol of all humanity's will to keep alive.
"Ladies," said Mis' Winslow, with no other preface, "what do you think? Mary Chavah's little boy is coming from Idaho with a tag on, and when do you s'pose he's going to get here? Christmas Eve."
"Christmas Eve," repeated Mis' Bates, whose mind never lightly forsook old ways or embraced a contretemps; "what a funny time to travel."
"Likely catch the croup and be down sick on Mary's hands the first thing," said Mis' Moran. "It's a pity it ain't the Spring of the year."
Mis' Winslow looked at them searchingly to see if her thought too far outdistanced theirs.
"What struck me all of a heap," she said, "is his getting here then.Thatnight. Christmas Eve."
The three woman looked at one another.
"That's so," Mis' Moran said.
"Him—that child," Mis' Winslow put it, "getting here Christmas Eve, used to Christmas all his life, ten to one knowing in his head what he hopes he'll get. And no Christmas. And him with no mother. And her only a month or so dead."
"Well," said Mis' Mortimer Bates, "it's too bad it's happened so. But it has happened so. You have to say that to your life quite often, I notice. I don't know anything to do but to say it now."
Mis' Winslow had not taken off her cloak. She sat on the edge of her chair, with her hands deep in its pockets, her black knit "fascinator" fallen back from her hair. She waslooking down at her cloth overshoes, and she went on speaking as if she had hardly heard what Mis' Bates had interposed.
"He'll get in on the express," she said; "Mary said so. She don't have to go to the City to meet him. The man he travels with is going to put him on the train in the City. The little fellow'll get here after dark. After dark on Christmas Eve."
"And no time for anybody to warn him that there won't be any Christmas waiting for him," Mis' Moran observed thoughtfully.
"And like enough he'll bring a little something for Mary for a present," Mis' Winslow went on. "How'll she feelthen?"
"Ain't it too bad it ain't last year?" Mis' Moran mourned. "Everything comes too late or too soon or not at all or else too much so, 'seems though."
Mis' Bates's impulse to nonconformity hadnot prevented her forehead from being drawn in their common sympathy; but it was a sympathy that saw no practical way out and existed tamely as a high window and not as a wide door.
"Well," she said, "Mary ain't exactly the one to see it so. You'll never get her to feel bad about anybody not having a Christmas. I donno, if it was any other year, as she'd be planning any different."
"No," said Mis' Winslow, thoughtfully, "Mary won't do anything. But we could."
Mis' Bates's forehead took alarm—the alarm of the sympathetic hearer who is challenged to be doer.
"Do?" she repeated. "You can't go back on the paper at this late day. And you can't give him a Christmas and every other of our children not have any just because we're their parents and still living. There ain't a thing to do."
Mis' Winslow's eyes were still on her overshoes. "I don't believe there'snever'not a thing' to do," she said, "I don't believe it."
Mis' Bates looked scandalized. "That's nonsense," she said sharply, "and it's sacrilegious besides. When God means a thing to happen, there's not a thing to do. What about earthquakes and—and cancers?"
"I don't believe he ever means earthquakes and cancers," said Mis' Winslow, to her overshoes.
"Prevent 'em, then!" challenged Mis' Bates, triumphantly.
Mis' Winslow looked up. Her eyes were shining as they had shone sometimes when one of her seven-under-fifteen had given its first sign of consciousness of more than self.
"I believe we'll do it some day," she said. "I believe there's more to us than we've got any idea of. I believe there's so much to us thatone of us that found out about it and told the rest would get hounded out of town. But even now, I bet there's enough to us to do something every time—something every time, no matter what. And I believe there's something we can do about this little orphaned boy's Christmas, if we nip our brains on to it in the right place."
"Oh, dear," said Mis' Moran, "sometimes when I think about Christmas I almost wish we almost hadn't done the way we're going to do."
Mis' Bates stiffened.
"Jane Moran," she said, "do you think it's right to go head over heels in debt to celebrate the birth of our Lord?"
"No," said Mis' Moran, "I don't. But—"
"And you know nobody in Old Trail Town could afford any extravagance this year?"
"Yes," said Mis' Moran, "I do. Still—"
"And if part could and part couldn't, that makes it all the worse, don't it?"
"I know," said Mis' Moran, "I know."
"Well, then," said Mis' Bates triumphantly, "we've done the only way there is to do. Land knows, I wish there was another way. But there ain't."
Mis' Winslow looked up from her overshoes.
"I don't believe there's never 'no other way,'" she said. "There's always another way...."
"Not without money," said Mis' Bates.
"Money," Mis' Winslow said, "money. That's like setting up one day of peace on earth, good will to men, and asking admission to it."
"Mis' Winslow," said Mis' Moran, sadly, "what's the use of saying anything? You know as well as I do that Christmas is abused all up and down the land, and made a day of expense and extravagance and folks overspendingthemselves. And we've stopped all that in Old Trail Town. And now you're trying to make us feel bad."
"I ain't," said Mis' Winslow, "we felt bad about it already, and you know it. I'm glad we've stopped all that. But I wish't we had something to put in its place. I wish't we had."
"What in time are them children doing?" said Mis' Moran, abruptly.
The three women looked. On the side lawn, where a spreading balsam had been left untrimmed to the ground, stood little Emily Moran and Gussie and Bennet and Tab and Pep. And the four boys had their caps in their hands, and Gussie, having untied her own hood, turned to take off little Emily's. The wind, sweeping sharply round the corner of the house, blew their hair wildly and caught at muffler ends. Mis' Bates and Mis' Moran,with one impulse, ran to the side door, and Mis' Winslow followed.
"Emily," said Mis' Moran, "put on your hood this minute."
"Gussie," said Mis' Bates, "put on your cap this instant second. What you got it off for? And little Emily doing as you do—I'm su'prised at you."
The children consulted briefly, then Pep turned to the two women, by now coming down the path, Mis' Bates with her apron over her head, Mis' Moran in her shawl.
"Please," said Pep, "it's a funeral. An' we thought we'd ought to take our caps off till it gets under."
"A funeral," said Mis' Bates. "Who you burying?"
"It's just a rehearsal funeral," Pep explained; "the real one's going to be Christmas."
By now the two women were restoring hoodand stocking cap to the little girls, and it was Mis' Winslow, who had followed, who spoke to Pep.
"Who's dead, Pep?" she asked.
Between the belief of "Who's dead?" and the skepticism of "Who you burying?" the child was swift to distinguish.
"Sandy Claus," he answered readily.
Mis' Winslow stood looking down at him. Pep stepped nearer.
"We're doing it for little Emily," he said confidentially. "She couldn't get it straight about where Sandy Claus would be this Christmas. The rest of us—knew. But Emily's little—so we thought we'd play bury him on her 'count."
Mis' Bates, who had not heard, turned from Gussie.
"Going to dowhaton Christmas?" she exclaimed. "You ain't to do a thing on Christmas. Or ain't you grown up, after all?"
"Well, we thought a Christmas funeral wouldn't hurt," interposed Bennet, defensively. "Can't we even have a funeral for fun on Christmas?" he ended, aggrieved.
"It's Sandy Claus's funeral," observed little Emily putting a curl from her face.
"We're goin' dress up a Sandy Claus, you know," Pep added,sotto voce. "It's going to be right after breakfast, Christmas."
"Come on, come ahead, fellows," said Bennet; "I'll be corpse. Keep your lids on. I don't mind. Go ahead, sing."
Already Mis' Winslow was walking back to the house; the other two women overtook her; and from the porch they heard the children begin to sing:—
"Go bury Saint Nicklis...."
The rest was lost in the closing of the door.
Back in the sitting room the women stood looking at one another. Mis' Bates was frowningand all Mis' Moran's expressions were on the verge of dissolving; but in Mis' Winslow's face it was as though she had found some new way of consciousness.
"Ladies," Mis' Winslow said, "them children are out there pretending to bury Santa Claus—and so are we. And I bet we can't any of us do it."
In the room, there was a moment of silence in which familiar things seemed to join with their way of saying, "We've been keeping still all the while!" Then Mis' Winslow pushed her hair, regardless of its parting, straight back from her forehead,—a gesture with which she characterized any moment of stress.
"Ladies," she said, "I don't want we should go back on our paper, either. But mebbe there's more to Christmas than it knows about—or than we know about. Mebbe we can do something that won't interfere with thepaper we've all signed, and yet that'll be something that is something. Mebbe they's things to use that ain't never been used yet.... Oh, I donno. Nor I guess you donno. But let's us find out!"