diff options
Diffstat (limited to '20516.txt')
| -rw-r--r-- | 20516.txt | 4849 |
1 files changed, 4849 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/20516.txt b/20516.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..06be900 --- /dev/null +++ b/20516.txt @@ -0,0 +1,4849 @@ +The Project Gutenberg EBook of Christmas, by Zona Gale + +This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with +almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or +re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included +with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org + + +Title: Christmas + A Story + +Author: Zona Gale + +Illustrator: Leon V. Solon + +Release Date: February 4, 2007 [EBook #20516] + +Language: English + +Character set encoding: ASCII + +*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CHRISTMAS *** + + + + +Produced by Roger Frank and the Online Distributed +Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net + + + + + +CHRISTMAS + +----------------------------------------------------------------------- + +THE MACMILLAN COMPANY +NEW YORK . BOSTON . CHICAGO +DALLAS . SAN FRANCISCO + +MACMILLAN & CO., LIMITED +LONDON . BOMBAY . CALCUTTA +MELBOURNE + +THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, LTD. +TORONTO + +----------------------------------------------------------------------- + +[Illustration: "MARY FILLED HER ARMS WITH HAY AND TURNED TO THE +MANGER"] + +----------------------------------------------------------------------- + +CHRISTMAS + +A STORY + +BY +ZONA GALE +AUTHOR OF "THE LOVES OF PELLEAS AND ETARRE" +"FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE," ETC. + +WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY +LEON V. SOLON + +New York +THE MACMILLAN COMPANY +1912 +All rights reserved + +----------------------------------------------------------------------- + +COPYRIGHT, 1912, +BY THE McCLURE PUBLICATIONS, INCORPORATED. + +COPYRIGHT, 1912, +BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. + +Set up and electrotyped. Published October, 1912. + +Norwood Press + +J. S. Cushing Co.--Berwick & Smith Co. +Norwood, Mass., U.S.A. + +----------------------------------------------------------------------- + +ILLUSTRATIONS + +"Mary filled her arms with hay, and turned to the +manger" Frontispiece + + FACING + PAGE + +"He stood looking at it from part way across the road" 76 + +"Across the still fields came flashing the point of +flame" 110 + +"The children began to sing, 'Go bury Saint Nicklis'" 150 + +"Their way led east between high banks of snow" 200 + +"The three men stepped into the lamplight" 240 + +----------------------------------------------------------------------- + + + + +CHRISTMAS + +I + + +It was in October that Mary Chavah burned over the grass of her lawn, +and the flame ran free across the place where in Spring her wild flower +bed was made. Two weeks later she had there a great patch of purple +violets. And all Old Trail Town, which takes account of its neighbours' +flowers, of the migratory birds, of eclipses, and the like, came to see +the wonder. + +"Mary Chavah!" said most of the village, "you're the luckiest woman +alive. If a miracle was bound to happen, it'd get itself happened to +you." + +"I don't believe in miracles, though," Mary wrote to Jenny Wing. "These +come just natural--only we don't know how." + +"That _is_ miracles," Jenny wrote back. "They do come natural--we don't +know how." + +"At this rate," said Ellen Bourne, one of Mary's neighbours, "you'll be +having roses bloom in your yard about Christmas time. For a Christmas +present." + +"I don't believe in Christmas," Mary said. "I thought you knew that. But +I'll take the roses, though, if they come in the Winter," she added, +with her queer flash of smile. + +When it was dusk, or early in the morning, Mary Chavah, with her long +shawl over her head, stooped beside the violets and loosened the earth +about them with her whole hand, and as if she reverenced violets more +than finger tips. And she thought:-- + +"Ain't it just as if Spring was right over back of the air all the +time--and it could come if we knew how to call it? But we don't know." + +But whatever she thought about it, Mary kept in her heart. For it was as +if not only Spring, but new life, or some other holy thing were nearer +than one thought and had spoken to her, there on the edge of Winter. + +And Old Trail Town asked itself:-- + +"Ain't Mary Chavah the funniest? Look how nice she is about +everything--and yet you know she won't never keep Christmas at all. No, +sir. She ain't kept a single Christmas in years. I donno why...." + + + + +II + + +Moving about on his little lawn in the dark, Ebenezer Rule was aware of +two deeper shadows before him. They were between him and the leafless +lilacs and mulberries that lined the street wall. A moment before he had +been looking at that darkness and remembering how, once, as a little +boy, he had slept there under the wall and had dreamed that he had a +kingdom. + +"Who is't?" he asked sharply. + +"Hello, Ebenezer," said Simeon Buck, "it's only me and Abel. We're all." + +Ebenezer Rule came toward them. It was so dark that they could barely +distinguish each other. Their voices had to do it all. + +"What you doing out here?" one of the deeper shadows demanded. + +"Oh, nothing," said Ebenezer, irritably, "not a thing." + +He did not ask them to go in the house, and the three stood there +awkwardly, handling the time like a blunt instrument. Then Simeon Buck, +proprietor of the Simeon Buck North American Dry Goods Exchange, plunged +into what they had come to say. + +"Ebenezer," he said, with those variations of intonation which mean an +effort to be delicate, "is--is there any likelihood that the factory +will open up this Fall?" + +"No, there ain't," Ebenezer said, like something shutting. + +"Nor--nor this Winter?" Simeon pursued. + +"No, sir," said Ebenezer, like something opening again to shut with a +bang. + +"Well, if you're sure--" said Simeon. + +Ebenezer cut him short. "I'm dead sure," he said. "I've turned over my +orders to my brother's house in the City. He can handle 'em all and not +have to pay his men a cent more wages." And this was as if something had +been locked. + +"Well," said Simeon, "then, Abel, I move we go ahead." + +Abel Ames, proprietor of the Granger County Merchandise Emporium ("The +A. T. Stewart's of the Middle West," he advertised it), sighed +heavily--a vast, triple sigh, that seemed to sigh both in and out, as a +schoolboy whistles. + +"Well," he said, "I hate to do it. But I'll be billblowed if I want to +think of paying for a third or so of this town's Christmas presents and +carrying 'em right through the Winter. I done that last year, and Fourth +of July I had all I could do to keep from wishing most of the crowd +Merry Christmas, 'count of their still owing me. I'm a merchant and a +citizen, but I ain't no patent adjustable Christmas tree." + +"Me neither," Simeon said. "Last year it was _me_ give a silk cloak and +a Five Dollar umbrella and a fur bore and a bushel of knick-knicks to +the folks in this town. My name wa'n't on the cards, but it's me that's +paid for 'em--_up_ to now. I'm sick of it. The storekeepers of this town +may make a good thing out of Christmas, but they'd ought to get some of +the credit instead of giving it all, by Josh." + +"What you going to do?" inquired Ebenezer, dryly. + +"Well, of course last year was an exceptional year," said Abel, +"owing--" + +He hesitated to say "owing to the failure of the Ebenezer Rule Factory +Company," and so stammered with the utmost delicacy, and skipped a +measure. + +"And we thought," Simeon finished, "that if the factory wasn't going to +open up this Winter, we'd work things so's to have little or no +Christmas in town this year--being so much of the present giving falls +on us to carry on our books." + +"It ain't only the factory wages, of course," Abel interposed, "it's the +folks's savings being et up in--" + +"--the failure," he would have added, but skipped a mere beat instead. + +"--and we want to try to give 'em a chance to pay us up for last +Christmas before they come on to themselves with another celebration," +he added reasonably. + +Ebenezer Rule laughed--a descending scale of laughter that seemed to +have no organs wherewith to function in the open, and so never got +beyond the gutturals. + +"How you going to fix it?" he inquired again. + +"Why," said Simeon, "everybody in town's talking that they ain't going +to give anybody anything for Christmas. Some means it and some don't. +Some'll do it and some'll back out. But the churches has decided to omit +Christmas exercises altogether this year. Some thought to have speaking +pieces, but everybody concluded if they had exercises without oranges +and candy the children'd go home disappointed, so they've left the whole +thing slide--" + +"It don't seem just right for 'em not to celebrate the birth of our Lord +just because they can't afford the candy," Abel Ames observed mildly, +but Simeon hurried on:-- + +"--slide, and my idea and Abel's is to get the town meeting to vote a +petition to the same effect asking the town not to try to do anything +with their Christmas this year. We heard the factory wasn't going to +open, and we thought if we could tell 'em that for sure, it would settle +it--and save him and me and all the rest of 'em. Would--would you be +willing for us to tell the town meeting that? It's to-night--we're on +the way there." + +"Sure," said Ebenezer Rule, "tell 'em. And you might point out to 'em," +he added, with his spasm of gutturals, "that failures is often salutary +measures. Public benefactions. Fixes folks so's they can't spend their +money fool." + +He walked with them across the lawn, going between them and guiding them +among the empty aster beds. + +"They think I et up their savings in the failure," he went on, "when all +I done is to bring 'em face to face with the fact that for years they've +been overspending themselves. It takes Christmas to show that up. This +whole Christmas business is about wore out, anyhow. Ain't it?" + +"That's what," Simeon said, "it's a spendin' sham, from edge to edge." + +Abel Ames was silent. The three skirted the flower beds and came out on +the level sweep of turf before the house that was no house in the +darkness, save that they remembered how it looked: a square, smoked +thing, with a beard of dead creepers and white shades lidded over its +never-lighted windows--a fit home for this man least-liked of the three +hundred neighbours who made Old Trail Town. He touched the elbows of the +other two men as they walked in the dark, but he rarely touched any +human being. And now Abel Ames suddenly put his hand down on that of +Ebenezer, where it lay in the crook of Abel's elbow. + +"What you got there?" he asked. + +"Nothing much," Ebenezer answered, irritably again. "It's an old glass. +I was looking over some rubbish, and I found it--over back. It's a field +glass." + +"What you got a field glass out in the dark for?" Abel demanded. + +"I used to fool with it some when I was a little shaver," Ebenezer said. +He put the glass in Abel's hand. "On the sky," he added. + +Abel lifted the glass and turned it on the heavens. There, above the +little side lawn, the firmament had unclothed itself of branches and lay +in a glorious nakedness to three horizons. + +"Thunder," Abel said, "look at 'em look." + +Sweeping the field with the lens, Abel spoke meanwhile. + +"Seems as if I'd kind of miss all the fuss in the store around +Christmas," he said,--"the extra rush and the trimming up and all." + +"Abel'll miss lavishin' his store with cut paper, I guess," said Simeon; +"he dotes on tassels." + +"Last year," Abel went on, not lowering the glass, "I had a little kid +come in the store Christmas Eve, that I'd never see before. He ask' me +if he could get warm--and he set down on the edge of a chair by the +stove, and he took in everything in the place. I ask' him his name, and +he just smiled. I ask' him if he was glad it was Christmas, and he says, +Was I. I was goin' to give him some cough drops, but when I come back +from waiting on somebody he was gone. I never could find out who he was, +nor see anybody that saw him. I thought mebbe this Christmas he'd come +back. Lord, don't it look like a pasture of buttercups up there? Here, +Simeon." + +Simeon, talking, took the glass and lifted it to the stars. + +"Cut paper doin's is all very well," he said, "but the worst nightmare +of the year to the stores is Christmas. I always think it's come to be +'Peace on earth, good will to men and extravagance of women.' Quite a +nice little till of gold pieces up there in the sky, ain't there? I'd +kind o' like to stake a claim out up there--eh? Lay it out along about +around that bright one down there--by Josh," he broke off, "look at that +bright one." + +Simeon kept looking through the glass, and he leaned a little forward to +try to see the better. + +"What is it?" he repeated, "what's that one? It's the biggest star I +ever see--" + +The other two looked where he was looking, low in the east. But they saw +nothing save boughs indeterminately moving and a spatter of sparkling +points not more bright than those of the upper field. + +"You look," Simeon bade the vague presence that was his host; but +through the glass, Ebenezer still saw nothing that challenged his sight. + +"I don't know the name of a star in the sky, except the dipper," he +grumbled, "but I don't see anything out of the ordinary, anyhow." + +"It is," Simeon protested; "I tell you, it's the biggest star I ever +saw. It's blue and purple and green and yellow--" + +Abel had the glass now, and he had looked hardly sooner than he had +recognized. + +"Sure," he said, "I've got it. It _is_ blue and purple and green and +yellow, and it's as big as most stars put together. It twinkles--yes, +sir, and it swings...." he broke off, laughing at the mystification of +the others, and laughed so that he could not go on. + +"Is it a comet, do you s'pose?" said Simeon. + +"No," said Abel, "no. It's come to stay. It's our individual private +star. It's the arc light in front of the Town Hall you two are looking +at." + +They moved to where Abel stood, and from there, up the rise of ground to +the east, they could see Simeon's star, shining softly and throwing +long rays, it seemed, almost to where they stood: the lamp that marked +the heart of the village. + +"Shucks," said Simeon. + +"Sold," said Ebenezer. + +"Why, I don't know," said Abel, "I kind of like to see it through the +glass. It looks like it was a bigger light than we give it credit for." + +"It's a big enough light," said Ebenezer, testily. It was his own plant +at the factory that made possible the town's three arc lights, and these +had been continued by him at the factory's closing. + +"No use making fun of your friends' eyesight because you're all of +twenty minutes younger than them," Simeon grumbled. "Come on, Abel. It +must be gettin' round the clock." + +Abel lingered. + +"A man owns the hull thing with a glass o' this stamp," he said. "How +much does one like that cost?" he inquired. + +"I'll sell you this one--" began Ebenezer; "wait a week or two and I may +sell you this one," he said. "I ain't really looked through it myself +yet." + +Not much after this, the two went away and left Ebenezer in the dark +yard. + +He stood in the middle of his little grass plot and looked through his +glass again. That night there was, so to say, nothing remote about the +sky, save its distance. It had none of the reticence of clouds. It made +you think of a bed of golden bells, each invisible stalk trying on its +own account to help forward some Spring. As he had said, he did not know +one star from another, nor a planet for a planet with a name. It had +been years since he had seen the heavens so near. He moved about, +looking, and passed the wall of leafless lilacs and mulberries. Stars +hung in his boughs like fruit for the plucking. They patterned patches +of sky. He looked away and back, and it was as if the stars repeated +themselves, like the chorus of everything. + +"You beggars," Ebenezer said, "awful dressed up, ain't you? It must be +for something up there--it ain't for anything down here, let me tell +you." + +He went up to his dark back door. From without there he could hear Kate +Kerr, his general servant, who had sufficient personality to compel the +term "housekeeper," setting sponge for bread, with a slapping, hollow +sound and a force that implied a frown for every down stroke of the iron +spoon. He knew how she would turn toward the door as he entered, with +her way of arching eyebrows, in the manner of one about to recite the +symptoms of a change for the worse--or at best to say "about the same" +to everything in the universe. And when Kate Kerr spoke, she always +whispered on the faintest provocation. + +A sudden distaste for the entire inside of his house seized Ebenezer. He +turned and wandered back down the little dark yard, looking up at the +high field of the stars, with only his dim eyes. + +"There must be quite a little to know about them," he thought, "if +anybody was enough interested." + +Then he remembered Simeon and Abel, and laughed again in his way. + +"I done the town a good turn for once, didn't I?" he thought; "I've +fixed folks so's they can't spend their money fool!" + +Two steps from Ebenezer's front gate, Simeon and Abel overtook a woman. +She had a long shawl over her head, and she was humming some faint air +of her own making. + +"Coming to the meeting, Mary?" Simeon asked as they passed her. + +"No," said Mary Chavah, "I started for it. But it's such a nice night +I'm going to walk around." + +"Things are going to go your way to that meeting, I guess," said Simeon; +"ain't you always found fault with Christmas?" + +"They's a lot o' nonsense about it," Mary assented; "I don't ever bother +myself much with it. Why?" + +"I donno but we'll all come round to your way of thinking to-night," +said Simeon. + +"For just this year!" Abel Ames called back, as they went on. + +"You can't do much else, I guess," said Mary. "Everybody dips Christmas +up out of their pocketbooks, and if there ain't nothing there, they +can't dip." + +The men laughed with her, and went on down the long street toward the +town. Mary followed slowly, under the yellowing elms that made great +golden shades for the dim post lamps. And high at the far end of the +street down which they went, hung the blue arc light before the Town +Hall, center to the constellation of the home lights and the shop lights +and the street lights, all near neighbours to the stream and sweep of +the stars hanging a little higher and shining as by one sun. + + + + +III + + +It was interesting to see how they took the proposal to drop that +Christmas from the calendar there in Old Trail Town. It was so eminently +a sensible thing to do, and they all knew it. Oh, every way they looked +at it, it was sensible, and they admitted it. Yet, besides Mary Chavah +and Ebenezer Rule, probably the only person in the town whose +satisfaction in the project could be counted on to be unfeigned was +little Tab Winslow. For Tab, as all the town knew, had a turkey brought +up by his own hand to be the Winslows' Christmas dinner, but such had +become Tab's intimacy with and fondness for the turkey that he was +prepared to forego his Christmas if only that dinner were foregone, +too. + +"Theophilus Thistledown is such a human turkey," Tab had been heard +explaining patiently; "he knows me--and he knows his name. He don't +_expect_ us to eat him ... why, you _can't_ eat anything that knows its +name." + +But every one else was just merely sensible. And they had been +discussing Christmas in this sensible strain at the town meeting that +night, before Simeon and Abel broached their plan for standardizing +their sensible leanings. + +Somebody had said that Jenny Wing, and Bruce Rule, who was Ebenezer's +nephew, were expected home for Christmas, and had added that it "didn't +look as if there would be much of any Christmas down to the station to +meet them." On which Mis' Mortimer Bates had spoken out, philosophical +to the point of brutality. Mis' Bates was little and brown and quick, +and her clothes seemed always to curtain her off, so that her figure +was no part of her presence. + +"I ain't going to do a thing for Christmas this year," she declared, as +nearly everybody in the village had intermittently declared, "not a +living, breathing thing. I can't, and folks might just as well know it, +flat foot. What's the use of buying tinsel and flim-flam when you're +eating milk gravy to save butter and using salt sacks for handkerchiefs? +I ain't educated up to see it." + +Mis' Jane Moran, who had changed her chair three times to avoid a +draught, sat down carefully in her fourth chair, her face twitching a +little as if its muscles were connected with her joints. + +"Christmas won't be no different from any other day to our house this +year," she said. "We'll get up and eat our three meals and sit down and +look at each other. We can't even spare a hen--she might lay if we +didn't eat her." + +Mis' Abby Winslow, mother of seven under fifteen, looked up from her +rocking-chair--Mis' Winslow always sat limp in chairs as if they were +reaching out to rest her and, indeed, this occasional yielding to the +force of gravity was almost her only luxury. + +"You ain't thinking of the children, Mis' Bates," she said, "nor you +either, Jane Moran, or you couldn't talk that way. We can't have no real +Christmas, of course. But I'd planned some little things made out of +what I had in the house: things that wouldn't be anything, and yet would +seem a little something." + +Mis' Mortimer Bates swept round at her. + +"Children," she said, "ought to be showed how to do without things. +Bennet and Gussie ain't expecting a sliver of nothing for Christmas--not +a sliver." + +Mis' Winslow unexpectedly flared up. + +"Whether it shows through on the outside or not," she said, "I'll bet +you they are." + +"My three," Mis' Emerson Morse put in pacifically, "have been kept from +popping corn and cracking nuts all Fall so's they could do both +Christmas night, and it would seem like something that _was_ something." + +"That ain't the idea," Mis' Bates insisted; "I want them learnt to do +without--" ("They'll learn that," Mis' Abby Winslow said; "they'll +learn....") "Happening as it does to most every one of us not to have no +Christmas, they won't be no distinctions drawn. None of the children can +brag--and children is limbs of Satan for bragging," she added. (She was +remembering a brief conversation overheard that day between Gussie and +Pep, the minister's son:-- + +"I've got a doll," said Gussie. + +"I've got a dollar," said Pep. + +"My mamma went to a tea party," said Gussie. + +"My mamma give one," said Pep. + +Gussie mustered her forces. "My papa goes to work every morning," she +topped it. + +"My papa don't have to," said Pep, and closed the incident.) + +"I can't help who's a limb of Satan," Mis' Winslow replied doggedly, "I +can't seem to sense Christmas time without Christmas." + +"It won't _be_ Christmas time if you don't have any Christmas," Mis' +Bates persisted. + +"Oh, yes it will," Mis' Winslow said. "Oh, yes, it will. You can't stop +that." + +It was Mis' Bates, who, from the high-backed plush rocker, rapped with +the blue glass paperweight on the red glass lamp and, in the absence of +Mr. Bates, called the meeting to order. The Old Trail Town Society was +organized on a platform of "membership unlimited, dues nothing but +taking turns with the entertaining, officers to consist of: President, +the host of the evening (or wife, if any), and no minutes to bother +with." And it was to a meeting so disposed on the subject of Christmas +that Simeon Buck rose to present his argument. + +"Mr. President," he addressed the chair. + +"It's Madam President, you ninny geese," corrected Buff Miles, _sotto +voce_. + +"It had ought to be Madam Chairman," objected Mis' Moran; "she ain't the +continuous president." + +"Well, for the land sakes, call me Mis' Bates, formal, and go ahead," +said the lady under discussion. "Only I bet you've forgot now what you +was going to say." + +"Not much I did _not_," Simeon Buck continued composedly, and, ignoring +the interruptions, let his own vocative stand. Then he presented a +memorandum of a sum of money. It was not a large sum. But when he quoted +it, everybody looked at everybody else, stricken. For it was a sum large +enough to have required, in the earning, months of work on the part of +an appalling proportion of Old Trail Town. + +"From the day after Thanksgiving to the night before Christmas last +year," said Simeon, "that is the amount that the three hundred +souls--no, I guess it must have been bodies--in our town spent in the +local stores. Now, bare living expenses aside,--which ain't very much +for us all, these days,--this amount may be assumed to have been spent +by the lot of us for Christmas. Of course there was those," continued +Mr. Buck, looking intelligently about him, "who bought most of their +Christmas stuff in the City. But these--these economic traitors only +make the point of what I say the more so. Without them, the town spent +this truly amazing sum in keeping the holidays. Now, I ask you, frank, +could the town afford that, or anything like that?" + +Buff Miles spoke out of the extremity of his reflections. + +"That's a funny crack," he said, "for a merchant to make. Why not leave +'em spend and leave 'em pay?" + +"Oh, I'll leave 'em _pay_ all right," rejoined Simeon, significantly, +and stood silent and smiling until there were those in the room who +uncomfortably shifted. + +Then he told them the word he bore from Ebenezer Rule that as they had +feared and half expected, the factory was not to open that Winter at +all. Hardly a family represented in the rooms was not also +representative of a factory employee, now idle these seven months, as +they were periodically idle at the times of "enforced" suspension of the +work. + +"What I'm getting at is this," Simeon summed it up, "and Abel Ames, +here, backs me up--don't you, Abel?--that hadn't we all ought to come to +some joint conclusion about our Christmas this year, and roust the town +up to it, like a town, and not go it blind and either get in up to our +necks in debt, same as City folks, or else quit off Christmas, +individual, and mebbe hurt folks's feelings? Why not move intelligent, +like a town, and all agree out-and-out to leave Christmas go by this +year? And have it understood, thorough?" + +It was very still in the little rooms when he had finished. There seems +to be no established etiquette of revolutions. But something of the +unconsciousness of the enthusiast was upon Mis' Mortimer Bates, and she +spoke before she knew:-- + +"So's we can be sure everybody else'll know it and not give something +either and be disappointed too," she assented. "Well, I bet everybody'd +be real relieved." + +"The churches has sanctioned us doing away with Christmas this year by +doing away with it themselves," observed Mis' Jane Moran. "That'd ought +to be enough to go by." + +"It don't seem to me Christmas is a thing for the churches to decide +about," said Simeon, thoughtfully. "It seems to me the matter is up to +the merchants and the grocers and the family providers. We're the ones +most concerned. Us providers have got to scratch gravel to get together +any Christmas at all, if any. And speaking for us merchants, I may say, +we'll lay in the stock if folks'll buy it. But if they can't afford to +pay for it, we don't want the stock personally." + +"I guess we've all had the experience," observed Mis' Jane Moran, "of +announcing we wasn't going to give any gifts _this_ year, and then had +somebody send something embroidered by hand, with a solid month's work +on it. But if we all agree to secede from Christmas, we can lay down the +law to folks so's it'll be understood: _No Christmas for nobody_." + +"Not to children?" said Mis' Abby Winslow, doubtfully. + +"My idea is to teach 'em to do entirely without Christmas," harped Mis' +Bates. "We can't afford one. Why not let the children share in the +family privation without trying to fool 'em with make-shift presents and +boiled sugar?" + +Over in a corner near the window plants, whose dead leaves she had been +picking off, sat Ellen Bourne--Mis' Matthew Bourne she was, but nearly +everybody called her Ellen Bourne. There is some law about these things: +why instinctively we call some folk by the whole name, some by their +first names, some by the last, some by shortening the name, some by a +name not their own. Perhaps there is a name for each of us, if only we +knew where to look, and folk intuitively select the one most like that. +Perhaps some of us, by the sort of miracle that is growing every day, +got the name that is meant for us. Perhaps some of us struggle along +with consonants that spell somebody else. And how did some names get +themselves so terrifically overused unless by some strange might, say, a +kind of astrological irregularity.... Ellen Bourne sat by the window and +suddenly looked over her shoulder at the room. + +"If we've got the things made," she said, "can't we give 'em? If it's to +children?" + +"I think if we're going to omit, we'd ought to omit," Mis Bates held her +own; "it can't matter to you, Ellen, with no children, so...." She +caught herself sharply up. Ellen's little boy had died a Christmas or +two ago. + +"No," Ellen said, "I ain't any children, of course. But--" + +"Well, I think," said Mis' Jane Moran, "that we've hit on the only way +we could have hit on to chirk each other up over a hard time." + +"And get off delicate ourselves same time," said Buff Miles. From the +first Buff had been advocating what he called "an open Christmas," and +there were those near him at the meeting to whom he had confided some +plan about "church choir Christmas carol serenades," which he was loath +to see set at naught. + +Not much afterward Simeon Buck put the motion:-- + +"Mis' Chairman," he said, "I move you--and all of us--that the Old Trail +Town meeting do and hereby does declare itself in favour of striking +Christmas celebrations from its calendar this year. And that we +circulate a petition through the town to this effect, headed by our +names. And that we all own up that it's for the simple and regretful +reason that not a mother's son of us can afford to buy Christmas +presents this year, and what's the use of scratching to keep up +appearances?" + +For a breath Abel Ames hesitated; then he spoke voluntarily for the +first time that evening. + +"Mr. President, I second the hull of that," said he, slowly, and without +looking at anybody; and then sighed his vast, triple sigh. + +There was apparently nobody to vote against the motion. Mis' Winslow did +not vote at all. Ellen Bourne said "No," but she said it so faintly that +nobody heard save those nearest her, and they felt a bit embarrassed for +her because she had spoken alone, and they tried to cover up the +minute. + +"Carried," said the Chair, and slipped out in the kitchen to put on the +coffee. + +At the meeting there was almost nobody who, in the course of the +evening, did not make or reply to some form of observation on one theme. +It was:-- + +"Well, I wish Mary Chavah'd been to the meeting. She'd have enjoyed +herself." + +Or, "Well, won't Mary Chavah be glad of this plan they've got? She's +wanted it a good while." + +Or, "We all seem to have come to Mary Chavah's way of thinking, don't +we? You know, she ain't kept any Christmas for years." + +Unless it was Abel Ames. He, in fact, made or replied to almost no +observations that evening. He drank his coffee without cream, sugar, or +spoon,--they are always overlooking somebody's essentials in this way, +and such is Old Trail Town's shy courtesy that the omission is never +mentioned or repaired by the victim,--and sighed his triple sigh at +intervals, and went home. + +"Hetty," he said to his wife, who had not gone to the meeting, "they put +it through. We won't have no Christmas creditors this year. We don't +have to furnish charged Christmas presents for nobody." + +She looked up from the towel she was featherstitching--she was a little +woman who carried her head back and had large eyes and the long, curved +lashes of a child. + +"I s'pose you're real relieved, ain't you, Abel?" she answered. + +"My, yes," said Abel, without expression. "My, yes." + + * * * * * + +They all took the news home in different wise. + +"Matthew," said Ellen Bourne, "the town meeting voted not to have any +Christmas this year. That is, to ask the folks not to have any--'count +of expense." + +"Sensible move," said Matthew, sharpening his ax by the kitchen stove. + +"It'll be a relief for most folks not to have the muss and the clutter," +said Ellen's mother. + +"Hey, king and country!" said Ellen's old father, whittling a stick, "I +ain't done no more'n look on at a Christmas for ten years and more--with +no children around so." + +"I know," said Ellen Bourne, "I know...." + +The announcement was greeted by Mortimer Bates with a slap of the knee. + +"Good-by, folderol!" he said. "We need a sane Christmas in the world a +good sight more'n we need a sane Fourth, most places. Good work." + +But Bennet and Gussie Bates burst into wails. + +"Hush!" said Mis' Bates, peremptorily. "You ain't the only ones, +remember. It's no Christmas for nobody!" + +"I thought the rest of 'em would have one an' we could go over to +theirs...." sobbed Gussie. + +"I'd rather p'etend it's Christmas in other houses even if we ain't it!" +mourned Bennet. + +"Be my little man and woman," admonished Mis' Mortimer Bates. + +At the Morans, little Emily Moran made an unexpected deduction:-- + +"I _won't_ stay in bed all day Christmas!" she gave out. + +"Stay in bed!" echoed Mis' Moran. "Why on this earth should you stay in +bed?" + +"Well, if we get up, then it's Christmas and you can't stop it!" little +Emily triumphed. + +When they told Pep, the minister's son, after a long preparation by +story and other gradual approach, and a Socratic questioning cleverly +winning damning admissions from Pep, he looked up in his father's face +thoughtfully:-- + +"If they ain't no Christ's birthday this year, is it a lie that Christ +was born?" he demanded. + +And secretly the children took counsel with one another: Would Buff +Miles, the church choir tenor, take them out after dark on Christmas +Eve, to sing church choir serenades at folks' gates, or would he not? +And when they thought that he might not, because this would be +considered Christmas celebration and would only make the absence of +present-giving the more conspicuous, as in the case of the Sunday +schools themselves, they faced still another theological quandary: For +if it was true that Christ was born, then Christmas was his birthday; +and if Christmas was his birthday, wasn't it wicked not to pay any +attention? + +Alone of them all, little Tab Winslow rejoiced. His brothers and sisters +made the time tearful with questionings as to the effect on Santa +Claus, and how would they get word to him, and would it be Christmas in +the City, and why couldn't they move there, and other matters denoting +the reversal of this their earth. But Tab slipped out the kitchen door, +to the corner of the barn, where the great turkey gobbler who had been +named held his empire trustingly. + +"Oh, Theophilus Thistledown," said Tab to him, "you're the only one in +this town that's goin' to have a Christmas. You ain't got to be et." + + + + +IV + + +The placard was tacked to the Old Trail Town post-office wall, between a +summons to join the Army and the Navy of the United States, and the +reward offered for an escaped convict--all three manifestoes registering +something of the stage of society's development. + + NOTICE + + Owing to the local business depression and to the current private + decisions to get up very few home Christmas celebrations this year, + and also to the vote of the various lodges, churches, Sunday + schools, etc., etc., etc., to forego the usual Christmas tree + observances, the merchants of this town have one and all united + with most of the folks to petition the rest to omit all Christmas + presents, believing that the Christmas spirit will be kept up best + by all agreeing to act alike. All that's willing may announce it by + signing below and notifying others. + + THE COMMITTEE. + +There were only three hundred folk living in Old Trail Town. Already two +thirds of their signatures were scrawled on the sheets of foolscap +tacked beneath the notice. + +On the day after her return home, Jenny Wing stood and stared at the +notice. Her mother had written to her of the town's talk, but the +placard made it seem worse. + +"I'll go in on the way home and see what Mary says," she thought, and +asked for the letter that lay in Mary Chavah's box, next her own. They +gave her the letter without question. All Old Trail Town asks for its +neighbour's mail and reads its neighbour's postmarks and gets to know +the different Writings and to inquire after them, like persons. ("He +ain't got so much of a curl to his M to-day," one will say of a +superscription. "Better write right back and chirk 'im up." Or, "Here's +Her that don't seal her letters good. Tell her about that, why don't +you?" Or, "This Writing's a stranger to me. I'll just wait a minute to +see if birth or death gets out of the envelope.") + +As she closed Mary's gate and hurried up the walk, in a keen wind +flowing with little pricking flakes, Jenny was startled to see both +parlour windows open. The white muslin curtains were blowing idly as if +June were in the air. Turning as a matter of course to the path that led +to the kitchen, she was hailed by Mary, who came out the front door with +a rug in her hands. + +"Step right in this way," said Mary; "this door's unfastened." + +"Forevermore!" Jenny said, "Mary Chavah! What you got your house all +open for? You ain't moving?" + +A gust of wind took Mary's answer. She tossed the rug across the icy +railing of the porch and beckoned Jenny into the house, and into the +parlour. And when she had greeted Jenny after the months of her +absence:-- + +"See," Mary said exultantly, "don't it look grand and empty? Look at it +first, and then come on in and I'll tell you about it." + +The white-papered walls of the two rooms were bare of pictures; the +floor had been sparingly laid with rugs. The walnut sofa and chairs, the +table for the lamp, and the long shelves of her grandfather's +books--these were all that the room held. A white arch divided the two +chambers, like a benign brow whose face had long been dimmed away. It +was all exquisitely clean and icy cold. A little snow drifted in +through the muslin curtains. The breath of the two women showed. + +"What on earth you done that for?" Jenny demanded. + +Mary Chavah stood in the empty archway, the satisfaction on her face not +veiling its pure austerity. She was not much past thirty-three, but she +looked older, for she was gaunt. Her flesh had lost its firmness, her +dressmaking had stooped her, her strong frame moved as if it habitually +shouldered its way. In her broad forehead and deep eyes and somewhat in +her silent mouth, you read the woman--the rest of her was obscured in +her gentle reticence. She had a gray shawl, blue-bordered, folded +tightly about her head and pinned under her chin, and it wrapped her to +her feet. + +"I feel like a thing in a new shell," she said. "Come on in where it's +warm." + +Instead of moving her dining-room table to her kitchen, as most of Old +Trail Town did in Winter, Mary had moved her cooking stove into the +dining room, had improvised a calico-curtained cupboard for the +utensils, and there she lived and sewed. The windows were bare. + +"I'll let the parlour have curtains if it wants to," she had said, "but +in the room I live in I want every strip of the sun I can get." + +There were no plants, though every house in Old Trail Town had a window +of green, and slips without number were offered.... + +"... You can have flowers all you want," she said once; "I like 'em too +well to box 'em up in the house." + +And there were no books. + +"I don't read," she admitted; "I ain't ever read a book in my life but +"Pilgrim's Progress" and the first four chapters of "Ben Hur." What's +the use of pretending, when books is such a nuisance to dust? +Grandfather's books in the parlour--oh, they ain't books. They're +furniture." + +But she had a little bookcase whose shelves were filled with her +patterns--in her dressmaking she never used a fashion plate. + +"I like to make 'em up and cut 'em out," she sometimes told her friends. +"I don't care nothing whatever about the dresses when they get +done--more fool the women for ornamenting themselves up like lamp +shades, I always think. But I just do love to fuss with the paper and +make it do like I say. Land, I've got my cupboard full of more patterns +than I'd ever get orders for if I lived to be born again." + +She sat down before the cooking stove and drew off her woolen mittens. +She folded a hand on her cheek, forcing the cheek out of drawing by her +hand's pressure. There was always about her gestures a curious +nakedness--indeed, about her face and hands. They were naive, perfectly +likely to reveal themselves in their current awkwardness and ugliness of +momentary expression which, by its very frankness, made a new law as it +broke an old one. + +"Don't you tell folks I've been house cleaning," she warned Jenny. "The +town would think I was crazy, with the thermometer acting up zero so. +Anyway, I ain't been house cleaning. I just simply got so sick to death +of all the truck piled up in this house that I had to get away from it. +And this morning it looked so clean and white and smooth outdoors that I +felt so cluttered up I couldn't sew. I begun on this room--and then I +kept on with the parlour. I've took out the lambrequins and 'leven +pictures and the what-not and four moth-catching rugs and four sofa +pillows, and I've packed the whole lot of 'em into the attic. I've done +the same to my bedroom. I've emptied my house out of all the stuff the +folks' and the folks' folks and their folks--clear back to Grandmother +Hackett had in here--I mean the truck part. Not the good. And I guess +now I've got some room to live in." + +Jenny looked at her admiringly, and asked: "How did you ever do it? I +can't bear to throw things away. I can't bear to move things from where +they've been." + +"I didn't use to want to," said Mary, "but lately--I do. The Winter's so +clean, you kind of have to, to keep up. What's the news?" + +"Here's a letter," Jenny said, and handed it. "I didn't look to see who +it's from. I guess it's a strange Writing, anyway." + +Mary glanced indifferently at it. "It's from Lily's boy, out West," she +said, and laid the letter on the shelf. "I meant, what's the news about +you?" + +Jenny's eyes widened swiftly. "News about me?" she said. "Who said there +was any news about me?" + +"Nobody," Mary said evenly; "but you've been gone most a year, ain't +you?" + +"Oh," Jenny said, "yes...." + +For really, when Old Trail Town stopped to think of it, Jenny Wing was +Mrs. Bruce Rule, and had been so for a year. But no one thought of +calling her that. It always takes Old Trail Town several years to adopt +its marriages. They would graduate first to "Jenny Wing that was," and +then to "Jenny Wing What's-name," and then to "Mis' Rule that was Jenny +Wing...." + +"... You tell me some news," Jenny added. "Mother don't ever write much +but the necessaries." + +"That's all there's been," Mary Chavah told her; "we ain't had no +luxuries for news in forever." + +"But there's that notice in the post office," cried Jenny. "I come home +to spend Christmas, and there's that notice in the post office. Mother +wrote nobody was going to do anything for Christmas, but she never wrote +me that. I've brought home some little things I made----" + +"Oh--Christmas!" Mary said. "Yes, they all got together and concluded +best not have any. You know, since the failure--" + +Mary hesitated--Ebenezer Rule was Bruce Rule's uncle. + +"I know," said Jenny, "it's Uncle Ebenezer. I don't know how I'm going +to tell Bruce when he comes. To think it's in our family, the reason +they can't have any Christmas...." + +"Nonsense," said Mary, briskly; "no Christmas presents is real +sensible, my way of thinking. It's been 'leven years since I've given a +Christmas present to anybody. The first Christmas after mother died, I +couldn't--I just couldn't. That kind of got me out of the idea, and +then I see all the nonsense of it." + +"The _nonsense_?" Jenny repeated. + +"If you don't like folks, you don't want to give nothing to them or take +nothing from them. And if you do like 'em you don't want to have to wait +to Christmas to give 'em things. Ain't that so?" Mary Chavah put it. + +"_No_," said Jenny; "it ain't. Not a bit so." And when Mary laughed, +questioned her, pressed her, "It seems perfectly awful to me not to have +a Christmas," Jenny could say only, "I feel like the Winter didn't have +no backbone to it." + +"It's a dead time, Winter," Mary assented. "What's the use of tricking +it up with gewgaws and pretending it's a live time? Besides, if you +ain't got the money, you ain't got the money. And nobody has, this year. +Unless they go ahead and buy things anyway, like the City." + +Jenny shook her head. "I got seven Christmas-present relatives and ten +Christmas-present friends, and I've only spent Two Dollars and Eighty +cents on 'em all," she said, "for material. But I've made little things +for every one of 'em. It don't seem as if that much had ought to hurt +any one." + +Jenny looked past her out the window, somewhere beyond the snow. + +"They's something else," she added, "it ain't all present giving...." + +"Nonsense," said Mary Chavah, "take the present trading away from +Christmas and see how long it'd last. I was in the City once for +Christmas. I'll never forget it--never. I never see folks work like the +folks worked there. The streets was Bedlam. The stores was worse. +'What'll I get him?...' 'I've just got to get something for her....' 'It +don't seem as if this is nice enough after what she give me last +year....' I can hear 'em yet. They spent money wicked. And I said to +myself that I was glad from my head to my feet that I was done with +Christmas. And I been preaching it ever since. And I'm pleased this town +has had to come to it." + +"It ain't the way I feel," said Jenny. She got up and wandered to the +window and hardly heard while Mary went on with more of the sort. "It +seems kind of like going back on the ways things are," Jenny said, as +she turned. Then, as she made ready to go, she broke off and smote her +hands together. + +"Oh," she said, "it don't seem as if I could bear it not to have +Christmas--not _this_ year." + +"You mean your and Bruce's first Christmas," said Mary. "Mark my words, +he'll be glad to be rid of the fuss. Men always are. Come on out the +front door if you're going," said Mary. "You might as well use it when +it's open." + +As Jenny passed the open parlour door, she looked in again at the bare +room. + +"Don't you _like_ pictures?" she asked abruptly. + +"I like 'em when I like 'em," Mary answered. "I didn't like them I had +up here--I had a shot stag and a fruit piece and an eagle with a child +in its claws. I've loathed 'em for years, but I ain't ever had the heart +to throw 'em out till now. They're over behind the coal bin." + +Jenny thought. "They's a picture over to mother's," she said, "that she +ain't put up because she ain't had the money to frame it. I guess I'll +bring it over after supper and see if you don't want it up here--frame +or no frame." She looked at Mary and laughed. "If I bring it to you +to-night," she said, "it ain't a Christmas present--legal. But if I want +to call it a Christmas present inside me, the town can't help that." + +"What's the picture?" Mary asked. + +"I don't know who it represents," said Jenny, "but it's nice." + +When Jenny had gone, Mary Chavah stood in the snow shaking the rug she +had left outside, and looking at the clean, white town. + +"It looks like it was waiting for something," she thought. + +A door opened and shut. A child shouted. In the north east a shining +body had come sparkling above the trees--Capella of the brightness of +one hundred of our suns, being born into the twilight like a little +star.... + +Mary closed the parlour windows and stood for a moment immersed in the +quiet and emptiness of the clean rooms. + +"This looks like it was waiting for something, too," she thought. "But +it ought to know it won't get it," she added whimsically. + +Then she went back to the warm room and saw the letter on the shelf. She +meant to go in a moment to the stable to make it safe there for the +night; so, with the gray shawl still binding her head and falling to her +feet, she sat by the stove and read the letter. + + + + +V + + + "... because she wasn't sick but two days and we never thought of + her dying till she was dead. Otherwise we'd have telegraphed. She + was buried yesterday, right here, and we'll get some kind of stone. + You say how you think it'd ought to be marked. That's about all + there is to tell except about _Yes_. He's six years old now and + Aunt Mary this ain't a place for him. He's a nice little fellow and + I hate for him to get rough and he will if he stays here. I'll do + the best I can and earn money to help keep him but I want he should + come and live with you...." + +"I won't have him!" said Mary Chavah, aloud. + + "... he could come alone with a tag all right and I could send his + things by freight. He ain't got much. You couldn't help but like + him and I hate for him to get rough. Please answer and oblige your + loving Nephew, + "JOHN BLOOD." + +Mary kept reading the letter and staring out into the snow. Her sister +Lily's boy--they wanted to send him to her. Lily's boy and Adam +Blood's--the man whose son she had thought would be her son. It was +twenty years ago that he had been coming to the house--this same +house--and she had thought that he was coming to see her, had never +thought of Lily at all till Lily had told her of her own betrothal to +him. It hurt yet. It had hurt freshly when he had died, seven years ago. +Now Lily was dead, and Adam's eldest son, John, wanted to send this +little brother to her, to have. + +"I won't take him," she said a great many times, and kept reading the +letter and staring out into the snow. + +For Lily she had no tears--she seldom had tears at all. But after a +little while she was conscious of a weight through her and in her, +aching in her throat, her breast, her body. She rose and went near to +the warmth of the fire, then to the freedom of the window against which +the snow lay piled, then she sat down in the place where she worked, +beside her patterns. The gray shawl still bound her head, and it was +still in her mind that she must go to the barn and lock it. But she did +not go--she sat in the darkening room with all her past crowding it.... + +... That first day with Adam at the Blood's picnic, given at his +home-coming. They had met with all that perilous, ready-made intimacy +which a school friendship of years before had allowed. As she had walked +beside him she had known well what he was going to mean to her. She +remembered the moment when he had contrived to ask her to wait until the +others went, so that he might walk home with her. And when they had +reached home, there on the porch--where she had just shaken the rugs in +the snow--Lily had been sitting, a stool--one of the stools now at +length banished to the shed--holding the hurt ankle that had kept her +from the picnic. Adam had stayed an hour, and they had sat beside Lily. +He had come again and again, and they had always sat beside Lily. Mary +remembered that those were the days when she was happy in _things_--in +the house and the look of the rooms and of the little garden from the +porch, and of the old red-cushioned rocking-chairs on the tiny "stoop." +She had loved her clothes and her little routines, and all these things +had seemed desirable and ultimate because they two were sharing them. +Then one day Mary had joined Lily and Adam there on the porch, and Lily +had been looking up with new eyes, and Mary had searched her face, and +then Adam's face; and they had all seemed in a sudden nakedness; and +Mary had known that a great place was closed against her. + +Since then house and porch and garden and routines had become like those +of other places. She had always been shut outside something, and always +she had borne burdens. The death of her parents, gadflys of need, worst +of all a curious feeling that the place closed against her was somehow +herself--that, so to say, she and herself had never once met. She used +to say that to herself sometimes, "There's two of me, and we don't +meet--we don't meet." + +"And now he wants me to take her boy and Adam's," she kept saying; "I'll +never do such a thing--never." + +She thought that the news of Lily's death was what gave her the strange, +bodily hurt that had seized her--the news that what she was used to was +gone; that she had no sister; that the days of their being together and +all the tasks of their upbringing were finished. Then she thought that +the remembering of those days of her happiness and her pain, and the +ache of what might have been and of what never was, had come to torture +her again. But the feeling was rather the weight of some imminent thing, +the ravage of something that grew with what it fed on, the grasp upon +her of something that would not let her go.... + +She had never seen them after their marriage, and so she had never seen +either of the children. Lily had once sent her a picture of John, but +she had never sent one of this other little boy. Mary tried to recall +what they had ever said of him. She could not even remember his +baptismal name, but she knew that they had called him "Yes" because it +was the first word he had learned to say, and because he had said it to +everything. "The baby can say 'Yes,'" Lily had written once; "I guess +it's all he'll ever be able to say. He says it all day long. He won't +try to say anything else." And once later: "We've taken to calling the +baby 'Yes,' and now he calls himself that. 'Yes wants it,' he says, and +'Take Yes,' and 'Yes is going off now.' His father likes it. He says yes +is everything and no is nothing. I don't think that means much, but we +call him that for fun...." But Mary could not remember what the child's +real name was. What difference did it make? As if she could have a child +meddling round the house while she was sewing. But of course this was +not the real reason. The real reason was that she could not bring up a +child--did she not know that? + +"... He's six years old now and Aunt Mary this ain't a place for him. +He's a nice little fellow and I hate for him to get rough and he will if +he stays here...." + +She tried to think who else could take him. They had no one. Adam, she +knew, had no one. Some of the neighbours there by the ranch ... it was +absurd to send him that long journey ... so she went through it all, +denying with all the old denials. And all the while the weight in her +body grew and filled her, and she was strangely conscious of her breath. + +"What ails me?" she said aloud, and got up to kindle a light. She was +amazed to see that it was seven o'clock, and long past her supper hour. +As she took from the clock shelf the key to the barn, some one rapped at +the back door and came through the cold kitchen with friendly +familiarity. It was Jenny, a shawl over her head, her face glowing with +the cold, and in her mittened hands a flat parcel. + +"My hand's most froze," Jenny admitted. "I didn't want to roll this +thing, so I carried it flat out, and it blew consider'ble. It's the +picture." + +"Get yourself warm," Mary bade her. "I'll undo it. Who is it of?" she +added, as the papers came away. + +"That's what I don't know," said Jenny, "but I've always liked it +around. I thought maybe you'd know." + +It was a picture which, in those days, had not before come to Old Trail +Town. The figure was that of a youth, done by a master of the times--the +head and shoulders of a youth who seemed to be looking passionately at +something outside the picture. + +"There it is, anyhow," Jenny added. "If you like it enough to hang it +up, hang it up. It's a Christmas present!" Jenny laughed elfishly. + +Mary Chavah held the picture out before her. + +"I do," she said; "I could take a real fancy to it. I'll have it up on +the wall. Much obliged, I'm sure. Set down a minute." + +But Jenny could not do this, and Mary, the key to the barn still in her +hands, followed her out. They went through the cold kitchen where the +refrigerator and the ironing board and the clothes bars and all the +familiar things stood in the dark. To Mary these were sunk in a great +obscurity and insignificance, and even Jenny being there was unimportant +beside the thing that her letter had brought to think about. They +stepped out into the clear, glittering night, with its clean, white +world, and its clean, dark sky on which some story was written in stars. +Capella was shining almost overhead--and another star was hanging bright +in the east, as if the east were always a dawning place for some new +star. + +"Mary!" said Jenny, there in the dark. + +"Yes," Mary answered. + +"You know I said I just couldn't bear not to have any Christmas--_this_ +Christmas?" + +"Yes," Mary said. + +"Did you know why?" + +"I thought because it's your and Bruce's first--" + +"No," Jenny said, "that isn't all why. It's something else." + +She slipped her arm within Mary's and stood silent. And, Mary still not +understanding,-- + +"It's somebody else," Jenny said faintly. + +Mary stirred, turned to her in the dimness. + +"Why, Jenny!" she said. + +"Soon," said Jenny. + +The two women stood for a moment, Jenny saying a little, Mary quiet. + +"It'll be late in December," Jenny finished. "That seems so wonderful to +me--so wonderful. Late in December, like--" + +The cold came pricking about them, and Jenny moved to go. Mary, the +shawled figure on the upper step, looked down on the shawled figure +below her, and abruptly spoke. + +"It's funny," Mary said, "that you should tell me that--now. I haven't +told you what's in my letter." + +"What was?" asked Jenny. + +Mary told her. "They want I should have the little boy," she ended it. + +"Oh...." Jenny said. "Mary! How wonderful for you! Why, it's almost next +as wonderful as mine!" + +Mary hesitated for a breath. But she was profoundly stirred by what +Jenny had told her--the first time, so far as she could recall, that +news like this had ever come to her directly, as a secret and a marvel. +News of the village births usually came in gossip, in commiseration, in +suspicion. Falling as did this confidence in a time when she was +re-living her old hope, when Adam's boy stood outside her threshold, the +moment quite suddenly put on its real significance. + +"We can plan together," Jenny was saying. "Ain't it wonderful?" + +"Ain't it?" Mary said then, simply, and kissed Jenny, when Jenny came +and kissed her. Then Jenny went away. + +Mary went on to the barn, and opened the door, and listened. She had +brought no lantern, but the soft stillness within needed no vigilance. +The hay smell from the loft and the mangers, the even breath of the +cows, the quiet safety of the place, met her. She was wondering at +herself, but she was struggling not at all. It was as if concerning the +little boy, something had decided for her, in a soft, fierce rush of +feeling not her own. She had committed herself to Jenny almost without +will. But Mary felt no exultation, and the weight within her did not +lift. + +"I really couldn't do anything else but take him, I s'pose," she +thought. "I wonder what'll come on me next?" + +All the while, she was conscious of the raw smell of the clover in the +hay of the mangers, as if something of Summer were there in the cold. + + + + +VI + + +Mary Chavah sent her letter of blunt directions concerning her sister's +headstone and the few belongings which her sister had wished her to +have. The last lines of the letter were about the boy. + +"Send the little one along. I am not the one, but I don't know what else +to tell you to do with him. Let me know when to expect him, and put his +name in with his things--I can't remember his right name." + +When the answer came from John Blood, a fortnight later, it said that a +young fellow of those parts was starting back home shortly to spend +Christmas, and would take charge of the child as far as the City, and +there put him on his train for Old Trail Town. She would be notified +just what day to expect him, and John knew how glad his mother would +have been and his father too, and he was her grateful Nephew. P. S. He +would send some money every month "toward him." + +The night after she received this letter, Mary lay long awake, facing +what it was going to mean to have him there: to have a child there. + +She recalled what she had heard other women say about it,--stray +utterances, made with the burdened look that hid a secret complacency, a +kind of pleased freemasonry in a universal lot. + +"The children bring so much sand into the house. You'd think it was +horses." + +"... the center table looks loaded and ready to start half the time ... +but I can't help it, with the children's books and truck." + +"... never would have another house built without a coat closet. The +children's cloaks and caps and rubbers litter up everything." + +"... every one of their knees out, and their underclothes outgrown, and +their waists soiled, the whole time. And I do try so hard...." + +Now with all these bewilderments she was to have to do. She wondered if +she would know how to dress him. Once she had watched Mis' Winslow dress +a child, and she remembered what unexpected places Mis' Winslow had +buttoned--buttonholes that went _up and down_ in the skirt bands, and so +on. Armholes might be too small and garters too tight, and how was one +ever to know? If it were a little girl now ... but a little boy.... What +would she talk to him about while they ate together? + +[Illustration: "HE STOOD LOOKING AT IT FROM PART WAY ACROSS THE ROAD"] + +She lay in the dark and planned--with no pleasure, but merely because +she always planned everything, her dress, her baking, what she would say +to this one and that. She would put up a stove in the back parlour, and +give him the room "off." She was glad that the parlour was empty and +clean--"no knick-knacks for a boy to knock around," she found herself +thinking. And a child would like the bedroom wallpaper, with the owl +border. When Summer came he could have the room over the dining room, +with the kitchen roof sloping away from it where he could dry his +hazelnuts--she had thought of the pasture hazelnuts, first thing. There +were a good many things a boy would like about the place: the bird house +where the martins always built, the hens, the big hollow tree, the +pasture ant hill.... She would have to find out the things he liked to +eat. She would have to help him with his lessons--she could do that for +only a little while, until he would be too old to need her. Then maybe +there would come the time when he would ask her things that she would +not know.... + +She fell asleep wondering how he would look. Already, not from any +impatience to have this done, but because that was the way in which she +worked, she had his room in order; and her picture of his father was by +the mirror, the young face of his father. Something faded had been +written below the picture, and this she had painstakingly rubbed away +before she set the picture in its place. Next day, while she was working +on Mis' Jane Moran's bead basque that was to be cut over and turned, she +laid it aside and cut out a jacket pattern, and a plaited waist +pattern--just to see if she could. These she rolled up impatiently and +stuffed away in her pattern bookcase. + +"I knew how to do them all the while, and I never knew I knew," she +thought with annoyed surprise. "I s'pose I'll waste a lot of time +pottering over him." + +It was so that she spent the weeks until the letter came telling her +what day the child would start. On the afternoon of the day the letter +came, she went down town to the Amos Ames Emporium to buy a washbasin +and pitcher for the room she meant the little boy to have. She stood +looking at a basin with a row of brown dogs around the rim, when over +her shoulder Mis' Abby Winslow spoke. + +"You ain't buying a Christmas present for anybody, are you?" she asked +warningly. + +Mary started guiltily and denied it. + +"Well, what in time do you want with dogs on the basin?" Mis' Winslow +demanded. + +Almost against her own wish, Mary told her. Mis' Winslow was one of +those whose faces are invariable forerunners of the sort of thing they +are going to say. With eyebrows, eyes, forehead, head, and voice she +took the news. + +"He is! Forever and ever more. When's he going to get here?" + +"Week after next," Mary said listlessly. "It's an awful responsibility, +ain't it--taking a child so?" + +Mis' Winslow's face abruptly rejected its own anxious lines and let the +eyes speak for it. + +"I always think children is like air," she said; "you never realize how +hard they're pressing down on you--but you do know you can't live +without them." + +Mary looked at her, her own face not lighting. + +"I'd rather go along like I am," she said; "I'm used to myself the way I +am." + +"Mary Chavah!" said Mis' Winslow, sharply, "a vegetable sprouts. Can't +you? Is these stocking caps made so's they won't ravel?" she inquired +capably of Abel Ames. "These are real good value, Mary," she added +kindly. "Better su'prise the little thing with one of these. A red one." + +Mary counted over her money, and bought the red stocking cap and the +basin with the puppies. Then she went into the street. The sense of +oppression, of striving, that had seldom left her since that night in +the stable, made the day a thing to be borne, to be breasted. The air +was thick with snow, and in the whiteness the dreary familiarity of the +drug store, the meat market, the post office, the Simeon Buck Dry Goods +Exchange, smote her with a passion to escape from them all, to breed new +familiars, to get free of the thing that she had said she would do. + +"And I could," she thought; "I could telegraph to John not to send him. +But Jenny--she can't. I don't see how she stands it...." + +The thought may have been why, instead of going home, she went to see +Jenny. A neighbor was in the sitting room with Mrs. Wing. Jenny met Mary +at the kitchen door and stood against a background of clothes drying on +lines stretched indoors. + +"Don't you want to come upstairs?" Jenny said. "There ain't a fire up +there--but I can show you the things." + +She had put them all in the bottom drawer, as women always do; and, as +women always do, had laid them so that all the lace and embroidery and +pink ribbons possible showed in a flutter when the drawer was opened. +Jenny took the things out, one at a time, unfolded, discussed, compared, +with all the tireless zeal of a robin with a straw in its mouth or of a +tree, blossoming. "Smell of them," Jenny bade her. "Honestly, wouldn't +you know by the smell who they are for?" "I donno but you would," Mary +admitted awkwardly, and marveled dumbly at the newness Jenny was +feeling in that which, after all, was not new! + +When these things were all out, a little tissue-paper parcel was left +lying in the drawer. + +"There's one more," Mary said. + +Jenny flushed, hesitated, lifted it. + +"That's nothing," she said; "before I came I made some little things for +its Christmas. I thought maybe it would come first, and we'd have the +Christmas in my room, and I made some little things--just for fun, you +know. But it won't be fair to do it now, with the whole town so set +against our having any Christmas. Mary, it just seems as though I had to +have a Christmas this year!" + +"Oh, well," said Mary, "the baby'll be your Christmas. The town can't +help that, I guess." + +"I know," Jenny flashed back brightly, "you and I have got the best of +them, haven't we? We've each got one present coming, anyway." + +"I s'pose we have...." Mary said. + +She looked at Jenny's Christmas things--a ribbon rattle, a crocheted +cap, a first picture book, a cascade of colored rings--and then in grim +humour at Jenny. + +"It'll never miss its Christmas," she said dryly. + +"Don't you think so?" said Jenny, soberly. "I donno. It seems as if it'd +be kind o' lonesome to get born around Christmas and not find any going +on." + +She put the things away, and closed the drawer. For no appreciable +reason, she kept it locked, and the key under the bureau cover. + +"Do you know yet when yours is coming?" Jenny asked, as she rose. + +"Week after next," Mary repeated,--"two weeks from last night," she +confessed, "if he comes straight through." + +"I think," said Jenny, "I think mine will be here--before then." + +When they reached the foot of the stair, Mary unexpectedly refused to go +in the sitting room. + +"No," she said, "I must be getting home. I just come out for a minute, +anyway. I'm--I'm much obliged for what you showed me," she added, and +hesitated. "I've got his room fixed up real nice. There's owls on the +wall paper and puppies on the washbasin," she said. "Come in when you +can and see it." + +It was almost dusk when Mary reached home. While she was passing the +billboard at the corner--a flare of yellow letters, as if Colour and the +Alphabet had united to breed a monster--she heard children shouting. A +block away, and across the street, coming home from Rolleston's hill +where they had been coasting, were Bennet and Gussie Bates, little +Emily, Tab Winslow, and Pep. Nearly every day of snow they passed her +house. She always heard them talking, and usually she heard, across at +the corner, the click of the penny-in-the-slot machine, which no child +seemed able to pass without pulling. To-night, as she heard them coming, +Mary fumbled in her purse. Three, four, five pennies she found and ran +across the street and dropped them in the slot machine, and gained her +own door before the children came. She stood at her dark threshold, and +listened. She had not reckoned in vain. One of the children pushed down +on the rod, in the child's eternal hope of magic, and when magic came +and three, four, five chocolates dropped obediently in their hands, Mary +listened to what they said. It was not much, and it was not very +coherent, but it was wholly intelligible. + +"Look at!" shrieked Bennet, who had made the magic. + +"_Did_ it?" cried Gussie, and repeated the operation. + +"It--it--it never!" said Tab Winslow, at the third. + +"Make it again--make it again!" cried little Emily, and they did. + +"Gorry," observed Pep, in ecstasy. + +When it would give no more, they divided with the other children and ran +on, their red mittens and mufflers flaming in the snow. Mary stood +staring after them for a moment, then she closed her door. + +"I wonder what made me do that," she thought. + +In her dining room she mended the fire without taking off her hat. It +was curious, she reflected; here was this room looking the way it +looked, and away off there was the little fellow who had never seen the +room; and in a little while he would be calling this room home, and +looking for his books and his mittens, and knowing it better than any +other place in the world. And there was Jenny, with that bottom +drawerful, and pretty soon somebody that now was not, would be, and +would be wearing the drawerful and calling Jenny "mother," and would +know her better than any one else in the world. Mary could not imagine +that little boy of Lily's getting used to her--Mary--and calling +her--well, what would he call her? She hadn't thought of that.... + +"Bother," thought Mary Chavah, "there's going to be forty nuisances +about it that I s'pose I haven't even thought of yet." + +She stood by the window. She had not lighted the lamp, so the world +showed white, not black. Snow makes outdoors look big, she thought. But +it was big--what a long journey it was to Idaho. Suppose ... something +happened to the man he was to travel with. John Blood was only a boy; he +would probably put the child's name and her address in the little +traveler's pocket, and these would be lost. The child was hardly old +enough to remember what to do. He would go astray, and none of them +would ever know what had become of him ... and what would become of him? +She saw him and his bundle of clothes alone in the station in the +City.... + +She turned from the window and mechanically mended the fire again. She +drew down the window shade and went to the coat closet to hang away her +wraps. Then abruptly she took up her purse, counted out the money in the +firelight, and went out the door and down the street in the dusk, and +into the post office, which was also the telegraph office,--one which +the little town owed to Ebenezer Rule, and it a rival to the other +telegraph office at the station. + +"How much does it cost to send a telegram?" she demanded. "Idaho," she +answered the man's question, flushing at her omission. + +While the man, Affer by name, laboriously looked it up,--covering +incredible little dirty figures with an incredibly big dirty +forefinger,--Mary stood staring at the list of names tacked below the +dog-eared Christmas Notice. She remembered that she had not yet signed +it herself. She asked for a pencil--causing confusion to the little +figures and delay to the big finger--and, while she waited, wrote her +name. "A good, sensible move," she thought, as she signed. + +When Affer gave her the rate, thrusting finger and figures jointly +beneath the bars,--solicitous of his own accuracy,--Mary filed her +message. It was to John Blood, and it read:---- + +"Be sure you tie his tag on him good." + + + + +VII + + +Ebenezer Rule had meant to go to the City before cold weather came. He +had there a small and decent steam-warmed flat where he boiled his own +eggs and made his own coffee, read his newspapers and kept his counsel, +descending nightly to the ground-floor cafe to dine on ambiguous dishes +at tables of other bank swallows who nested in the same cliff. But as +the days went by, he found himself staying on in Old Trail Town, with +this excuse and that, offered by himself to himself. As, for example, +that in the factory there were old account books that he must go +through. And having put off this task from day to day and finding at +last nothing more to dally with, he set out one morning for the ancient +building down in that part of the village which was older than the rest +and was where his business was conducted when it was conducted. + +It had snowed in the night, and Buff Miles, who drove the village +snowplow, was also driver of "the 'bus." So on the morning after a +snowfall, the streets always lay buried thick until after the 8.10 +Express came in; and since on the morning following a snowfall the 8.10 +Express was always late, Old Trail Town lay locked in a kind of circular +argument, and everybody stayed indoors or stepped high through drifts. +The direct way to the factory was virtually untrodden, and Ebenezer made +a detour through the business street in search of some semblance of a +"track." + +The light of a Winter morning is not kind, only just. It is just to the +sky and discovers it to be dominant; to trees, and their lines are seen +to be alive, like leaves; to folk, and no disguise avails. Summer gives +complements and accessories to the good things in a human face. Winter +affords nothing save disclosure. In the uncompromising cleanness of that +wash of Winter light, Ebenezer Rule was himself, for anybody to see. +Looking like countless other men, lean, alert, preoccupied, his tall +figure stooped, his smooth, pale face like a photograph too much +retouched, this commonplace man took his place in the day almost as one +of its externals. With that glorious pioneer trio, mineral, vegetable +and animal; and with intellect, that worthy tool, he did his day's work. +His face was one that had never asked itself, say, of a Winter morning: +_What else?_ And the Winter light searched him pitilessly to find that +question somewhere in him. + +Before the Simeon Buck North American Dry Goods Exchange, Simeon Buck +himself had just finished shoveling his walk, and stood wiping his snow +shovel with an end of his muffler. When he saw Ebenezer, he shook the +muffler at him, and then, over his left shoulder, jabbed the air with +his thumb. + +"Look at here," he said, his head reenforcing his gesture toward his +show window, "look what I done this morning. Nice little touch--eh?" + +In the show window of the Exchange--Dry Goods Exchange was just the name +of it for the store carried everything--a hodgepodge of canned goods, +lace curtains, kitchen utensils, wax figures, and bird cages had been +ranged round a center table of golden oak. On the table stood a figure +that was as familiar to Old Trail Town as was its fire engine and its +sprinkling cart. Like these, appearing intermittently, the figure had +seized on the imagination of the children and grown in association until +it belonged to everybody, by sheer use and wont. It was a _papier-mache_ +Santa Claus, three feet high, white-bearded, gray-gowned, with tall +pointed cap--rather the more sober Saint Nicholas of earlier days than +the rollicking, red-garbed Saint Nick of now. Only, whereas for years he +had graced the window of the Exchange, bearing over his shoulder a +little bough of green for a Christmas tree, this season he stood +treeless, and instead bore on his shoulder a United States flag. On a +placard below him Simeon had laboriously lettered:-- + + High Cost of Living + and too much fuss + Makes Folks want a + Sane Christmas + Me Too. S. C. + +"Ain't that neat?" said Simeon. + +Ebenezer looked. "What's the flag for?" he inquired dryly. + +"Well," said Simeon, "he had to carry something. I thought of a toy +gun--but that didn't seem real appropriate. A Japanese umbrella wasn't +exactly in season, seems though. A flag was about the only thing I could +think of to have him hold. A flag is always kind of tasty, don't you +think?" + +"Oh, it's harmless," Ebenezer said, "harmless." + +"No hustling business," Simeon pursued, "can be contented with just +_not_ doing something. It ain't enough not to have no Christmas. You've +got to find something that'll express nothing, and express it forcible. +In business, a minus sign," said Simeon, "is as good as a plus, if you +can keep it whirling round and round." + +This Ebenezer mulled and chuckled over as he went on down the street. He +wondered what the Emporium would do to keep up with the Exchange. But in +the Emporium window there was nothing save the usual mill-end display +for the winter white goods sale. + +Ebenezer opened the store door and put his head in. + +"Hey," he shouted at Abel, back at the desk, "can't you keep up with +Simeon's window?" + +Abel came down the aisle between the lengths of white stuff plaited into +folds at either side. The fire had just been kindled in the stove, and +the air in the store was still frosty. Abel, in his overcoat, was +blowing on his fingers. + +"I ain't much of any heart to," said he, "but the night before Christmas +I guess'll do about right for mine." + +"What'll you put up?" Ebenezer asked, closing the door behind him. + +"Well, sir," said Abel, "I ain't made up my mind full yet. But I'll be +billblowed if I'm going to let Christmas go by without saying something +about it in the window." + +"Night before Christmas'll be too late to advertise anything," said +Ebenezer. "If I was in trade," he said, half closing his eyes, "I'd fill +my window up with useful articles--caps and mittens and stockings and +warm underwear and dishes and toothbrushes. And I'd say: 'Might as well +afford these on what you saved out of Christmas.' You'd ought to get all +the advertising you can out of any situation." + +Abel shook his head. + +"I ain't much on such," he said lightly--and then looked intently at +Ebenezer. "Jenny's been buying quite a lot here for her Christmas," he +said. + +Ebenezer was blank. "Jenny?" he said. "Jenny Wing? I heard she was here. +I ain't seen her. Is she bound to keep Christmas anyhow?" + +"Just white goods, it was," said Abel, briefly. + +Ebenezer frowned his lack of understanding. + +"I shouldn't think her and Bruce had much of anything to buy anything +with," he said. "I s'pose you know," he added, "that Bruce, the young +beggar, quit working for me in the City after the--the failure? Threw up +his job with me, and took God knows what to do." + +Abel nodded gravely. All Old Trail Town knew that, and honoured Bruce +for it. + +"Headstrong couple," Ebenezer added. "So Jenny's bent on having +Christmas, no matter what the town decides, is she?" he added, "it's +like her, the minx." + +"I don't think it was planned that way," Abel said simply; "she's only +buying white goods," he repeated. And, Ebenezer still staring, "Surely +you know what Jenny's come home for?" Abel said. + +A moment or two later Ebenezer was out on the street again, his face +turned toward the factory. He was aware that Abel caught open the door +behind him and called after him, "Whenever you get ready to sell me that +there star glass, you know...." Ebenezer answered something, but his +responses were so often guttural and indistinguishable that his will to +reply was regarded as nominal, anyway. He also knew that now, just +before him, Buff Miles was proceeding with the snowplow, cutting a firm, +white way, smooth and sparkling for soft treading, momentarily bordered +by a feathery flux, that tumbled and heaped and then lay quiet in a +glitter of crystals. But his thought went on without these things and +without his will. + +Bruce's baby! It would be a Rule, too.... the third generation, the +third generation. And accustomed as he was to relate every experience to +himself, measure it, value it by its own value to him, the effect of his +reflection was at first single: The third generation of Rules. _Was he +as old as that?_ + +It seemed only yesterday that Bruce had been a boy, in a blue necktie to +match his eyes, and shoes which for some reason he always put on wrong, +so that the buttons were on the inside. Bruce's baby. Good heavens! It +had been a shock when Bruce graduated from the high school, a shock when +he had married, but his baby ... it was incredible that he himself +should be so old as that. + +... This meant, then, that if Malcolm had lived, Malcolm might have had +a child now.... + +Ebenezer had not meant to think that. It was as if the Thought came and +spoke to him. He never allowed himself to think of that other life of +his, when his wife, Letty, and his son Malcolm had been living. Nobody +in Old Trail Town ever heard him speak of them or had ever been answered +when Ebenezer had been spoken to concerning them. A high white shaft in +the cemetery marked the two graves. All about them doors had been +closed. But with the thought of this third generation, the doors all +opened. He looked along ways that he had forgotten. + +As he went he was unconscious, as he was always unconscious, of the +little street. He saw the market square, not as the heart of the town, +but as a place for buying and selling, and the little shops were to him +not ways of providing the town with life, but ways of providing their +keepers with a livelihood. Beyond these was a familiar setting, arranged +that day with white background and heaped roofs and laden boughs, the +houses standing side by side, like human beings. There they were, like +the chorus to the thing he was thinking about. They were all thinking +about it, too. Every one of them knew what he knew. Yet he never saw the +bond, but he thought they were only the places where men lived who had +been his factory hands and would be so yet if he had not cut them away: +Ben Torrey, shoveling off his front walk with his boy sweeping behind +him; August Muir, giving his little girl a ride on the snow shovel; +Nettie Hatch, clearing the ice out of her mail box, while her +sister--the lame one--watched from her chair by the window, interested +as in a real event. Ebenezer spoke to them from some outpost of +consciousness which his thought did not pass. The little street was not +there, as it was never there for him, as an entity. It was merely a +street. And the little town was not an entity. It was merely where he +lived. He went behind Buff Miles and the snowplow--as he always went--as +if space had been created for folk to live in one at a time, and as if +this were his own turn. + +When he reached the bend from the Old Trail to the road where the +factory was, he understood at last that he had been hearing a song sung +over a great many times. + + "... One for the way it all begun, + Two for the way it all has run, + What three'll be for I do forget, + But what's to be has not been yet.... + So holly and mistletoe, + So holly and mistletoe, + So holly and mistletoe, + Over and over and over, oh." + +Buff, who was singing it, looked over his shoulder, and nodded. + +"They said you can't have no Christmas on Christmas Day," he observed, +grinning, "but I ain't heard nothing to prevent singing Christmas carols +right up to the day that is the day." + +Ebenezer halted. + +"How old are you?" he abruptly demanded of Buff--whom he had known from +Buff's boyhood. + +"Thirty-three," said Buff, "dum it." + +"You and Bruce about the same age, ain't you?" said Ebenezer. + +Buff nodded. + +"Well," said Ebenezer, "well...." and stood looking at him. Malcolm +would have been his age, too. + +"Going down to the factory, are you?" Buff said. "Wait a bit. I'll hike +on down ahead of you." + +He turned the snowplow down the factory road, as if he were making a +triumphal progress, fashioning his snow borders with all the freedom of +some sculpturing wind on summer clouds. + + "One for the way it all begun, + Two for the way it all has run...." + +he sang to the soft push and thud and clank of his going. He swept a +circle in front of the little house that was the factory office, as if +he had prepared the setting for a great event; and Ebenezer, following +in the long, bright path, stepped into the hall of the house. + +For thirty years he had been accustomed to enter the little house with +his mind ready to receive its interior of desks and shelves and safes +and files. To-day, quite unexpectedly, as he opened the door, the thing +that was in his mind was a hall stair with a red carpet, and a parlour +adjoining with figured stuff at the windows and a coal fire in the +stove.... And thirty-five years ago it had been that way, when he and +his wife and child had lived in the little house where his business was +then just starting at a machine set up in the woodshed. As his project +had grown and his factory had arisen in the neighbouring lots, the +family had moved farther up in the town. Remembrance had been divorced +from this place for decades. To-day, without warning, it waited for him +on the threshold. + +He had asked his bookkeeper to meet him there, but the man had not yet +arrived. So Ebenezer himself kindled a fire in the rusty office stove, +in the room where the figured curtains had been. The old account books +that he wanted were not here on the shelves, nor in the cupboards of the +cold adjoining rooms. They dated so far back that they had been filed +away upstairs. He had not been upstairs in years, and his first impulse +was to send his bookkeeper, when he should appear. But this, after all, +was not Ebenezer's way; and he went up the stairs himself. + +Each upper room was like some one unconscious in stupor or death, and +still as distinct in personality as if in some ancient activity. There +was the shelf he had put up in their room, the burned place on the floor +where he had tipped over a lamp, tattered shreds of the paper she had +hung to surprise him, the little storeroom which they had cleared out +for Malcolm when he was old enough, and whose door had had to be kept +closed because innumerable uncaged birds lived there.... + +When he had gone through the piles of account books in a closet and +those he sought were not found among them, he remembered the trunkful up +in the tiny loft. He let down from the passage ceiling the ladder he had +once hung there, and climbed up to the little roof recess. + +Light entered through four broken panes of skylight. It fell in a faint +rug on the dusty floor. The roof sloped sharply, and the trunks and +boxes had been pressed back to the rim of the place. Ebenezer put his +hands out, groping. They touched an edge of something that swayed. He +laid hold of it and drew it out and set down on the faint rug of light +a small wooden hobbyhorse. + +He stood staring at it, remembering it as clearly as if some one had set +before him the old white gate which he bestrode in his own boyhood. It +was Malcolm's hobbyhorse, dappled gray, the tail and the mane missing +and the paint worn off--and tenderly licked off--his nose. When they had +moved to the other house, he had bought the boy a pony, and this horse +had been left behind. Something else stirred in his memory, the name by +which Malcolm had used to call his hobbyhorse, some ringing name ... but +he had forgotten. He thrust the thing back where it had been and went on +with his search for the account books. + +By the time he had found them and had got down again in the office, the +bookkeeper was there, keeping up the fire and uttering, with some +acumen, comments on the obvious aspects of the weather, of the climate, +of the visible universe. The bookkeeper was a young man, very ready to +agree with Ebenezer for the sake of future favour, but with the +wistfulness of all industrial machines constructed by men from human +potentialities. Also, he had a cough and thin hands and a little family +and no job. + +"Get to work on this book," Ebenezer bade him; "it's the one that began +the business." + +The man opened the book, put it to his nearsighted eyes, frowned, and +glanced up at Ebenezer. + +"I don't think it seems...." he began doubtfully. + +"Well, don't think," said Ebenezer, sharply; "that's not needful. Read +the first entries." + +[Illustration: "ACROSS THE STILL FIELDS CAME FLASHING THE POINT OF +FLAME"] + +The bookkeeper read:-- + + Picking hops (4 days) . . . . $1.00 + Sewing (Mrs. Shackell). . . . .60 + Egg money (3-1/4 dozen) . . . .75 + Winning puzzle. . . . . . . . 2.50 + ----- + $4.86 + + Disbursed: + + Kitchen roller. . . . . . . . $ .10 + Coffee mill . . . . . . . . . .50 + Shoes for M. . . . . . . . . 1.25 + Water colors for M. . . . . . .25 + Suit for M. . . . . . . . . . 2.00 + Gloves--me. . . . . . . . . . .50 + ----- + $4.75 + + Cash on hand: 11 cents. + +The bookkeeper paused again. Ebenezer, frowning, reached for the book. +In his wife's fine faded writing were her accounts--after the eleven +cents was a funny little face with which she had been wont to illustrate +her letters. Ebenezer stared, grunted, turned to the last page of the +book. There, in bold figures, the other way of the leaf, was his own +accounting. He remembered now--he had kept his first books in the back +of the account book that she had used for the house. + +Ebenezer glanced sharply at his bookkeeper. To his annoyance, the man +was smiling with perfect comprehension and sympathy. Ebenezer averted +his eyes, and the bookkeeper felt dimly that he had been guilty of an +indelicacy toward his employer, and hastened to cover it. + +"Family life does cling to a man, sir," he said. + +"Do you find it so?" said Ebenezer, dryly. "Read, please." + +At noon Ebenezer walked home alone through the melting snow. And the +Thought that he did not think, but that spoke to him without his +knowing, said:-- + +"Winning a puzzle--Two Dollars and a half. She never told me she tried +to earn a little something that way." + + + + +VIII + + +"If we took the day before Christmas an' had it for Christmas," observed +Tab Winslow, "would that hurt?" + +"Eat your oatmeal," said Mis' Winslow, in the immemorial manner of +adults. + +"Would it, would it, would it?" persisted Tab, in the immemorial manner +of youth. + +"And have Theophilus Thistledown for dinner that day instead?" Mis' +Winslow suggested with diplomacy. + +On which Tab ate his oatmeal in silence. + +But, like adults immemorially, Mis' Winslow bore far more the adult +manner than its heart. After breakfast she stood staring out the pantry +window at the sparrows on the bird box. + +"It looks like Mary Chavah was going to be the only one in Trail Town to +have any Christmas after all," she thought, "that little boy coming to +her, so." + +He was coming week after next, Mary had said, and Mis' Winslow had heard +no word about it from anybody else. When "the biggest of the work" of +the forenoon was finished, Mis' Winslow ran down the road to Ellen +Bourne's. In Old Trail Town they always speak of it as running down, or +in, or over, in the morning, with an unconscious suiting of terms to +informalities. + +Ellen was cleaning her silver. She had "six of each"--six knives, six +forks, six spoons, all plated and seldom used, pewter with black handles +serving for every day. The silver was cleaned often, though it was never +on the table, save for company, and there never had been any company +since Ellen had lost her little boy from fever. Having no +articulateness and having no other outlet for emotion, she fed her grief +by small abstentions: no guests, no diversions, no snatches of song +about her work. Yet she was sane enough, and normal, only in dearth of +sane and normal outlets for emotion, for energy, for personality, she +had taken these strange directions for yet unharnessed forces. + +"Mercy," observed Mis' Winslow, warming her hands at the cooking stove, +"you got more energy." + +"... than family, I guess you mean," Ellen Bourne finished. Ellen was +little and fair, with slightly drooping head, and eyebrows curved to a +childlike reflectiveness. + +"Well, I got consider'ble more family than I got energy," said Mis' +Winslow, "so I guess we even it up. Seven-under-fifteen eats up energy +like so much air." + +"Hey, king and country," said Ellen's old father, whittling by the fire, +"you got family enough, Ellen. You got your hands full of us." He rubbed +his hands through his thin upstanding silver hair on his little pink +head, and his fine, pink face took on the look of father which rarely +intruded, now, on his settled look of old man. + +"I donno what she'd do," said Ellen's mother, "with any more around here +to pick up after. We're cluttered up enough, as it is." She was an old +lady of whose outlines you took notice before your attention lay further +upon her--angled waist, chin, lips, forehead, put on her a succession of +zigzags. But her eyes were awake, and it was to be seen that she did not +mean what she said and that she was looking anxiously at Ellen in the +hope of having deceived her daughter. Ellen smiled at her brightly, and +was not deceived. + +"I keep pretty busy," she said. + +Mis' Abby Winslow, who was not deceived either, hastened to the subject +of Mary. + +"I should think Mary Chavah had enough to do, too," she said, "but she's +going to take Lily's little boy. Had you heard?" + +"No," Ellen said, and stopped shaving silver polish. + +"He's coming in two weeks," Mis' Winslow imparted; "she told me so +herself. She's got his room fixed up with owls on the wall paper. She's +bought him a washbasin with a rim of puppies, and a red stocking cap. I +saw her." + +"How old is he?" Ellen asked, and worked again. + +"I never thought to ask her," Mis' Winslow confessed; "he must be quite +a little fellow. But he's coming alone from some place out West." + +"Hey, king and country," Ellen's father said; "I'd hate to have a boy +come here, with my head the way it is." + +"And keeping the house all upset," Ellen's mother said, and asked Mis' +Winslow some question about Mary; and when she turned to Ellen again, +"Why, Ellen Bourne," she said, "you've shaved up every bit of that +cleaning polish and we're most done cleaning." + +Ellen was looking at Mis' Winslow: "If you see her," Ellen said, "you +ask her if I can't do anything to help." + +Later in the day, happening in at Mis' Mortimer Bates's, Mis' Winslow +found Mis' Moran there before her, and asked what they had heard "about +Mary Chavah." Something in that word "about" pricks curiosity its +sharpest. "Have you heard about Mary Chavah?" "It's too bad about Mary +Chavah." "Isn't it queer about Mary Chavah?"--each of these is like +setting flame to an edge of tissue. Omit "about" from the language, and +you abate most gossip. At Mis' Winslow's phrase, both women's eyebrows +curved to another arc. + +Mis' Winslow told them. + +"Ain't that nice?" said Mis' Moran, wholeheartedly; "I couldn't bring up +another, not with my back. But I'm glad Mary's going to know what it +is...." + +Mis' Mortimer Bates was glad, too, but being by nature a nonconformist, +she took exception. + +"It's an awful undertaking for a single-handed woman," she observed. + +But this sort of thing she said almost unconsciously, and the other two +women regarded it with no more alarm than any other reflex. + +"It's no worse starting single-handed than being left single-handed," +offered Mis' Winslow somewhat ambiguously. "Lots does that's thrifty." + +"Seems as if we could do a little something to help her get ready, +seem's though," Mis' Moran suggested; "I donno what." + +"I thought I'd slip over after supper and ask her," Mis' Winslow said; +"maybe I'd best go now--and come back and tell you what she says." + +Mis' Winslow found Mary Chavah sitting by her pattern bookcase, cutting +out a pattern. Mary's face was flushed and her eyes were bright, and she +went on with her pattern, thrilled by it as by any other creating. + +"I just thought of this," Mary explained, looking vaguely at her +visitor. "It come to me like a flash when I was working on Mis' Bates's +basque. Will you wait just a minute, and then I'll explain it out to +you." + +Without invitation, Mis' Winslow laid aside her coat and waited, +watching Mary curiously. She was cutting and folding and pinning her +tissue paper, oblivious of any presence. Alarm, suspense, doubt, +solution, triumph, came and went, and neither woman was conscious that +the flame of creation burned and breathed in the room as truly as if the +product were to be acknowledged. + +"There!" Mary cried at last. "See it--can't you see it?--in gray wool?" + +It was the pattern for a boy's topcoat, cunningly cut in new lines of +seam and revers, with a pocket, a bit of braid, a line of buttons laid +in as delicately as the factors in any other good composition. Mis' +Winslow inevitably recognized its utility, exclaimed, and wondered. + +"Mary Chavah! How did you know how to do things for children?" + +"How did you know how?" Mary inquired coolly. + +"Why, I've had 'em," Mis' Winslow offered simply. + +"Do you honestly think that makes any difference?" Mary asked. + +Mis' Winslow gasped, in the immemorial belief that the physical basis of +motherhood is the guarantee of both spiritual and physical equipment. + +"Could you have cut out that coat?" Mary asked. + +Mis' Winslow shook her head. She was of those whose genius is for +cutting over. + +"Well," said Mary, "I could. It ain't having 'em that teaches you to do +for 'em. You either know how, or you don't know how. That's all." + +Mis' Winslow reflected that she could never make Mary understand--though +any mother, she thought complacently, would know in a minute. The +cutting of the coat did give her pause; but then, she summed it up, +coat included, "Mary was queer"--and let it go at that. + +"I didn't know," Mis' Winslow said then, "but what I could help you some +about the little boy's coming. Seven-under-fifteen does teach you +something, you've got to allow. Mebbe I could tell you something, now +and then. Or if we could do anything to help you get ready for him...." + +"Oh," said Mary, in swift penitence, "thank you, Mis' Winslow. After he +comes, maybe. But these things now I don't mind doing. The real +nuisance'll come afterwards, I s'pose." + +Mis' Winslow smiled in soft triumph. + +"_Nuisance!_" she said. "That's what I meant comes to you by having 'em. +You don't think so much of the nuisance part as you did before." + +"Then you don't look the thing in the face," said Mary, calmly. "That's +all about that." + +"Well," Mis' Winslow said pacifically, "when's he coming?" + +"A week from Tuesday. A week from to-morrow," Mary told her. + +Mis' Winslow looked at her intently, with the light of calculation in +her narrowed eyes. + +"A week from Tuesday," she said. "A week from Tuesday," she repeated. +"_A week from Tuesday!_" she exclaimed. "Why, Mary Chavah. That's +Christmas Eve." + +It was some matter of recipes that was absorbing Mis' Bates and Mis' +Moran when Mis' Winslow breathlessly returned to them. They were deep in +tradition, and in method, its buttonhole relation. During the weary +period when nutrition has been one of the two great problems the +tremendous impulse that has nourished the world was alive in the faces +of the two women, a kind of creative fire, such as had burned in Mary at +the cutting of her pattern. Asparagus escalloped with toast crumbs and +butter was for the moment symbol of all humanity's will to keep alive. + +"Ladies," said Mis' Winslow, with no other preface, "what do you think? +Mary Chavah's little boy is coming from Idaho with a tag on, and when do +you s'pose he's going to get here? Christmas Eve." + +"Christmas Eve," repeated Mis' Bates, whose mind never lightly forsook +old ways or embraced a contretemps; "what a funny time to travel." + +"Likely catch the croup and be down sick on Mary's hands the first +thing," said Mis' Moran. "It's a pity it ain't the Spring of the year." + +Mis' Winslow looked at them searchingly to see if her thought too far +outdistanced theirs. + +"What struck me all of a heap," she said, "is his getting here then. +_That_ night. Christmas Eve." + +The three woman looked at one another. + +"That's so," Mis' Moran said. + +"Him--that child," Mis' Winslow put it, "getting here Christmas Eve, +used to Christmas all his life, ten to one knowing in his head what he +hopes he'll get. And no Christmas. And him with no mother. And her only +a month or so dead." + +"Well," said Mis' Mortimer Bates, "it's too bad it's happened so. But it +has happened so. You have to say that to your life quite often, I +notice. I don't know anything to do but to say it now." + +Mis' Winslow had not taken off her cloak. She sat on the edge of her +chair, with her hands deep in its pockets, her black knit "fascinator" +fallen back from her hair. She was looking down at her cloth overshoes, +and she went on speaking as if she had hardly heard what Mis' Bates had +interposed. + +"He'll get in on the express," she said; "Mary said so. She don't have +to go to the City to meet him. The man he travels with is going to put +him on the train in the City. The little fellow'll get here after dark. +After dark on Christmas Eve." + +"And no time for anybody to warn him that there won't be any Christmas +waiting for him," Mis' Moran observed thoughtfully. + +"And like enough he'll bring a little something for Mary for a present," +Mis' Winslow went on. "How'll she feel _then_?" + +"Ain't it too bad it ain't last year?" Mis' Moran mourned. "Everything +comes too late or too soon or not at all or else too much so, 'seems +though." + +Mis' Bates's impulse to nonconformity had not prevented her forehead +from being drawn in their common sympathy; but it was a sympathy that +saw no practical way out and existed tamely as a high window and not as +a wide door. + +"Well," she said, "Mary ain't exactly the one to see it so. You'll never +get her to feel bad about anybody not having a Christmas. I donno, if it +was any other year, as she'd be planning any different." + +"No," said Mis' Winslow, thoughtfully, "Mary won't do anything. But we +could." + +Mis' Bates's forehead took alarm--the alarm of the sympathetic hearer +who is challenged to be doer. + +"_Do?_" she repeated. "You can't go back on the paper at this late day. +And you can't give him a Christmas and every other of our children not +have any just because we're their parents and still living. There ain't +a thing to do." + +Mis' Winslow's eyes were still on her overshoes. "I don't believe +there's _never_ 'not a thing' to do," she said, "I don't believe it." + +Mis' Bates looked scandalized. "That's nonsense," she said sharply, "and +it's sacrilegious besides. When God means a thing to happen, there's not +a thing to do. What about earthquakes and--and cancers?" + +"I don't believe he ever means earthquakes and cancers," said Mis' +Winslow, to her overshoes. + +"Prevent 'em, then!" challenged Mis' Bates, triumphantly. + +Mis' Winslow looked up. Her eyes were shining as they had shone +sometimes when one of her seven-under-fifteen had given its first sign +of consciousness of more than self. + +"I believe we'll do it some day," she said. "I believe there's more to +us than we've got any idea of. I believe there's so much to us that one +of us that found out about it and told the rest would get hounded out of +town. But even now, I bet there's enough to us to do something every +time--something every time, no matter what. And I believe there's +something we can do about this little orphaned boy's Christmas, if we +nip our brains on to it in the right place." + +"Oh, dear," said Mis' Moran, "sometimes when I think about Christmas I +almost wish we almost hadn't done the way we're going to do." + +Mis' Bates stiffened. + +"Jane Moran," she said, "do you think it's right to go head over heels +in debt to celebrate the birth of our Lord?" + +"No," said Mis' Moran, "I don't. But--" + +"And you know nobody in Old Trail Town could afford any extravagance +this year?" + +"Yes," said Mis' Moran, "I do. Still--" + +"And if part could and part couldn't, that makes it all the worse, don't +it?" + +"I know," said Mis' Moran, "I know." + +"Well, then," said Mis' Bates triumphantly, "we've done the only way +there is to do. Land knows, I wish there was another way. But there +ain't." + +Mis' Winslow looked up from her overshoes. + +"I don't believe there's never 'no other way,'" she said. "There's +always another way...." + +"Not without money," said Mis' Bates. + +"Money," Mis' Winslow said, "money. That's like setting up one day of +peace on earth, good will to men, and asking admission to it." + +"Mis' Winslow," said Mis' Moran, sadly, "what's the use of saying +anything? You know as well as I do that Christmas is abused all up and +down the land, and made a day of expense and extravagance and folks +overspending themselves. And we've stopped all that in Old Trail Town. +And now you're trying to make us feel bad." + +"I ain't," said Mis' Winslow, "we felt bad about it already, and you +know it. I'm glad we've stopped all that. But I wish't we had something +to put in its place. I wish't we had." + +"What in time are them children doing?" said Mis' Moran, abruptly. + +The three women looked. On the side lawn, where a spreading balsam had +been left untrimmed to the ground, stood little Emily Moran and Gussie +and Bennet and Tab and Pep. And the four boys had their caps in their +hands, and Gussie, having untied her own hood, turned to take off little +Emily's. The wind, sweeping sharply round the corner of the house, blew +their hair wildly and caught at muffler ends. Mis' Bates and Mis' +Moran, with one impulse, ran to the side door, and Mis' Winslow +followed. + +"Emily," said Mis' Moran, "put on your hood this minute." + +"Gussie," said Mis' Bates, "put on your cap this instant second. What +you got it off for? And little Emily doing as you do--I'm su'prised at +you." + +The children consulted briefly, then Pep turned to the two women, by now +coming down the path, Mis' Bates with her apron over her head, Mis' +Moran in her shawl. + +"Please," said Pep, "it's a funeral. An' we thought we'd ought to take +our caps off till it gets under." + +"A funeral," said Mis' Bates. "Who you burying?" + +"It's just a rehearsal funeral," Pep explained; "the real one's going to +be Christmas." + +By now the two women were restoring hood and stocking cap to the little +girls, and it was Mis' Winslow, who had followed, who spoke to Pep. + +"Who's dead, Pep?" she asked. + +Between the belief of "Who's dead?" and the skepticism of "Who you +burying?" the child was swift to distinguish. + +"Sandy Claus," he answered readily. + +Mis' Winslow stood looking down at him. Pep stepped nearer. + +"We're doing it for little Emily," he said confidentially. "She couldn't +get it straight about where Sandy Claus would be this Christmas. The +rest of us--knew. But Emily's little--so we thought we'd play bury him +on her 'count." + +Mis' Bates, who had not heard, turned from Gussie. + +"Going to do _what_ on Christmas?" she exclaimed. "You ain't to do a +thing on Christmas. Or ain't you grown up, after all?" + +"Well, we thought a Christmas funeral wouldn't hurt," interposed Bennet, +defensively. "Can't we even have a funeral for fun on Christmas?" he +ended, aggrieved. + +"It's Sandy Claus's funeral," observed little Emily putting a curl from +her face. + +"We're goin' dress up a Sandy Claus, you know," Pep added, _sotto voce_. +"It's going to be right after breakfast, Christmas." + +"Come on, come ahead, fellows," said Bennet; "I'll be corpse. Keep your +lids on. I don't mind. Go ahead, sing." + +Already Mis' Winslow was walking back to the house; the other two women +overtook her; and from the porch they heard the children begin to +sing:-- + + "_Go bury Saint Nicklis...._" + +The rest was lost in the closing of the door. + +Back in the sitting room the women stood looking at one another. Mis' +Bates was frowning and all Mis' Moran's expressions were on the verge +of dissolving; but in Mis' Winslow's face it was as though she had found +some new way of consciousness. + +"Ladies," Mis' Winslow said, "them children are out there pretending to +bury Santa Claus--and so are we. And I bet we can't any of us do it." + +In the room, there was a moment of silence in which familiar things +seemed to join with their way of saying, "We've been keeping still all +the while!" Then Mis' Winslow pushed her hair, regardless of its +parting, straight back from her forehead,--a gesture with which she +characterized any moment of stress. + +"Ladies," she said, "I don't want we should go back on our paper, +either. But mebbe there's more to Christmas than it knows about--or than +we know about. Mebbe we can do something that won't interfere with the +paper we've all signed, and yet that'll be something that is something. +Mebbe they's things to use that ain't never been used yet.... Oh, I +donno. Nor I guess you donno. But let's us find out!" + + + + +IX + + +Christmas Week came. + +Cities by thousands made preparation. Great shops took on vast cargoes +of silk and precious things and seemed ready to sail about, distributing +gifts to the town, and thought better of it, and let folk come in +numbers to them to pay toll for what they took. Banks opened their doors +and poured out, now a little trickling stream of pay envelopes, now a +torrent of green and gold. Flower stalls drew tribute from a million +pots of earth where miracles had been done. Pastry counters, those mock +commissariats, delicately masking as servants to necessity, made ready +their pretty pretences to nutrition. The woods came moving in--acres of +living green, taken in their sleep, their roots left faithful to a +tryst with the sap, their tops summoned to bear an hybrid fruitage. From +cathedrals rose the voices of children now singing little carols and +hymns in praise of the Christ-child, now speaking little verses in +praise of the saint, Nicholas, now clamouring for little new +possessions. And afar from the fields that lay empty about the clustered +roofs of towns came a chorus of voices of the live things, beast and +fowl, being offered up in the gorgeous pagan rites of the day. + +Hither and yonder in every city the grown townsfolk ran. The most had +lists of names,--Grace, Margaret, Laura, Alice, Miriam, John, Philip, +Father, Mother,--beautiful names and of rich portent, so that, +remembering the time, one would have said that these were entered there +with some import of special comradeship, of being face to face, of +having realized in little what will some day be true in large. But on +looking closer, the lists were found to have quite other connotations: +as, Grace, bracelet; Margaret, spangled scarf; Laura, chafing-dish; +Philip, smoking set; Father (Memo: Ask mother what she thinks he'd +like). And every name, it seemed, stood for some bestowal of new +property, mostly of luxuries, and chiefly of luxuries of decoration. And +the minds of the buying adults were like lakes played upon by clouds and +storm birds and lightning, and, to be sure, many stars--but all in +unutterable confusion. + +Also from the cargo-laden shops there came other voices in thousands, +but these were mostly answers. And when one, understanding Christmas, +listened to hear what part in it these behind the counter played, he +heard from them no voice of sharing in the theory of peace, or even of +truce, but instead:-- + +"Two a yard and double width. Jewelry is in the Annex. Did you want +three pairs of each? Veils and neckwear three aisles over. Leather, +glassware, baskets, ribbons, down the store beyond the notions. Toys and +dolls are in the basement--toys and dolls are in the basement. Jewelry +is in the Annex...." + +So that a great part of the town seemed some strong chorus of invocation +to new possessions. + +But there were other voices. Whole areas of every town lay, perforce, +within the days of Christmas Week--it must have been so, for there is +only one calendar to embrace humanity, as there is only one way of birth +and breath and death, one source of tears, one functioning for laughter. +But to these reaches of the town the calendar was like another thing, +for though it was upon them in name, its very presence was withdrawn. In +those ill-smelling stairways and lofts there was little to divulge the +imminence of anything other than themselves. And wherever some echo of +Christmas Week had crept, the wistfulness or the lust was for possession +also; but here one could understand its insistence. So here the voices +said only, "I wish--I wish," and "I choose this--and this," at windows; +or, "If I had back my nickel...." "Don't you go expecting nothink!" And +over these went the whirr of machinery, beat of treadles, throb of +engines, or the silence of forced idleness, or of the disease of +dereliction. It was a time of many pagan observances, as when some were +decked in precious stuffs and some were thrown to lions. + +To all these in the towns Christmas Week came. And of them all not many +stood silent and looked Christmas Week in the face. Yet it is a human +experience that none is meant to die without sharing. For the season is +the symbol of what happens to folk if they claim it. + +Christmas is the time of withdrawal of most material life. It is the +time when nature subtracts the externals, hides from man the phenomena +of even her evident processes. Left alone, his thought turns inward and +outward--which is to say, it lays hold upon the flowing force so +slightly externalized in himself. If he finds in his own being a +thousand obstructions, a thousand persons,--dogs, sorcerers, +whoremongers,--he will try to escape from them all, back to the +externals. But if he finds there a channel which the substance of being +is using, he will be no stranger, but a familiar, with himself. Only +when the channel has been long cleared, when there has left it all +consciousness of striving, of self in any form, only when he finds +himself empty, ready, immaculate, will he have the divine adventure. For +it is then that in him the spirit of God will have its birth, then that +he will first understand his own nature ... the nature of being. + +Then the turn of the year comes in, the year begins to mount. Birth is +in it, growth is in it, Spring is in it. Sometime, away back in +beginnings, they knew this. They knew that the time of the Winter +solstice is in some strange fashion the high moment of the year, as the +beginning of new activity in nature and in the gods. They solemnized the +return of the fiery sun wheel; they traced in those solstice days the +operations on earth of Odin and Berchta. They knew in themselves a thing +they could not name. And when the supreme experience took place in +Christ, they made the one experience typify the other, and became +conscious of the divine nature of this nativity. So, by the illuminati, +the prophets, the adepts, the time that followed was yearly set +aside--forty days of dwelling within the temple of self, forty days of +reverence for being, of consciousness of new birth. Then the emergence, +then the apotheosis of expression typifying and typified by Spring--the +time when bursting, pressing life almost breaks bounds, when birth and +the impulse to birth are in every form of life, without and within. +These festivals are not arbitrary in date. They grow out of the +universal experience. + +Is it not then cause for stupefaction that this time of "divine +bestowal" should have become so physical a thing? From the ancient +perception, to have slipped into a sense of annual social comradeship +and good will and peace was natural and fine--to live in the little what +will some day be true in the large. But from this to have plunged down +into a time of frantic physical bestowals, of "present trading," of +lists of Grace and Margaret and Philip, of teeming shops with hunting +and hunted creatures within, of sacrificial trees and beasts, of a +sovereign sense of good for me and mine and a shameless show of Lord +and Lady Bountiful ... how can that have come about, how can the great +festival have been so dishonoured? + +Not all dishonoured, for within it is its own vitality which nothing can +dishonour. Through all the curious variations which it receives at our +hands, something shines and sings: self-giving, joy giving, a vast, dim +upflickering on humanity of what this thing really is that it seeks to +observe, this thing that grips men so that no matter what they are +about, they will drop it at the touch of the gong and turn to some +expression, however crooked and thwarted, of the real spirit of the +time. If in war, then bayonets are stacked and holly-wreathed, and +candles stuck on each point! If at sea, some sailor climbs out on the +bowsprit with a wreath of green. If on the western plains, a turkey +wishbone for target will make the sport, at fifty paces; if at home, +some great extravagance or some humble gift or some poignant wish will +point the day; if at church, then mass and carol; in certain hearts, +reverence,--everywhere the time takes hold of folk and receives whatever +of greatness or grotesqueness they choose to give it.... So, too, the +actual and vital experience which it brings to humanity is universal, is +offered with cosmic regularity, cannot be escaped. Through all the +tumult of the time, Christmas Week and the time that lies near to it is +always waiting to claim its own, to take to itself those who will not be +deceived, who see in the stupendous yearly pageant only the usual +spectacle of humanity trying to say divine things in terms of things +physical, because the time for the universal expression is not yet come. + +When that time comes ... when the time of the worship of _things_ shall +be past; when the tribal sense of holiday shall have given place to the +family sense, and that family shall be mankind; when shall never be seen +the anomaly of celebrating in a glorification of little family +tables--whose crumbs fall to those without--the birth of him who +preached brotherhood; and the mockery of observing with wanton spending +the birth of him who had not where to lay his head; when the rudiments +of divine perception, of self-perception, of social perception, shall +have grown to their next estate; when the area of consciousness shall be +extended yet farther toward the outermost; when that new knowledge with +which the air is charged shall let man begin to know what he is ... when +that time comes, they will look back with utmost wonder at our uncouth +gropings to note and honour something whose import we so obscurely +discern; but perhaps, too, with wonder that so much of human love and +divining should shine for us through the mists we make. + + + + +X + + +Two days before Christmas Ellen Bourne went through the new-fallen snow +of their wood lot. Her feet left scuffled tracks clouded about by the +brushing of her gown's wet hem and by a dragging corner of shawl. She +came to a little evergreen tree, not four feet tall, with low-growing +boughs, and she stood looking at it until her husband, who was also +following the snow-filled path, overtook her. + +"Matthew," she said then, "will you cut me that?" + +Matthew Bourne stood with his ax on his shoulder and looked a question +in slow preparation to ask one. + +[Illustration: "THE CHILDREN BEGAN TO SING 'GO BURY SAINT NICKLIS'"] + +"I just want it," she said; "I've--took a notion." + +He said that she had a good many notions, it seemed to him. But he cut +the little tree, with casual ease and no compunctions, and they dragged +it to their home, the soft branches patterning the snow and obscuring +their footprints. + +"It's like real Christmas weather," Ellen said. "They can't stop that +coming, anyhow." + +In the kitchen Ellen's father sat before the open oven door of the +cooking stove, letting the snow melt from his heavy boots. + +"Hey," he said, "I was beginning to think you'd forgot about supper. +What was in the trap?" + +At once Ellen began talking rapidly. "Oh," she said, "we'll have some +muffins to-night, father. The kind you like, with--" + +"Well, what was in the trap?" the old man demanded peevishly. "Why +don't you answer back? What was, Mat?" + +Matthew, drying his ax blade, looked at it with one eye closed. + +"Rabbit," he said. + +"Where is it?" her father demanded. + +"It was a young one--not as big as your fist," Ellen said. "I let it out +before he got there. Where's mother?" + +"Just because a thing's young, it ain't holy water," the old man +complained. "Last time it was a squirrel you let go because it was +young--it's like being spendthrift with manna...." he went on. + +Ellen's mother appeared, gave over to Ellen the supper preparations, +contented herself with auxiliary offices of china and butter getting, +and talked the while, pleased that she had something to disclose. + +"Ben Helders stopped in," she told. "He's going to the City to-morrow. +What do you s'pose after? A boy. He's going to take him to bring up and +work on the farm." + +"Where's he going to get the boy?" Ellen asked. + +Her mother did not know, but Mrs. Helders was going to have a new +diagonal and she wanted the number of Ellen's pattern. Ben would stop +for it that night. + +Evenings their kitchen was a sitting room, and when the supper had been +cleared away and the red cotton spread covered the table, Ellen asked +her husband to bring in the little tree. She found a cracker box, +handily cut a hole with a cooking knife, and set up the little tree by +the kitchen window. + +"What under the canopy--" said her mother, her voice cracking. + +"Oh, something to do in the evening," Ellen answered. "Father's going to +pop me some corn to trim it with; aren't you, father? Mother, why don't +you get you a good big darning needle and string what he pops?" + +"It'll make a lot of litter," said her mother, but she brought the +needle, for something to do. + +"Hey, king and country," said her father; "I'd ought to have somebody +here to shell it for me." + +"Who you trimming up a tree for?" her mother demanded; "I thought they +wasn't to be any in town this year." + +"It ain't Christmas yet," Ellen said only. "I guess it won't do any hurt +two days before." + +While the two worked, Ellen went to the cupboard drawer, and from behind +her pile of kitchen towels she drew out certain things: walnuts, wrapped +in shining yeast tinsel and dangling from red yarn; wishbones tied with +strips of bright cloth; a tiny box, made like a house, with rudely cut +doors and windows; eggshells penciled as faces; a handful of peanut +owls; a glass-stoppered bottle; a long necklace of buttonhole twist +spools. A certain blue paper soldier doll that she had made was +upstairs, but the other things she brought and fastened to the tree. + +Her husband smoked and uneasily watched her. He saw somewhat within her +plan, but he was not at home there. "If the boy _had_ lived and _had_ +been up-chamber asleep now," he thought once, "it'd be something like, +to go trimming up a tree. But _this_ way--" + +"What you leaving the whole front of the tree bare for?" her mother +asked. + +"The blue paper soldier goes there. I want it should see the blue paper +soldier first thing...." Ellen said, and stopped abruptly. + +"You talk like you was trimming the tree for somebody," her mother +observed, aggrieved. + +"Maybe something might look in the window--going by," Ellen said. + +"Get in there! Get your heads in there, ye beggars!" said the old man to +the popcorn. "I'd ought to have somebody here to pick up them shooting +kernels," he complained. + +In a little while, with flat-footed stamping, Ben Helders came in. When +he had the pattern number, by laborious copying against the wall under +the bracket lamp, Matthew said to him:-- + +"Going to get a boy to work out, are you?" + +Helders laughed and shifted. + +"He's going to work by and by," he said. "We allow to have him to +ourselves a spell first." + +"Keep him around the house till Spring?" + +"More," said Helders. "You see," he added, "it's like this with us ... +family all gone, all married, and got their own. We figured to get hold +of a little shaver and have some comfort with him before he goes to +work, for life." + +"Adopt him?" said Matthew, curiously. + +"That's pretty near it," Helders admitted. "We've got one spoke for at +the City Orphand Asylum." + +Ellen Bourne turned. "How old?" she asked. + +"Around five--six, we figure." Helders said it almost sheepishly. + +Ellen stood facing the men, with the white festoons of popcorn in her +hands. + +"Matthew," she said, "let him bring us one." + +Matthew stared. "You mean bring us a boy?" he asked. + +"I don't care which--girl or boy. Anything young," Ellen said. + +"Good Lord, Ellen," Matthew said, with high eyebrows, "ain't you got +your hands full enough now?" + +Ellen Bourne lifted her hands slightly and let them fall. "No," she +answered. + +The older woman looked at her daughter, and now first she was +solicitous, as a mother. + +"Ellen," she said, "you have, too, got your hands full. You're wore out +all the time." + +"That's it," Ellen said, "and I'm not wore out with the things I want to +do." + +"Hey, king and country!" the old man cried, upsetting the popper. "Don't +get a child around here underfoot. I'm too old. I deserve grown folks. +My head hurts me--" + +"Matthew," said Ellen to her husband, "let Helders bring us one. +To-morrow--for Christmas, Mat!" + +Matthew looked slowly from side to side. It seemed incredible that so +large a decision should lie with a man so ineffectual. + +"'Seems like we'd ought to think about it a while first," he said +weakly. + +"Think about it!" said Ellen. "When haven't I thought about it? When +have I thought about anything else but him we haven't got any more?" + +"Ellen!" the mother mourned, "you don't know what you're taking on +yourself--" + +"Hush, mother," Ellen said gently; "you don't know what it is. You had +me." + +She faced Helders. "Will you bring two when you come back to-morrow +night?" she said; "and one of them for us?" + +Helders looked sidewise at Matthew, who was fumbling at his pipe. + +"Wouldn't you want to see it first, now?" Helders temporized. "And a +girl or a boy, now?" + +"No--I wouldn't want to see it first--I couldn't bear to choose. One +healthy--from healthy parents--and either girl or boy," Ellen said, and +stopped. "The nicest tree thing I've made is for a boy," she owned. +"It's a paper soldier.... I made these things for fun," she added to +Helders. + +For the first time Helders observed the tree. Then he looked in the +woman's face. "I'll fetch out a boy for you if you say so," he said. + +"Then do," she bade. + +When the four were alone again, Mat sat looking at the floor. "Every +headlong thing I've ever done I've gone headlong over," he said +gloomily. + +Ellen took a coin from the clock shelf. "When Ben goes past to-morrow," +she merely said, "you'll likely see him. Have him get some little +candles for the tree." + +"My head hurts me," the old man gave out; "this ain't the place for a +great noisy boy." + +Ellen put her hand on his shoulder almost maternally. + +"See, dear," she said, "then you'd be grandfather." + +"Hey?" he said; "not if it was adopted, I wouldn't." + +"Why, of course. That would make it ours--and yours. See," she cried, +"you've been stringing popcorn for it already, and you didn't know!" + +"Be grandfather, would I?" said the old man. "Would I? Hey, king and +country! Grandfather again." + +Ellen was moving about the kitchen lightly, with that manner, which +eager interest brings, of leaving only half footprints. + +"Come on, mother," she said, "we must get the popcorn strung for sure, +now!" + +The mother looked up at the tree. "Seems as if," she said, wrinkling her +forehead, "I used to make pink tarleton stockings for your trees and +fill 'em with the corn. I donno but I've got a little piece of pink +tarleton somewheres in my bottom drawer...." + +... Next night they had the bracket lamp and the lamp on the shelf and +the table hand lamp all burning. The little tree was gay with the white +corn and the coloured trifles. The kitchen seemed to be centering in the +tree, as if the room had been concerned long enough with the doings of +these grown folk and now were looking ahead to see who should come next. +It was the high moment of immemorial expectancy, when those who are +alive turn the head to see who shall come after. + +"What you been making all day, daddy?" Ellen asked, tense at every sound +from without. + +Her father, neat in his best clothes, blew away a last plume of shaved +wood and held out something. + +"I just whittled out a kind of a clothespin man," he explained. "I made +one for you, once, and you liked it like everything. Mebbe a boy won't?" +he added doubtfully. + +"Oh, but a boy will!" Ellen cried, and tied the doll above the blue +paper soldier. + +"Hadn't they ought to be here pretty soon?" Matthew asked nervously. +"Where's mother?" + +"She's watching from the front room window," Ellen answered. + +Once more Helders came stamping on the kitchen porch, but this time +there was a patter of other steps, and Ellen caught open the door before +he summoned. Helders stepped into the room, and with him was a little +boy. + +"This one?" Ellen asked, her eyes alive with her eagerness. + +But Helders shook his head. + +"Mis' Bourne," he said, "I'm real dead sorry. They wa'n't but the one. +Just the one we'd spoke for." + +"_One!_" Ellen said; "you said Orphan Asylum." + +"There's only the one," Helders repeated. "The others is little bits of +babies, or else spoke for like ours--long ago. It seems they do that +way. But I want you should do something: I want you and Matthew should +take this one. Mother and I--are older ... we ain't set store so much...." + +Ellen shook her head, and made him know, with what words she could find, +that it could not be so. Then she knelt and touched at the coat of the +child, a small frightened thing, with cap too large for him and one +mitten lost. But he looked up brightly, and his eyes stayed on the +Christmas tree. Ellen said little things to him, and went to take down +for him some trifle from the tree. + +"I'm just as much obliged," she said quietly to Helders. "I never +thought of there not being enough. We'll wait." + +Helders was fumbling for something. + +"Here's your candles, I thought you might want them for somethin' else," +he said, and turned to Matthew: "And here's your quarter. I didn't get +the toy you mentioned. I thought you wouldn't want it, without the +little kid." + +Matthew looked swiftly at Ellen. He had not told her that he had sent by +Helders for a toy. And at that Ellen crossed abruptly to her husband, +and she was standing there as they let Helders out, with the little boy. + +Ellen's father pounded his knee. + +"But how long'll we have to wait? How long'll we have to wait?" he +demanded shrilly. "King and country, why didn't somebody ask him that?" + +Matthew tore open the door. + +"Helders!" he shouted, "how long did they say we'd have to wait?" + +"Mebbe only a week or two--mebbe longer," Helders' voice came out of the +dark. "They couldn't tell me." + +Ellen's mother stood fastening up a fallen tinsel walnut. + +"Let's us leave the tree right where it is," she said. "Even with it +here, we won't have enough Christmas to hurt anything." + + + + +XI + + +On that morning of the day before Christmas, Mary Chavah woke early, +while it was yet dark. With closed eyes she lay, in the grip of a dream +that was undissipated by her waking. In the dream she had seen a little +town lying in a hollow, lighted and peopled, but without foundation. + +"It isn't born yet," they told her, who looked with her, "and the people +are not yet born." + +"Who is the mother?" she had asked, as if everything must be born of +woman. + +"You," they had answered. + +On which the town had swelled and rounded and swung in a hollow of +cloud, globed and shining, like the world. + +"You," they had kept on saying. + +The sense that she must bear and mother the thing had grasped her with +all the sickening force of dream fear. And when the dream slipped into +the remembrance of what the day would bring her, the grotesque terror +hardly lessened, and she woke to a sense of oppression and coming +calamity such as not even her night of decision to take the child had +brought to her, a weight as of physical faintness and sickness. + +"I feel as if something was going to happen," she said, over and over. + +She was wholly ignorant that in that week just passed the word had been +liberated and had run round Old Trail Town in the happiest open +secrecy:-- + +"... coming way from Idaho, with a tag on, Christmas Eve. We thought if +everybody could call that night--just run into Mary's, you know, like it +was any other night, and take in a little something to eat--no presents, +you know ... oh, of course, no presents! Just supper, in a basket. We'd +all have to eat _some_-where. It won't be any Christmas celebration, of +course--oh, no, not with the paper signed and all. But just for us to +kind of meet and be there, when he gets off the train from Idaho." + +"Just ... like it was any other night." That was the part that abated +suspicion. Indeed, that had been the very theory on which the +nonobservance of Christmas had been based: the day was to be treated +like any other day. And, obviously, on any other day such a simple plan +as this for the welcoming of a little stranger from Idaho would have +gone forward as a matter of course. Why deny him this, merely because +the night of his arrival chanced to be Christmas Eve? When Christmas was +to be treated _exactly_ as any other day? + +If, in the heart of Mis' Abby Winslow, where the plan had originated, it +had originated side by side with the thought that the point of the plan +was the incidence of Christmas Eve, she kept her belief secret. The open +argument was unassailable, and she contented herself with that. Even +Simeon Buck, confronted with it, was silent. + +"Goin' back on the paper, are you?" he had at first said, "and hev a +celebration?" + +"Celebration of what?" Mis' Winslow demanded; "celebration of that +little boy getting here all alone, 'way from Idaho. And we'd celebrate +that any other night, wouldn't we? Of course we would. Our paper signing +don't call for us to give everybody the cold shoulder as I know of, just +because it's Christmas or Christmas Eve, either." + +"No," Simeon owned, "of course it don't. Of course it don't." + +As for Abel Ames, he accepted the proposal with an alacrity which he was +put to it to conceal. + +"So do," he said heartily, "so do. I guess we can go ahead just like it +was a plain day o' the week, can't we?" + +"Hetty," he said to his wife, whom that noon he went through the house +to the kitchen expressly to tell, "can you bake up a basket of stuff to +take over to Mary Chavah's next Tuesday night?" + +She looked up from the loaf she was cutting, the habitual wonder of her +childish curved lashes accented by her sudden curving of eyebrows. + +"Next Tuesday?" she said, "Why, that's Christmas eve!" + +Abel explained, saying, "What of that?" and trying to speak +indifferently but, in spite of himself, shining through. + +"Well, that's kind of nice to do, ain't it?" she answered. + +"My, yes," Abel said, emphatically, "It's a thing to do--that's the +thing to do." + +It was Mis' Mortimer Bates, the nonconformist by nature, in whom doubts +came nearest to expression. + +"I _don't_ know," she said, "it kind of _does_ seem like hedging." + +"They ain't anybody for it to seem to," Mis' Winslow contended +reasonably, "but us. And we understand." + +"We was going to do entirely without a Christmas this year. Entirely +without," Mis' Bates rehearsed. + +"Was we going to do entirely without everyday, week-day, +year-in-and-year-out milk of human kindness?" Mis' Winslow demanded. +"Well, then, let's us use a little of it, same as we would on a Monday +wash day." + +No voice was raised in real protest. None who had signed the paper and +none who had not done so could take exception to this simple way of +hospitality to the little stranger with a tag on. And it was the glory +of the little town being a little town that they somehow let it be known +that every one was expected to look in at Mary's that night. No one was +uninvited. And this was like a part of the midwinter mystery expressing +itself unbidden. + +Mary alone was not told. She had consistently objected to the Christmas +observances for so long that they feared the tyranny of her custom. "She +might not let us do it," they said, "but if we all get there, she can't +help liking it. She would on any other day...." + +... So she alone in Old Trail Town woke that morning before Christmas +with no knowledge of this that was afoot. And yet the day was not like +any other day, because she lay there dreading it more. + +She had cleared out her little sleeping room, as she had cleared the +lower floor. The chamber, with its white-plastered walls, and boards +nearly bare, and narrow white bed, had the look of a cell, in the first +light struggling through the single snow-framed window. Here, since her +childhood she had lain nightly; here she had brought her thought of Adam +Blood, and had seen the thought die and had watched with it; here she +had lain on the nights after her parents had died; here she had rested, +body-sick with fatigue, in the years that she had toiled to keep her +home. In all that time there had gone on within her many kinds of death. +She had arrived somehow at a dumb feeling that these dyings were +gradually uncovering her self from somewhere within; rather, uncovering +some self whose existence she only dimly guessed. "They's two of me," +she had thought more often of late "and we don't meet--we don't meet." +She lived among her neighbors without hate, without malice; for years +she had "meant nothing but love"--and this not negatively. The rebellion +against Christmas was against only the falsity of its meaningless +observance. The rebellion against taking the child, though somewhat +grounded in her distrust of her own fitness, was really the last vestige +of a self that had clung to her, in bitterness not toward Adam, but +toward Lily. Ever since she had known that the child was coming she had +felt a kind of spiritual exhaustion, sharpened by the strange sense of +oppression that hung upon her like an illness. + +"I feel as if something was going to happen," she kept saying. + +In a little while she leaned toward the window at her bed's head, and +looked down the hill toward Jenny's. Her heart throbbed when she saw a +light there. Of late, when she had waked in the night, she had always +looked, but always until now the little house had been wrapped in the +darkness. Because of that light, she could not sleep again, and so +presently she rose, and in the sharp chill of the room, bathed and +dressed, though what had once been her savage satisfaction in braving +the cold had long since become mere undramatic ability to endure it +without thinking. With Mary, life and all its constructive rites had won +what the sacrificial has never been able to achieve--the soul of the +casual, of, so to say, second nature, which is last nature, and nature +triumphant. + +While she was at breakfast Mis' Abby Winslow came in. + +"Mercy," Mis' Winslow said, "is it breakfast--early? I've been up hours, +frosting the cakes." + +"What cakes?" Mary asked idly. + +Mis' Winslow flushed dully. "I ain't baked anything much in weeks +before," she answered ambiguously, and hurried from the subject. + +"The little fellow's coming in on the Local, is he?" she said. "You +ain't heard anything different?" + +"Nothing different," Mary replied. "Yes, of course he's coming. They +left there Saturday, or I'd have heard. The man he's with is going to +get home to-night for Christmas with his folks in the City." + +"Going down to meet him of course, ain't you," Mis' Winslow pursued +easily. + +"Why, yes," said Mary. + +"Well," Mis' Winslow mounted her preparation, "I was thinking it would +be kind of dark for you to bring him in here all alone. Don't you want I +should come over and keep up the lights and be here when you get here?" + +She watched Mary in open anxiety. If she were to refuse, it would go +rather awkwardly. To her delight Mary welcomed with real relief the +suggestion. + +"I'd be ever so much obliged," she said; "I thought of asking somebody. +I'll have a little supper set out for him before I leave." + +"Yes, of course," Mis' Winslow said, eyes down. "I'll be over about +seven," she added. "If the train's on time, you'll be back here around +half past. The children want to go down with you--they can be at Mis' +Moran's when you go by. You'll walk up from the depot, won't you? You +do," she said persuasively; "the little fellow'll be glad to stretch his +legs. And it'll give the children a chance to get acquainted." + +"I might as well," Mary assented listlessly. "There's no need to hurry +home, as I know of, except keeping you waiting." + +"Oh, I don't mind," Mis' Winslow told her. "Better come around through +town, too. It's some farther, but he'll like the lights. What's the +little chap's name?" she asked; "I donno's I've heard you say." + +Mary flushed faintly. "Do you know," she said, "I don't know his name. I +can't remember that Lily ever told me. They always called him just +_Yes_, because he learned to say that first." + +"'_Yes!_'" repeated Mis' Winslow, blankly. "Why, it don't sound to me +real human." + +Later in the day, Mis' Mortimer Bates and Mis' Moran came in to see +Mary. Both were hurried and tired, and occasionally one of them lapsed +into some mental calculation. "We must remember something for the middle +of the table," Mis' Bates observed to Mis' Moran, under cover of Mary's +putting wood in the stove. And when Mary related the breaking of the +bracket lamp, the two other women telegraphed to each other a glance of +memorandum. + +"Don't it seem funny to _you_ to have Christmas coming on to-morrow and +no flurry about it?" Mary asked. + +"_No flurry!_" Mis' Bates burst out. "Oh, well," she amended, "of course +this Christmas does feel a little funny to all of us. Don't you think +so, Mis' Moran?" + +"I donno," said Mary, thoughtfully, "but what, when folks stop chasing +after Christmas and driving it before them, Christmas may turn around +and come to find them." + +"Mebbe so," Mis' Moran said with bright eyes, "mebbe so. Oh, Mary," she +added, "ain't it nice he's coming?" + +Mary looked at them, frowning a little. "It seemed like the thing had to +happen," she said; "it'll fit itself in." + +Before dark she took a last look about the child's room. The owl paper, +the puppy washbasin, the huge calendar with its picture of a stag, the +shelves for whatever things of his own he had, all pleased her newly. +She had laid on his table her grandfather's Bible with pictures of +Asiatic places. Below his mirror hung his father's photograph, that +young face, with the unspeakable wistfulness of youth, looking somewhere +outside the picture. It made her think of the passionate expectation in +the face of the picture that Jenny had brought. + +"Young folks in pictures always look like they was setting store by +something that ain't true yet," Mary thought. "It makes you kind of feel +you have to pitch in and make whatever it is come true, a little...." + +It was when Mis' Winslow came back toward seven o'clock that there was +news of Jenny. Mary had been twice to her door in the course of the +day, and had come away feeling, in her inquiry, strangely outside the +moment and alien to its incidence, as if she were somehow less alive +than those in Jenny's house. + +"Jenny's got a little girl," Mis' Winslow said. + +Mary stood staring at her. It seemed impossible. It was like seeing the +hands of time move, like becoming momentarily conscious of the swing and +rush of the earth, like perceiving the sweep of the stream of stars in +which our system moves.... She was startled and abashed that the news so +seized upon her. Little that had ever happened to herself seemed so +poignant, so warmed its place in sensation. While Mis' Winslow's mind +marked time on details of time and pounds, as is the way with us +immortals when another joins our ranks, Mary was receiving more +consciousness. There are times when this gift is laid on swiftly, as +with hands, instead of coming when none knows. Rather than with the +child whom she was to meet, her thought was with Jenny as she left Mis' +Winslow in the doorway and went down the street. + +"Expect you back in about half an hour if the train's on time," Mis' +Winslow called. + +Mary nodded, and turned into the great cathedral aisle that was Old +Trail Street, now arched and whitened, spectral in the dark, silver with +starlight.... + +... Capella was in the east, high and bright, and as imperative as +speech. Mary's way lay north, so that that great sun went beside her, +and there was no one else abroad but these two. A coat of ice had +polished the walks, so she went by the road, between the long white +mounds that lined it. The road, whose curves were absorbed in the +dimness, had thus lost its look of activity and lay inert as any frozen +waterway. Only a little wind, the star's sparkle, and Mary's step and +breath seemed living things--but from the rows of chimneys up and down +the Old Trail Road, faint smoke went up, a plume, a wreath, a veil, +where the village folk, invisible within quiet roof and wall, lifted +common signals; and from here a window and there a window, a light shone +out, a point, a ray, a glow, so that one without would almost say, +"There's home." + +The night before Christmas; and in not one home was there any +preparation for to-morrow, Mary thought, unless one or two lawless ones +had broken bounds and contrived something, from a little remembrance for +somebody to a suet pudding. It was strange, she owned: no trees being +trimmed, no churches lighted for practice, and the shops closed as on +any other night. Only the post office had light--she went in to look in +her box. Affer was there at the telegraph window, and he accosted her. + +"Little boy's comin' to-night, is he?" he said, as one of the sponsors +for that arrival. + +"I'm on my way to the train now," Mary answered, and noted the Christmas +notice with its soiled and dog-eared list still hanging on the wall. "It +was a good move," she insisted to herself, as she went out into the +empty street again. + +"You got a merry Christmas without no odds of the paper or me either," +Affer called after her; but she did not answer save with her "Thank you, +Mr. Affer." + +"Why do they all pretend to think it's so fine for me?" she wondered. +"To cheer me up, I guess," she thought grimly. + +To-night they were all sharing the aloofness from the time, an aloofness +which she herself had known for years. All save Jenny. To Jenny's house, +in defiance of that dog-eared paper in the post office, Christmas had +come. Not a Christmas of "present trading," not a Christmas of things +at all; but _Christmas_. Unto them a child was born. + +"Jenny's the only one in this town that's got a real Christmas," thought +Mary, on her way to meet her own little guest. + +The Simeon Buck North American Dry Goods Exchange was dark, too, and +from its cave of window the gray Saint Nicholas looked out, bearing his +flag--and he to-night an idle, mummy thing of no significance. The Abel +Ames General Merchandise Emporium was closed, but involuntarily Mary +stopped before it. In its great plate-glass window a single candle +burned. She stood for a moment looking. + +"Why, that's what they do, some places, to let the Christ-child in," +Mary thought. "I wonder if Abel knows. How funny--for a store!" + +Some one whom she did not know passed her and looked too. + +"Kind o' nice," said the other. + +"Real nice," Mary returned, and went on with a little glow. + +Abel's candle, and the arc light shining like cold blue crystal before +the dark Town Hall, and the post-office light where the dog-eared list +hung and the telegraph key clicked out its pretence at hand touching +with all the world, these were the only lights the street showed--save +Capella, that went beside her and, as she looked, seemed almost to stand +above the town. + +At Mis' Moran's house on the other side of the square, the children were +waiting for her--Bennet and Gussie and Tab and Pep and little Emily. +They ran before Mary in the road, all save little Emily, who walked +clasping Mary's hand. + +"Aren't you staying up late, Emily?" Mary asked her. + +"Yes," assented the child, contentedly. + +"Won't you be sleepy?" Mary pursued. + +"I was going to stay awake anyhow," she said; "I ain't goin' sleep all +night. We said so. We're goin' stay 'wake and see Santa Claus go by." + +"Go by?" Mary repeated. + +"Yes," the child explained; "you don't think that'll hurt, do you?" she +asked anxiously. "And then," she pursued, "if we don't see him, we'll +know he's dead everywheres else, too. An' then we're goin' bury him +to-morrow morning, up to Gussie's house." + +At the station, no one was yet about. The telegraph instrument was +clicking there, too, signaling the world; a light showed in the office +behind a row of sickly geraniums; the wind came down through the cut and +across the tracks and swept the little platform. But the children +begging to stay outside, Mary stood in a corner by the telegraph +operator's bay window and looked across to the open meadows beyond the +tracks and up at the great star. The meadows, sloping to an horizon +hill, were even and white, as if an end of sky had been pulled down and +spread upon them. Utter peace was there, not the primeval peace that is +negation, but a silence that listened. + +"'While shepherds watched their flocks by night, all seated on the +ground,...'" Mary thought and looked along the horizon hill. The time +needed an invocation from some one who watched, as many voices, through +many centuries, had made invocation on Christmas Eve. For a moment, +looking over the lonely white places where no one watched, as no +one--save only Jenny--watched in the town, Mary forgot the children.... + +The shoving and grating of baggage truck wheels recalled her. Just +beyond the bay window she saw little Emily lifted to the truck and the +four others follow, and the ten heels dangle in air. + +"Now!" said Pep. And a chant arose: + + "'Twas the night before Christmas when all + through the house + Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse. + The stockings were hung by the chimney with + care + In the hope that Saint Nicholas soon would + be there...." + +Upborne by one, now by another, now by all three voices, the verses went +on unto the end. And it was as if not only Tab and Pep and Bennet and +Gussie and little Emily were chanting, but all children who had ever +counted the days to Christmas and had found Christmas the one piece of +magic that is looked on with kindness by a grown-up world. The magic of +swimming holes, for example, is largely a forbidden magic; the magic of +loud noises, of fast motion, of living things in pockets, of far +journeys, of going off alone, of digging caves, of building fires, of +high places, of many closed doors, words, mechanisms, foods, ownerships, +manners, costumes, companions, and holidays are denied them. But in +Christmas their affinity for mystery is recognized, encouraged, +gratified, annually provided for. The little group on the baggage truck +chanted their watch over a dead body of Christmas, but its magic was +there, inviolate. The singsong verses had almost the dignity of lyric +expression, of the essence of familiarity with that which is unknown. As +if, because humanity had always recognized that the will to Christmas +was greater than it knew, these words had somehow been made to catch +and reproduce, for generations, some faint spirit of the midwinter +mystery. + +The 'bus rattled up to the platform and Buff Miles leaped down and +blanketed his horses, talking to them as was his wont. + + "So, holly and mistletoe, + So, holly and mistletoe, + So, holly, and mistletoe, + Over and over and over, oh...." + +he was singing as he came round the corner of the station. + +"It ain't Christmas yet," he observed defensively to Mary. "It ain't +forbid except for Christmas Day, is it?" + +He went and bent over the children on the truck. + +"Look alive as soon as you can do it," Mary heard him say to them, and +wondered. + +She stood looking up the track. Across the still fields, lying empty +and ready for some presence, came flashing the point of flame that +streamed from the headlight of the train. The light shone out like a +signal flashed back to the star standing above the town. + + + + +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 ever +_do_ get 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' Bates said, 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 so _deadly_ +afraid 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 we _have_ broke 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 wonder if 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've got 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. + +"_He_ might 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." + +[Illustration: "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 pitch +dark, 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 thing for that little kid that's +coming to her--we could find something that wouldn't cost much--it +hadn't _ought_ to 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 ovens _ain'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 him _for_ Christmas 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't _for_ +Christmas--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, refused the 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 grown +daughters. 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, flowered +curtains 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 knew what 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 other light 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 worn +saddle-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; but when 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 for _him_." + +"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." Mary watched the clock. She had not milked or fed the cows +before she went, because she had thought that _he_ would 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 solitary +traveling 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 not after 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. "Something _has_ happened...." + +So she had got on toward her own door. There the swift relief was like +an upbearing into another air, charged with more intimate largess 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 roles. The +background itself, modified by many an unshadowed promontory, was +accented in caverns of manger and roof. 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 felt _herself_ to 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 Trail Town, 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 he only 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's_ it!" 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 saw streamed 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 mistletoe + Over 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 and _lend_ him 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 entered Mary'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 to Mary 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 had known, 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 as _Others_, as +belonging to countless equations of which he was one term, and they +playing that wonderful, near role of _Other_. 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 the next 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 and Bruce 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 think +that 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 of his 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." + +[Illustration: "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 flag still 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 COMPANY +Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York + +----------------------------------------------------------------------- + +NEW MACMILLAN FICTION + +A MAN'S WORLD +By Albert 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 +By Martin 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 COMPANY +Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York + +----------------------------------------------------------------------- + +NEW MACMILLAN FICTION--Continued + +THE RICH MRS. BURGOYNE +By Kathleen 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 +By E. 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 COMPANY +Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York + +----------------------------------------------------------------------- + +NEW MACMILLAN FICTION--Continued + +THE DRIFTING DIAMOND +By Lincoln Colcord +With Frontispiece in Colors by Anton 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 +By James 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 COMPANY +Publishers 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 COMPANY +Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York + + + + + +End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Christmas, by Zona Gale + +*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CHRISTMAS *** + +***** This file should be named 20516.txt or 20516.zip ***** +This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: + https://www.gutenberg.org/2/0/5/1/20516/ + +Produced by Roger Frank and the Online Distributed +Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net + + +Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions +will be renamed. + +Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no +one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation +(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without +permission and without paying copyright royalties. Special rules, +set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to +copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to +protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark. Project +Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you +charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission. If you +do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the +rules is very easy. You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose +such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and +research. They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do +practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks. Redistribution is +subject to the trademark license, especially commercial +redistribution. + + + +*** START: FULL LICENSE *** + +THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE +PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK + +To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free +distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work +(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project +Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project +Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at +https://gutenberg.org/license). + + +Section 1. General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm +electronic works + +1.A. By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm +electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to +and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property +(trademark/copyright) agreement. If you do not agree to abide by all +the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy +all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession. +If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project +Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the +terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or +entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8. + +1.B. "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark. It may only be +used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who +agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement. There are a few +things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works +even without complying with the full terms of this agreement. See +paragraph 1.C below. There are a lot of things you can do with Project +Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement +and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic +works. See paragraph 1.E below. + +1.C. The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation" +or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project +Gutenberg-tm electronic works. Nearly all the individual works in the +collection are in the public domain in the United States. If an +individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are +located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from +copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative +works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg +are removed. Of course, we hope that you will support the Project +Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by +freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of +this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with +the work. You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by +keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project +Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others. + +1.D. The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern +what you can do with this work. Copyright laws in most countries are in +a constant state of change. If you are outside the United States, check +the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement +before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or +creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project +Gutenberg-tm work. The Foundation makes no representations concerning +the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United +States. + +1.E. Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg: + +1.E.1. The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate +access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently +whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the +phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the phrase "Project +Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed, +copied or distributed: + +This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with +almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or +re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included +with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org + +1.E.2. If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived +from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is +posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied +and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees +or charges. If you are redistributing or providing access to a work +with the phrase "Project Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the +work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1 +through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the +Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or +1.E.9. + +1.E.3. If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted +with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution +must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional +terms imposed by the copyright holder. Additional terms will be linked +to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the +permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work. + +1.E.4. Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm +License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this +work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm. + +1.E.5. Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this +electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without +prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with +active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project +Gutenberg-tm License. + +1.E.6. You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary, +compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any +word processing or hypertext form. However, if you provide access to or +distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than +"Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official version +posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.org), +you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a +copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon +request, of the work in its original "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other +form. Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm +License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1. + +1.E.7. Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying, +performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works +unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9. + +1.E.8. You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing +access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided +that + +- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from + the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method + you already use to calculate your applicable taxes. The fee is + owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he + has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the + Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation. Royalty payments + must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you + prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax + returns. Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and + sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the + address specified in Section 4, "Information about donations to + the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation." + +- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies + you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he + does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm + License. You must require such a user to return or + destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium + and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of + Project Gutenberg-tm works. + +- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any + money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the + electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days + of receipt of the work. + +- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free + distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works. + +1.E.9. If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm +electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set +forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from +both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael +Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark. Contact the +Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below. + +1.F. + +1.F.1. Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable +effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread +public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm +collection. Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic +works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain +"Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or +corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual +property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a +computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by +your equipment. + +1.F.2. LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right +of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project +Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project +Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project +Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all +liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal +fees. YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT +LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE +PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH F3. YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE +TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE +LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR +INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH +DAMAGE. + +1.F.3. LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a +defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can +receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a +written explanation to the person you received the work from. If you +received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with +your written explanation. The person or entity that provided you with +the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a +refund. If you received the work electronically, the person or entity +providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to +receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund. If the second copy +is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further +opportunities to fix the problem. + +1.F.4. Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth +in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS' WITH NO OTHER +WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO +WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTIBILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE. + +1.F.5. Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied +warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages. +If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the +law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be +interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by +the applicable state law. The invalidity or unenforceability of any +provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions. + +1.F.6. INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the +trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone +providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance +with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production, +promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works, +harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees, +that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do +or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm +work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any +Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause. + + +Section 2. Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm + +Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of +electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers +including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers. It exists +because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from +people in all walks of life. + +Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the +assistance they need, is critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's +goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will +remain freely available for generations to come. In 2001, the Project +Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure +and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations. +To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation +and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4 +and the Foundation web page at https://www.pglaf.org. + + +Section 3. Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive +Foundation + +The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit +501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the +state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal +Revenue Service. The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification +number is 64-6221541. Its 501(c)(3) letter is posted at +https://pglaf.org/fundraising. Contributions to the Project Gutenberg +Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent +permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state's laws. + +The Foundation's principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S. +Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered +throughout numerous locations. Its business office is located at +809 North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887, email +business@pglaf.org. Email contact links and up to date contact +information can be found at the Foundation's web site and official +page at https://pglaf.org + +For additional contact information: + Dr. Gregory B. Newby + Chief Executive and Director + gbnewby@pglaf.org + + +Section 4. Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg +Literary Archive Foundation + +Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide +spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of +increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be +freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest +array of equipment including outdated equipment. Many small donations +($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt +status with the IRS. + +The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating +charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United +States. Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a +considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up +with these requirements. We do not solicit donations in locations +where we have not received written confirmation of compliance. To +SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any +particular state visit https://pglaf.org + +While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we +have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition +against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who +approach us with offers to donate. + +International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make +any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from +outside the United States. U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff. + +Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation +methods and addresses. Donations are accepted in a number of other +ways including including checks, online payments and credit card +donations. To donate, please visit: https://pglaf.org/donate + + +Section 5. General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic +works. + +Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm +concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared +with anyone. For thirty years, he produced and distributed Project +Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support. + + +Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed +editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S. +unless a copyright notice is included. Thus, we do not necessarily +keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition. + + +Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility: + + https://www.gutenberg.org + +This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm, +including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary +Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to +subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks. |