XII
Ten minutes after Mary Chavah had left her house, every window was lighted, a fire was kindled in the parlour, and neighbours came from the dark and fell to work at the baskets they had brought.
It was marvelous what homely cheer arose. The dining-room table, stretched at its fullest length and white-covered, was various with the yellow and red of fruit and salads, the golden brown of cake and rolls, and the mosaic of dishes. The fire roared in the flat-topped stove on whose "wings" covered pans waited, and everywhere was that happy stir and touch and lift, that note of preparation which informs a time as sunshine or music will strike its key.
"My land, the oven—the warming oven.Mary ain't got one. However will we keep the stuff hot?" Mis' Winslow demanded. "What time is it?"
"We'd ought to had my big coffee-pot. We'd ought to set two going. I donno why I didn't think of it," Mis' Moran grieved.
"Well," said Mis' Mortimer Bates, "when the men get here—if they everdoget here—we'll send one of 'em off somewheres for the truck we forgot. What time is it?"
"Here comes a whole cartload of folks," Mis' Moran announced. "I hope and pray they've got the oysters—they'd ought to be popped in the baking oven a minute. What time did you say it is?"
"It's twenty minutes past seven," Mis' Winslow said, pushing her hair straight back, regardless of its part, "and we ain't ready within 'leven hundred miles."
"Well, if they only all get here," Mis' Batessaid, ringing golden and white stuffed eggs on Mary's blue platter; "it's their all being here when she gets here that I want. I ain't worried about the supper—much."
"The road's black with folks," Mis' Moran went on. "I'm sodeadlyafraid I didn't make enough sandwiches. Oh, I donno why it wasn't given me to make more, I'm sure."
"Who's seeing to them in the parlour? Who's getting their baskets out here? Where they finding a place for their wraps? Who's lighting the rest of the lamps? What time is it?" demanded Mis' Winslow, cutting her cakes.
"Oh," said Mis' Bates from a cloud of brown butter about the cooking stove, "I donno whether we've done right. I donno but we've broke our word to the Christmas paper. I donno whether we ain't going to get ourselves criticized for this as never folks was criticized before."
Mis' Moran changed her chair to the draughtless corner back of the cooking stove and offered to stir the savoury saucepan.
"I know it," she said, "I know it. We never planned much in the first start. It grew and it grew like it grew with its own bones. But mebbe there's some won't believe that, one secunt."
Mis' Winslow straightened up from the table and held out a hand with fingers frosting-tipped.
"Well," she said, with a great period, "if wehavebroke our word to the Christmas paper, I'd rather stand up here with my word broke this way than with it kept so good it hurt me. Is it half-past seven yet?"
"I wish Ellen Bourne was here," Mis' Bates observed. "She sent her salad dressing over and lent her silver and her Christmas rose for the table—but come she would not. I wonderif she couldn't come over now if we sent after her, last minute?"
Simeon Buck, appearing a few minutes later at the kitchen door to set a basket inside, was dispatched for Ellen Bourne, the warming oven, and the coffee-pot, collectively. He took with him Abel Ames, who was waiting for him without. And it chanced that they knocked at the Bournes' door just after Ben Helders had driven away with the little boy, so that the men found the family still in the presence of the little tree.
"Hello," said Simeon, aghast, "Christmassing away all by yourselves, I'll be bound, like so many thieves. I rec'lect not seeing your names on the paper."
"No, I didn't sign," Ellen said. "I voted against it that night at the town meeting, but I guess nobody heard me."
"Well," said Simeon, "and so here you'vegot a Christmas of your own going forward, neat as a kitten's foot—"
"Ain't you coming over to Mary Chavah's?" Abel broke in with a kind of gentleness. "All of you?"
Ellen smote her hands together.
"I meant to go over later," she said, "and take—" She paused. "I thought we'd all go over later," she said. "I forgot about it. Why, yes, I guess we can go now, can't we? All three of us?"
Abel Ames stood looking at the tree. He half guessed that she might have dressed it for no one who would see it. He looked at Ellen and ventured what he thought.
"Ellen," he said, "if you ain't going to do anything more with that tree to-night, why not take some of the things off, and have Matthew set it on his shoulder, and bring it over to Mary's for the boy that's coming?"
Ellen hesitated. "Would they like it?" she asked. "Would folks?"
Abel smiled. "I'll take the blame," he said, "and you take the tree." And seeing Simeon hesitate, "Now let's stop by for Mis' Moran's coffee-pot," he added. "Hustle up. The Local must be in."
So presently the tree, partly divested of its brightness, was carried through the streets to the other house—in more than the magic which attends the carrying in the open road of a tree, a statue, a cart filled with flowers,—for the tree was like some forbidden thing that still would be expressed.
"Hemight not come till Christmas is 'way past," Ellen thought, following. "She'll leave it standing a few days. We can go down there and look at it—if he comes."
"THEIR WAY LED EAST BETWEEN HIGH BANKS OF SNOW""THEIR WAY LED EAST BETWEEN HIGH BANKS OF SNOW"
A little way behind them, Simeon and Abel, with the coffee-pot and the warming oven, were hurrying back to Mary's. They went down the deserted street where Abel's candle burned and Simeon's saint stood mute.
"When I was a little shaver," Abel said, "they used to have me stand in the open doorway Christmas Eve, and hold a candle and say a verse. I forget the verse. But I've always liked the candle in doors or windows, like to-night. Look at mine over there now—ain't it like somebody saying something?"
"Well," said Simeon, not to be outdone, "when we come by my window just now, the light hit down on it and I could of swore I see the saint smile."
"Like enough," said Abel, placidly, "like enough. You can't put Christmas out. I see that two weeks ago." He looked back at his own window. "If the little kid that come in the store last Christmas Eve tries to come in again to-night," he said, "he won't find it all pitchdark, anyway. I'd like to know who he was...."
Near the corner that turned down to the Rule Factory, they saw Ebenezer Rule coming toward them on the Old Trail Road. They called to him.
"Hello, Ebenezer," said Abel, "ain't you coming in to Mary Chavah's to-night?"
"I think not," Ebenezer answered.
"Come ahead," encouraged Simeon.
As they met, Abel spoke hesitatingly.
"Ebenezer," he said, "I was just figuring on proposing to Simeon here, that we stop in to your house—I was thinking," he broke off, "how would it be for you and him and me, that sort of stand for the merchandise end of this town, to show up at Mary's house to-night—well, it's the women have done all the work so far—and I was wondering how it would be for us three to get there with some little thingfor that little kid that's coming to her—we could find something that wouldn't cost much—it hadn'toughtto cost much, 'count of our set principles. And take it to him...." Abel ended doubtfully.
Ebenezer simply laughed his curious succession of gutturals.
"Crazy to Christmas after all, ain't you?" he said.
But Simeon wheeled and stared at Abel. For defection in their own camp he had never looked.
"I knew you'd miss it—I knew you'd miss it!" Simeon said excitedly, "cut paper and fancy tassels and—"
"No such thing," said Abel, shortly. "I was thinking of that boy getting here, that's all. And I couldn't see why we shouldn't do our share—which totin' coffee-pots and warming ovensain't, as I see it."
"Well, but my heavens, man!" said Simeon, "it's Christmas! You can't go giving anybody anything, can you?"
"I don't mean give it to himforChristmas at all," protested Abel. "I mean give it to him just like you would any other day. We'd likely take him something if it wasn't Christmas? Sort of to show our good will, like the women with the supper? Well, why not take him some little thing even if it is Christmas?"
"Oh, well," said Simeon, "that way. If you make it plain it ain'tforChristmas—Of course, we ain't to blame for what day his train got in on."
"Sure we ain't," said Abel, confidently.
Ebenezer was moving away.
"We'll call in for you in half an hour or so," Abel's voice followed him. "We'll slip out after the boy gets there. There won't be time before ... what say, Ebenezer?"
"I think not," said Ebenezer; "you don't need me."
"Well—congratulations anyhow!" Abel called.
Ebenezer stopped on the crossing.
"What for?" he asked.
"Man alive," said Abel, "don't you know Bruce has got a little girl?"
"No," said Ebenezer, "I—didn't know. I'm obliged to you."
He turned from them, but instead of crossing the street to go to his house, he faced down the little dark street to the factory. He had walked past Jenny's once that evening, but without being able to force himself to inquire. He knew that Bruce had come a day or two before, but Bruce had sent him no word. Bruce had never sent any word since the conditions of the failure had been made plain to him, when he had resigned his position, refusedthe salary due him, and left Old Trail Town. Clearly, Ebenezer could make no inquiry under those circumstances, he told himself. They had cut themselves off from him, definitely.
How definitely he was cut off from them was evident as he went down the dark street to the factory. He was strangely quickened, from head to foot, with the news of the birth of Bruce's child. He went down toward the factory simply because that was the place that he knew best, and he wanted to be near it. He walked in the snow of the mid-road, facing the wind, steeped in that sense of keener being which a word may pour in the veins until the body flows with it. The third generation; the next of kin,—that which stirred in him was a satisfaction almost physical that his family was promised its future.
As he went he was unconscious, as he was always unconscious, of the little street. But,perhaps because Abel had mentioned Mary's house, he noted the folk, bound thither, whom he was meeting: Ben Torry, with a basket, and his two boys beside him; August Muir, carrying his little girl and a basket, and his wife following with a basket. Ebenezer spoke to them, and after he had passed them he thought about them for a minute.
"Quite little families," he thought. "I s'pose they get along.... I wonder how much Bruce is making a week?"
Nellie Hatch and her lame sister were watching at the lighted window, as if there were something to see.
"Must be kind of dreary work for them—living," he thought, "... I s'pose Bruce is pretty pleased ... pretty pleased."
At the corner, some one spoke to him with a note of pleasure in his voice. It was his bookkeeper, with his wife and two partly growndaughters. Ebenezer thought of his last meeting with his bookkeeper, and remembered the man's smile of perfect comprehension and sympathy, as if they two had something in common.
"Family life does cling to a man," he had said.
That was his wife on his arm, and their two daughters. On that salary of his.... Was it possible, it occurred to Ebenezer, that she was saving egg money, earning sewing money, winning prizes for puzzles—as Letty had done?
Outside the factory, the blue arc light threw a thousand shadows on the great bulk of the building, but left naked in light the little office. He stood looking at it, as he so rarely saw it, from part way across the road. Seen so, it took on another aspect, as if it had emerged from some costuming given it by the years. The office was painted brown, and discoloured. He saw it white, with lozenge panes unbroken, floweredcurtains at the windows, the light of lamp and wood stove shining out. And as sharply as if it had been painted on the air, he saw some unimportant incident in his life there—a four-wheel carriage drawn up at the door with some Christmas guests just arriving, and himself and Letty and Malcolm in the open doorway. He could not remember who the guests were, or whether he had been glad to see them, and he had no wish in the world to see those guests again. But the simple, casual, homely incident became to him the sign of all that makes up everyday life, the everyday life of folk—of folks—from which he had so long been absent.
His eye went down the dark little street where were the houses of the men who were his factory "hands." Just for a breath he saw them as they were,—the chorus to the thing he was thinking about. They were all thinking about it, too. Every one of them knewwhat he knew.... Just for a breath he saw the little street as it was: an entity. Then the sight closed, but through him ran again that sense of keener being, so poignant that now, as his veins flowed with it, something deeper within him almost answered.
He wheeled impatiently from where he stood. He wanted to do something. At the end of the street he could see them crossing under the light, on their way to Mary Chavah's. Abel and Simeon might stop for him ... but how could he go there, among the folk whom he had virtually denied their Christmas? What would they have to say to him? Yet what they should say would, after all, matter nothing to him ... and perhaps he would hear them say something about Bruce and Jenny. Still, he had nothing to take there, as Abel had suggested. What had he that a boy would want to have? Unless....
He thought for a moment. Then he crossed the street to what had been his house. He went in, seeing again the hallway and stair, red-carpeted, and the door opened into the lamplit room beyond. He found and lighted an end of candle that he knew, and made his way up the stair. There he set the candle down and lowered the ladder that led to the loft.
In the loft, a gust of wind from the skylight blew out the flame of his little wick. In the darkness, the broken panes above his head looked down on him like a face, and that face the sky, thousand-eyed. He mounted a box, pushed up the frame, and put out his head. The sky lay near. The little town showed, heaped roofs and lifting smoke, and here and there a light. Sparkling in their midst was the light before the Town Hall, like an eye guarding something and answering to the light before his factory and to the otherlight before the station, where the world went by. High over all, climbing the east, came Capella, and seemed to be standing above the village.
As he looked, the need to express what he felt beset Ebenezer.
"Quite a little town," he thought, "quite a little town."
He closed the glass, and groped in the darkness to where the roof, sloping sharply, met the door. There he touched an edge of something that swayed, and he laid hold of and drew out that for which he had come: Malcolm's hobbyhorse.
Downstairs in the hall he set it on the floor, examined it, rocked it with one finger. The horse returned to its ancient office as if it were irrevocably ordained to service. Ebenezer, his head on one side, stood for some time regarding it. Then he slipped something in its wornsaddle-pocket. Last, he lifted and settled the thing under his arm.
"I donno but I might as well walk around by Mary Chavah's house," he thought. "I needn't stay long...."
At Mary Chavah's house the two big parlours, the hall, the stairs, the dining room, even the tiny bedroom with the owl wall paper, were filled with folk come to welcome the little boy. And on the parlour table, set so that he should see it when first he entered, blazed Ellen Bourne's little tree. The coffee was hot on the stove, good things were ready on the table, and the air was electric with expectation, with the excitement of being together, with the imminent surprise to Mary, and with curiosity about the little stranger from Idaho.
"What'll we all say when he first comes in?" somebody asked.
"Might say 'Merry Christmas,'" two or three suggested.
"Mercy, no!" replied shocked voices, "not to Mary Chavah, especially."
But however they should say it, the time was quick with cheer.
At quarter to eight the gate clicked. The word passed from one to another, and by the time a step sounded on the porch the rooms were still, save for the whispers, and a voice or two that kept unconsciously on in some remote corner. But instead of the door opening to admit Mary and her little boy, a hesitating knock sounded.
Those nearest to the door questioned one another with startled looks, and one of them threw the door open. On the threshold stood Affer, the telegraph operator, who thrust in a very dirty hand and a yellow envelope.
"We don't deliver nights," he said, "but I thought she'd ought to have this one. I'm going home to wash up, and then I'll be back," he added, and left them staring at one another around the little lighted tree.
XIII
Before they could go out to find Mary, as a dozen would have done, she was at the threshold, alone. She seemed to understand without wonder why they were there, and with perfect naturalness she turned to them to share her trouble.
"He hasn't come," she said simply.
Her face was quite white, and because they usually saw her with a scarf or shawl over her head, she looked almost strange to them, for she wore a hat. Also she had on an unfamiliar soft-coloured wrap that had been her mother's and was kept in tissues. She had dressed carefully to go to meet the child. "I might as well dress up a little," she had thought, "and I guess he'll like colours best."
Almost before she spoke they put in her hands the telegram. They were pressing toward her, dreading, speechless, trying to hear what should be read. She stepped nearer to the light of the candles on the little tree, read, and reread in the stillness. When she looked up her face was so illumined that she was strange to them once more.
"Oh," she said, "it's his train. It was late for the Local. They've put him on the Express, and it'll drop him at the draw."
The tense air crumpled into breathings, and a soft clamour filled the rooms as they told one another, and came to tell her how glad they were. She pulled herself together and tried to slip into her natural manner.
"It did give me a turn," she confessed; "I thought he'd been—he'd got...."
She went into the dining room, still without great wonder that they were all there; butwhen she saw the women in white aprons, and the table arrayed, and on it Ellen Bourne's Christmas rose blooming, she broke into a little laugh.
"Oh," she said, "you done this a-purpose forhim."
"I hope, Mary, you won't mind," Mis' Mortimer Bates said formally, "it being Christmas, so. We'd have done just the same on any other day."
"Oh," Mary said, "mind!"
They hardly knew her, she moved among them so flushed and laughing and conformable, praising, admiring, thanking them.
"Honestly, Mary," said Mis' Moran, finally, "we'll have you so you can't tell Christmas from any other day—it'll be so nice!"
The Express would be due at the "draw" at eight-thirty—eight-thirty-three, Affer told her when he came back, "washed up." Marywatched the clock. She had not milked or fed the cows before she went, because she had thought thathewould like to watch the milking, and it would be something for him to do on that first evening. So, when she could, she took her shawl and slipped out to the shed for the pails and her lantern, and went alone to the stable.
Mary opened the door, and her lantern made a golden room of light within the borderless shadow. The hay smell from the loft and the mangers, the even breathing of the cows, the quiet safety of the place, met her. She hung her lantern in its accustomed place, and went about her task.
Her mind turned back to the time that had elapsed since the Local came in at the Old Trail Town station. She had stood there, with the children about her, hardly breathing while the two Trail Town men and a solitarytraveling man had alighted. There had been no one else. In terror lest the child should be carried past the station, she had questioned the conductor, begged him to go in and look again, parleyed with him until he had swung his lantern. Then she had turned away with the children, utterly unable to formulate anything. There was no other train to stop at Old Trail Town that night. It must mean disaster ... indefinable disaster that had somehow engulfed him and had not pointed the way that he had gone. She recalled, now, that she had refused Buff Miles's invitation to ride, but had suffered him to take the children. Then she had set out to walk home.
On that walk home she had unlived her plans. Obscure speculations, stirring in her fear, at first tormented her, and then gave place to the conclusion that John had changed his mind, had seen perhaps that he could notafter all let the child go so far, had found some one else to take him; and that the morrow would bring a letter to tell her so. In any case, she was not to have him. The conclusion swept her with the vigour of certainty. But instead of the relief for which she would have looked, that certainty gave her nothing but desolation. Until the moment when the expectation seemed to die she had not divined how it had grown into her days, as subtly as the growth of little cell and little cell. And now the weight upon her, instead of lifting, soaring in the possibility of the return of her old freedom, lay the more heavily, and her sense of oppression became abysmal.... "Something is going to happen," she had kept saying. "Somethinghashappened...."
So she had got on toward her own door. There the swift relief was like an upbearing into another air, charged with more intimatelargess for life. Now Mary sat in the stable in a sense of happy reality that clothed all her feeling—rather, in a sense of superreality, which she did not know how to accept.... So, slowly singing in her as she sat at her task, came that which had waited until she should open the way....
In the stable there was that fusion of shadow and light in which captive spaces reveal all their mystery. Little areas of brightness, of functioning; then dimness, then the deep. Brightness in which surfaces of worn floor, slivered wall, dusty glass, showed values more specific than those of colour. Dimness in which gray rafters with wavering edges, rough posts each with an accessory of shadow, an old harness in grotesque loops, ceased to be background and assumed rôles. The background itself, modified by many an unshadowed promontory, was accented in caverns of manger androof. The place revealed mystery and beauty in the casual business of saying what had to be said.
Mary filled her arms with hay, and turned to the manger. The raw smell of the clover smote her, and it was as sweet as Spring repromised. She stood for a moment with the hay in her arms, her breath coming swiftly....
Down on the marsh, not half an hour away, he was coming to her, to be with her, as she had grown used to imagining him. She had thought that he was not coming, and he was almost here.... She knew now that she was glad of this, no matter what it brought her; glad, as she had never known how to be glad of anything before. He was coming—there was a thrill in the words every time that she thought them. Already she was welcoming him in her heart, already he was here, already he was born into her life....
... With a soft, fierce rush of feeling not her own, it seemed to her that her point of perception was somehow drawn inward, as if she no longer saw from the old places, as if something in her that was not used to looking, looked. In the seat where her will had been was no will. But somewhere in there, beyond all conflict, she feltherselfto be. Beyond a thousand mists, volitions, little seekings for comfort, rebellions at toil, the cryings of personality for its physical own, she stood at last, herself within herself. And that which, through the slow process of her life and of life and being immeasurably before her, had been seeking its expression, building up its own vehicle of incarnation, quite suddenly and simply flowered. It was as if the weight and the striving within her had been the pangs of some birth. She stood, as light of heart as a little child, filled with peace and tender exaltation.
These filled her on the road which she took to meet him—and took alone, for she would have no one go with her. ("What's come over Mary?" they asked one another in the kitchen. "She acts like she was somebody else and herself too.") The night lay about her as any other winter night, white and black,—a clean white world on which men set a pattern of highway and shelter, a clean dark sky on which a story is written in stars; and between—no mystery, but only growth. Out toward the drawbridge the road was not well broken. She went, stumbling in the ruts and hardly conscious of them. And Mary thought—
"Something in me is glad.
"It's as if something in me knew how to be glad more than I ever knew how alone.
"For I'm nothing but me, here in Old TrailTown, and yet it's as if Something had come, secret, on purpose to make me know why to be glad.
"It's something in the world bigger than I know about.
"It's in me, and I guess it was in folks before me, and it will be in folks always.
"It isn't just for Ebenezer Rule and the City.
"It's for everybody, here in Old Trail Town as much as anywhere.
"It's for folks that's hungry for it, and it's for folks that ain't.
"It's always been in the world and it always will be in the world, and some day we'll know what to do."
But this was hardly in her feeling, or even in her thought; it lay within her thanksgiving that the child was coming; and heonly a little way down there across the marsh.
... It seemed quite credible and even fitting that the mighty, rushing, lighted Express, which seldom stopped at Old Trail Town, should that night come thundering across the marsh, and slow down at the drawbridge for her sake and the little boy's. Several coaches' length from where she stood she saw a lantern shine where they were lifting him down. She ran ankle deep through the thinly crusted snow.
"That'sit!" said the conductor. "All the way from Idaho!" and swung his lantern from the step. "Merry Christmas!" he called back.
The little thing clasping Mary's hand suddenly leaped up and down beside her.
"Merry Christmas! Merry Christmas! Merry Christmas!" he shouted with all his might.
Mary Chavah stood silent, and as the train drew away held out her hand, still in silence, for the boy to take.
As the noise of the train lessened, he looked up.
"Are you her?" he asked soberly.
"Yes," she cried joyously, "I'm her!"
Their way led east between high banks of snow. At the end of the road was the village, looking like something lying on the great white plate of the meadows and being offered to one who needed it. At the far end of the road which was Old Trail Road, hung the blue arc light of the Town Hall, center to the constellation of the home lights and the shop lights and the street lights. There, in her house, were her neighbours, gathered to do no violence to that Christmas paper of theirs, since there was to be no "present trading," no "money spending."Nevertheless, they had drawn together by common consent, and it was Christmas Eve. She knew it now: There is no arbitrary shutting out of that for which Christmas stands. As its spirit was in the village, so its spirit is in the world—denied indeed, put upon, crowned with mockery, dragged in the dirt, bearing alien burdens, but through it all immaculate, waiting for men to cross the threshold at which it never ceases to beckon to a common heritage: Home of the world, with a thousand towers shining with uncounted lights, lying very near—above the village, at the end of the Old Trail Road, upon the earth at the end of a yet unbeaten path—where men face the sovereign fact of humanhood.
... But all this lay within Mary's dumb thanksgiving that the child was running at her side. And the vision that she sawstreamed down from Capella, of the brightness of an hundred of our suns, the star that stood in the east above the village where she lived.
Lanterns glowed through the roadside shrubbery, little kindly lights, like answers; and at a bend in the road voices burst about them, and Buff Miles and the children, Gussie and Bennet and Tab and Pep and little Emily, ran, singing, and closed about Mary and the child, and went on with them, slipping into the "church choir Christmas carols," and more, that Buff had been fain to teach them. The music filled the quiet night, rose, in the children's voices, like an invocation to all time.
"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 will be has not been yet.So holly and mistletoe,So holly and mistletoe,So holly and mistletoeOver and over and over, oh!"
Between songs the children whispered together for a minute.
"What's the new little boy's name?" asked Tab.
Nobody knew. That would be something to find out.
"Well," Tab said, "to-morrow morning, right after breakfast, I'm going to bring Theophilus Thistledown down andlendhim to him."
"Ain't we going to bury Sandy Claus right after breakfast?" demanded Gussie.
And all the children, even little Emily, answered:
"No, let's not."
They all went on together and enteredMary's gate. Those within,—hearing the singing, had opened the door, and they brought them through that deep arch of warmth and light. Afterward, no one could remember whether or not the greeting had been "Merry Christmas," but there could have been no mistaking what everybody meant.
XIV
At his gate in the street wall lined with snow-bowed lilacs and mulberries, Ebenezer Rule waited in the dark for his two friends to come back. He had found Kate Kerr in his kitchen methodically making a jar of Christmas cookies. ("You've got to eat, if it is Christmas," she had defended herself in a whisper.) And to her stupefaction he had dispatched her to Mary Chavah's with her entire Christmas baking in a basket.
"I don't believe they've got near enough for all the folks I see going," he explained it.
While he went within doors he had left the hobbyhorse in the snow, close to the wall; and he came back there to wait. The street had emptied. By now every one had gone toMary Chavah's. Once he caught the gleam of lanterns down the road and heard children's voices singing. For some time he heard the singing, and after it had stopped he fancied that he heard it. Startled, he looked up into the wide night lying serene above the town, and not yet become vexed by the town's shadows and interrupted by their lights. It was as if the singing came from up there. But the night kept its way of looking steadily beyond him.
... It came to Ebenezer that the night had not always been so unconscious of his presence. The one long ago, for example, when he had slept beneath this wall and dreamed that he had a kingdom; those other nights, when he had wandered abroad with his star glass. Then the night used to be something else. It had seemed to meet him, to admit him. Now he knew, and for a long time hadknown, that when he was abroad in the night he was there, so to say, without its permission. As for men, he could not tell when relation with them had changed, when he had begun to think of them as among the externals; but he knew that now he ran along the surface of them and let them go. He never met them asOthers, as belonging to countless equations of which he was one term, and they playing that wonderful, near rôle ofOther. Thus he had got along, as if his own individuation were the only one that had ever occurred and as if all the mass of mankind—and the Night and the Day—were undifferentiated from some substance all inimical.
Then this vast egoism had heard itself expressed in the mention of Bruce's baby—the third generation. But by the great sorcery wherewith Nature has protected herself, this mammoth sense of self, when it extends unto thenext generations, becomes a keeper of the race. Ebenezer had been touched, relaxed, disintegrated. Here was an interest outside himself which was yet no external. Vast, level reaches lay about that fact, and all long unexplored. But these were peopled. He saw them peopled....
... As in the cheer and stir within the house where that night were gathered his townsfolk, his neighbours, his "hands." He had thought that their way of meeting him, if he chose to go among them, would matter nothing. Abruptly now he saw that it would matter more than he could bear. They were in there at Mary's, the rooms full of little families, getting along as best they could, taking pride in their children, looking ahead, looking ahead—and they would not know that he understood. He could not have defined offhand what it was that he understood. But it had, it seemed,something to do with Letty's account book and Bruce's baby....
Gradually he let himself face what it was that he was wanting to do. And when he faced that, he left the hobbyhorse where it was under the wall and went into the street.
He took his place among the externals of the Winter night, himself unconscious of them. The night, with all its content, a thing of explicable fellowships, lay waiting patiently for those of its children who knew its face. In the dark and under the snow the very elements of earth and life were obscured, as in some clear wash correcting too strong values. He moved along the village, and now his dominant consciousness was the same consciousness in which that little village lived. But he knew it only as the impulse that urged him on toward Jenny's house. If he went to Jenny's, if he signified so that he wished not to be cut off from her andBruce and the baby, if he asked Bruce to come back to the business, these meant a lifetime of modification to the boy's ideals for that business, and modification to the lives of the "hands" back there in Mary Chavah's house—and to something else....
"What else?" he asked himself.
Mechanically he looked up and saw the heavens crowded with bright watchers. In that high field one star, brighter than the others, hung over the little town. He found himself trying to see the stars as they had looked to him years ago, when they and the night had seemed to mean something else....
"What else?" he asked himself.
The time did not seem momentous. It was only very quiet. Nothing new was there, nothing different. It had always been so. The night lay in a sovereign consciousness of being more than just itself. "Do you thinkthat you are all just you and nothing else?" it was seen to be compassionately asking.
"What else?" Ebenezer asked himself.
He did not face this yet. But in that hour which seemed pure essence, with no attenuating sound or touch, he kept on up the hill toward Jenny's house.
Mary Chavah left ajar the door from the child's room to the room where, in the dark, the tree stood. He had wanted the door to be ajar "so the things I think about can go back and forth," he had explained.
In the dining room she wrapped herself in the gray shawl and threw up the two windows. New air swept in, cleansing, replacing, prevailing. Her guests had left her early, as is the way in Old Trail Town. Then she had had her first moments with the child alone. He had done the things that she had not thought ofhis doing but had inevitably recognized: Had delayed his bed-going, had magnified and repeated the offices of his journey, had shown her the contents of his pockets, had repeatedly mentioned by their first names his playmates in Idaho and shown surprise when she asked him who they were. Mary stood now by the window conscious of a wonderful thing: That it seemed as if he had been there always.
In the clean inrush of the air she was aware of a faint fragrance, coming to her once and again. She looked down at her garden, lying wrapped in white and veiled with black, like some secret being. Three elements were slowly fashioning it, while the fourth, a soft fire within her, answered them. The fragrance made it seem as if the turn of the year were very near, as if its prophecy, evident once in the October violets in her garden, were come again. But when she moved, she knew that the fragrance came from within the room, from Ellen Bourne's Christmas rose, blossoming on the table.... Above, her eye fell on the picture that Jenny had brought to her on that day when she had all but emptied the house, as if in readiness. Almost she understood now the passionate expectation in that face, not unlike the expectation of those who in her dream had kept saying "You."
"THE THREE MEN STEPPED INTO THE LAMPLIGHT""THE THREE MEN STEPPED INTO THE LAMPLIGHT"
There was a movement in her garden and on the walk footsteps. The three men stepped into the rectangle of lamplight—Abel, Ames and Simeon, who had left the party a little before the others and, hurrying back with the gifts that they planned, had met Ebenezer at his gate, getting home from Jenny's house. In Abel's arms was something globed, like a little world; in Simeon's, the tall, gray-gowned Saint Nicholas taken from the Exchange window, the lettered sign absent, but the little flagstill in his hand; and Ebenezer was carrying the hobbyhorse. If at him the other two had wondered somewhat, they had said nothing, in that fashion of treating the essential which is as peculiar to certain simple, robust souls as to other kinds of great souls.
"Has the boy gone to bed?" Abel asked without preface.
"Yes," Mary answered, "he has. I'm sorry."
"Never mind," Simeon whispered, "you can give him these in the morning."
Mary, her shawl half hiding her face, stooped to take what the three lifted.
"They ain't presents, you know," Abel assured her positively. "They're just—well, just to let him know."
Mary set the strange assortment on the floor of the dining room—the things that were to be nothing in themselves, only just "to let him know."
"Thank you for him," she said gently. "And thank you for me," she added.
Ebenezer fumbled for a moment at his beaver hat, and took it off. Then the other two did so to their firm-fixed caps. And with an impulse that came from no one could tell whom, the three spoke—the first time hesitatingly, the next time together and confidently.
"Merry Christmas. Merry Christmas," they said.
Mary Chavah lifted her hand.
"Merry Christmas!" she cried.
The following pages contain advertisements of Macmillan books by the same author, and new fiction.
THE OTHER BOOKS OF MISS GALE
Mothers to Men
Decorated cloth, 12mo, $1.50 net; by mail, $1.62
The author is singularly successful in detaching herself from all the wear and tear of modern life and has produced a book filled with sweetness, beautiful in ideas, charming in characterizations, highly contemplative, and evidencing a philosophy of life all her own.
"One of the most widely read of our writers of short fiction."—The Bookman.
Friendship Village
Cloth, 12mo, $1.50
"As charming as an April day, all showers and sunshine, and sometimes both together, so that the delighted reader hardly knows whether laughter or tears are fittest."—The New York Times.
The Loves of Pelleas and Etarre
Cloth, 12mo, $1.50
"It contains the sort of message that seems to set the world right for even the most depressed, and can be depended upon to sweeten every moment spent over it."—San Francisco Chronicle.
Friendship Village Love Stories
Decorated cloth, gilt top, 12mo, $1.50
Miss Gale's pleasant and highly individual outlook upon life has never been revealed to better advantage than in these charming stories of the heart affairs of the young people of Friendship Village.
THE MACMILLAN COMPANYPublishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York
NEW MACMILLAN FICTION
A Man's World
ByALBERT EDWARDS
Cloth, 12mo, $1.25 net; postpaid, $1.36
"A striking book that should attract wide attention."—New York Tribune.
"There never has been a book like 'A Man's World.' ... A novelist of skill and power.... His greatest gift is his power of creating the illusion of reality.... Vividness and conviction unite in the wonderful portrait of Nina.... There never has been such a character in American fiction before.... Nina will be one of the famous twentieth century heroines."—Brooklyn Eagle.
"It is a great book, full of the real things of life.... Zola might have written such a book had he lived in New York and not in Paris. Yet, it is doubtful if he could have told a better tale in a better way, for Nina and Ann are just as true to life as Nana and Ninon."—Chicago Record-Herald.
"The book is far from ordinary and its philosophy is extraordinary."—New York Times Book Review.
"A new type of human document—written in all sincerity and honesty."—New York Herald.
My Love and I
ByMARTIN REDFIELD
Cloth, 12mo, $1.35 net; postpaid, $1.47
Even the publishers do not know who the author of this remarkable book is. Its pages tell with powerful reality the struggle of a heart against the subtler problems of love and a solution not usually found in fiction. It is not an ordinary love story; it is, on the contrary, the intimate confession of a man's life.
THE MACMILLAN COMPANYPublishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York
NEW MACMILLAN FICTION—Continued
The Rich Mrs. Burgoyne
ByKATHLEEN NORRIS Author of "Mother"
Decorated cloth, 12mo, illustrated, $1.25 net; postpaid, $1.38
When it is rumored about in Santa Paloma that Mrs. Burgoyne, a widow and heiress to many millions, has bought an old-fashioned and somewhat run-down estate and intends to make her home in the little California town, food for gossip at all the bridge clubs is furnished for more than one meeting. To live well in Santa Paloma involves heavy expenditures for all sorts of social functions and many a family feels the strain which, however, they would not admit for worlds. The society clique think that everything will be run on even a more gorgeous scale with Mrs. Burgoyne's millions in the game, but they reckon without the possessor of these millions, as the successive events of the story show in a highly entertaining fashion.
London Lavender
ByE. V. LUCAS
Decorated cloth, 12mo, $1.35 net; postpaid, $1.47
We meet again several of the fine characters with whom Mr. Lucas has already made us acquainted in his other novels as well as others equally interesting and entertaining. The intimate sketches of various phases of London life—visits to the Derby, Zoo, the National Gallery—are delightfully chronicled and woven into a novel that is a most charming entertainment.
THE MACMILLAN COMPANYPublishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York
NEW MACMILLAN FICTION—Continued
The Drifting Diamond
ByLINCOLN COLCORD
With Frontispiece in Colors byAnton Fischer
Decorated cloth, 12mo, $1.25 net
The strange effects which the possession of a gem of marvelous beauty and great value has upon several sharply differentiated characters is the thread with which this dramatic tale of events is woven. The combination of the mystical, the imaginative and the realistic makes very unusual reading. The diamond has the power of making its owner love it not for what it means in money, but for itself; it also has in it a lurking devil which portends evil happenings. The series of incidents which these qualities in the gem bring about, taken with the love story, which runs through it all, comprise a novel which holds the reader's attention from the very first adventure to the final outcome.
A NEW NOVEL
ByJAMES LANE ALLEN
The Heroine in Bronze
Decorated cloth, 12mo, $1.35 net
In "The Heroine in Bronze" Mr. Allen has written with exquisite felicity of thought and expression a novel that is unique and powerful. The story of a young man,—a writer,—the women he loves, and the great novel he writes, is the design threading a background which reveals Mr. Allen's profound understanding of life and his high spirituality. "The Heroine in Bronze" is the most vital contribution to American literature in recent years.
THE MACMILLAN COMPANYPublishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York
A BEAUTIFUL EDITION OF A BEAUTIFUL STORY
The Christmas Edition of Kathleen Norris's
Mother
Decorated cloth, 12mo, illustrations, $1.25; by mail, $1.36
"A little book that can be finished in an hour, but the sweet thoughts will remain in the mind long after the book has been set aside.... Before I had covered ten pages I realized that I had something worth its weight in gold. What theme could be more interesting to the ordinary reader than 'Mother,' especially when it is a panegyric on maternal devotion? The author was fortunate in her selection and still happier in her treatment of it, for if there is anything that appeals, it is a true loyal discussion of mother and mother-love. In modern fiction we have too little of the chastening and purifying presence of real motherhood. Few books have the power of recalling worthy thoughts with the force and with the good effect possessed by this little book."—Catholic Columbian.
A NEW EDITION OF A MASTERPIECE
The Christmas Edition of Jack London's
The Call of the Wild
Decorated cloth, 12mo, profusely illustrated in color, $1.50 net; by mail, $1.63
To all readers of Jack London and particularly to those who love his masterpiece, this new edition of "The Call of the Wild" will mean much. Some of the previous issues of this great book were thought to be beautiful, but none of them seems so now in comparison with the latest one, the make-up of which is distinguished by a number of features. In the first place there are many full-page plates reproduced in color from paintings done by Mr. Bransom. More than this, the first two pages of each chapter are printed in colors and decorated with head pieces and drawings, while every other two pages carry black and white half tones in the text, also the work of Mr. Bransom.
THE MACMILLAN COMPANYPublishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York