Tailpiece - Emancipation and Impeachment

Headpiece - A CHRISTMAS FÊTE IN CALIFORNIA

INCLUDING A MASQUE IN THE MUIR WOODS

BY LOUISE HERRICK WALL

WITH PICTURES BY W. T. BENDA

EARLY in December the Angel of Peace on earth came to us, saying:

“How would you like a Christmas day deep in the woods, with no tissue-paper parcels or tinsel ribbon, with the people that you know best and like best and their children, with old English carols and games and wassail-songs and morris-dances, and stockings, and a huge bowl of innocent punch, and presents that cost fifteen cents, and no more, on pain of death? Now, how would you?”

Then we cried with one accord:

“Hath eye seen or ear heard? Can the cords of custom be loosened?”

“They can,” said the Angel, snapping her glove-clasp into its socket. She rose.

We turned questioningly to our Valiant One.

“I should like that,” she said. “I remember seventy Christmases, but none like that.”

“If I go,” said the Objector, “my Christmas-tree shall be a living tree. No cut-down, mutilated trees in a forest for me.”

The Angel frowned. Commentators spring up to amend the text almost before a miraculous visitant can catch a ferry-boat back to town. “We will see,” she said with the asperity common to women and angels.

MANYwere called before our party of foresters was chosen. We were told that a little inn on a mountain-side, in a redwood grove, even in California, is a drafty place for aged parents and young children to be laid. And who would be separated from his own on Christmas day?

We found, too, that when Heaven had made the marriages between our friends, that no trouble had been taken to pair them for like qualities. Initiative and energy lay in streaks in families: the woman would, and the man would not, or the other way around, which, alas! was no way around at all, but just animpasse. Then there were aged parents-in-law who purposed to eat their turkey in the immemorial, family way or to perish forthwith of reproachful old age; others frankly confessed themselves caught in the Christmas mill: it was not that they enjoyed shopping for Christmas, or even the effects of Christmas-shopping, but to stop seemed perilous. Had it been tried?

At length forty freed spirits agreed.Muir Inn, part way up the shaggy flank of Mount Tamalpais, was to be the place; December 24 was to be the time; and sixteen young people were to do what they could toward supplying the action.

“THE GREAT FIRE WAS FED AGAIN, AND BY ITS LIGHT CHRISTMAS STORIES, IN SOBER PANTOMIME, WERE ENACTED”

On the day before Christmas seven of us, tucked in a touring-car, were climbing the foot-hills opposite the purple bulk of the mountain. A soft drizzle hung its drops on the fronds of the redwoods and made the leaves of the dwarf manzanita look ashen on their twisted, wine-red stems. As we beat up the grade, the world behind and below began to unroll, the inlets of the bay and the light-lying islands flattened to a map, while across and beyond we lifted San Francisco on her hills. The broken gray of the city houses laid washes of color, one above another, dove against rose-gray, against fawn, against pearl, and all cut by the sharper tones of the dark buildings.

At the crest of the foot-hills the car plunged down into the green-black shade of Muir Woods. Autumn and winter had touched the interior of the forest, and left sparse, lantern-like leaves of pale yellow on the bushes along the stream that gave to the wide, dim evergreen space an air of delicate and transient mortality. We ran beside the stream, the huge, shifting columns and the red, needle-silenced ground flowing past us, and on our eyelashes clung the caressing mist. Then our good cylinders labored hard to lift us by a winding, slippery grade up the abrupt side of the mountain to the inn. At a turn, without warning, we came out on a little plateau and up to the weather-stained building itself.

“AT THAT MOMENT FROM THE HOLLOW TRUNK OF A REDWOOD ANOTHER FIGURE STEPPED OUT”⇒LARGER IMAGE

“AT THAT MOMENT FROM THE HOLLOW TRUNK OF A REDWOOD ANOTHER FIGURE STEPPED OUT”

⇒LARGER IMAGE

As we stopped, the inn doors flew open, and out on the porches came friends, and friends, children, young girls, and men called our names, tossing us greetings and laughing. Something tightened in the throat, and we knew, before we tore the rugs off our knees, that the Muir Woods Christmas was going to be—different.

The inn was chiefly one big room of seventy feet or so smelling of evergreens. The fireplace, built for a sleigh-and-six, held a red mound of fire that just now gnawed, half-sated, at the carcass of a tree. Evergreens hung from the rafters, and all the tangle of California winter woods—wild huckleberry, manzanita, sallol, Oregon grape, rose-haws, Woodwardia fern, as tall as the tallest child, and swordfern—branched forth from jars in the corners.

We were busy at once. There were costumes to arrange for the charades, and costumes to trim in secrecy for the Christmas masque in the woods; there were stockings—each family had brought characteristic ones for its group—to make ready to be strung on the wire in front of the fire; there were derisive jingles to be written and affixed to fifteen-cent presents for one’s dearest friend; ferns, evergreens, and candies had to be tied to things; there were packages with disguised contours to be hidden. Concealment, like a worm, preyed everywhere, and people talked muffledly because of twine and tacks between the teeth. Busy, efficient men nailed things, to the envy of wives who had brought ruminative, pocket-handed men of the smoking variety. The children romped and peeped at forbidden things, and the people who were not their mothers said they were wonderfully good, and what the mothers said was not recorded. About the whole place there was such a smell of evergreens and such a mood of noisy fellowship, climbing, nailing, upsetting, and standing about, that one suddenly realized that Dickens was not a caricaturist, just a merrymaker.

When the lights were lighted and things at their busiest, so that they could not possibly be moved from the tables, the waiters came to lay the cloth for Christmas-eve dinner. This sent us all to the fire. Laps were made, two-child deep; the very little people were fed hygienic pulp and simmered into drowsiness, so that they could be put to bed; and the women, and especially the girls, went and dressed in chilly little bedrooms smelling of matting.

We got back to the warm room again, to find that the tables had been laid in the form of a great cross, red berries at every place. All seemed sweet and familiar as we seated ourselves, for every face was the face of a friend. Food came and went, songs, stories, laughter; toasts were drunk and answered, and we wagged our heads and said the inevitable thing, “There used to be a time when people had families the size of this!” and were half sad and half glad for the decline of the good old times of abundance.

After dinner, chairs and tables were pushed aside, the great fire was fed again, and by its light Christmas stories, in sober pantomime, were enacted: Joseph and Mary, foot-sore and weary, knocked at the door of the inn at Bethlehem, and found not where to lay their heads; the shepherds fed their flocks by night, and a voice sang of peace on earth, good-will to men; then came the Magi, following the star, to the manger where the Child was laid and offered gifts of frankincense and myrrh, and all the simple, reverent scenes spelled adoration for those who watched. The absence of footlights and formal costumes made the little plays seem a part of some humble worship in memory of the hallowed and gracious time. The familiar faces, with a thousand every-day associations, perhaps, under veil or turban took on a new suggestion, a shade of mystery from a time and thought not wholly ours, yet wrought with ours by centuries of faith.

“Mirth is also of Heaven’s making,” and this soberness melted into laughter with the tramping of feet as the big circle formed to play the old English ring-games that have been sung and played where children have gathered, in merrymaking times, since our speech broke into rugged, rhythmic verse. As the older children and most of the grown people played,—for only trundle-bed trash had been put to bed,—the rope in front of the fire was putting forth a grotesque fruitage of harlequin stockings, stuffed with ten-cent surprises. One giant, pink sock, decorated with carnations, was for some one’s big, red-haired nephew, and the St. Patrickgreen one, bound with serpents, was marked “For Rattlesnake Pete, the Sierra Snake-Destroyer.” And so all down the line the stockings mocked their owners with intimate audacities. There were genuine baby stockings, too, to melt one’s heart, so little, woolly, and shrunken from the wash.

“GIVING AN ALMOST INTOLERABLE BEAUTY TO THE AGE-OLD TRUNKS”⇒LARGER IMAGE

“GIVING AN ALMOST INTOLERABLE BEAUTY TO THE AGE-OLD TRUNKS”

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It grew late; the piano, which had been beating its life out all the evening over, “Oats, Pease, Beans, and Barley Grows” and “London Bridge is Falling Down, O My Lady!” began whispering a strange, old air, a marching tune with a pulse of marching feet, more and more loudly, until suddenly we all sang in lusty unison:

“Here we come a-wassailingAmong the leaves so green,Here we come a-wanderingSo fair to be seen.Love and joy come to you—”

“Here we come a-wassailing

Among the leaves so green,

Here we come a-wandering

So fair to be seen.

Love and joy come to you—”

when in came the large and paunchy punch-bowl, borne by the stoutest of the waiters. All in line, singing and marching, old and young, we circled in a wide detour about the room, coming to a stand, our glasses high, about the wassail-bowl.

“Christmas! God bless us!” We drank the toast, and even the lip of the abstainer was touched with the foam of egg-nog.

When at last all was quiet for the night, the big room dark and empty, and the heavy line of forty stockings sagged and bulged in front of the fire, several sober rioters stole back for a few last words.

“The only thing that could spoil Christmas now,” said an anxious Martha, stooping to pick up a string from the floor, “would be that some of the younger children who have been sending letters to Santa Claus for automobiles and hill-coasters may be disappointed by ten-cent toys.”

“I know children,” said the Chief Emancipator. “They are not half as mercenary as we think. Play is what they love. They will never think of hill-coasters on the happy day when the grown people come to their senses and give themselves up to fun.”

Noël, Noël, Noël, Noël,Born was the King of Israel!

Noël, Noël, Noël, Noël,

Born was the King of Israel!

Did you ever wake on a Christmas morning to the sound of fresh voices singing at your door and the soft swish of a redwood bough across your window-pane—eyes opening upon walls as bare as the walls of a stable, and the smell and feel of Christmas in the air of your naked little room?

The first Noël, the angels did say,Was to certain poor shepherds, in fields as they lay,In fields as they lay, keeping their sheep,On a cold winter’s night that was so deep.Noël, Noël, Noël, Noël,Born was the King of Israel!

The first Noël, the angels did say,

Was to certain poor shepherds, in fields as they lay,

In fields as they lay, keeping their sheep,

On a cold winter’s night that was so deep.

Noël, Noël, Noël, Noël,

Born was the King of Israel!

The carolers were down from the little cabins on the hillside where they had slept with a figment of roof between them and the stars, and the cries of Merry Christmas beat upon our doors until we all came together, in noisy collision; on the porches, and swept in to strip the line of stockings. The babies dropped on the floor with their pouches, dumping their toys frankly between their outspread legs, laughing, crooning, and picking, with tiny, pointed fingers, at the mystery of things. It was with them, as the wise woman had said, all bubbling contentment and delight. Little tin wagons bounded over the floor, any side up, two babies abreast, and every mouth blew upon squeakers and trumpets the blasts of which were mercifully tempered to the short wind of the little lambs. Our own gifts unmasked, with even-handed justice, our inner foibles, but the children’s came to the breakfast table with them in a spirit of peace. Live stock surrounded every plate, and cattle fed from porcelain mangers, and became entangled in patent breakfast foods.

As breakfast ended, a call came from the doorway, “Who wants to come with me to the woods and pick out a Christmas tree?” It was she of the Yerba Buena wreath and shoe-top skirt. We all wanted to come. This finding of the tree was to be a ceremony. Though a faint mist was still a-drift, no one cared, and a few wraps made the children snug.

A dozen tangled little paths lead down among the chaparral to the redwoods, and here the children gathered from everywhere, laughing and calling among the undergrowth, scattering, breaking, andrunning down the steep paths exactly as a brood of quail run and call and scatter through the mesquite under the convoy of their crested leader.

“The Woodsman! The Woodsman! First we must find a woodsman with an ax to cut the Christmas-tree,” called the leader. “He used to live over here. Who can find him?”

Her brood scurried here and there, unconsciously led where she would, beating up the brush, when suddenly, shouting with delight, they came full upon a man with an ax—a flannel-shirted man with a kind face and a great, broad, shining ax.

“Yes, I am the Woodsman,” he called. “May I cut a Christmas-tree for you this morning?” He came forward, and jumped straight into the story, without preliminaries. The whole flock surged down upon him and off to find the tree, accepting his being there with his ax as children do accept pleasant things. We all went down into the winding wood road, almost roofed over by redwood plumes, the little children stopping to consult gravely with the Woodsman about the suitability of trees two hundred feet high or saplings of a century’s growth, squinting up trunks, considering, rejecting, earnestly intent, each one, upon finding the perfect tree. The older conspirators, half lost in brake and fern, kept close behind.

“This one I think will do,” cried the Woodsman at last, and he lifted his ax.

At that moment from the hollow trunk of a redwood another figure stepped out, and all the children started, he was so strange.

“I am the Spirit of the Woods,” he said in a deep voice; “I come to plead with you for the life of this tree.”

He wore a mantle bordered with fern and moss. Instead of hair, his head was closely covered with the greenish lichen that grows on the north side of trees in winter, and his beard was of long, gray moss. He spoke very earnestly, and told the children how sweet it is to live, as a tree, in the forest. They were not exactly frightened; they even drew a step nearer: in that beautiful, solemn place strange things might happen. Then the Woodsman once more lifted his ax, when a very little boy, quite unprompted, and to every one’s surprise, suddenly broke from his father, and ran to the Woodsman, clasping his arms about him, crying out for the life of the tree.

“Don’t cut it down!” he sobbed. “It wants to be a tree; it doesn’t want to be logs.”

We were quite still for a moment, then the Spirit of the Woods said: “The tree has another friend. I thought I was the only one who really loved it.” Then turning to us all, he said with authority: “Do as the child bids. Come with me, for I have something to show you.” He moved with a long stride in his long mantle, the moss wagged from his sleeves like the beard of a goat, and the children crowded nearer to the Woodsman; but at a turn of the road they all cried out and ran forward. Growing beside the road, with its branches full of gold and silver ornaments, snow and cranberries and gifts, was a lovely living Christmas-tree, bearing its shining fruitage in the thick forest.

Then all took hands and danced about the tree, and sang to it, and praised it, and called it beautiful. From the thick branches, which were not so very high in that high place, grown people took packages marked with names. There were little Robin Hood costumes for several of the children, with feathered caps and feathered bows, and a Cupid’s dress of white gauze and filmy wings for the four-year-old cherub, and green mantles for every one, that slipped over the head, and wreaths of fresh green vines for the hair. The living tree gave up toys and tinsel and everything, as other trees, that have given up their lives, have never been known to do. The children starred themselves over with its ornaments, and everybody dressed at the same moment. The pretty girls wrapped tinsel and cranberry ropes in their hair, and looked prettier than ever. It was so deep in the forest that for mirrors each must inquire of the eyes that loved her for news of how she looked.

By the time that the tree was stripped quite bare, with only a spangle here or a fleece of snow there, the whole party was peacocking in its finery down the wood road, two by two, and two by two: the Woodsman with his boy on his shoulder; the green-mantled, vine-wreathed folk; the lonely Spirit of the Woods, a hesitating child peeping up at him; the little Robin Hoods, a-chase for sparrows; and, straggling behind the rest, the Cupid-baby,like a new-born butterfly, not quite able either to run or to fly. And so, winding with the winding red road, all our brightness subdued to the dim atmosphere in which we moved,—that impalpable violet that floats about the stems of the trees in these vast groves, giving an almost intolerable beauty to the age-old trunks,—we came to recognize that about us were the real Christmas-trees; for they were fast-rooted here when homeless Mary was with child in Bethlehem.

What broke the spell was the old Edenic curse. Some one spoke of food. I think it was a man. He said, in effect, that he wished to be comforted with apples; that he was sick of love; he described a cold Christmas dinner; then a dinner burned to a crisp and served to forty empty chairs. It was a moving tale, and had that effect upon our procession.

The dinner-hour had been set early that every child might come; and one or two little heads, with their first thistle-down thatch, beside the old white ones, made the Christmas dinner seem more than ever a gracious family feast. We did not come dressed as people dining on Christmas day, but all still in our mantles of forest green and wreaths of vine. Down the tables, formed like a cross, shone the red of toyon berries, in the folds of the girls’ coiled hair and in the chains about children’s necks.

If there, was a moment of disillusionment, it was the one in which it was discovered that the Spirit of the Woods did not subsist on wood-alcohol, as had been rumored, but contrived large pieces of turkey between the fringes of moss about his lips. But this, too, had a happy influence, because it loosened some rather silent tongues, and the children’s talk burst out fluent and simultaneous.

Housed intimately in by the evergreen-hung walls, the fire-light and soft lamps bringing us into one warm group, the sense of comradeship, up there on the big, misty mountain, and the gracious presence of little children and our own, dear people, brought us to our feet to sing again the wassail-song.

“Here we come a-wassailingAmong the leaves so green,Here we come a-wanderingSo fair to be seen.”

“Here we come a-wassailing

Among the leaves so green,

Here we come a-wandering

So fair to be seen.”

And as we stood, glasses lifted, we looked from the faces that had made our own first Christmases bright to the little ones, just above the cloth, and pledged the birth of this good, new way of being glad on Christmas day.

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