TO SPRINGVALE FOR CHRISTMAS[7]
Her children arise up and call her blessed.
Zona Gale
When President Arthur Tilton of Briarcliff College, who usually used a two-cent stamp, said “Get me Chicago, please,” his secretary was impressed, looked for vast educational problems to be in the making, and heard instead:
“Ed? Well, Ed, you and Rick and Grace and I are going out to Springvale for Christmas.... Yes, well, I’ve got a family too, you recall. But mother was seventy last Fall and—Do you realize that it’s eleven years since we’ve all spent Christmas with her? Grace has been every year. She’s going this year. And so are we! And take her the best Christmas she ever had, too. Ed, mother wasseventylast Fall——”
At dinner, he asked his wife what would be a suitable gift, a very special gift, for a woman of seventy. And she said: “Oh, your mother. Well, dear, I should think the material for a good wool dress would be right. I’ll select it for you, if you like—” He said that he would see, and he did not reopen the subject.
In town on December twenty-fourth he timed his arrival to allow him an hour in a shop. There he bought a silver-gray silk of a fineness and a lightness which pleased him and at a price which made him comfortably guilty. And at the shop, Ed, who was Edward McKillop Tilton, head of a law firm, picked him up.
“Where’s your present?” Arthur demanded.
Edward drew a case from his pocket and showed him a tiny gold wrist-watch of decent manufacture and explained: “I expect you’ll think I’m a fool, but you know that mother has told time for fifty years by the kitchen clock, or else the shield of the black-marble parlor angel who never goes—you get the idea?—and so I bought her this.”
At the station was Grace, and the boy who bore her bag bore also a parcel of great dimensions.
“Mother already has a feather bed,” Arthur reminded her.
“They won’t let you take an automobile into the coach,” Edward warned her.
“It’s a rug for the parlor,” Grace told them. “You know itisa parlor—one of the few left in the Mississippi valley. And mother has had that ingrain down since before we left home——”
Grace’s eyes were misted. Why would women always do that? This was no occasion for sentiment. This was a merry Christmas.
“Very nice. And Ricky’d better look sharp,” said Edward dryly.
Ricky never did look sharp. About trains he wasconspicuously ignorant. He had no occupation. Some said that he “wrote,” but no one had ever seen anything that he had written. He lived in town—no one knew how—never accepted a cent from his brothers and was beloved of every one, most of all of his mother.
“Ricky won’t bring anything, of course,” they said.
But when the train had pulled out without him, observably, a porter came staggering through the cars carrying two great suitcases and following a perturbed man of forty-something who said, “Oh, here you are!” as if it were they who were missing, and squeezed himself and his suitcases among brothers and sister and rug. “I had only a minute to spare,” he said regretfully. “If I’d had two, I could have snatched some flowers. I flung ’em my card and told ’em to send ’em.”
“Why are you taking so many lugs?” they wanted to know.
Ricky focused on the suitcases. “Just necessities,” he said. “Just the presents. I didn’t have room to get in anything else.”
“Presents! What?”
“Well,” said Ricky, “I’m taking books. I know mother doesn’t care much for books, but the bookstore’s the only place I can get trusted.”
They turned over his books: Fiction, travel, biography, a new illustrated edition of the Bible—they were willing to admire his selection. And Grace said confusedly but appreciatively: “You know, the parlorbookcase has never had a thing in it excepting a green curtainoverit!”
And they were all borne forward, well pleased.
Springvale has eight hundred inhabitants. As they drove through the principal street at six o’clock on that evening of December twenty-fourth, all that they expected to see abroad was the pop-corn wagon and a cat or two. Instead they counted seven automobiles and estimated thirty souls, and no one paid the slightest attention to them as strangers. Springvale was becoming metropolitan. There was a new church on one corner and a store-building bore the sign “Public Library.” Even the little hotel had a rubber-plant in the window and a strip of cretonne overhead.
The three men believed themselves to be a surprise. But, mindful of the panic to be occasioned by four appetites precipitated into a Springvale ménage, Grace had told. Therefore the parlor was lighted and heated, there was in the air of the passage an odor of brown gravy which, no butler’s pantry ever having inhibited, seemed a permanent savory. By the happiest chance, Mrs. Tilton had not heard their arrival nor—the parlor angel being in her customary eclipse and the kitchen grandfather’s clock wrong—had she begun to look for them. They slipped in, they followed Grace down the hall, they entered upon her in her gray gingham apron worn over her best blue serge, and they saw her first in profile, frosting a lemon pie. With some assistance from her, they all took her in their arms at once.
“Aren’t you surprised?” cried Edward in amazement.
“I haven’t got over being surprised,” she said placidly, “since I first heard you were coming!”
She gazed at them tenderly, with flour on her chin, and then she said: “There’s something you won’t like. We’re going to have the Christmas dinner to-night.”
Their clamor that they would entirely like that did not change her look.
“Our church couldn’t pay the minister this Winter,” she said, “on account of the new church-building. So the minister and his wife are boarding around with the congregation. To-morrow’s their day to come here for a week. It’s a hard life and I didn’t have the heart to change ’em.”
Her family covered their regret as best they could and entered upon her little feast. At the head of her table, with her four “children” about her, and father’s armchair left vacant, they perceived that she was not quite the figure they had been thinking her. In this interval they had grown to think of her as a pathetic figure. Not because their father had died, not because she insisted on Springvale as a residence, not because of her eyes. Just pathetic. Mothers of grown children, they might have given themselves the suggestion, were always pathetic. But here was mother, a definite person with poise and with ideas, who might be proud of her offspring, but who, in her heart, never forgot that theywereher offspring and that she was the parent stock.
“I wouldn’t eat two pieces of that pie,” she said to President Tilton; “it’s pretty rich.” And he answered humbly: “Very well, mother.” And she took with composure Ricky’s light chant:
“Now, you must remember, wherever you are,That you are the jam, but your mother’s the jar.”
“Now, you must remember, wherever you are,That you are the jam, but your mother’s the jar.”
“Now, you must remember, wherever you are,That you are the jam, but your mother’s the jar.”
“Now, you must remember, wherever you are,
That you are the jam, but your mother’s the jar.”
“Certainly, my children,” she said. “And I’m about to tell you when you may have your Christmas presents. Not to-night. Christmas eve is no proper time for presents. It’s stealing a day outright. And you miss the fun of looking forward all night long. The only proper time for the presents is after breakfast on Christmas morning,afterthe dishes are washed. The minister and his wife may get here any time from nine on. That means we’ve got to get to bed early!”
President Arthur Tilton lay in his bed looking at the muslin curtain on which the street-lamp threw the shadow of a bare elm which he remembered. He thought:
“She’s a pioneer spirit. She’s the kind who used to go ahead any way, even if they had missed the emigrant party, and who used to cross the plains alone. She’s the backbone of the world. I wish I could megaphone that to the students at Briarcliff who think their mothers ‘try to boss’ them!”
“Don’t leave your windows open too far,” he heard from the hall. “The wind’s changed.”
In the light of a snowy morning the home parlorshowed the cluttered commonplace of a room whose furniture and ornaments were not believed to be beautiful and most of them known not to be useful. Yet when—after the dishes were washed—these five came to the leather chair which bore the gifts, the moment was intensely satisfactory. This in spite of the sense of haste with which the parcels were attacked—lest the minister and his wife arrive in their midst.
“That’s one reason,” Mrs. Tilton said, “why I want to leave part of my Christmas for you until I take you to the train to-night. Do you care?”
“I’ll leave a present I know about until then too,” said Ricky. “May I?”
“Come on now, though,” said President Arthur Tilton. “I want to see mother get her dolls.”
It was well that they were not of an age to look for exclamations of delight from mother. To every gift her reaction was one of startled rebuke.
“Grace! How could you? All that money! Oh, it’s beautiful! But the old one would have done me all my life.... Why, Edward! You extravagant boy! I never had a watch in my life. You ought not to have gone to all that expense. Arthur Tilton! A silk dress! What a firm piece of goods! I don’t know what to say to you—you’re all too good to me!”
At Ricky’s books she stared and said: “My dear boy, you’ve been very reckless. Here are more books than I can ever read—now. Why, that’s almost more than they’ve got to start the new library with. And you spent all that money on me!”
It dampened their complacence, but they understood her concealed delight and they forgave her an honest regret at their modest prodigality. For, when they opened her gifts for them, they felt the same reluctance to take the hours and hours of patient knitting for which these stood.
“Hush, and hurry,” was her comment, “or the minister’ll get us!”
The minister and his wife, however, were late. The second side of the turkey was ready and the mince pie hot when, toward noon, they came to the door—a faint little woman and a thin man with beautiful, exhausted eyes. They were both in some light glow of excitement and disregarded Mrs. Tilton’s efforts to take their coats.
“No,” said the minister’s wife. “No. We do beg your pardon. But we find we have to go into the country this morning.”
“It is absolutely necessary to us that we go into the country,” said the minister earnestly. “This morning,” he added impressively.
“Into the country! You’re going to be here for dinner.”
They were firm. They had to go into the country. They shook hands almost tenderly with these four guests. “We just heard about you in the post-office,” they said. “Merry Christmas—oh, Merry Christmas! We’ll be back about dark.”
They left their two shabby suitcases on the hall floor and went away.
“All the clothes they’ve got between them wouldhardly fill these up,” said Mrs. Tilton mournfully. “Why on earth do you suppose they’d turn their back on a dinner that smells so good and go off into the country at noon on Christmas Day? They wouldn’t do that for another invitation. Likely somebody’s sick,” she ended, her puzzled look denying her tone of finality.
“Well, thank the Lord for the call to the country,” said Ricky shamelessly. “It saved our day.”
They had their Christmas dinner, they had their afternoon—safe and happy and uninterrupted. Five commonplace-looking folk in a commonplace-looking house, but the eye of love knew that this was not all. In the wide sea of their routine they had found and taken for their own this island day,unforgettable.
“I thought it was going to be a gay day,” said Ricky at its close, “but it hasn’t. It’s been heavenly! Mother, shall we give them the rest of their presents now, you and I?”
“Not yet,” she told them. “Ricky, I want to whisper to you.”
She looked so guilty that they all laughed at her. Ricky was laughing when he came back from that brief privacy. He was still laughing mysteriously when his mother turned from a telephone call.
“What do you think!” she cried. “That was the woman that brought me my turkey. She knew the minister and his wife were to be with me to-day. She wants to know why they’ve been eating a lunch in a cutter out that way. Do you suppose——”
They all looked at one another doubtfully, then inabrupt conviction. “They went because they wanted us to have the day to ourselves!”
“Arthur,” said Mrs. Tilton with immense determination, “let me whisper to you, too.” And from that moment’s privacy he also returned smiling, but a bit ruefully.
“Mother ought to be the president of a university,” he said.
“Mother ought to be the head of a law firm,” said Edward.
“Mother ought to write a book about herself,” said Ricky.
“Mother’s mother,” said Grace, “and that’s enough. But you’re all so mysterious, except me.”
“Grace,” said Mrs. Tilton, “you remind me that I want to whisper to you.”
Their train left in the late afternoon. Through the white streets they walked to the station, the somber little woman, the buoyant, capable daughter, the three big sons. She drew them to seclusion down by the baggage-room and gave them four envelopes.
“Here’s the rest of my Christmas for you,” she said. “I’d rather you’d open it on the train. Now, Ricky, what’s yours?”
She was firm to their protests. The train was whistling when Ricky owned up that the rest of his Christmas present for mother was a brand-new daughter, to be acquired as soon as his new book was off the press. “We’re going to marry on the advance royalty,” he said importantly, “and live on—” The rest was lost in the roar of the express.
“Edward!” shouted Mrs. Tilton. “Come here. I want to whisper——”
She was obliged to shout it, whatever it was. But Edward heard, and nodded, and kissed her. There was time for her to slip something in Ricky’s pocket and for the other good-bys, and then the train drew out. From the platform they saw her brave, calm face against the background of the little town. A mother of “grown children” pathetic? She seemed to them at that moment the one supremely triumphant figure in life.
They opened their envelopes soberly and sat soberly over the contents. The note, scribbled to Grace, explained: Mother wanted to divide up now what she had had for them in her will. She would keep one house and live on the rent from the other one, and “here’s all the rest.” They laughed at her postscript:
“Don’t argue. I ought to give the most—I’m the mother.”
“And look at her,” said Edward solemnly. “As soon as she heard about Ricky, there at the station, she whispered to me that she wanted to send Ricky’s sweetheart the watch I’d just given her. Took it off her wrist then and there.”
“That must be what she slipped in my pocket,” said Ricky.
It was.
“She asked me,” he said, “if I minded if she gave those books to the new Springvale public library.”
“She asked me,” said Grace, “if I cared if shegave the new rug to the new church that can’t pay its minister.”
President Arthur Tilton shouted with laughter.
“When we heard where the minister and his wife ate their Christmas dinner,” he said, “she whispered to ask me whether she might give the silk dress to her when they get back to-night.”
All this they knew by the time the train reached the crossing where they could look back on Springvale. On the slope of the hill lay the little cemetery, and Ricky said:
“And she told me that if my flowers got there before dark, she’d take them up to the cemetery for Christmas for father. By night she won’t have even a flower left to tell her we’ve been there.”
“Not even the second side of the turkey,” said Grace, “and yet I think——”
“So do I,” her brothers said.
FOOTNOTES:[7]By permission of the author and the “Delineator.”
[7]By permission of the author and the “Delineator.”
[7]By permission of the author and the “Delineator.”