VIIA PILLAR OF FIRE
THE opening years of the new century found Mary and Cynthia within the white-columned academy and in daily verbal conflict with Orgetorix, chief of the Helvetians, Catiline, and the Ten Thousand Greeks with their interminable parasangs; Roger mightily concerned with “Thanatopsis” and cube root; and John under the initial spell of the burial of De Soto in the dark Mississippi. They found Mrs. Wescott still true to sulphur and molasses, blue serge, and a nine o’clock bedtime, and Mr. Wescott still a victim during the summer months of that distressing habit already fully described, and an all-the-year supporter of the party which had brought forth a Lincoln and inspired a McKinley—the party whose bedrock principles of conservatism and integrity must safely weather its present rather drastic andimpulsive leadership. And they found Mary Christmas still a traveler of the coast roads from the drifting of apple blossoms in early June to the falling of the leaves in late October.
Nor had those years wrought many changes in Mary Christmas. Except for some white threads in her dark hair and the deepening of certain lines about her nose and mouth, she was outwardly as she had been on that memorable first visit. She still wore the gold coins in her ears and the red silk handkerchief, shifted her black bundle from one hip to the other with surprising agility, and persisted in falling upon her face at the initial approach of Mr. Wescott. She was still an inexhaustible treasure-house of stories, each year adding others to those first and best beloved, of the ark and Ararat, of the ancient saints and the pilgrim, and of that holy city, Etchmiadzin. Her eyes under their dark brows had not lost their restlessness. Now they burned with anguish over the sufferings of her land, now glowed with the sad loveliness of the tales which she told, now gleamed with ominous revenge at the hated name ofTurk, which, although the children were forbidden to use it in her presence, occasionally found its way to her ears. Falling petals and the drying of the country roads still were heralds of her coming; indeed, those early days in June when orchard blossoms drifted through the bright air had come to be known in the Wescott family and among the other children of the village as Mary Christmas days.
And yet the opening years of that new century found Mary Christmas in ways of pleasantness which the late nineties had been reluctant to promise her. Indeed, she might well have cried with the Psalmist, perchance of her own hill pastures: “The lines are fallen unto me in pleasant places; yea, I have a goodly heritage.” Slowly but steadily she had built up a reputation for herself among a people by nature skeptical of the “foreigner,” and in districts far from Utopian for peddlers of all sorts. Although she had in no small measure the shrewdness of her race, all suspicion of dishonesty, rife upon her early appearance, had been dispelled by an openness in her business dealings, almostchildlike in its simplicity. Attendant upon this was a ready understanding of the whims and prejudices of her customers, a happy faculty which forbade the tenacity of the average seller, but was quick to suggest a substitute for whatever was refused. Aiding these assets to good business and yet transcending them all was her larger, more bountiful self, which, once met with on the common way, was never to be forgotten, and which now, as then, beggars all attempts at description.
She manifested, even to dull people, an almost overwhelming prodigality of nature. Her energy was tireless and apparently incapable of consumption. It carried her over miles of country, sometimes in a drenching rain, and left her at nightfall at the back door of some upland farm, whose unwilling inhabitants grudgingly offered her the hayloft as a bedchamber and in an hour were taking down the newspapers from the windows of the spare room. It lent a buoyancy to her tired feet when during her first months as a traveler she had left the main road for an outlying house, only to be turned away atthe gate. It prompted her in long stretches of woodland to sing the folk songs of her people—songs of Vartan, who saved Armenia from the worship of fire, and of the Virgin, on whose festival the ripening grapes are blessed by a holy cross. It made her never too tired to talk or to play with children. In its gracious strength she dreamed dreams and saw visions: dreams of the day when she should bring her children to this kind, new land; visions of herself, behind a red pushcart with stout, well-oiled wheels, convenient apartments for small accessories, and a thick rubber cover, protective against bad weather. Who shall say that it sprang from a superabundance of physical well-being alone? Surely such power breathed of the spiritual, and suggested the generosity of God on the day of her creation.
Thus it happened that after five summers in the country and five winters in the towns the dream of dreams came true, and Raphael Christmas and his sister Mary arrived from Erzerum. What excitement there was in the Wescott family and in the Wescott village, when on a Mary Christmas day, just fiveyears from the first, this great announcement was proudly made under the apple trees! Even Mary and Cynthia, with their braids turned under and college only two years away, were thrilled to their finger-tips, and John and Roger refused to let Mary Christmas go on her way until she had promised to bring Raphael with her the following spring.
But Raphael Christmas, it must be confessed, was a sore disappointment. When, the news of his mother’s approach having been brought to them by the doctor in his carriage, they ran to meet her up the hill, and saw a tall, awkward boy in clothes like their own, they were all conscious of a sinking feeling within themselves. No imagination, even of the most leaping and vivid variety, could see in this overgrown lad, who shifted uneasily from one side of the road to the other, threw stones at sparrows, and was impolite to his mother, one who had lived in the Garden of Eden and had looked upon Mount Ararat with its light-touched shadow of the ark. Not the most friendly feeling in the world could transformhis dark, thin face, with its shrewd black eyes and its total lack of all those qualities which made his mother’s beautiful, into the welcome one of a valued, if infrequent, companion.
Swift Americanization, a process at that time relatively unhampered by theories, had left its marks on Raphael Christmas. A year at school in Portland had taught him many things. Among the most outstanding of these were an astounding command of American slang of a range and versatility known to few natives, the art of chewing gum noisily and continuously, and the most rampant desire to lose as soon as possible all traces of his foreign birth. This longing prompted him to an almost continual nagging of his mother. Her red silk handkerchief, the gold coins in her ears, and her gold-laced bodice annoyed him. His playfellows in Portland laughed at them and taunted him. Whenever his quick eyes saw money pass into her hands from the sale of anything, he began his questions.
“There’s money, Ma! For a dress, ain’t it—a real dress, and a hat? Yes?”
“There’s money! You buy a hat now, and take out the coins?”
He had grown quickly to dislike all references to Armenia, and only tolerated his mother’s fervent hopes that he might some day avenge his father’s death, because he liked the picture of himself, knife-armed, and giving blood for blood.
All these things the Wescotts gathered for themselves on that sixth Mary Christmas day—gathered with a ready sympathy for Mary Christmas that helped to quell their own disillusionment. Mary and Cynthia, escaping to their own room after dinner while their father and mother talked with their guest and while John and Roger introduced Raphael more or less apologetically to the baseball team, confided to each other their only remaining hope, that Mary Christmas could not, for the blinding glory of her dreams, see in Raphael what they saw. What might happen, they wondered, if she did see in one quick, all-illuminating flash or in a hundred more slow, more cruel perceptions the unloveliness in him, so apparent to them all! Then the light that went beforeher like a pillar of fire, that made her forgetful of tired feet, that impelled her to sing songs and to tell stories to children—might it not vanish into unutterable darkness?
But Fate was kind to Mary Christmas and reassuring to Mary and Cynthia. Surely no all-illuminating flash revealed Raphael to his mother, and, if the perceptions came, they were slow and far less cruel than they might have been. To her, Raphael, in spite of his derision of their country, his shiftiness, his nagging, and his gum, was heir to the wealth of ages and, in some mysterious way which would later be revealed to them, the certain avenger of his father’s cruel death. She did concede, it is true, to his nagging, and, to the Wescott mind, in a deplorable measure; for in the spring following his visit she appeared in a rusty green suit, many sizes too large for her, and in a red, daisy-trimmed hat, which she wore so insecurely pinned to her dark hair that it sat upon one ear in a most rakish manner. But the gold coins she never relinquished.
That year, too, the vision of the pushcart became a reality. It was red, with the stout,well-oiled wheels of which she had dreamed; it boasted the protective rubber covering, which on fair days folded neatly under its shining body; it had compartments of all sizes with hinged covers, and, for those which carried the most valuable of her wares, padlocks with tiny keys. Her pride in it and her repeated assurances that the labor of her journey was now depleted by half atoned in some degree for the loss of the gold-laced bodice and for the advent of the red hat.
It was on this visit that they noted the deepening lines around her nose and mouth, and a perceptible, if slight, dulling of her eyes that had so burned and glowed through all the years they had known her.
“You’re tired, Mary Christmas,” said Father Wescott. “Stay at home this winter and let the town trade go.”
And John, drawing his mother into the pantry on the pretext of an afternoon lunch, confessed, in a burst of anxious confidence, that he, for one, was worried.
But Mary Christmas laughed at them as she adjusted her new hat, which immediately became unadjusted when she stooped to liftthe handle of the pushcart. She must work winter and summer, she said; it cost a lot to keep a family of three in a real house. There was pride in her voice, however, when she told John, who pushed the cart up the hill for her, how Raphael was now standing on the street corners and selling papers in shrill calls like a real American boy, and how deftly and quickly the fingers of little Mary went in and out of the frames that held the laces.